Young Woman and Child at Play (1780s): Art, History and Details

Young Woman and Child at Play (1780s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Clodion (French, 1738–1814).

The work and its context

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

The French sculptor Claude Michel, called Clodion (1738–1814), constructed much of his work in terracotta. After firing, the unglazed color of the clay can vary widely, so each of Clodion's works in this medium has a slightly different hue, in this case a smooth reddish gray. Clodion depicts a mother nursing her newborn with painstaking attention to detail, from the tendrils of hair that cascade gracefully down to the mother's shoulders to the brilliant bouquet at the pair's feet.

Object facts

• Title: Young Woman and Child at Play
• Date: 1780s
• Creator attribution: Clodion (French, 1738–1814)
• Culture: France
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: terracotta
• Dimensions: Overall: 30.8 x 29.1 x 22.4 cm (12 1/8 x 11 7/16 x 8 13/16 in.)
• Collection: Sculpture
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1942.783

Collection credit

Bequest of John L. Severance

Further reading listed by the museum

• Catalogue of the John L. Severance Collection: Bequest of John L. Severance, 1936. [Cleveland, Ohio]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1942.
• Milliken, William M. “Bequest of John L. Severance, 1936.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 29, no. 9 (1942).
• Ditner, David Charles. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century European Sculpture in the Cleveland Museum of Art. 1986.

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.