A Visit to the Nursery

By the 1770s French taste was drifting away from the powdered flirtations Fragonard had made his name on, toward something warmer, scenes of family tenderness and plain domestic virtue, the mood the writer Rousseau had made fashionable. This is Fragonard trying it on. Two parents lean over a cradle in adoring silence, their older children crowding in to see the new baby with a maid at its side, while light falls through an open door and window onto the sleeping infant. For so small a picture he did something unusual: he worked up a large oil sketch first, the sort of preparation normally saved for a grand commission. It came to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1946 with the collection of the dime-store magnate Samuel Kress.