Portrait of a Man (1800): Art, History and Details

Portrait of a Man (1800) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin (French, 1759–1832).

The work and its context

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

Although the size of this carefully worked crayon drawing is modest, it is actually much larger than a typical work by Jean-Baptiste Augustin. As a leading painter of ivory portrait miniatures in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Augustin stood out because of the precision and naturalism of his style. Although the sitter in this drawing is no longer known, Augustin's naturalistic technique and the sitter's slight, easy smile encourage a familiar connection with the viewer.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a Man
• Date: 1800
• Creator attribution: Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin (French, 1759–1832)
• Culture: France, late 18th-early 19th Century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: Black chalk with stumping heightened with white gouache on light brown wove paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 22.1 x 17.5 cm (8 11/16 x 6 7/8 in.); Image: 20.3 x 16 cm (8 x 6 5/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2008.406

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. [Cleveland, Ohio]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001.
• Gorchkoff, Dimitri. "Uniforme des Commissaires des Guerres du Consultat, a l'example d'un Portriat peint par Louis Gauffier." Le Briquet. bulletin de l'Amicale des collectionneurs de figurines historiques du Centre-Loire, no. 3 (2019) 13-23.

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.