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A Seated Shepherdess
Jules Dupré (French, 1811–1889)
c. 1836
- Medium
- black chalk with white heightening and white pastel on brown paper laid down on board
- Classification
- Drawing
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 61.1 x 47.6 cm (24 1/16 x 18 3/4 in.)
- Culture
- France, 19th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Drawings
- Credit line
- Bequest of Muriel Butkin
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Unique for Jules Dupré, who mostly recorded landscapes, this sheet features a woman holding a crook for herding sheep. Many middle-class collectors at the time were eager for images of rural life while cities grew and factories proliferated. Cleveland’s drawing forms a pair with a similar depiction of a male shepherd, also created using wetted and burnished white pastel on earthy brown paper. It is one of numerous objects in these galleries formerly owned by Clevelander Muriel Butkin, a passionate scholar and collector of French art from the 1800s who bequeathed nearly 300 drawings to the museum.
