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Lot Essay
Two paintings by Fragonard are recorded in the catalogue of an anonymous sale held in Paris on 30 March 1785: the first, "representing a woman who is putting on her garter...", has been missing since the 18th century; the other, "...a woman who learns of the death of her lover", is almost certainly the present canvas, 'La mauvaise nouvelle', a painting which was last exhibited publicly a half-century ago and only became available to scholars of Fragonard's work in the late 1980s. In it, a beautiful young woman, clutching an unsealed letter in her hand, swoons with grief upon receiving the dreadful news; a small sculpture of classical lovers -- Cupid and Psyche? Orpheus and Euridice? -- mocks her tragedy; her body twists into a pose at once abstractly beautiful and operatic in its tragic intensity. Like the victim in Fragonard's celebrated 'Le Verrou' ('The Bolt'; Musée du Louvre, Paris), the young woman in 'La mauvaise nouvelle' is distinguished by a powerful sense of movement and strong emotion; indeed, there is a striking similarity of expression and handling in the female heads in the two pictures. The extreme sensibilité evident in the present painting suggests that Fragonard -- ever responsive to changing fashions in art -- may have intended it as a conscious challenge to Jean-Baptiste Greuze, whose têtes d'expression were so much in vogue by the end of the 1770s.
Fragonard was identified as the sole author of the painting when it was sold in 1785, and both Louis Réau (1956) and Jean-Pierre Cuzin (1988) have upheld its attribution to Fragonard alone. Pierre Rosenberg (1989), however, believes that the picture is one of the dozen or so paintings that Fragonard created in collaboration with Marguerite Gérard in the 1780s. Gérard was Fragonard's sister-in-law and she lived in his household from the time of her arrival in Paris in 1775 (at age fourteen) until his death in 1806; she would be his only serious, long-term student. Gérard was an apt pupil and quickly developed into a genre painter of great refinement. It appears that by the early 1780s she and her famous brother-in-law were regularly creating paintings together: her collaboration with Fragonard, Cuzin asserts, "was in all probability, frequent, extensive, and assumed many different forms".
An exquisite pair of paintings in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard, suggests something of the way in which the two worked in tandem. The First Step of Infancy and The Beloved Child were engraved in 1786 by Gérard Vidal and Nicolas Regnault and printed with the inscription "painted by M. Fragonard and Mlle. Gérard". Eunice Williams has demontrated Fragonard's preponderant role in their creation: he completely mapped out the composition for The First Step in an elaborate chalk drawing (acquired by the Fogg in 1992) and painted most of the principle figures and landscape, while Gérard confined her contribution largely to the painting of fabrics and still life elements, at which she excelled. The surviving paintings made by the two artists together are consistant in subject matter, format and style, and date from a period not spanning more than a decade (c.1780-1790): among them is 'Sleep My Child' in Karlsruhe, which is signed by Gérard alone, but was sold in 1795 as by both artists; 'The Sleeping Child' in a private collection, which is signed by Fragonard; and 'The Reading' in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, which is unsigned.
The seemless ease with which Fragonard and Gérard collaborated complicates one's ability to distinguish all of their individual contributions to 'La mauvaise nouvelle'. However, the skillful, convincing evocation of fabrics, decor and still life elements, painted in emulation of the 17th-century Dutch masters, is characteristic of Gérard's work, while no one but Fragonard could be responsible for the unforgetable figure of the woman who seems, even in her sorrow, convulsed with erotic longing. Her figure infuses the picture with a quality of balletic movement and a burning emotional intensity that are alien to the reserved -- even static -- compositions that Marguerite Gérard devised on her own, but are found regularly in Fragonard's paintings of the late 1770s and 1780s: 'Le Verrou', Invocation to Love, Sacrifice of the Rose and The Fountain of Love. The shimmer on her silvery blonde hair and the soft vaporousness of her features are triumphs of Fragonard's late style.
A complete compositional drawing of 'La mauvaise nouvelle' in bister wash, identical in every detail to the painting, was in the famous collection of Fragonard drawings and paintings amassed by Hippolyte Walferdin in the mid-19th century (his sale, Paris, 12-16 April 1880, lot 181), and later appeared in the Muhlbacher sale (13-15 May 1907, lot 72). The drawing is signed by Fragonard (fig. 1), but Alexandre Ananoff (L'oeuvre dessiné de Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), Paris, 1963, vol.II, p. 72, no. 735), who did not know the drawing in the original, suggested that it might be by Fragonard with the assistance of Gérard; Sarah Well-Robertson attributed the drawing to Gérard alone. Its present whereabouts is unknown and it was last seen at auction thirty years ago (23 March 1971, Paris, Palais Galliera, lot 5).
