An Elegant Woman Playing Chess

Public Domain

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Artist Charles-Nicolas Cochin the Younger(French, 1715–1790)French, 1715–1790

CultureFrench

Titles

An Elegant Woman Playing Chess

Date1779

MediumBlack chalk on laid paper

DimensionsSheet: 6 7/8 × 4 13/16 in. (17.4 × 12.2 cm)
Frame: 13 1/2 × 11 1/4 × 1 1/2 in. (34.3 × 28.6 × 3.8 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by the Alvin S. Romansky Prints and Drawings Accessions Endowment and Orna Feinstein at Art + Paper 2026

Object number2026.19

Non exposé

Explore Further

Department

Prints and Drawings

Object Type

DRAWINGS, PASTELS & WATERCOLORS

Provenance[Possibly sale, Drouot, Ader Michaud, December 10, 1937, lot 2]; [Sale, Paris, Thierry de Maigret, 30 March 2011, part of lot 134]; [Didier Aaron & Cie, Paris, 2012]; Diane A. Nixon; Diane A. Nixon (1935−2024), 2012-2024 [1]; Estate of Diane A. Nixon, 2024-2026; [Sotheby's, New York, February 4, 2026, Master Drawings from the Collection of Diane A. Nixon, Lot 63]; purchased by MFAH, 2026.

1 Diane A. (“Dee”) Nixon was a collector of Old Master drawings and a philanthropist. She was a muse and former model for Italian fashion designer Emilio Pucci and acquired her first Old Master drawing (Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Head of God the Father and the Holy Spirit) while traveling in Barcelona in 1993. An alumnus of Smith College, her interest in collecting drawings from the mid-1990s was fired by her friendship with Charles Ryskamp, Director of the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Frick as well as an avid collector of drawings himself. She built a remarkable collection in a short span of fewer than thirty years including 200 drawings covering most schools and periods. Collection was a great passion of her life and she pursued it with intelligence and discernment. Nixon was on the board of directors for the journal Master Drawings from 1997 and as vice president from 2005. She served as a trustee of the Morgan and held seats on the visiting committee of its drawings department. She was involved as a supporter of numerous other museums, including the National Gallery of Art’s Trustees Council, the Smith College Museum of Art’s Visiting Committee, the British Museum’s Ottley Group, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Paper Conservation Committee, the Director’s Circle of the Frick Collection, the American Friends of the Royal Academy of Arts, the American Friends of the Louvre, and the Rijksmuseum’s International Circle. She was a generous lender to exhibitions and two shows of her collections highlighted its quality and range including New York, Morgan Library and Museum and Washington DC, National Gallery of Art, Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings (2007); Northampton, Smith College Museum of Art and Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Drawn to Excellence: Renaissance to Romantic Drawings from a Private Collection (2013). See also “Obituary,” Master Drawings, vol. 63, no. 3 (2024), pp. 411-12.

Exhibition HistoryN/A
Published References N/A Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

Recto: Signed and dated in graphite, lower center: C.N. Cochin f. delin. 1779
Verso: [inaccessible]

None

Catalogue raisonnéRocheblave, Samuel. Charles-Nicolas Cochin, graveur et dessinateur, 1715-1790 (Paris: G. Van Oest, 1927).

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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