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Two women, a man, and three small children gather around a baby sleeping in a wicker cradle near an open window in this horizontal painting. The people all have pale skin with rosy cheeks. The cradle is just to left of center of the composition. It has a half canopy to shade the baby, and it sits on rockers. The baby sleeps with chubby arms over the covers tucked around the body. A woman sits on a low chest next to and on our side of the crib, near the lower left corner of the canvas. She has a prominent nose and jutting chin. She wears an oatmeal-brown bonnet and apron, and a muted red dress. She holds a staff with fabric or a spindle at the top tucked in one elbow, and the other hand rests on the canopy. A white cat lies like a loaf next to her feet. On the far side of the crib, a clean-shaven man kneels on a low platform covered by a pillow at the foot of the cradle and leans into the arms of a standing young woman. The man has a pointed nose and rounded chin, and he looks with heavy-lidded eyes at the baby. His long gray hair is tied at the nape of his neck, and he wears an ice-blue and tan long-tailed coat, breeches, and stockings. He rests one cheek against the arm of the woman who stands at his far shoulder. Her body faces the man, and she rests her other hand on his shoulder as she turns to look at the baby. A round, broad-brimmed hat casts a shadow over her delicate nose and round cheeks, and she wears a white dress with elbow-length sleeves and a full skirt. Three children stand behind the man’s feet and along the right edge of the canvas. The child closest to us has carrot-orange hair tied in a bun with a blue ribbon. She wears a white, puffy-sleeved shirt, and a parchment-white apron bunched over a pale pink skirt. She faces our left in profile, looking at the man, and holds one end of a ball of yarn that has rolled away from her. The boy behind her stands with his body facing us as he looks up and to our left. He wears a yellow jacket and a broad-brimmed hat pushed back on his head. Only the forehead and eyes of an even smaller child standing behind this pair are visible. Voluminous curtains part to either side of a window at the head of the cradle, near the upper left corner of the composition. An unlit lantern sits on the sill, and the sky beyond is dusk-blue. Bright light shines into the room, especially onto the man and woman and three children. A piece of furniture, perhaps a wardrobe, is on the far wall behind the woman, and the door to the room is open behind the children.

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.

________________________________

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.

The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.

The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.

The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.

The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art

Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”

www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...

..

________________________________

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.

The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.

The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.

The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.

The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art

Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”

www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...

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Composition. Bath. by lisa bergh