La Gimblette

A girl lies laughing in a canopied bed, playing with her little dog. Fragonard's La Gimblette is one of the most famous Rococo pictures, and its story is a puzzle of versions, some lost, none signed.

The story behind the painting

La Gimblette is one of Fragonard's most famous paintings and one of the best known Rococo images, with the same frivolous streak as The Swing. Three versions can be traced to the eighteenth century through auction catalogues, but two are now considered lost, so no one can say for certain which came first. None of the versions is signed, and there is no record of how many Fragonard painted. This page is about the Munich version, about 89 by 70 cm, now in the Alte Pinakothek.

What to look for

The picture shows a girl lying under a canopy in a deep bed heaped with linen, playing with a dog. Other titles describe it plainly: Young girl in her bed, making her dog dance, or Girl with dog. In some versions she feeds the dog a gimblette, the treat named in the title. The details change from version to version: how she wears her clothes, how she holds the animal, even the breed of dog. In the Munich version, the dog also serves to hide parts of her body.

Meaning and intent

The source calls the painting a testament to the Ancien Régime, with symbolism that shifts between versions and has to be read in context. It quotes a remark that the lovers' paradise of the mid-eighteenth century is no longer ours, so these pictures may stay strange to us. That is part of their charm: a private, playful moment, painted with lightness, that also shows the taste of an aristocratic world. Small changes in a dog's pose could turn the joke in a different direction.

Legacy

The Munich version has a provenance going back to the eighteenth century and was on the art market in 1795, 1839, 1847 and 1868. It was in the Walferdin Collection, which held two versions, and was sold at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris in 1880, bought by the sale's own expert, Henri Haro. In 1977 it belonged to Jeannette Veil-Picard before HypoVereinsbank bought it that same year; it has since been made available to the Alte Pinakothek. Engravers such as Legrand and Lafrensen spread the composition widely.