Self-Portrait at Easel (1897): Art, History and Details

Self-Portrait at Easel (1897) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Hippolyte Petitjean (French, 1854–1929).

The work and its context

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

In this self-portrait, Hippolyte Petitjean depicted himself standing before an easel while gazing directly at the viewer. The drawing is one of five representations of himself that the artist created late in his career based on his admiration for Rembrandt van Rijn. Petitjean was deeply influenced by the anarchist writer Charles-Albert, who argued for the utopian potential of artmaking, suggesting that the work was meant as a broader statement about the place of the artist within contemporary society.

Object facts

• Title: Self-Portrait at Easel
• Date: 1897
• Creator attribution: Hippolyte Petitjean (French, 1854–1929)
• Culture: France
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: conté crayon with charcoal on laid paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 62 x 47.7 cm (24 7/16 x 18 3/4 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2021.6

A detail from the museum

Hippolyte Petitjean met the artist Georges Seurat in 1884, and the two worked closely on a distinctive style of drawing using waxy black conté crayon.

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• De Vallotton à Desnos. Exh. cat. Vevey: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Vevey, 1965.
• Les Indépendants à la Belle Époque: Ni jury ni récompenses. Exh. cat. Paris: Grand Palais, 1966.
• Sutter, Jean. The Neo-Impressionists. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1970.

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.