{
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"tombstone": "A Woman from the Arctic, 1826. L\u00e9on Cogniet (French, 1794\u20131880). Oil on fabric; framed: 62.9 x 57.2 x 8.9 cm (24 3/4 x 22 1/2 x 3 1/2 in.); unframed: 42.5 x 36.5 cm (16 3/4 x 14 3/8 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Bequest of Noah L. Butkin, 1980.249",
"current_location": null,
"title": "A Woman from the Arctic",
"creation_date": "1826",
"creation_date_earliest": 1826,
"creation_date_latest": 1826,
"artists_tags": [
"male"
],
"culture": [
"France, 19th century"
],
"technique": "oil on fabric",
"support_materials": [],
"department": "Modern European Painting and Sculpture",
"collection": "Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960",
"type": "Painting",
"measurements": "Framed: 62.9 x 57.2 x 8.9 cm (24 3/4 x 22 1/2 x 3 1/2 in.); Unframed: 42.5 x 36.5 cm (16 3/4 x 14 3/8 in.)",
"dimensions": {
"framed": {
"height": 0.629,
"height_inch": 24,
"height_inch_fraction": 0.75,
"width": 0.572,
"width_inch": 22,
"width_inch_fraction": 0.5,
"depth": 0.089,
"depth_inch": 3,
"depth_inch_fraction": 0.5
},
"unframed": {
"height": 0.425,
"height_inch": 16,
"height_inch_fraction": 0.75,
"width": 0.365,
"width_inch": 14,
"width_inch_fraction": 0.375
}
},
"state_of_the_work": null,
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"copyright": null,
"inscriptions": [
{
"inscription": "Signed lower right: L\u00e9on Cogniet / 1826\r\n\r\n\r\n",
"inscription_translation": null,
"inscription_remark": null,
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}
],
"exhibitions": {
"current": [
{
"id": 304521,
"title": "Year in Review: 1980",
"description": "Year in Review: 1980. The Cleveland Museum of Art (organizer) (June 24-July 19, 1981).",
"opening_date": "1981-06-24T04:00:00"
},
{
"id": 221753,
"title": "Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics, 1820-1840",
"description": "Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics, 1820-1840. Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN (June 1-August 31, 2003); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (September 29, 2003-January 4, 2004).",
"opening_date": "2003-02-06T00:00:00"
}
],
"legacy": [
{
"description": "Paris, Galerie Lebrun. Explication des ouvrages de peinture expos\u00e9s au profit des grecs (1826), no. 26, Une femme du pays des Esquimaux, peinte d'apr\u00e8s nature.",
"opening_date": null
},
{
"description": "Paris, Mus\u00e9e Royal des Arts. Salon (1827), no. 211, Femme du pays des Esquimaux (Ce tableau appartient \u00e0 M. le baron Gros).",
"opening_date": null
}
]
},
"provenance": [
{
"description": "Offered by Cogniet to Baron Gros in 1826. His sale, Paris, 23 November 1835 (lot 125), Femme du pays des Esquimaux, ouvrage expos\u00e9 au salon du Louvre en 1827, for ff 715 to Dubois. Mme P\u00e9trus Martin, Paris. Her collection sale, Paris, Drouot, 6-7 February 1902 (lot 10), Femme du pays des Esquimaux, sign\u00e9 \u00e0 gauche, 45 x 36 cm, ff 42. (The CMA painting is signed on the right and the Douwes version is signed on the left, so this auction catalogue entry may refer to that painting.) Shepherd Gallery, New York. Bought in August 1976 by Mr. and Mrs. Noah L. Butkin, Cleveland. Bequeathed to the CMA in 1980.",
"citations": [],
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}
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"description": "When this painting was shown in an 1826 exhibition, the accompanying catalogue stated that it was \"painted after nature.\" Although L\u00e9on Cogniet never traveled to North America, he may have encountered a native person from the Arctic. In 1820, an American sea captain, Samuel Hadlock, met two Inuit from Labrador, George Niakungitok and Mary Coonahnik, who accompanied Hadlock on a tour of America and Europe. The tour, an early example of a commercial show presenting people from lesser-known parts of the world to paying European audiences, concluded in Paris in 1826. The show also included a panoramic view of Baffin Bay (located between northeast Canada and Greenland) that may have inspired the cloudy sky and ice formations in Cogniet's painting.",
"external_resources": {
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"https://archive.org/details/clevelandart-1980.249-a-woman-from-the-lan"
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"citations": [
{
"citation": "Talbot, William S. \"Cogniet and Vernet at the Villa Medici.\" The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 67, no. 5 (1980): 135-49.",
"page_number": "Reproduced & Mentioned: p. 137",
"url": "https://www.jstor.org/stable/25159675"
},
{
"citation": "Lee, Sherman E. \u201cThe Year in Review for 1980.\u201d The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 68, no. 6 (June 1981): 163\u2013219.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: p. 171; Mentioned: p. 212, no. 38",
"url": "http://www.jstor.org/stable/25159730"
},
{
"citation": "Argencourt, Louise d', and Roger Diederen. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 4. European Paintings of the 19th Century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.",
