Head of a Young Woman (early 1730s): Art, History and Details

Head of a Young Woman (early 1730s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is François Boucher (French, 1703–1770).

The work and its context

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

This work was catalogued as "style of Chardin" when it entered the museum's collection, and was considered a minor rococo revival work of the 1800s. In 2011, the museum asked Alastair Laing, the leading scholar of the artist Boucher, to study it. He confirmed that the painting is a rare survival from the artist's early career—one of only two known oil studies of this type by the artist.

Object facts

• Title: Head of a Young Woman
• Date: early 1730s
• Creator attribution: François Boucher (French, 1703–1770)
• Culture: France
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 47 x 40 x 6 cm (18 1/2 x 15 3/4 x 2 3/8 in.); Unframed: 32.4 x 25.6 cm (12 3/4 x 10 1/16 in.)
• Collection: P - French 18th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 2012.95

Collection credit

Bequest of Muriel Butkin

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.