The Love Letter
Artist: Jean Honoré Fragonard (French, 1732–1806)
Original Dimensions: 32 3/4" x 26 3/8"
Location: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
About Artwork: (early 1770s) "Eighteenth-century artists and collectors valued oil sketches, believing that they attested to painters’ first ideas and their physical presence in each work of art. This finished painting engages with that new aesthetic. Fragonard’s sketch has energetic brushstrokes of varying thickness that capture sunlight as it lands at the center of the canvas along the woman’s cap, powdered face, flowers, dress, and bedraggled dog. This is not a portrait, but a genre scene that implies a narrative that continues outside the frame through a letter accompanied by a bouquet. The simple conceit of love letters had been popular in the previous century with Johannes Vermeer and his contemporaries." - (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

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