A lost painting by Marguerite Gérard, known from an engraving, derived its general composition from 'La mauvaise nouvelle'. Commissioned in 1789 by the engraver LeGrand as the model for a print, it depicted Geneviève de Brabant Doomed to Die, and was based on a medieval German folk tale of a princess condemned to death because she had been falsely accused of adultery. The pose of Geneviève was identical to the woman in 'La mauvaise nouvelle', but she was seated in an entirely different, Troubadour setting. Sarah Wells-Robertson suggested the unlikely hypothosis that the ex-Walferdin drawing was made by Gérard in preparation for Geneviève de Brabant Doomed to Die, despite its having a fully elaborated contemporary, rather than medieval, setting. It seems more likely that having worked on 'La mauvaise nouvelle' some years earlier, Gérard found it easy to recycle Fragonard's figure into a new, Gothic version of the composition for LeGrand. Knowing the present painting only from old photographs, Wells-Robertson supposed it to be a pastiche from an unknown hand that incorporated a copy of the head of the woman from 'Le Verrou' into a larger composition based on the ex-Walferdin drawing. Happily, the reemergence of the original 'La mauvaise nouvelle' in all its splendor puts to rest any such speculation.
Fragonard was identified as the sole author of the painting when it was sold in 1785, and both Louis Réau (1956) and Jean-Pierre Cuzin (1988) have upheld its attribution to Fragonard alone. Pierre Rosenberg (1989), however, believes that the picture is one of the dozen or so paintings that Fragonard created in collaboration with Marguerite Gérard in the 1780s. Gérard was Fragonard's sister-in-law and she lived in his household from the time of her arrival in Paris in 1775 (at age fourteen) until his death in 1806; she would be his only serious, long-term student. Gérard was an apt pupil and quickly developed into a genre painter of great refinement. It appears that by the early 1780s she and her famous brother-in-law were regularly creating paintings together: her collaboration with Fragonard, Cuzin asserts, "was in all probability, frequent, extensive, and assumed many different forms".
An exquisite pair of paintings in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard, suggests something of the way in which the two worked in tandem. The First Step of Infancy and The Beloved Child were engraved in 1786 by Gérard Vidal and Nicolas Regnault and printed with the inscription "painted by M. Fragonard and Mlle. Gérard". Eunice Williams has demontrated Fragonard's preponderant role in their creation: he completely mapped out the composition for The First Step in an elaborate chalk drawing (acquired by the Fogg in 1992) and painted most of the principle figures and landscape, while Gérard confined her contribution largely to the painting of fabrics and still life elements, at which she excelled. The surviving paintings made by the two artists together are consistant in subject matter, format and style, and date from a period not spanning more than a decade (c.1780-1790): among them is 'Sleep My Child' in Karlsruhe, which is signed by Gérard alone, but was sold in 1795 as by both artists; 'The Sleeping Child' in a private collection, which is signed by Fragonard; and 'The Reading' in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, which is unsigned.
The seemless ease with which Fragonard and Gérard collaborated complicates one's ability to distinguish all of their individual contributions to 'La mauvaise nouvelle'. However, the skillful, convincing evocation of fabrics, decor and still life elements, painted in emulation of the 17th-century Dutch masters, is characteristic of Gérard's work, while no one but Fragonard could be responsible for the unforgetable figure of the woman who seems, even in her sorrow, convulsed with erotic longing. Her figure infuses the picture with a quality of balletic movement and a burning emotional intensity that are alien to the reserved -- even static -- compositions that Marguerite Gérard devised on her own, but are found regularly in Fragonard's paintings of the late 1770s and 1780s: 'Le Verrou', Invocation to Love, Sacrifice of the Rose and The Fountain of Love. The shimmer on her silvery blonde hair and the soft vaporousness of her features are triumphs of Fragonard's late style.
A complete compositional drawing of 'La mauvaise nouvelle' in bister wash, identical in every detail to the painting, was in the famous collection of Fragonard drawings and paintings amassed by Hippolyte Walferdin in the mid-19th century (his sale, Paris, 12-16 April 1880, lot 181), and later appeared in the Muhlbacher sale (13-15 May 1907, lot 72). The drawing is signed by Fragonard (fig. 1), but Alexandre Ananoff (L'oeuvre dessiné de Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), Paris, 1963, vol.II, p. 72, no. 735), who did not know the drawing in the original, suggested that it might be by Fragonard with the assistance of Gérard; Sarah Well-Robertson attributed the drawing to Gérard alone. Its present whereabouts is unknown and it was last seen at auction thirty years ago (23 March 1971, Paris, Palais Galliera, lot 5).
A lost painting by Marguerite Gérard, known from an engraving, derived its general composition from 'La mauvaise nouvelle'. Commissioned in 1789 by the engraver LeGrand as the model for a print, it depicted Geneviève de Brabant Doomed to Die, and was based on a medieval German folk tale of a princess condemned to death because she had been falsely accused of adultery. The pose of Geneviève was identical to the woman in 'La mauvaise nouvelle', but she was seated in an entirely different, Troubadour setting. Sarah Wells-Robertson suggested the unlikely hypothosis that the ex-Walferdin drawing was made by Gérard in preparation for Geneviève de Brabant Doomed to Die, despite its having a fully elaborated contemporary, rather than medieval, setting. It seems more likely that having worked on 'La mauvaise nouvelle' some years earlier, Gérard found it easy to recycle Fragonard's figure into a new, Gothic version of the composition for LeGrand. Knowing the present painting only from old photographs, Wells-Robertson supposed it to be a pastiche from an unknown hand that incorporated a copy of the head of the woman from 'Le Verrou' into a larger composition based on the ex-Walferdin drawing. Happily, the reemergence of the original 'La mauvaise nouvelle' in all its splendor puts to rest any such speculation.