A Young Girl Reading

A girl in a lemon yellow dress sits in profile, lost in a small book, her back resting on a violet cushion. Fragonard painted her quickly, and under her head lies another face he painted over.

The story behind the painting

Jean-Honore Fragonard won the Prix de Rome in 1753 and became one of the leading French painters in the Rococo style, a style of light colours, asymmetry and curving natural forms that flourished in Paris under Louis XV. He was drawn above all to the playful lives and loves of the aristocratic youth of his day. Young Girl Reading, also called The Reader or La Liseuse, belongs to a series of quickly painted pictures of young girls known as figures de fantaisie. Wikidata dates it to 1770.

What to look for

The girl is seated in profile, wearing a lemon yellow dress with a white ruff collar and cuffs and purple ribbons, holding a small book in her right hand. Notice the violet cushion behind her, the darker walls and armrest, and her rosy skin: the bright colours stand out against the dark background and lead the eye along the curves of her figure. Look closely at the frills of the dress, made with loose, energetic, gestural brushstrokes. The wall, the dress and the armrest each have a different texture, created by different ways of handling the brush.

Meaning and intent

The colour scheme is typically Rococo, soft and delicate with hues of gold, and it creates a sense of warmth, joy and sensuality. Yet the subject is simply someone absorbed in reading. The work is more a genre painting of an everyday scene than a portrait, and the sitter's name is not known. X-ray photography revealed that the canvas first showed a different head looking toward the viewer, which Fragonard painted over. By turning her away into her book, he left us watching a private moment rather than being watched.

Legacy

The picture was not a finished academic work and probably passed through several collectors and dealers in France. It belonged to the surgeon Theodore Tuffier and reached the United States before 1930, when it was in the New York collection of Alfred W. Erickson, founder of the advertising agency McCann Erickson. His wife Anna Edith McCann Erickson inherited it in 1936. After her death in 1961 it was bought by the National Gallery of Art in Washington with funds given by Ailsa Mellon Bruce, daughter of Andrew W. Mellon.