Bust-length portrait study of a young woman with a striped shawl

Bust-length portrait study of a young woman with a striped shawl

Joseph van Aken

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

After training in Antwerp, the young Van Aken went to London, where he specialized in painting draperies. The leading portraitists there, including Joseph Highmore, Thomas Hudson, and Allan Ramsay, often painted only a sitter's face, relying on Van Aken to finish the rest of the figure. His work became ubiquitous, to the point that the collector and writer Horace Walpole remarked wryly: "As in England almost everybody's picture is painted, so almost every painter's works were painted by Van Aken." An assistant probably made this portrait study, but it demonstrates Van Aken's typical attention to texture using black and white chalk to describe the elements of the costume, with touches of brown ink used to refine details. The design was then overlaid with a graphite grid to allow it to be transferred accurately onto canvas.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bust-length portrait study of a young woman with a striped shawlBust-length portrait study of a young woman with a striped shawlBust-length portrait study of a young woman with a striped shawlBust-length portrait study of a young woman with a striped shawlBust-length portrait study of a young woman with a striped shawl

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.