TitlePortrait of a Young Woman
Artist
George Henry Hall
(American, 1825 - 1913)
Date1856
MediumGraphite on tan wove paper
DimensionsSheet size: 8 5/8 × 6 15/16 in.
SignedSigned at LL: "N.Y. '56 / G.H.H.".
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, Gift of Samuel Tarlton, 1984
Object number1984.56
Label TextThe figure and still life painter George Henry Hall spent more than 20 years of his career living and working in Europe. He first traveled abroad in 1849, when he enrolled in the Royal Academy in Düsseldorf, Germany. Following his return to America in 1852, he spent the next seven years creating mostly figurative subjects based on his European travels or on European and American literary sources. Many of the works depicted daily life in Spain in a style indebted to the art of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. Beginning in the early 1870s, Hall turned almost exclusively to creating Italian genre subjects. He lived for an extended period in Rome in the mid-1880s, and over the course of approximately the next 15 years alternated residences in Rome, Paris, and New York.
