Young Saint John (1890): Art, History and Details

Young Saint John (1890) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Berthe Morisot (French, 1841–1895).

The work and its context

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

In the spring of 1890 Berthe Morisot and her husband, Eugène Manet, rented a house with a garden overlooking the Seine River in the rural French town of Mézy. Morisot worked in the attic studio while the pair was there. A young boy from the village served as the model for this pastel, one of several studies for a full-length painting of Saint John the Baptist with his cross. In this drawing, Morisot developed the loose and sketchy marks that would characterize her final canvas.

Object facts

• Title: Young Saint John
• Date: 1890
• Creator attribution: Berthe Morisot (French, 1841–1895)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pastel on pale blue laid paper
• Dimensions: 57.1 x 38.1 cm (22 1/2 x 15 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1975.83

A detail from the museum

This pastel's first owner was Berthe Morisot's daughter, Julie Manet, and her husband Ernest Rouart.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Lewis B. Williams

Further reading listed by the museum

• Berthe Morisot, exposition de son œuvre. Exh. cat. Paris: Durand-Ruel, 1896.
• “Studio-Talk,” The Studio 42 (1908): 318-20.
• Fourreau, Armand. Berthe Morisot. Paris: F. Rieder, 1925.

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.