Mary Holland Bacher (1891): Art, History and Details

Mary Holland Bacher (1891) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Otto H. Bacher (American, 1856–1909).

The work and its context

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

Bacher was the first artist from Cleveland to achieve international renown, and this portrait of his wife exemplifies the Impressionist style he adopted after studying in Paris during the late 1880s. The painting’s unusual subject testifies to the emergence of tennis as one of the few sports of the era in which women could participate without being considered inappropriately masculine or uncouth.

Object facts

• Title: Mary Holland Bacher
• Date: 1891
• Creator attribution: Otto H. Bacher (American, 1856–1909)
• Culture: United States, Ohio, Cleveland
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Unframed: 90.6 x 57.4 cm (35 11/16 x 22 5/8 in.)
• Collection: American - Cleveland School
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1966.388

A detail from the museum

As a child, Otto Bacher liked to sketch shipping activities around Cleveland's port.

Collection credit

Gift of Will Low Bacher

Further reading listed by the museum

• “Year in Review.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 54, no. 10 (December 1967): 302–346.
• Sackerlotzky, Rotraud, Mary Sayre Haverstock, Nan Grossman. F.C. Gottwald and the Old Bohemians. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Artists Foundation, 1993.

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.