Portrait of a Young Woman
1858
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
1858
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Portrait of a Young Woman is a 1858 by Unknown, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a small, painted portrait of a young woman in a dark dress, her hair neatly parted, staring straight ahead. The background is plain, almost like a photograph. This wasn’t made by a famous artist—it was likely done by a traveling painter or a studio worker. In the 1850s, middle-class Americans wanted keepsakes of their families, and this kind of portrait was affordable. The case it came in was fancy, meant to show off on a shelf. If you like this, look up more under the subject america.
It seemed a miracle that anyone could afford to have an accurate record of their own likeness or those of their loved ones. This portrait is an excellent example of the hundreds of thousands of portraits produced by commercial photographers in mid-nineteenth-century America. Small scale yet housed in an elaborately decorated thermoplastic case, it was intended to be carried by its owner or displayed on parlor tables or knickknack shelves.
During the first decades of photography, portraits far outnumbered every other type of image.
Read the full account in the museum source.
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