Marguerite Gérard

Bio

Marguerite Gerard’s artistic education was the fruit of a close relationship with Jean-Honore Fragonard, who had married her elder sister Marie-Anne in 1769. Fragonard’s rococo style was no longer the fashion by the time the aspiring young artist arrived to live with her sister and brother-in-law in 1777. Her preference for painting in the highly finished manner of the Dutch masters, Terborch, Metsu and Van Mieris, seems to have influenced Fragonard himself as he responded to changing taste. Such was the closeness of their co-operation that Pierre Rosenberg and Thomas Gaehtgens have suggested (Fragonard exhibition catalogue, 1987, p. 577), that his young pupil painted what was formerly considered one of Fragonard’s most famous and popular paintings, Le Baiser a la derobee, (Leningrad, Hermitage). Certainly an extraordinary similarity in style can be seen in the execution of the highly finished fabrics in some of Fragonard’s late works, and the Gerard’s of the 1780’s, 1790’s and early 1800’s. Le Premier Pas and L’Enfant Cheri (both in the Fogg, Cambridge) and dating from the late 1780’s, are paintings in which a definite co-operation between the two painters can be seen, and engravings after both were first published as by Fragonard and Gerard together (the original composition having been drawn by Fragonard).