Notre-Dame de Paris (c. 1881): Art, History and Details

Notre-Dame de Paris (c. 1881) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Luc-Olivier Merson (French, 1846–1920).

The work and its context

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

Victor Hugo's celebrated 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris tells the story of Quasimodo, a disfigured orphan raised by the archdeacon of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. Hugo's novel became an important influence on many artists and helped to define a poetic view of the medieval period and of Gothic architecture that lasted well into the second half of the century. This drawing by Luc-Olivier Merson was reproduced as a wood engraving in an illustrated tribute to Hugo published in 1881.

Object facts

• Title: Notre-Dame de Paris
• Date: c. 1881
• Creator attribution: Luc-Olivier Merson (French, 1846–1920)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pen and black ink, brush and black wash, white gouache and graphite on paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 32.6 x 21.7 cm (12 13/16 x 8 9/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2008.359

A detail from the museum

After creating this drawing, Luc-Olivier Merson went on to illustrate an important 1889 edition of Notre-Dame de Paris, one of the major projects of his career.

Collection credit

Bequest of Muriel Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Foster, Carter E., Sylvain Bellenger, and Patrick Shaw Cable. French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin. Exh. Cat. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001.
• Dessins et aquarelles du XIXe siècle. Paris: Galerie La Nouvelle Athènes, 2021.

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.