The Milk Woman (1774): Art, History and Details

The Milk Woman (1774) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Louis-Marin Bonnet (French, 1736–1793).

The work and its context

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

This print belongs to a series created by Louis-Marin Bonnet featuring innovative color printing techniques derived from optical science to mimic the pastel drawings and miniature paintings highly sought by collectors. To increase the works’ appeal, the artist also developed a method for printing decorative frames by applying gold leaf. Hoping to evade strict governmental regulations on the uses of gold in France, he passed off his prints as English imports, which he sold at his store Au Magasin Anglois (At the English Shop). Bonnet’s elaborate ruse included English titles, the address of a London printshop, and a pseudonym, L. Marin.

Object facts

• Title: The Milk Woman
• Date: 1774
• Creator attribution: Louis-Marin Bonnet (French, 1736–1793)
• Culture: France
• Type: Print
• Technique: color-pastel–manner etching and engraving with applied gold leaf
• Dimensions: Image: 28.3 x 23.3 cm (11 1/8 x 9 3/16 in.); Sheet: 32.3 x 25.1 cm (12 11/16 x 9 7/8 in.)
• Collection: PR - Chalk Manner
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 2003.50

A detail from the museum

The elaborate gold frame surrounding this print was created with some of the same techniques used to gild frames in 1700s.

Collection credit

Carole W. and Charles B. Rosenblatt Endowment Fund

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.