Head of a Screaming Man (recto); Woman and Man Playing Cards (verso) (1792): Art, History and Details

Head of a Screaming Man (recto); Woman and Man Playing Cards (verso) (1792) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Benjamin West (American, born The Thirteen Colonies, 1738–1820).

The work and its context

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

Born in rural Pennsylvania, trained in Italy, and based in London for the entirety of his career, Benjamin West exemplifies the transatlantic character of colonial-era American art. In England, his success as a history painter propelled him to the position of court painter by 1772. West’s study of the head of a screaming man, believed to be done in preparation for a now-lost painting commissioned by King George III (1738–1820), was likely not drawn from life. It was modeled on the ideas of French artist Charles LeBrun (1619–1690), whose lectures on depicting the passions of the soul were surely known to the academic West. Working out the facial expression of terror, West emphasized the musculature of the man’s neck, jawline, and brow with thick, emphatic strokes. He employed light brown paper as a midtone and rubbed shadows beneath the man’s chin and flying hair. The purpose of the drawing is not entirely understood. In Pharaoh and His Host Lost in the Red Sea, an oil sketch West likely executed prior to Cleveland’s drawing, the dramatic twist of the pharaoh’s screaming head strongly resembles that in Cleveland’s sheet. However, a drawing in Boston believed to depict the lost painting indicates a composition quite different from West’s oil sketch, leaving the role of this crayon study in the creation of the final painting uncertain.

Object facts

• Title: Head of a Screaming Man (recto); Woman and Man Playing Cards (verso)
• Date: 1792
• Creator attribution: Benjamin West (American, born The Thirteen Colonies, 1738–1820)
• Culture: America
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: black crayon
• Dimensions: Sheet: 32.3 x 40.7 cm (12 11/16 x 16 in.)
• Collection: DR - American 18th Century
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1967.130

A detail from the museum

Benjamin West was born into poverty in rural Pennsylvania, the youngest of ten children, but rose to become the first American artist to train in Italy and command a successful career as a history painter in England.

Collection credit

Dudley P. Allen Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• “Year in Review.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 54, no. 10 (December 1967): 302–346.
• 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.