Cobbler's Quarters (1860s): Art, History and Details

Cobbler's Quarters (1860s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean-Alphonse Duplessy (French, 1817–after 1872).

The work and its context

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

This modest room is both the professional and personal domain of its inhabitant. Although the cobbler himself is not represented, he is nevertheless portrayed through all the details of his daily life. On the floor two pairs of boots wait to be repaired, surrounded by craftsman's tools. The pot-bellied stove in the middle of the room provides both heat and a place for cooking meals to be eaten at the folding table in the background at the left. The curtain behind the table probably hides an alcove with the cobbler's bed. A small statuette of Napoleon on the shelf at the upper right suggests the cobbler's political views. Next to it hangs a cage containing a green parakeet. Today the bird would undoubtedly be replaced by a radio, a necessary fixture to keep manual laborers company as they work. Little is known of Duplessy, who studied and worked in Paris, except that he concentrated on still-life painting. His interest in this subject can be seen in the careful rendering of object groupings in this scene. No records of the artist's life exist after 1872, the last year his work was shown at the annual Salon exhibition.

Object facts

• Title: Cobbler's Quarters
• Date: 1860s
• Creator attribution: Jean-Alphonse Duplessy (French, 1817–after 1872)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Unframed: 60.5 x 51.2 cm (23 13/16 x 20 3/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1980.257

Collection credit

Bequest of Noah L. Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1980.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 68, no. 6 (June 1981): 163–219.
• Argencourt, Louise d', and Roger Diederen. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 4. European Paintings of the 19th Century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.

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.