Portrait of a Woman (c. 1748): Art, History and Details

Portrait of a Woman (c. 1748) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean-Marc Nattier (French, 1685–1766).

The work and its context

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

Jean-Marc Nattier was a favorite portraitist of King Louis XV of France. He held the lucrative position as the court painter for Queen Mary Lesczynski, the daughter of the exiled king of Poland. The portrait was long thought to be of Madame Henriette de France, one of the daughters of Louis XV and Queen Mary Lesczynski, but this identification is no longer accepted and the sitter remains unknown. There has been considerable confusion over the identity of many of Nattier's sitters, as they tend to conform to an idealized concept of female beauty.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a Woman
• Date: c. 1748
• Creator attribution: Jean-Marc Nattier (French, 1685–1766)
• Culture: France
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 108 x 92.5 x 11 cm (42 1/2 x 36 7/16 x 4 5/16 in.); Unframed: 82 x 65 cm (32 5/16 x 25 9/16 in.)
• Collection: P - French 18th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1948.183

A detail from the museum

Though the sitters in his portraits often lack individualized traits, Nattier was fervently sought by French aristocratic women.

Collection credit

Gift of the Louis Dudley Beaumont Foundation

Further reading listed by the museum

• Francis, Henry. "A Gift of the Louis Dudley Beaumont Foundation." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 35, no. 10 (December 1948): 221-224.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

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.