Italy (c. 1889): Art, History and Details

Italy (c. 1889) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852–1934).

The work and its context

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

Italy provides insight into Käsebier’s earliest artistic productions. The woman’s pose and central placement emphasize the picture’s formalism and careful construction. Her rigid vertical posture echoes the trees in the background. Soft focus, a device borrowed from Pictorialist photography, frustrates a clear view of her features, suggesting that the image is neither portrait nor snapshot but a symbolic statement about womanhood and its association with nature.

Object facts

• Title: Italy
• Date: c. 1889
• Creator attribution: Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852–1934)
• Culture: America
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: platinum print mounted to Japanese paper
• Dimensions: Image: 18.6 x 12 cm (7 5/16 x 4 3/4 in.); Paper: 18.6 x 12 cm (7 5/16 x 4 3/4 in.); Mounted: 30 x 21.1 cm (11 13/16 x 8 5/16 in.)
• Collection: PH - American 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2022.116

A detail from the museum

Gertrude Käsebier did not begin to study art until she was 37 and had 3 adolescent children.

Collection credit

Gift of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Photographic Times, illustrated monthly magazine devoted to the interests of artistic and scientific photography, Vol. 30, Scoville Manufacturing Co., 1898
• Bill Jay, ed., Album 6, with an introduction by Beaumont Newhall on the George Eastman House, London 1970

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.