1761 -1837 · Paris, Louvre and genre painting

Lessons, letters, children and pets make Marguerite Gérard a subtle observer of intimacy at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Marguerite Gérard was born in Grasse in 1761 and died in Paris in 1837. After the death of her mother, in 1775 she joined her sister Marie-Anne and her brother-in-law Jean-Honoré Fragonard, installed in the artists' accommodation at the Louvre. Fragonard became his master, his collaborator and an essential support, but Gérard gradually built an independent career. From the 1780s, she specialized in small, refined genre scenes: women making music, attentive students, mothers, children, visitors, read or hidden letters and domestic animals. The interesting student shows a young woman absorbed in her learning in an interior where gestures, fabrics and objects tell as much as faces. Bad news transforms reading a letter into a psychological event. In maternity scenes, daily care acquires a new dignity. Gérard knows how to use merchants and the art market to disseminate his works at a time when women's access to institutions remains limited. Certain paintings from the 1780s were created with Fragonard or long attributed to him, but research today restores to the artist his autonomy, his narrative precision and his major role in the history of intimate portraiture and genre painting. The "Marguerite Gérard" selection notably compares The Interesting Student and The Bad news. Its reading favors composition.

In Marguerite Gérard, a look, a letter or the paw of a cat is enough to transform the domestic interior into a complete story.