Detail of a Portrait of a Woman with a Dog by Fragonard in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, March 2011

A Woman with a Dog

Jean Honoré Fragonard (French, Grasse 1732–1806 Paris)

Date: ca. 1769

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 32 x 25 3/4 in. (81.3 x 65.4 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Fletcher Fund, 1937

Accession Number: 37.118

Gallery Label:

The sitter's costume recalls the court dress in which Rubens had depicted Marie de Médicis (1573–1642), queen of Henri IV of France, in the series of famous paintings now in the Musée du Louvre. About 1769, Fragonard executed a number of three-quarter length images of men and three of women in theatrical seventeenth-century style costumes. Each is broadly painted, probably in a short period of time, with exceptional virtuosity and panache.

There is a certain humor in the contrast between the ample proportions of the sitter and the small size of her lapdog; the curl of his silky tail echoes her gray ringlets. Her brooch and pearls are much too large to have been real.


Text from: www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/1100...