Young Man Leaning Forward with Outstretched Arms (Study for Soldiers Distributing Bread to the Poor) (c. 1851): Art, History and Details

Young Man Leaning Forward with Outstretched Arms (Study for Soldiers Distributing Bread to the Poor) (c. 1851) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Isidore Pils (French, 1813/15–1875).

The work and its context

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

This unfinished sketch is a study for Isidore Pils's painting Soldiers Distributing Bread to the Poor, which was inspired by an actual scene he witnessed in the center of Paris. Here the artist focused his attention on the youth's upper body and left the legs lightly sketched in, indicating that he must have executed the sketch after he had already worked out the larger composition (where the legs are obscured by a low wall).

Object facts

• Title: Young Man Leaning Forward with Outstretched Arms (Study for Soldiers Distributing Bread to the Poor)
• Date: c. 1851
• Creator attribution: Isidore Pils (French, 1813/15–1875)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: oil, brown oil wash or ink wash, and black crayon
• Dimensions: Sheet: 33.8 x 26.9 cm (13 5/16 x 10 9/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2008.361

Collection credit

Bequest of Muriel Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Weisberg, Gabriel P. The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing, 1830-1900. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1980.
• Foster, Carter E., Sylvain Bellenger, and Patrick Shaw Cable. French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin. [Cleveland, Ohio]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001.

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.