The Bath (c. 1900): Art, History and Details

The Bath (c. 1900) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Félix Bracquemond (French, 1833–1914).

The work and its context

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

This drawing relates to Félix Bracquemond’s interest in integrating various artistic techniques, a practice that became increasingly common around 1900. With a range of black and white media, the artist depicted a nude in a forest pool. Faint gridding was used to transfer the image either to or from a similar enamel and a print. An important part of this working process, the drawing was included in both of the major exhibitions of Bracquemond’s oeuvre during his life. From one of these displays, in 1907, Bracquemond sold it to Parisian collector Alfred Beurdeley, who acquired hundreds of drawings with the aim of representing the art of his time.

Object facts

• Title: The Bath
• Date: c. 1900
• Creator attribution: Félix Bracquemond (French, 1833–1914)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: brush and black and brown wash with pen and black ink, black chalk, and charcoal, heightened with white chalk, on brown wove paper laid on yellow-beige wove paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 59 x 44 cm (23 1/4 x 17 5/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1980.240

A detail from the museum

Bracquemond drew extensively and promoted the medium as the source of all artistic practice.

Collection credit

Bequest of Noah L. Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Œuvres de Bracquemond. Exh. cat. Paris: Société nationale des beaux-arts, 1907.
• Catalogue de l’exposition de gravures, exécutées par M. Félix Bracquemond et Sir F. Seymour Haden. Paris: Hôtel des Modes, 1909.
• Catalogue des dessins, pastels, aquarelles modernes [. . .] composant la collection de M. A. Beurdeley (première vente). Paris: Galerie Georges Petit, 1920.

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.