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Richard Rand, “Jean Honoré Fragonard/The Visit to the Nursery/c. 1775,” French Paintings of the Fifteenth through Eighteenth Centuries, NGA Online Editions, https://purl.org/nga/collection/artobject/32685 (accessed March 18, 2024).

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Entry

Fragonard is usually associated in the popular imagination with amusing and mildly erotic works, yet he was also an observant and sometimes sincere painter of family life. The Visit to the Nursery is one of his more ambitious and successful domestic scenes, a touching and evocative image of parental affection. In a rustic interior, a fashionable young couple gaze lovingly at their sleeping child, who is looked after by an elderly woman seated beside the cradle. Three other children have wandered into the room and look on attentively. A soft light spills through the parted drapes at left, illuminating the scene with an ethereal glow. The quasi-devotional tenor of the scene is not unlike that found in Fragonard’s The Happy Family, although the characters are more fashionably dressed. The motif of a young husband and wife admiring their infant was popularized by such artists as Jean-Baptiste Greuze (French, 1725 - 1805),[1] and the theme undoubtedly would have had wide appeal in the years following Jean Jacques Rousseau’s (1712 – 1778) educational treatise Émile (1762), which advocated the development of emotional bonds between parents and their children.

The subject of a well-to-do couple admiring their sleeping child must have had a certain appeal for Fragonard, for he painted a number of variants. Several versions were circulating in Paris in the 1780s and 1790s, when there was a particularly active market for Fragonard’s work. The National Gallery of Art’s painting traditionally has been associated with one that appeared in the 1780 sale of Jean François Leroy de Senneville (1715 – 1784), a fermier général and important client of Fragonard; at one point he owned Young Girl Reading. The compiler of the sale catalogue, the dealer A. J. Paillet, described it in glowing terms: “This piece, with its broad and fluent handling, brings together all the spirit and the character suitable to the subject.” According to Paillet, “the picture is composed of eight figures, in which the subject is taken from the novel of Miss Sara by M. de Saint Lambert. This interesting composition represents the moment when the two spouses come to visit their child.”[2] This description is a plausible one for the National Gallery’s painting, although it has seven figures, not eight. When Leroy de Senneville’s painting came on the block again in 1784, the sale catalogue repeated the earlier description, with the addition that “this work . . . makes a great impact even if it is hardly finished,” a characterization difficult to reconcile with the National Gallery’s painting, which has all the appearance of a completed work.[3]

The issue is complicated further by the fact that Leroy de Senneville owned a second version of the subject, smaller and with “a completely different composition, in which one counts four figures, the principal one a pretty young woman wearing a straw hat; her husband sitting beside her appears to admire a child in his cradle, on which his nurse leans.”[4] The best candidate for this second version is a painting in the Rothschild Collection [fig. 1], despite there being seven figures (Paillet easily might have overlooked the three children at right): the dimensions he recorded are accurate, and the description is reasonably precise, particularly the straw hat worn by the mother and the young nurse who has taken the place of the old crone at the side of the cradle.[5] Yet its composition cannot be described as “completely different” from the Washington version, if that is the one accepted as Leroy de Senneville’s larger picture.[6]

The emergence of another version of the subject, from a collection in Estonia, could help to resolve the puzzle [fig. 2]. Recently published by Jean-Pierre Cuzin, the canvas is characterized by a “broad and fluent handling” — much more so than the National Gallery’s painting — and indeed could be described as “hardly finished,” particularly in the background figures, the dog at lower left, and the bedclothes in the center, where the paint film is thin, revealing the brown ground layer. Moreover, it features the requisite eight figures, and its composition is undeniably “completely different” from the smaller Rothschild version.[7] Of all the known variants, it best fits the descriptions in the Leroy de Senneville sale catalogues. If that is the case, the early history of the Washington painting remains to be discovered.[8]