"page_number": "Mentioned and reproduced: P. 138-140, Vol. I, no. 52",
"url": ""
},
{
"citation": "Noon, Patrick, Stephen Bann, Tate Britain (Gallery), Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.). Constable to Delacroix : British Art and the French Romantics, 1820-1840. London: Tate, 2003.",
"page_number": "Cat nbr 36. p. 92-93.",
"url": ""
},
{
"citation": "Nolan, Dennis. Keepers of the Flame: Parrish, Wyeth, Rockwell and the Narrative Tradition. Stockbridge, MA: Norman Rockwell Museum, 2018.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: p. 63; Mentioned: p. 58",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Feest, Christian. \u201cThin Ice: The Captain and the Inuk.\u201d Tribal Art 30, i. 2 (Spring 2026): 104-115.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: p. 107; Reproduced: p. 114, fig. 17",
"url": ""
}
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"creditline": "Bequest of Noah L. Butkin",
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"description": "L\u00e9on Cogniet (French, 1794\u20131880)",
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"biography": "L\u00e9on Cogniet came to painting just as the pictures by Th\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault (1791-1824) challenged the established neo-classical style and academic hierarchies. Straddling these two worlds, Cogniet experimented with different subjects and composition but generally retained a relatively traditional technique. He entered the \u00c9cole des Beaux-Arts in 1812 and studied with Baron Pierre-Narcisse Gu\u00e9rin (1774-1833), but he was friendly with Delacroix (q.v.), G\u00e9ricault, and other romantics. Aiming for the most esteemed rank of history painter, Cogniet won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1817 (Helen Freed by Castor and Pollux, \u00c9cole Nationale Sup\u00e9rieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris) and made his Salon debut while studying in Rome (Metabus, King of the Volscians, Mus\u00e9e des Beaux-Arts, Chartres). The French state first bought his paintings at the 1824 Salon (Marius on the Ruins of Carthage, Mus\u00e9e des Augustins, Toulouse), and three years later he was commissioned for a series of the life of St. Stephen for the church of St. Nicolas-des-Champs in Paris (in situ). Around the late 1820s Cogniet became especially enamored of subjects from contemporary British literature, by Sir Walter Scott for example, an interest shared by many French romantic artists. He seems to have been open to different styles and fluctuated between a conventional neoclassicism and more personally inflected romanticism. After 1831 Cogniet became regularly engaged on prestigious public commissions under the regime of Louis-Philippe. He painted Bonaparte's Expedition to Egypt (1833-35), a ceiling in the Louvre palace for the newly created Mus\u00e9e d'Egypte, then several large canvases for the new Mus\u00e9e Historique at Versailles. For these official paintings Cogniet combined his early neoclassical style of clearly organized pictorial space and forms, crisp modeling in light and shade, and smooth surface finish with greater attention to natural-istic details, a looser or more casual composition. The artists adopting this style were called the juste milieu (loosely, \"middle of the road\"), a term first used in the political arena to identify politicians who espoused neither conservative nor radical ideas but those that, rather, benefited the bourgeoisie, the same class that most admired these paintings. In 1843 Cogniet enjoyed a huge success with Tintoretto Painting His Dead Daughter (Mus\u00e9e des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux), an invented scene of the great Venetian painter at the deathbed of his beloved daughter. In spite of its popularity, Cogniet exhibited only portraits at the following Salons, and his production fell off after the mid-1850s. He received the highest titles given to painters: Academician (1840), Legion of Honor (1846), and professor at the \u00c9cole des Beaux-Arts (1851). \r\nTeaching became an important aspect of Cogniet's later life. Besides the atelier for men that he established by 1830, he was also responsible for another for women, which his sister Marie-Am\u00e9lie directed. He served as drawing instructor at the Lyc\u00e9e Louis-le-Grand from 1831 to 1876, where Degas (q.v.) was his student. He also taught at the \u00c9cole Polytechnique for sixteen years, which may have contributed to his interest in such new technologies as drawing machines and photography that he later integrated into his painting. Nevertheless, after the administrative and curricular reforms of 1863 were passed to reorganize the Acad\u00e9mie and \u00c9cole des Beaux-Arts, Cogniet resigned from his teaching position there in protest. Among his hundreds of pupils were Bonnat (q.v.), Meissonier (q.v.), and Jean-Paul Laurens (1838-1921).",
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"sortable_date": 1826,
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"updated_at": "2026-09-16 16:19:50.363000"
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