Claire Campbell (1876): Art, History and Details

Claire Campbell (1876) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Édouard Manet (French, 1832–1883).

The work and its context

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

During the late 1870s, Edouard Manet began to experience health problems that made it difficult for him to work in oil painting. Instead, he began to draw using pastel, a powdery medium that allowed him to render line and color with each stroke. This work is one of numerous portraits that Manet created around this time with the medium. It depicts Claire Campbell, a fashionable young British woman whose father published The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper. Manet used the velvety texture of pastel to render the subject's skin and hair, limiting his palette to mostly neutral tones such as white, gray, and black.

Object facts

• Title: Claire Campbell
• Date: 1876
• Creator attribution: Édouard Manet (French, 1832–1883)
• Culture: America
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: Pastel with oil on fine-weave canvas
• Dimensions: Unframed: 55.2 x 45.7 cm (21 3/4 x 18 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1956.718

A detail from the museum

Edouard Manet almost always depicted the subjects of his pastel portraits against plain colored backgrounds, as seen in this work.

Collection credit

The Fanny Tewksbury King Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Exposition des oeuvres de Édouard Manet. Exh. Cat. Paris: École nationale des Beaux-Arts, 1884.
• Manet: trente-cinq tableaux de la collection Pellerin. Exh. Cat. Paris: Bernheim Jeune et Cie, 1910.
• Manet and the Post-Impressionists. Exh. Cat. London: Grafton Galleries, 1910.

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.