Study for the Mother in The Fisherman's Family (c. 1875): Art, History and Details

Study for the Mother in The Fisherman's Family (c. 1875) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (French, 1824–1898).

The work and its context

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

This study relates to the figure of the mother in Pierre Puvis de Chavannes's The Fisherman's Family, a painting first shown at the 1875 Paris Salon, and which the artist also painted in reduced scale in 1887. While Puvis represented his female figure completely nude in the study, in the painting he left bare just a breast, shoulder, and arm. The artist derived the mother figure seen in this drawing from an earlier canvas, Summer, purchased by the French state at the 1873 Salon. In this study, the figure retains some naturalistic features smoothed away in the later paintings, as seen in her proper right arm and hand and her collar and cheekbones.

Object facts

• Title: Study for the Mother in The Fisherman's Family
• Date: c. 1875
• Creator attribution: Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (French, 1824–1898)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: black and white chalk with stumping, squared in black chalk
• Dimensions: Sheet: 46.6 x 32.8 cm (18 3/8 x 12 15/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2008.390

A detail from the museum

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes also worked out the composition of the female figure seen in this drawing through a more developed study now in the collection of the Musée Saint-Nazaire in Bourbon-Lancy, France.

Collection credit

Bequest of Muriel Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Foster, Carter E., Sylvain Bellenger, and Patrick Shaw Cable. French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin. Exh. Cat. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001.
• Stratis, Harriet K. "Unintended Outcomes: Recognizing Change in 19th-Century French Drawings." In Nineteenth-Century French Drawings: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 11-23. Lewes, UK, Cleveland, Ohio: GILES; Cleveland Museum of Art, 2023.

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.