Portrait of an Old Man (c. 1884): Art, History and Details

Portrait of an Old Man (c. 1884) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is John Kavanagh (American, 1857–1898).

The work and its context

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

This charcoal study by Cleveland-based artist John Kavanagh shows the dramatic use of contrasting light and shade (chiaroscuro) and the detailed modeling favored by students at the Royal Academy in Munich, where the artist studied in the early 1880s.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of an Old Man
• Date: c. 1884
• Creator attribution: John Kavanagh (American, 1857–1898)
• Culture: America
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: charcoal; framing line in graphite (lower margin)
• Dimensions: Sheet: 49 x 38.7 cm (19 5/16 x 15 1/4 in.)
• Collection: DR - American 19th Century
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1944.8

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. A. J. Weatherhead

Further reading listed by the museum

• Robinson, William H., et. al. Transformations in Cleveland Art, 1796-1946: Community and Diversity in Early Modern America. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996.

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.