Portrait of a lady and a gentleman in an interior

Although Marguerite Gérard, Fragonard’s talented sister-in-law, was a prolific portraitist as well as an admired genre painter, the present painting is of unusual format for the artist. Gérard specialized in very small-scale, full-length portraits on postcard-sized wooden panels, whereas this beautiful painting of an elegant and fashionable couple (yet to be identified), lounging in their drawing room, is comparatively large for her portraits of full-length format. Characteristically, it is signed ‘Mte Gerard’ (on the lower left) but, unusually, the painting bears a very specific inscription detailing its creation on the bottom of the original stretcher, noting that Marguerite Gérard began the painting on 28 July 1818 and completely it in less than two weeks, on 11 August. A work from the final years of the artist’s career, its refined and luminous handling is nevertheless characteristic of Gérard’s finest earlier works.