Head of a Young Woman (c. 1785): Art, History and Details

Head of a Young Woman (c. 1785) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean-Baptiste Greuze (French, 1725–1805).

The work and its context

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

This female head relates to a finished drawing by Greuze called The Reconciliation, which shows the return of a husband to his wife after a domestic argument. The artist specialized in scenes of family life, depicted with high drama and theatrical gestures. From narrative scenes such as this, he would often make large red chalk drawings-close-ups in a sense-of the facial expressions of individual figures in the scene. This sheet relates to the head of the wife in The Reconciliation, who turns toward her husband entering at the right. Greuze created and sold such drawings as finished works of art. Like the drawing by Taraval on view nearby, and the sheets by Antoine Coypel and Edgar Degas also on view in this exhibition, this type of work is called an expressive head (tête d'expression), which has a rich tradition in French art.

Object facts

• Title: Head of a Young Woman
• Date: c. 1785
• Creator attribution: Jean-Baptiste Greuze (French, 1725–1805)
• Culture: France
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: red chalk on white laid paper pasted down on heavy-weight gray paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 41 x 31.5 cm (16 1/8 x 12 3/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2008.354

Collection credit

Bequest of Muriel Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Foster, Carter E., Sylvain Bellenger, and Patrick Shaw Cable. French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin. [Cleveland, Ohio]: 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.