Head of a Woman (Mme. Deshayes?) (c. 1771): Art, History and Details

Head of a Woman (Mme. Deshayes?) (c. 1771) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Louis-Marin Bonnet (French, 1736–1793); François Boucher (French, 1703–1770).

The work and its context

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

To produce this print, Bonnet used three different printing plates to layer black ink, then semitransparent blue ink, and finally a thicker red pigment onto white paper. After the first run through the press, Bonnet had to carefully align each subsequent plate to achieve the desired coloration. Although the identity of this young woman is unknown, she may be Boucher’s daughter, Jean-Elisabeth Victoire, who married Jean-Baptiste Henri Deshays, a pupil of Boucher.

Object facts

• Title: Head of a Woman (Mme. Deshayes?)
• Date: c. 1771
• Creator attribution: Louis-Marin Bonnet (French, 1736–1793); François Boucher (French, 1703–1770)
• Culture: France
• Type: Print
• Technique: color chalk-manner etching and engraving
• Dimensions: Image: 41.5 x 35.7 cm (16 5/16 x 14 1/16 in.)
• Collection: PR - Chalk Manner
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1996.6

Collection credit

Dudley P. Allen Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, “The Cleveland Museum of Art Acquires Major Works,” March 18, 1996, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.
• Glaubinger, Jane. "Inventive Impressions." Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 41, no. 6 (Summer 2001): 8-9.
• Cleveland Museum of Art. The CMA Companion: A Guide to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2014.

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.