Woman Watching Puppies
late 19th century
Medium
graphite on wove paper
Dimensions
sheet: 30.16 × 22.86 cm (11 7/8 × 9 in.)
Classification
Drawing
Department
CG-W
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Corcoran Collection
Accession Number
2015.19.3546
Rights
Public Domain
Art Historical Context
Walter Shirlaw’s *Woman Watching Puppies* captures a tender, everyday moment in graphite on wove paper. Created in the late nineteenth century, the modest sheet—measuring just under 12 by 9 inches—invites close looking. The soft, velvety lines typical of graphite allow Shirlaw to render both the gentle curve of the woman’s posture and the lively, tumbling forms of the puppies with quiet intimacy. Drawings such as this one often served as studies or personal records for artists of the period, preserving fleeting observations that might later inform larger paintings. Here, the medium’s immediac...
About the Artist
Walter Shirlaw · 1838–1909
Walter Shirlaw (1838–1909) was a Scottish-born American painter and illustrator whose career bridged the genteel tradition of academic figure painting and the emerging ambitions of American art in the Gilded Age. Born in Paisley, Scotland, Shirlaw emigrated to the United States as a child and received his early artistic training in America before traveling to Munich to study at the Royal Academy —...