Shepherdess (c. 1878): Art, History and Details

Shepherdess (c. 1878) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910).

The work and its context

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

Homer spent the summer of 1878 at Mountainsville, New York, where his brother's business partner, Lawson Valentine, had a country place called Houghton Farm. While there he developed pastoral images of shepherdesses. The flirtatious quality of these depictions becomes intriguing when we consider that Homer never married, and that he worked not only from female models but also sometimes from boys in girls' clothing.

Object facts

• Title: Shepherdess
• Date: c. 1878
• Creator attribution: Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910)
• Culture: America
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: charcoal with brush and brown wash, heightened with white chalk; framing lines in graphite
• Dimensions: Sheet: 41.8 x 25.8 cm (16 7/16 x 10 3/16 in.); Image: 41 x 24.1 cm (16 1/8 x 9 1/2 in.)
• Collection: DR - American 19th Century
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1924.489

Collection credit

Gift of Dr. J. A. Vincent

Further reading listed by the museum

• Francis, Henry. "Recent Additions to the Collection of Homer." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 42, no. 3 (March 1955): 51-54.

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.