A Young Girl Reading

Fragonard painted this around 1770, a young woman in a lemon-yellow dress absorbed in a small book, and for two centuries that was the whole story. Then modern imaging of the canvas turned up something the eye can't see. Underneath the reader is an earlier picture, a different woman altogether, wearing a feathered headdress and looking straight out at us. Fragonard let that first paint dry for months, then turned her in profile and put the book in her hands. The pose we know is a revision. Look at how she holds the volume, pinched daintily between finger and thumb, and at the plump cushion propping her back, and you're seeing a scene the painter settled on only after changing his mind about who she was.