The Love Letter

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The Love Letter: Jean-Honore Fragonard

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Jean-Honore Fragonard Oil Painting - The Love Letter

Keywords: Love, Letter

Work Overview: The Love Letter
Jean-Honore Fragonard
Date: c.1770 - c.1780
Style: Rococo
Genre: portrait
Oil on canvas
83,2 X 67 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This picture exemplifies Fragonard's feeling for colour, his sensitive handling of effects of light, and his extraordinary technical facility. The elegant blue dress, lace cap, and coiffure of the woman seated at her writing table must have been the height of fashion at the time this painting was made. The inscription on the letter she holds has given rise to different interpretations. It may simply refer to her cavalier, but if it is read Cuvillere, then the sitter would be the daughter of François Boucher, Fragonard's teacher. Marie Émilie Boucher, born in 1740, was widowed in 1769 and married, in 1773, her father's friend, the architect Charles Étienne Gabriel Cuvillier.

After 1767, Fragonard's chief work was decorative panels commissioned by Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, for her chateau at Louveciennes. Surprisingly enough, she rejected the panels as unsuitable. This painting was executed shortly before the series, and may have been shown to Madame du Barry as part of Fragonard's "pitch" to win the commission.

In any case, The Love Letter is characteristically muted, with an eroticism that is certainly present, but deeply hidden. What attracts the eye here are the glorious golden colors, and the coquettish attitude of the young lady, rather than body parts. The painting seems to glow with passion.

In the work of Fragonard, by comparison, for example, with that of Boucher, finish is a relative term. Here, over a brown tone, Fragonard shapes the composition in darker shades of brown, drawing and modeling with the tip of the brush and with strokes of varying thickness. Color and white are confined to passages under strong light toward the center of the canvas: the young woman's powdered face, her dress and cap, writing surface and stool, flowers and dog. This famous canvas from the early 1770s should be read not as a portrait but as a genre scene.

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Jean-Honore Fragonard

Work Overview