Eva Meurier in a Green Dress (1891): Art, History and Details

Eva Meurier in a Green Dress (1891) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Maurice Denis (French, 1870–1943).

The work and its context

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

Delicate, elegantly folded hands in this painting allude to the sitter’s musical abilities. Eva Meurier, the sister-in-law of the artist, was a talented pianist. Maurice Denis painted the portrait on a fragment of an abandoned picture, hints of which appear around the edges of the composition, as if Eva’s portrait is mysteriously emerging from another painting.

Object facts

• Title: Eva Meurier in a Green Dress
• Date: 1891
• Creator attribution: Maurice Denis (French, 1870–1943)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 72.7 x 56.5 x 6.4 cm (28 5/8 x 22 1/4 x 2 1/2 in.); Overall: 55 x 38 cm (21 5/8 x 14 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 2002.92

A detail from the museum

Maurice Denis painted this early in his career, when he was only 21.

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• "Off the walls." Fine Art Connoisseur 18, no.4 (August 2021):128.
• Musée Toulouse-Lautrec. Exposition Maurice Denis; peintures, aquarelles, dessins, lithographies, du 28 juin au 29 septembre 1963, Musée Toulouse-Lautrec. Albi.1963.
• Chapin, Mary Weaver. “Music Chez Soi.’” In Private Lives: Home and Family in the Art of the Nabis, Paris, 1889-1900. Mary Weaver Chapin and Heather Lemonedes Brown, 142-186. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2021.

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.