Raven's Head in Profile (1875): Art, History and Details

Raven's Head in Profile (1875) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Édouard Manet (French, 1832–1883).

The work and its context

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

Edouard Manet created this lithograph for his friend Stephane Mallarmé’s 1875 French translation of American writer Edgar Allan Poe’s classic poem “The Raven” (1845) about a man mourning his deceased love who is visited by a raven that repeatedly cries, “Nevermore.” Mallarmé’s edition is considered one of the first modern livres d’artistes—books created specifically as works of visual art. Manet created four full-page illustrations, including the scene in which the raven stares at the narrator from the top of the bust of the goddess Athena, and a raven head design used on the book’s cover and on its advertising poster.

Object facts

• Title: Raven's Head in Profile
• Date: 1875
• Creator attribution: Édouard Manet (French, 1832–1883)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Print
• Technique: lithograph
• Dimensions: Image: 17 x 15.5 cm (6 11/16 x 6 1/8 in.); Sheet: 32.5 x 24.7 cm (12 13/16 x 9 3/4 in.)
• Collection: PR - Lithograph
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1923.215

Collection credit

Charles W. Harkness Endowment Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Catalogue of an exhibition of the art of lithography: commemorating the sesquicentennial of its invention, 1798-1948. [Cleveland]: The Cleveland Museum of Art, November 11, 1948-January 2, 1949. Published as: Le Corbeau (Tête de profil).
• Richards, Louise. "Prints of Edouard Manet." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 44, no. 8 (October 1957): 187-191.

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.