Portrait of a Young Boy (c. 1848): Art, History and Details

Portrait of a Young Boy (c. 1848) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Louis-Adolphe Humbert de Molard (French, 1800–1874).

The work and its context

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

Baron Humbert de Molard, a wealthy amateur, began taking daguerreotypes of his friends, family, and servants in 1843. The following year he became one of the earliest Frenchmen to experiment with paper print processes. This salted paper print was made from a glass-plate negative sensitized with albumen. The stiff pose, placement of the subject’s hands, and glaring gaze are likely due to the long exposure time required by those materials. They imbue a young boy with the gravity and formality of a much older man.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a Young Boy
• Date: c. 1848
• Creator attribution: Louis-Adolphe Humbert de Molard (French, 1800–1874)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: salted paper print from albumen on glass negative
• Dimensions: Image: 23.2 x 17.1 cm (9 1/8 x 6 3/4 in.); Paper: 23.6 x 17.7 cm (9 5/16 x 6 15/16 in.); Matted: 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in.)
• Collection: Photography
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1998.9

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, “Painting by 18th-century Italian Master Gaetano Gandolfi among Works Added to CMA Collection,” March 24, 1998, 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.