The Annunciation (1750s): Art, History and Details

The Annunciation (1750s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Johann Michael Düchert (German, 1725–1799).

The work and its context

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

This object entered the collection attributed to the German sculptor Johann Paul Egell. However, this attribution never sat comfortably because Egell mostly worked on large-scale commissions in stone, stucco, and wood, rather than with these more precious materials. Recent research indicates that the work is by Düchert, one of Egell's most gifted students, who translated Egell's distinct visual language—the elongated figures, tiny heads, unusually flattened space, and planar handling of drapery—into small-scale ivories.

Object facts

• Title: The Annunciation
• Date: 1750s
• Creator attribution: Johann Michael Düchert (German, 1725–1799)
• Culture: Germany, 18th century
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: ivory, ebony, velvet, in the original gilded and glazed frame
• Dimensions: Framed: 56.5 x 41.9 x 6.3 cm (22 1/4 x 16 1/2 x 2 1/2 in.); Unframed: 33.5 x 25.4 x 3.5 cm (13 3/16 x 10 x 1 3/8 in.)
• Collection: Sculpture
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1981.12

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. "The Year in Review for 1981." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 69, no. 2 (February 1982): 39-82.
• "La Chronique des Arts." Gazette des Beaux-Arts, supplement (Mars 1982): 1-92.
• Ditner, David Charles. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century European Sculpture in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Dissertation. Cleveland, OH; Case Western Reserve University, 1986.

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.