Far from being unfinished, The Visit to the Nursery appears to have been carefully prepared and executed. Fragonard worked out the composition in a large oil sketch, a practice he employed on only rare occasions in his smaller canvases [fig. 3].[9] Painted more fluidly and broadly, the sketch nevertheless established the principal distribution of forms and lighting that appear in the National Gallery’s painting. In the final conceptualization, Fragonard made the composition slightly more horizontal and worked up the details — particularly of the faces — with a finer technique and more evenly applied paint surface (which the artist enlivened by mixing sand or some other grainy material into the ground layer). Only slightly smaller than the final version, it was perhaps intended to convey to the patron what the finished painting would look like. Unfortunately, the provenance of this oil sketch cannot be traced back to the eighteenth century, further frustrating an identification of Fragonard’s patron.[10]

The specific subject of The Visit to the Nursery has been interpreted in various ways. For Roger Portalis it represented parents visiting their child at the home of a wet nurse; he suggested that Fragonard’s painting indicated that Rousseau’s condemnation of the practice of wet-nursing in Émile had not yet taken hold in French society.[11] Georges Wildenstein felt that here, as in all his family pictures, Fragonard was responding to his own presumably happy domestic life.[12] Mary Sheriff, whose complex and nuanced analysis of the painting focused on its ambiguous depiction of class identity and gender roles, also understood it as probably depicting an urban couple visiting their child in the rural home of a wet nurse.[13]

Yet in 1780 the two versions owned by Leroy de Senneville (presumably figs. 1 and 2) were identified as representing a scene from Jean François de Saint Lambert’s sentimental tale, Sara Th. . . .[14] First published in 1765, this moralizing romance tells the story of a beautiful and well-bred young English woman who falls in love with a humble but educated Scottish farmer. Forsaking an arranged marriage, Sara weds the farmer, Philips, and the couple lives happily and productively on the farm, their relationship and attitude toward life continually inspired by the extraordinary library that was the gift of her father (among its volumes are copies of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Rousseau’s Émile). Saint Lambert’s tale is a paean to sensibilité, the virtues of honesty and sincerity, and the emotional satisfaction of parenthood. Notably, Sara breastfeeds her children, and one of Saint Lambert’s points is that such “natural” mothering is a primary reason for their intimate familial bonding. The scenes depicted in Fragonard’s paintings are evidently the one witnessed by the story’s narrator, a traveler who visits Sara and Philips at their farmhouse: “I saw them enter a room off the garden, its window open: they went together to a cradle where their fifth child was lying; the two of them knelt by the cradle, by turn looking at their child and at each other, all the while holding hands and smiling. I was enchanted by this touching scene of conjugal love and parental tenderness.”[15]

Can one assume that the subject of the National Gallery’s painting is also drawn from Saint Lambert’s tale, even though it cannot definitively be identified with the picture described in the Senneville sale?[16] Its general subject, specific actions, and overall mood are entirely consistent with the story of Sara and with Fragonard’s representation of the key moment in the small version in the Rothschild Collection (fig. 1). The depiction of Sara herself is remarkably similar to the description of Saint Lambert’s narrator: “a woman of twenty-five or thirty, she was blonde and fresh, if a bit sunburned; she had large dark eyes and a very white throat, which she left completely exposed.”[17] One would not demand or expect that Fragonard be so literal in his conception, but if additional evidence were needed, it has been provided by Emma Barker: she recognized the striking relationship between The Visit to the Nursery and an engraving after a design by Jean Michel Moreau le Jeune for an edition of Saint Lambert’s tale published around 1776.[18] The images are so similar in composition and details — for example, the pairing of the two children at the right edge, the tilt of Sara’s head, the cat and ball — as to suggest the artists were responding directly to each other’s work. Barker believed that Moreau’s print must have come first, “since it explains the elegant dress, befitting a prosperous farmer and his wife, which sets the couple apart from the figures who people Fragonard’s other rural genre scenes.”[19] Yet surely Fragonard did not need Moreau’s example, since figures in elegant dress populate his genre scenes throughout his oeuvre, even if he may have been inspired by the 1775 luxury illustrated edition to paint a series of pictures based on the story of Sara. In any case, he made the subject his own, reimagining the scene as a broad and stable horizontal composition (as opposed to Moreau’s strongly vertical arrangement) and introducing the elderly woman in place of the old man (Sara’s father) who appears in the print. She has been identified convincingly not as a wet nurse but as a sage-femme, or midwife.[20]

