L'AMOUR: SAID TO BE A PORTRAIT OF MARIE-CATHERINE ROMBOCCOLI-RIGGIERI, CALLED COLOMBE, AS CUPID

Marie-Catherine Riggieri (1751-1830) and her two sisters, Marie-Thérèse (1754-1837) and Marie-Madeleine (1760-1841), were among the more celebrated demi-mondaines of their era. Appearing under the stage name 'Colombe' (French for 'Dove'), the beautiful (and notorious) Venetian-born actresses of the Comédie italienne made a sensation in late-eighteenth-century Paris. Ever since a pair of paintings depicting beautiful young women by Fragonard were rediscovered a century ago still installed in the bedroom of Marie-Catherine's former residence - Girl holding a Dove was encased in boiserie above the fireplace and Girl Playing with a Dog and a Cat in panelling on the wall opposite - it has been an article of faith that these pictures - and a whole group of similar images by Fragonard, including the present L'Amour -- portray the actress or one of her sisters. (Girl Holding a Dove (fig. 2) and Girl Playing with a Dog and a Cat, in a private collection, formerly belonging to the late Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild, were auctioned at Christie's London, 13 December 2000, lots 64 and 65.) Despite Fragonard's known connections to the sisters, and the fact that the artist very likely made Girl Holding a Dove and Girl Playing with a Dog and a Cat specifically for Marie-Catherine Colombe, there is little reason to believe that these or any other known paintings were to portray any of the sisters, as Pierre Rosenberg first acknowledged (1987). The Champalimaud L'Amour follows in a series of bust-length decorations of seductive young models, usually in allegorical guise, a vein that Fragonard had been working successfully throughout the 1770s: in addition to L'Amour, a Buste de jeune fille in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard (Cuzin, op. cit., no. 219), and another in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (ibid., no. 230), there are at least a dozen similar pictures (see ibid., nos. 218-25, 227, 228), most of which have been dubiously identified as depicting one or other Colombe sisters in the past. Rather than portraits, the subjects of the pictures are fictive creations that served as emblems of the joyfulness, vivacity and inviting sensuality that were hallmarks of a popular reputation that the Colombe sisters made great efforts to cultivate.

Like all of the bust-length depictions of women that have been associated with the Colombe sisters, L'Amour: Marie-Catherine Colombe as Cupid dates from the mid-1770s, a period when the mature Fragonard first began experimenting with dramatic lighting effects and neoclassical imagery - here, a blaze of hot light whose source is unseen illuminates an ancient God of Love as he prepares to strike the heart of his next unsuspecting victim. The voluptuous image, which is evoked in creamy strokes of rose, turquoise and butterscotch, was in the collection of Camille Groult in the late 19th century. Another painting by Fragonard of the same size and format, depicting another feminine-looking ephebe as Cupid (private collection; Cuzin, op. cit., no. 225), was probably intended as the pendant to the Champalimaud L'Amour, although it is more loosely and summarily executed than the present work. While the identification between L'Amour and Marie-Catgerine Colombe is speculative at best, the association of the celebrated courtesan with the God of Love would be typical of Fragonard's irreverent sense of humour, and would necessitate the delicate grace and feminine refinement with which the artist imbued this most seductive of his works.