2006.311: Head of a Woman Looking Up

Identification and Creation

Object Number

2006.311

People

Gilles Demarteau, French (Liège 1722 - 1776)
After François Boucher, French (Paris 1703 - 1770 Paris)

Title

Head of a Woman Looking Up

Classification

Prints

Work Type

print

Date

1767

Culture

French

Persistent Link

https://hvrd.art/o/318172

Physical Descriptions

Medium

Chalk manner, printed in black and orange-red inks

Dimensions

image: 19.5 x 14.9 cm (7 11/16 x 5 7/8 in.)
sheet: 21.6 x 16.4 cm (8 1/2 x 6 7/16 in.)

Inscriptions and Marks

• inscription: l.l. printed: F. Boucher f.

State, Edition, Standard Reference Number

Standard Reference Number

IFF, vol VI, no. 149, p. 386; Leymarie 149; Jean-Richard 720

Acquisition and Rights

Credit Line

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Nesta and Walter Spink

Accession Year

2006

Object Number

2006.311

Division

European and American Art

Contact

am_europeanamerican@harvard.edu

Permissions

The Harvard Art Museums encourage the use of images found on this website for personal, noncommercial use, including educational and scholarly purposes. To request a higher resolution file of this image, please submit an online request.

Descriptions

Commentary

A number of printmakers, beginning in the 1760s, developed the "chalk manner" (also called "crayon manner") technique for rendering imitations of pastel or chalk lines, most often used to create facsimiles of drawings. Chalk-manner prints were made in as many as three colors-black, red, and white-from one or more copper plates worked either in etching or engraving, or in a combination of the two. Special toothed tools such as roulettes were used to create dotted patterns on the plate that suggest the grainy appearance of chalk lines on paper. Demarteau was a master of the chalk-manner technique. Le Maraudeur, after a drawing by Boucher is nearly an exact replica, although the image appears in reverse. Head of a Woman Looking Up also reproduces a Boucher drawing (the location of the drawing is now unknown)-a study of the head of Aurora for the painting The Rising Sun. Demarteau often executed his prints on the same scale as the drawings he was copying, and also mixed printer's inks to closely match the colored chalks of the original.

Publication History

• Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Colorful Impressions: The Printmaking Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art/Lund Humphries Publishers (Washington, D.C., 2003), p. 61 [not Harvard impression]

Verification Level