Mademoiselle Louise Riesener in a Hat (c. 1877–80): Art, History and Details

Mademoiselle Louise Riesener in a Hat (c. 1877–80) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Berthe Morisot (French, 1841–1895).

The work and its context

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

This portrait depicts Louise Riesener, daughter of artist Léon Riesener and close friend of Morisot. The artist depicted her subject in bust-length profile wearing a black jacket out of which peek the decorative ties of a white blouse. Morisot paid particular attention to the hat; a fashionable Parisian woman of the upper-middle class would have worn such an accessory whenever she went out in public. Morisot produced nearly 200 pastels during her career, the majority figure studies and portraits brought to varying degrees of finish.

Object facts

• Title: Mademoiselle Louise Riesener in a Hat
• Date: c. 1877–80
• Creator attribution: Berthe Morisot (French, 1841–1895)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pastel on pale blue laid paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 55.5 x 46.8 cm (21 7/8 x 18 7/16 in.); Framed: 75.3 x 66.2 x 4.5 cm (29 5/8 x 26 1/16 x 1 3/4 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1958.41

A detail from the museum

Morisot favored the (formerly) blue paper used here for pastels and used it for numerous works.

Collection credit

Bequest of Leonard C. Hanna Jr.

Further reading listed by the museum

• Bataille, M.-L. and G. Wildenstein. Berthe Morisot: Catalogue des peintures, pastels, et aquarelles. Paris: Beaux-Arts, 1961.
• Rey, Jean Dominique. Berthe Morisot. Norwalk, CT: Easton Press, 1982.
• Burnham, Helen. “Fashion and the Representation of Modernity: Studies in the Late Work of Édouard Manet (1832–1883).” PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2007.

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.