Marguerite Gérard

Private collection, Europe;

By whom anonymously sold ("Property from a European Private Collection"), London, Sotheby's, 8 December 2011, lot 262.

C. Blumenfeld, Marguerite Gerard 1761-1837, Montreuil 2019, pp. 183-184, 245, cat. no. 275 P, reproduced p. 184. 

This work is a beautiful example of Marguerite Gérard's most commercial compositions: lavish interior scenes featuring upper class French women and their families. Gérard is noted for her meticulous attention to luxurious details within her genre scenes, contrasted in their sharp rendering by Gérard's penchant for softly modeled figures. The scene exudes a serenity allusive of the rarified social atmosphere the sitters in Gérard’s domestic interiors enjoyed, and this motif is only reinforced in the poses and garb of her subjects.   

A woman dressed in an extravagant yellow and white silk dress sits elegantly on a blue velvet chaise longue, her legs stretched out and crossed delicately at the ankles. In her right hand she holds a letter, but her gaze is instead upon a young girl, perhaps her daughter, at the end of the chaise longue, playing with a charming dog who has been dressed up and is standing on its hind legs. Two other children, one older and one younger, stand behind the mother, also entertained by the dog. A fireplace is lit in the background, and a folding screen otherwise serves to give privacy to the family during this precious moment.  

Marguerite Gérard was born in Grasse but moved to Paris in 1775 to live with her elder sister, Marie-Anne, and Marie-Anne’s husband, the painter Jean Honoré Fragonard. Gérard became Fragonard’s protégé, and while living with her sister and brother-in-law at their quarters in the Louvre, she was surrounded by the greatest works of art in Europe, specifically drawing inspiration from the Dutch interior scenes of the 17^th century. Gérard became one of the first female French genre painters, and by the late 1780s she had established her reputation as one of the leading female artists in France.

The pendant to this painting, depicting a gentleman seated with a lyre and a woman standing beside him reading a musical score, was also offered in the 2011 auction, but the two were sold as separate lots and subsequently entered different collections. The pair of paintings date from later in Gérard's career, circa 1824-26, and Blumenfeld points to her play on Fragonard's L'Education fait tout, now in São Paolo for inspiration in the present painting. While she had spent her earlier years working closely with Fragonard, it is interesting that by the 1820s she would again find inspiration from her brother-in-law; it is a testament to her enduring creativity that she sought to take this subject matter and inject a new story and composition in a style that was entirely her own.