Mother with Two Children (c. 1855): Art, History and Details

Mother with Two Children (c. 1855) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean-Baptist Frénet (French, 1814–1889).

The work and its context

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

After anti-government political activity closed off his professional opportunities as a painter, Jean-Baptiste Frénet took up photography in 1850 and a decade later opened a commercial portrait studio. He preferred simple, plain settings and relied on sitters’ interactions to reveal their personalities and relationships. This family grouping, probably taken for personal pleasure, offers a sense of casual immediacy unusual for the time in both painted and photographic portraiture.

Object facts

• Title: Mother with Two Children
• Date: c. 1855
• Creator attribution: Jean-Baptist Frénet (French, 1814–1889)
• Culture: France
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: salted paper print from a collodion negative
• Dimensions: Paper: 23.1 x 16.5 cm (9 1/8 x 6 1/2 in.); Matted: 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in.)
• Collection: PH - French 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2001.5

A detail from the museum

Frénet was one of the earliest photographers to take spontaneous, rather rigidly formal, portraits.

Collection credit

Jo Hershey Selden Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, “Recent Acquisitions Press Release,” April 4, 2001, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.

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.