Woman Meditating (after 1868): Art, History and Details

Woman Meditating (after 1868) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (French, 1796–1875).

The work and its context

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

This painting, acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1949, as a work by Corot, proved to be a copy when the signed original reappeared at a public auction in New York in 1981. Although the original, Jeune Femme Pensive or La Méditation, is not in the Corot catalogue raisonné compiled by his friend Alfred Robaut, that painting does have an unquestionable origin. According to one source, Corot painted the original version in Paris in 1866–68 and allowed his pupil, Eugène Lavieille, to make a copy with permission.

Object facts

• Title: Woman Meditating
• Date: after 1868
• Creator attribution: Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (French, 1796–1875)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Unframed: 59.4 x 42.9 cm (23 3/8 x 16 7/8 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1949.189

A detail from the museum

Scholars speculate that Camille Corot's model for this painting was Emma Dobigny, the frail young girl who posed for the two versions of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes's painting Hope of 1872 (Musée du Louvre, Paris; Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore). This painting, acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1949, as a work by Corot, proved to be a copy when the signed original reappeared at a public auction in New York in 1981.

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• Coe, Nancy. "'Woman Meditating' by Corot." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 45, no. 2 (February 1958): 23-26.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

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.