Profile portrait of a woman facing left (Constanze Håuser?)
1773–1820
Medium
Cut black paper silhouette
Dimensions
4 15/16 × 4 in. (12.5 × 10.2 cm)
Classification
Cut Paper
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gift of Leopold Heinemann, 1948, transferred from the Library
Accession Number
2013.141.1
Tags
Art Historical Context
This delicate silhouette, titled *Profile Portrait of a Woman Facing Left (Const Håuser?)*, captures the elegant profile of a woman in stark black paper, cut with remarkable precision by an anonymous German artist sometime between 1773 and1820. Measuring just under 5 inches tall, this intimate work exemplifies the cut-paper technique, a favored medium for affordable portraiture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Drawings and Prints department, entered the collection as a gift from Leopoldinemann in 1948, transferred from the Library. Silhou...