Young Girl Drawing
Medium
etching
Dimensions
image: 9.4 x 7.8 cm (3 11/16 x 3 1/16 in.) sheet: 27.5 x 20 cm (10 13/16 x 7 7/8 in.)
Classification
Department
CG-W
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Gift of Ruth Cole Kainen
Accession Number
2012.92.707
Art Historical Context
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's *Young Girl Drawing* (1906) is a delicate etching that captures a quiet moment of youthful concentration. Created just a year after Kirchner co-founded Die Brücke, the German Expressionist group in Dresden, this small print (image measures 9.4 x 7.8 cm) exemplifies the movement's raw emotional intensity and rejection of academic traditions. The artist, a pioneering figure in early 20th-century modernism, used sharp, energetic lines to convey the girl's absorbed focus, blending tenderness with the bold distortion characteristic of Expressionism. As an etching—a printmak...
About the Artist
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner · 1880–1938
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was born on May 6, 1880, in Aschaffenburg, Germany, to parents Ernst and Maria Kirchner, part of a family of Prussian descent that frequently relocated due to his father's career as a chemical technician. After early schooling in various towns, he studied architecture at the Königliche Technische Hochschule (Technical University) in Dresden from 1901 to 1905, taking courses i...