Woman at the Spinet (1860): Art, History and Details

Woman at the Spinet (1860) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is François Bonvin (French, 1817–1887).

The work and its context

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

The subject of the woman at the piano was a recurrent theme in Bonvin’s oeuvre. The pianist depicted here was likely Céline Prunaire, a 21-year-old musician who married the much older artist in 1860. Although the meticulously rendered composition celebrates the grace and propriety of the young woman, the happiness of the couple’s union was fleeting. Prunaire left the artist after fewer than three years, never to return. The pink carnation at her feet suggests a note of foreboding to the image, perhaps intended to allude to the ephemeral nature of music and sentimental bonds.

Object facts

• Title: Woman at the Spinet
• Date: 1860
• Creator attribution: François Bonvin (French, 1817–1887)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: fabricated black chalk with touches of brown and red chalk and stumping
• Dimensions: Sheet: 42 x 30.5 cm (16 9/16 x 12 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2010.166

Collection credit

Bequest of Muriel Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Snite Museum of Art, and Gabriel P. Weisberg. Breaking the Mold: The Legacy of the Noah L. and Muriel S. Butkin Collection of Nineteenth-Century French Art. 2012.

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.