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| MARGUERITE GÉRARD (Grasse 1761 - Paris 1837)
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| La dame avec son chat
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Signed lower left: Mle Gerard
Oil on panel
12 ¾ x 9 ¿ in. (32.4 x 24.5 cm.)
The sitter, an elegant young woman, is dressed in a fashionable gown with her hair carefully curled, she also wears a pair of graceful yet modest pearl earrings which all together attest to her wealth and social status. She is seated at a table upon which a large white cat rests; with its slightly tilted head and direct gaze, it is a charming example of comfortable domesticity, as is its mistress. Specialising in genre scenes and portraiture, Gérard’s paintings represent an idealised view of contemporary bourgeois life in the private sphere occupied by women. Her subjects are wives and mothers, often accompanied by children, servants, or – as in the present portrait – pets, their lives pleasant, domesticated and untroubled. The young lady, who is looking out at the viewer, is wearing a fine white dress, a blue shawl is wrapped around her. Corresponding to the colour scheme of her mistress, the fur of the cat is white, with a beige head. Gérard favoured a cool, silver-toned colour palette. The painting is executed with smooth and precise brushstrokes, demonstrating her exquisite attention to surface texture and detail.
The present painting is a typical example of Marguerite Gérard’s mature style, as are indeed ‘Le petit messager’ and ‘La chat angora’, both presently with Colnaghi. Gérard was one of the leading women artists in France during the late 1780s. Born in 1761, she moved to Paris in 1775 where she lived with her sister Marie-Anne and her sister’s husband Fragonard in their quarters in the Louvre. She became his protégé and may well have collaborated with him in the 1780s (e.g. First Steps of Childhood, c.1780-83; The Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts). For the next 30 years, the artist lived in the Louvre, where she was able to study masterpieces of art – an important factor given that, as a woman, she was deprived of an academic training. While Fragonard's tutelage was important to her technical development, it was her interest in Dutch masters of the 17th century that truly characterized her work. It was from these "conversation pieces" that she drew inspiration for her sentimental themes and learned to indulge in meticulous detail. While her canvases record the privileged and secluded lives of educated women of her own time, they also look forward to the domestic genre scenes that became so popular later in the nineteenth century. By 1785, she had become a respected genre painter, the first French woman to do so, and, alongside artists such as Vallayer-Coster and Vigée-Lebrun, was one of the leading women artists in France. An accomplished portrait painter, she exhibited at the Salon from 1799 to 1824, after the restriction on women exhibitors was lifted. Her work was popularized through engravings by Gérard Vidal, Robert de Launay and her brother Henri Gérard. Although her favourite themes were maternal roles, she herself never married, pursuing instead a long and successful career until her death in 1837.
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P. and D. Colnaghi and Co., Ltd - 15 Old Bond Street London W1S 4AX, United Kingdom Tel: +44-20-7491 7408 Fax: +44-20-7491 8851 contact@colnaghi.co.uk
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