Fanciful Figure: Portrait of the Abbé de Saint-Non

This portrait is one half of a pair of brothers. Jean-Claude Richard, the abbé de Saint-Non, was an amateur draughtsman and engraver and one of Fragonard's most loyal admirers. His elder brother, Louis Richard de La Bretèche, a financier, was painted in 1769 in the same kind of dress, strumming a guitar, and that canvas is in the Louvre too. The museum's record, with several question marks, has the two pictures passing together through the family before the collector Louis La Caze acquired them. Here the abbé turns sharply to look up over his shoulder, in a stiff white ruff and a blue costume crossed by a flying orange sash, one hand resting on a ledge. It is nothing like the dress of a churchman in 1769. In 2012 a sheet of small sketches after these fantasy figures, with names written under them in Fragonard's own hand, came up at auction in Paris, and it confirmed the traditional names of both brothers.