Historical context
Louis-Marin Bonnet (French, 1736–1793) was the most ambitious technician of the French manière de crayon — chalk-manner engraving — in the second half of the 18th century. He developed a multi-plate color process that could reproduce a pastel drawing so convincingly that contemporary buyers often took the prints for original drawings. The Woman Taking Coffee, 1774, is one of his showpiece works.
The image is after a lost pastel by François Boucher (1703–1770), the court painter to Madame de Pompadour and the dominant figure of the French rococo. The woman shown — powdered, in lace, mid-gesture of bringing a porcelain cup to her lips — is the rococo idea of coffee as elegant private consumption, far from the cabaret and the Brasserie.
Technically this is a chalk-manner engraving in colored inks — a process called la gravure aux deux crayons or aux trois crayons. Bonnet ground special tools that simulated the broken, granular line of a chalk drawing; the inks were mixed to match the pastel palette; the gold leaf and ornamental border were laid in last. The Cleveland Museum’s example (2003.49) is one of the surviving impressions with the gold leaf still intact.
The file is a 4042 × 5162 px high-resolution scan from the Cleveland Museum’s open-access program. At native scale it prints at 11 × 14 inches; it carries cleanly to 16 × 20 inches. The granular chalk-manner texture is the point of this image and shows best at the larger print.
Catalog
| Artist | Louis-Marin Bonnet (after François Boucher) French, 1736–1793 / 1703–1770 |
|---|---|
| Title | The Woman Taking Coffee |
| Year | 1774 |
| Medium | Chalk-manner engraving in colored inks |
| Original size | ≈ 38 × 30 cm |
| Holding | Cleveland Museum of Art (2003.49) |
| License | Public Domain |
| Archive № | CA-010 |
Print specifications
The size at which the chalk-manner stipple reads as drawing rather than print. Cream mat, slim warm-toned frame.
The rococo composition rewards the larger size. The printed gold-leaf border (visible in the Cleveland impression) is the unique element of the piece.
Pushable for a salon-style hang. The chalk granulation begins to look mechanical at this scale; 16 × 20 is our preference.
Source statement
Digital source: Cleveland Museum of Art, open-access program (accession 2003.49). Public Domain.
Original work: Louis-Marin Bonnet (1736–1793) after François Boucher (1703–1770), The Woman Taking Coffee, chalk-manner engraving in colored inks with printed gold leaf, 1774. Cleveland Museum of Art 2003.49.
Restoration notes. Conservative preservation of the Cleveland Museum’s photograph; paper tone and gold-leaf passages held to source. No retouching applied to the printed image.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.