Italy, Venice / c. 1740
A Young Woman Buying a Pink from a Young Man
The Cleveland Museum of Art catalogs A Young Woman Buying a Pink from a Young Man as drawing (Italy, Venice · c. 1740).
The flower the woman in this drawing plucks from the bouquet—a “pink”—was associated with marriage and love in 18th-century Europe.
A CLOSER LOOK
The museum identifies this drawing as black crayon (wetted and rubbed) heightened with white chalk on faded blue paper and credits Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (Italian, 1682–1754).
The museum's collection notes: Giovanni Battista Piazzetta was celebrated for his finished drawings of saints, portraits, and teste di carattere (character heads). Cleveland’s sheet belongs to the latter genre, which describes portraits embellished with props to suggest a character type or types. Here, Piazzetta united three independent studies of individuals into a single scene, in which a young woman appears to purchase a pink—a type of flower related to the carnation—from a boy with a second young woman looking on.The image bristles with tantalizing narrative potential, but it is left to the viewer to interpret the scene as they wish. Drawings of this size and quality o
FOLLOW THE EVIDENCE
The Cleveland Museum of ArtA Young Woman Buying a Pink from a Young ManOriginal explanation based on the sources above. Images carry their own reuse terms.