Young girl reading

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Young girl reading: Jean-Honore Fragonard

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Jean-Honore Fragonard Oil Painting - Young girl reading

Keywords: Young, girl, reading

Work Overview: Young Girl Reading
Artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Year c. 1770
Medium Oil-on-canvas
Dimensions 81.1 cm × 64.8 cm ( 31 15⁄16 in × 25 1⁄2 in)
Location National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., United States

Young Girl Reading, or The Reader (French: La Liseuse), is an 18th-century oil painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. It was purchased by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in 1961 using funds donated by Ailsa Mellon Bruce, the daughter of Andrew W. Mellon, following her father's death.

The painting features an unidentified girl wearing a lemon yellow dress with white ruff collar and cuffs and purple ribbons. The subject is depicted in profile, reading from a small book held in her right hand, sitting with her left arm on a wooden rail and her back supported by a large lilac cushion resting against a wall. Her hair is tied in a chignon with a purple ribbon, and her face and dress are lit from the front, casting a shadow in the wall behind her. Fragonard pays close attention to the face, but uses looser brushwork on the dress and cushion, and the ruff was scratched into the paint with the end of a brush. The horizontal line of the armrest and a vertical line between two unadorned walls provide a sense of space and structure.

The work is more a genre painting of an everyday scene than a portrait, and the name of the sitter is not known. X-ray photography has revealed that the canvas originally featured a different head looking towards the viewer, which Fragonard painted over.[2][3][4] It is one in a series of quickly executed paintings by Fragonard featuring young girls, known as figures de fantaisie.[5]

The painting was not a completed academic work, and probably passed through the hands of several collectors and dealers in France. It was owned by surgeon Théodore Tuffier, and came to the US before 1930, when it was in the collection of Alfred W. Erickson in New York, founder of the advertising agency McCann Erickson. It was inherited by his wife Anna Edith McCann Erickson in 1936, and following her death in 1961 it was bought by the National Gallery of Art.

In about 1769, Jean Honoré Fragonard (French, 1732 - 1806) painted a group of works known today as his fantasy figures: vibrant canvases showing individual models garbed in fancy dress and rendered in notably loose brushwork and bright colors. Among the most beloved works in his oeuvre, these pictures are also the most mysterious and have therefore prompted the most debate—produced for unknown reasons, perhaps representing real individuals, perhaps not.

The Gallery’s Young Girl Reading—a representation of a demure model in a lemon-yellow dress seated at a window ledge, a book in one upraised hand—has always been loosely associated with the fantasy figures on formal terms. On the one hand, compelling evidence supported a connection between the two. The dimensions of the Gallery’s picture (approximately 81 × 65 cm) are identical, or nearly so, to those of the fantasy figures. Its palette, dominated by bold yellow, mauve, and rose, recalls their coloring; its energetic, gestural brushwork reappears throughout the canvases; its costume, with its elaborate collar, evokes the elegant masquerade dress of the other models. Yet on the other, Young Girl Reading retreats resolutely into her book, appearing remote and absorbed, whereas the other fantasy figures are frontally turned toward the viewer.

In 2012, researchers discovered a previously unknown drawing by Fragonard that included sketches of 18 paintings, many recognizable as known fantasy figures. The drawing also included a sketch corresponding to Young Girl Reading, thereby conclusively establishing a relationship between this painting and the fantasy figures. This became the impetus for a new scholarly evaluation of the Gallery’s painting: a long-term project culminating with an exhibition, Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures, on view in the West Building from October 8 through December 3.

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Jean-Honore Fragonard

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