Bust of a Woman, Seen from Behind (1893): Art, History and Details

Bust of a Woman, Seen from Behind (1893) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Adolph von Menzel (German, 1815–1905).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Adolph Menzel left more than 5,000 drawings created during a long and successful career that spanned the 19th century. Near the end of his life, when this drawing was made, he used a carpenter's pencil--a broad, flat-pointed lead pencil made of soft graphite--and stumping (rubbing with bits of tightly rolled paper or leather) to created numerous studies of heads of models that he considered independent works of art. In this drawing of a woman seen from behind from the shoulders up, the virtuosity of Menzel's stumping creates the effect of tangible surfaces and light falling on them, especially on the woman's face and hat. While he used the width of the pencil vigorously to indicate grainy black shadows in the folds of the coat and seat back, he used the sharp point for fine lines describing hair and facial features. The immediacy of the image--drawn in close proximity and capturing her mouth slightly open--suggests Menzel's focus on a fleeting moment. He wrote of drawings such as this as "true to nature" yet without "being copied from nature with fearful exactitude."

Object facts

• Title: Bust of a Woman, Seen from Behind
• Date: 1893
• Creator attribution: Adolph von Menzel (German, 1815–1905)
• Culture: Germany, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: graphite (carpenter's pencil), with stumping
• Dimensions: Sheet: 41.4 x 28.9 cm (16 5/16 x 11 3/8 in.); Secondary Support: 53.3 x 39.2 cm (21 x 15 7/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - German
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1994.103

A detail from the museum

Adolph Menzel drew continuously and had a special coat made with deep pockets to hold his sketchpad, pencils, shading stumps, and gum eraser.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, Kunsthandel Bellinger, and Galerie de Bayser. European Master Drawings. New York: Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, 1994.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, Diane DeGrazia, and Carter E. Foster. Master Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art in association with Rizzoli International Publications, New York, 2000.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.