Cleveland Museum of Art

Portrait of Marianne Brockhaus in Leipzig

Otto Greiner

Date

1899

Medium

Pen lithograph

Culture

Germany

Department

Prints

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

Otto Greiner favored esoteric themes drawn from dreams, the unconscious, and a timeless classical past. Early on, he apprenticed with a lithographer, giving him proficiency in printmaking that was well-suited to experimentation. Here, Greiner portrayed Marianne Brockhaus, an influential collector of both artworks and books—a practice that was, in her time, still unusual for a woman. Her distant gaze and finger holding her place in a book suggest her intellectual interests, while her precisely rendered dress and chic chignon mark her as fashionable and modern. In addition to this portrait, Otto Greiner also designed an ex-libris (or bookplate) for Brockhaus to use in her prolific book collection.

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