Public data from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Learn more
About the Artwork
Adolph Menzel left more than 5,000 drawings created during a long and successful career that spanned the 19th century. Near the end of his life, when this drawing was made, he used a carpenter's pencil--a broad, flat-pointed lead pencil made of soft graphite--and stumping (rubbing with bits of tightly rolled paper or leather) to created numerous studies of heads of models that he considered independent works of art. In this drawing of a woman seen from behind from the shoulders up, the virtuosity of Menzel's stumping creates the effect of tangible surfaces and light falling on them, especially on the woman's face and hat. While he used the width of the pencil vigorously to indicate grainy black shadows in the folds of the coat and seat back, he used the sharp point for fine lines describing hair and facial features. The immediacy of the image--drawn in close proximity and capturing her mouth slightly open--suggests Menzel's focus on a fleeting moment. He wrote of drawings such as this as "true to nature" yet without "being copied from nature with fearful exactitude."
Inscriptions
signed, center left, in graphite: a.m. [underlined] / 93.
Provenance
1994: with Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, New York 1994-: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
Exhibition history
Master Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (August 27-October 17, 2000); The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY (May 23-August 19, 2001); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX (October 14, 2001-January 6, 2002).
Quick Overview
- Artist
- Adolph von Menzel (German, 1815–1905)
- Date
- 1893
- Medium
- graphite (carpenter's pencil), with stumping
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 41.4 x 28.9 cm (16 5/16 x 11 3/8 in.); Secondary Support: 53.3 x 39.2 cm (21 x 15 7/16 in.)
- Type
- Drawing
- Classification
- Drawing
- Department
- Drawings
- Credit line
- Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
- Accession no.
- 1994.103
More by Adolph Menzel in museum collections
Data retrieved from the Cleveland Museum of Art on October 8, 2026. The museum may have updated its record since.
Open-access museum record · AT-00011149
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