As is often the case with Fragonard’s oeuvre, the date of the present painting has proved elusive, and scholars have placed it anywhere from the mid-1760s to the late 1770s, a time when he is considered to have painted several other family pictures.[21] The Visit to the Nursery is an unusually classical composition consisting of a series of horizontal, vertical, and triangular forms arranged neatly before the viewer, which might argue for the earlier dating in the mid-1760s, near the time of the grand Corésus and Callirhoé (Salon of 1765; Paris, Musée du Louvre), his most academic production. Yet the blond tonality, the figure types, and the evenly applied paint surface point more toward the mid-1770s. This date would be consistent with the appearance of Moreau’s engraving around 1775. Alexandre Ananoff published a pen and wash drawing that closely resembles this painting. Rather than being a study, this highly finished drawing would appear to have been done afterward, as a finished work of art in its own right, as Colin Eisler proposed.[22] It first appeared in a sale in 1779, suggesting a terminus ad quem for the date of the oil.

 

This text was previously published in Philip Conisbee et al., French Paintings of the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Century, The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue (Washington, DC, 2009), 182–187.

Collection data may have been updated since the publication of the print volume. Additional light adaptations have been made for the presentation of this text online.

Richard Rand

January 1, 2009

Provenance

Traditionally associated with the collection of Jean François Leroy de Sennéville [1715-1784], Paris; (his sale, Chariot and Paillet at Hôtel de Bullion, Paris, 5-11 April 1780, no. 50, bought in); (his sale, Paillet, Paris, 26 April 1784, no. 26); purchased by Basan, Paris. possibly Madame Goman, Paris; (her sale, Le Brun and Julliot, Paris, 6 February 1792 and days following, no. 100); Le Brun. possibly Amédée Constantin, Paris; (his estate sale, at his residence by Pérignon, Paris, 18 November 1816, no. 365); bought in or purchased by Pérignon.[1] possibly purchased 1851 by the father of Jules Burat; by inheritance to Jules Burat, by 1883; (his estate sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 28-29 April 1885, no. 71, bought in); probably by inheritance to Madame Louis Burat, Paris, by 1907 until at least 1921.[2] (Wildenstein & Co., Paris, New York, and London), by 1939;[3] sold 1942 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York.[4]

Exhibition History

1883
L'Art au XVIIIe siècle Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 1883-1884, no. 53.
1907
Exposition Chardin et Fragonard, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 1907, no. 90.
1921
Exposition d'oeuvres de J.-H. Fragonard, Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Pavillon de Marsan, Paris, 1921, no. 69.
1939
The Great Tradition of French Painting, Wildenstein & Co., New York, 1939, no. 22.
1940
Masterpieces of Art. European & American Paintings 1500-1900, New York World's Fair, 1940, no. 201.
1946
Recent Additions to the Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1946, no. 772.
1997
Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in 18th-century France, Hood Museum of Aart, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1997-1998, no. 25, repro.
2006
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806): Orígenes e influencias. De Rembrandt al siglo XXI, CaixaForum Barcelona, 2006-2007, no. 41, repro.
2007
Fragonard: Les plaisirs d'un siècle, Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris, 2007-2008, no. 45, repro.

Technical Summary

The support is a tightly woven, medium-weight, plain-weave fabric that has been lined. The original tacking margins have been removed, but cusping visible in the X-radiographs indicates that the painting probably retains its original dimensions. The ground is a thick, textured white layer. The texture probably comes from sand or agglomerations of large pigment particles in the priming mixture, a somewhat common practice in grounds from this period. The paint was executed thinly and rapidly with low impasto only in the brightest highlights. The shadows were accomplished with thin glazes of dark, transparent colors. The finer of these shadows were brushed in first to serve as a guide for the painting.

The condition is generally good, with either a little fading or slight abrasion from past cleanings in the thinnest of the glazed shadows. There is only one small loss of paint and ground in the collar of the woman’s white dress. The painting was relined in 1943 by Stephen Pichetto, who also carried out minor inpainting. A discolored varnish was removed and the painting was restored in 1988.

