Head of a Boy Singing (Study for Music) (c. 1898): Art, History and Details

Head of a Boy Singing (Study for Music) (c. 1898) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Luc-Olivier Merson (French, 1846–1920).

The work and its context

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

This sheet was a preparatory study for the face of a singing boy who appears near the center of Music, a mural decorating the left grand staircase at the Théâtre National de l’Opéra-Comique in Paris. Drawn from life with exquisite naturalism, Luc-Olivier Merson captured the sitter’s youthful beauty with such clarity that the purity of the boy’s voice seems to emanate from the drawing.

Object facts

• Title: Head of a Boy Singing (Study for Music)
• Date: c. 1898
• Creator attribution: Luc-Olivier Merson (French, 1846–1920)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: black, white, and red chalk with stumping, pricked for transfer
• Dimensions: Sheet: 39.6 x 27.2 cm (15 9/16 x 10 11/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2008.394

A detail from the museum

The face of the boy in this drawing is pricked extensively so that the image could be transferred directly to the final painting for which it was a study. The two works differ only in the addition of a hat on the boy's head in the final work.

Collection credit

Bequest of Muriel Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Visages du dix-neuvième siècle. Exh. Cat. Paris: Galerie Jacques Fischer-Chantal Kiener, 1977.
• Le Moyen-Âge et les peintres français de la fin du XIXe siècle: Jean-Paul Laurens et ses contemporains. Exh. Cat. Cagnes-sur-Mer: Château-Musée de Cagnes-sur-Mer, 1980.
• Foster, Carter E., Sylvain Bellenger, and Patrick Shaw Cable. French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin. Exh. Cat. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001.

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.