Marguerite Gérard

When she was 14, Marguerite Gérard left Grasse in the south of France and moved into the Paris household of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, the celebrated Rococo painter of light, sunlit scenes. He had married her older sister, which made the great man her brother-in-law and, soon, her teacher.

Growing up inside a working studio, she learned drawing, painting, and printmaking directly from Fragonard, then went her own way. She looked past his feathery manner to the Dutch painters of a century before, Gabriel Metsu and Gerard ter Borch, masters of small, immaculate domestic interiors, and built a style of her own: quiet rooms, gleaming satin, women with children and letters and lapdogs, every surface polished to a shine.

It sold. Gérard became the first woman in France to make a real career out of genre painting, the everyday domestic scene, at a time when the profession was almost closed to women. More than 300 paintings are documented to her, and in 1808 Napoleon himself bought one, The Clemency of Napoleon, for his own collection.