The Milk Woman
1774
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
About the artist
Artist
Louis-Marin Bonnet
Louis-Marin Bonnet (1736–1793) was a French artist, born in Paris.
See the richer artist page1774
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
The Milk Woman is a 1774 by Louis-Marin Bonnet, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A woman in a white cap pours milk from a jug into a bowl. The scene is soft and quiet, like a snapshot from a kitchen long ago. Bonnet didn’t paint this—he printed it. He used a special method to layer colors so the image looked like a pastel drawing. To sell more, he even added fake gold frames, pretending the prints came from England to avoid French laws. Look up how artists used sfumato to blend colors this smoothly.
This print belongs to a series created by Louis-Marin Bonnet featuring innovative color printing techniques derived from optical science to mimic the pastel drawings and miniature paintings highly sought by collectors. To increase the works’ appeal, the artist also developed a method for printing decorative frames by applying gold leaf. Hoping to evade strict governmental regulations on the uses of gold in France, he passed off his prints as English imports, which he sold at his store Au Magasin Anglois (At the English Shop). Bonnet’s elaborate ruse included English titles, the address of a…
The elaborate gold frame surrounding this print was created with some of the same techniques used to gild frames in 1700s.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Louis-Marin Bonnet (1736–1793) was a French artist, born in Paris.
See the richer artist page