Bibliography

1880
Goncourt, Edmond de, and Jules de Goncourt. L'art du dix-huitième siècle. 2 vols. Paris, 1880-1884: 2:334.
1889
Portalis, Roger. Honoré Fragonard, sa vie et son oeuvre. 2 vols. Paris, 1889: 64, 119, 202, 291.
1906
Nolhac, Pierre de. J.-H. Fragonard. Paris, 1906: 127.
1907
Dayot, Armand, and Léandre Vaillat. L'oeuvre de J.-B.-S. Chardin et de J.-H. Fragonard. Paris, 1907: 15-16, no. 120, repro.
1944
Cairns, Huntington, and John Walker, eds. Masterpieces of Painting from the National Gallery of Art. New York, 1944: 122, color repro.
1944
Frankfurter, Alfred M. The Kress Collection in the National Gallery. New York, 1944: 79, repro. p. 65
1944
"Kress Makes Important Donation of French Painting to the Nation." Art Digest 18, no. 19 (1 August 1944): 5.
1944
"One of the Greatest Donations of XVIIIth Century French Painting Ever Received by a Museum - The Kress Collection." The Illustrated London News 115, no. 2992 (26 August 1944):249, repro.
1945
Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1945 (reprinted 1947, 1949): 170, repro.
1948
Wildenstein and Company. French XVIII Century Paintings. New York, 1948: 4.
1956
Einstein, Lewis. "Looking at French Eighteenth Century Pictures in Washington." Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6th ser., 47, no. 1048-1049 (May-June 1956): 244, repro. 237.
1956
Réau, Louis. Fragonard: sa vie et son oeuvre. Brussels, 1956: 172.
1959
Paintings and Sculpture from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1959: 370, repro.
1960
Wildenstein, Georges. The Paintings of Fragonard. New York, 1960: no. 459
1965
Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 51.
1968
National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 43, repro.
1971
Watson, Francis. "Fragonard." Art News Annual 37 (1971):86
1972
Mandel, Gabriele. L'Opera completa di Fragonard. Milan, 1972: no. 482, repro.
1975
European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 132, repro.
1977
Eisler, Colin. Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: European Schools Excluding Italian. Oxford, 1977: 333-335, fig. 292.
1977
Pope-Hennessy, John. "Completing the Account." Review of Colin Eisler, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection, London 1977. Times Literary Supplement no. 3,927 (17 June 1977).
1984
Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 341, no. 460, color repro.
1985
European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 158, repro.
1987
Cuzin, Jean-Pierre. "Jean-Honoré Fragonard: Vie et oeuvre." Fribourg, 1987. English edition New York, 1988: 89-92, no. 123, repro. pl. 118.
1989
Rosenberg, Pierre. Tout l'oeuvre peint de Fragonard. Paris, 1989: no. 304.
1990
Sheriff, Mary D. Fragonard. Art and Eroticism. Chicago and London, 1990: 117, fig. 27.
1991
Sheriff, Mary D. "Fragonard’s Erotic Mothers and the Politics of Reproduction.” In Eroticism and the Body Politic. Ed. Lynn Hunt. Baltimore, 1991:16-40, fig. 1.2.
1994
Barker, Emma. Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment: The Family in French Art 1755-1785. Ph.D. diss, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1994: I: 163-165.
2001
Cuzin, Jean-Pierre. "Fragonard: quelques nouveautés et quelque questions." In Mélanges en hommage à Pierre Rosenberg: peintures et dessins en France et en Italie XVIIe - XVIIIe siècles. Paris, 2001: 173, no. 18.
2005
Baillio, Joseph, et al. The Arts of France from François Ier to Napoléon Ier. A Centennial Celebration of Wildenstein's Presence in New York. Exh. cat. Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York, 2005: 270-272, fig. 113a (not in the exhibition).
2005
Barker, Emma. Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment. Cambridge, 2005: 139-143.
2009
Conisbee, Philip, et al. French Paintings of the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Century. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 2009: no. 37, 182-187, color repro.

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