1836
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
A Seated Shepherdess is a 1836 by Jules Dupré, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A young woman sits on a rock, holding a shepherd’s crook. She wears a simple dress and bonnet, her gaze steady and calm. This sketch is rare for Dupré, who usually painted landscapes. In the 1830s, city-dwelling collectors wanted scenes of rural life, seeing it as peaceful and honest. The artist used soft pastels, blending them to create a warm, earthy look. To see more of this style, look up *sfumato*.
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…
Dupré was known for his evocative skies reflecting different atmospheric conditions.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Jules Louis Dupré (French pronunciation: ; April 5, 1811 – October 6, 1889) was a French painter, one of the chief members of the Barbizon school of landscape painters.
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