One Artist Continues Where the Other Left Off

During a period when social and cultural restrictions allowed few women to pursue a career as a professional artist, Marguerite Gérard (1761–1837) inventively developed a signature style that proved popular on the art market. She was enormously successful and became one of the most appealing genre painters of her generation. Her works were collected by connoisseurs and the wealthy upper class and widely disseminated in reproductive prints by leading engravers.

Getty recently acquired I Was Thinking of You, which Gérard created in collaboration with her brother-in-law, teacher, and mentor, Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806). It is one in a group of genre paintings the duo made on the theme of courtship and love. In a richly appointed room, a young couple is captured during their amorous encounter. The woman’s unfinished love letter on the desk is superfluous, now that her beloved has burst in, overwhelming her with admiration. In the affectionate commotion, his left foot slips under her dress, a subtle erotic gesture. However, the presence of the elderly chaperone prevents the embrace from going any further. Gérard’s fine brushwork, carefully rendering costly fabrics and the reflection of light, is articulated in the shimmering satin and silk of the couple’s yellow and blue garments.

I Was Thinking of You went on view in early April in the South Pavilion at the Getty Center. I am particularly excited for our visitors to see this work, as it embodies artistic reception and inspiration from earlier periods, with its precedents in the adjacent East Pavilion. But, perhaps most importantly, I am glad to see another woman artist in our museum galleries. With this painting, we can give insight into the status of female artists in the 18th century.

Gérard’s artistic beginnings

Following her mother’s passing, Gérard—then 14 years old—moved in with her older sister, Marie-Anne, and brother-in-law, Fragonard, who lived and worked in the Louvre Palace in Paris. The latter, already an established artist at the time and a member of the Royal Academy, trained his young sister-in-law to paint. As a woman, Gérard was excluded from the French Academy and not allowed to study nude models—an essential aspect of artistic training. In the environment of the palace, however, she was granted firsthand access to the royal collections, where she studied her artistic precedents.

During visits to the royal galleries, Gérard primarily took inspiration from Dutch 17th-century genre paintings. The intimate interiors and everyday events—such as a music lesson, a woman receiving a letter, a doctor’s visit—in Gérard’s work echo those in paintings by Gerard ter Borch (1617–1681) and Frans van Mieris the Elder (1635–1681). Drawing on the subject matter and style of these fijnschilders (fine manner painters), Gérard developed distinctive, highly finished scenes with a smooth, glossy surface.

Subjects like masculine chivalry and gallantry and feminine chastity were popular in the last quarter of the 18th century. According to art historian François Pupil, these themes were chiefly admired among female viewers, who were expected to be charmed by picturesque scenes of courtly lovers and settings in which a husband or suitor was mainly concerned with a woman’s feelings and happiness.

Gérard, aware of the taste of the art market, answered this demand by painting idealized historical settings with virtuous interactions between lovers or a mother and her child. Many of Gérard’s scenes take place indoors, in strict privacy, except for the presence of a chaperone to oversee the intimate encounters, as seen in I Was Thinking of You. As noted by the art historian Sally Wells-Robertson, Gérard innovatively depicted women as paragons of virtue while expressing her own style and female perspective.

Gérard and Fragonard: A collaborative duo

When I Was Thinking of You was first offered for sale in 1795, it was listed as a collaborative painting by Gérard and Fragonard. Yet the 1788 print that reproduces the work—entitled Je m’occupais de vous—only mentions Gérard’s name. What does I Was Thinking of You tell us about Gérard’s position as a female artist in the late 18th century?

Fragonard was Gérard’s teacher and ultimately collaborator and bon ami (good friend), as we can read from letters between the two. At first, she focused on making reproductive prints after his canvases; later, she started painting on her own. Early in her career, Gérard’s connection to Fragonard ensured a market for her output. Her creations were often listed under both of their names, presumably to promote sales. The nature of their collaborative work and the dual authorship of their compositions have long occupied art historians, as attributing specific painted areas to either artist proves to be difficult.

In the Getty painting, however, the artistic collaboration seems clearer to identify. Scholars, including Carole Blumenfeld and Richard Rand, the Museum’s associate director of collections, recognize Gérard’s meticulous style in the majority of I Was Thinking of You, especially in the highly detailed costumes and elegant furnishings. Fragonard’s contribution is found in the more impressionistic rendering of the heads of the figures and the hands of the gentleman.

Thus, I Was Thinking of You presents a creative collaboration, in which one artist continued where the other left off. The painting further provides a wonderful insight into their close familial and artistic relationship: one hand so extremely precise and fine (Gérard), and the other lighter and with painterly, flickering brushstrokes (Fragonard).

I hope you will be as amazed as I am by Gérard’s depiction of costly fabrics and Fragonard’s softer portrayal of faces. Do you see the work of two different hands in the painting? And what do you think of this encounter: is it romance or intrusion?