Mother and Child

The first owner on record of this small oval canvas is François-Alexandre-Frédéric de La Rochefoucauld, duke of Liancourt, the liberal nobleman who, by a famous account, told Louis the Sixteenth on the night the Bastille fell that what was happening in Paris was a revolution. He lived on until 1827, and that June his pictures were sold in Paris. This one went in the same lot as a companion piece, now lost, described as a mother making her child say please before giving him some bread. Fragonard painted it between about 1777 and 1779. A young woman in white and gold turns to look out at us, a baby in a loose white cloth sprawls across a pile of large sheets of paper beside her, and two more children press in at the right. Later it passed through a Madame Corbin in Paris and the dealers Wildenstein, who sold it in 1945 to Forsyth Wickes, a collector who filled his summer house in Newport, Rhode Island, with French art of the 18th century. His bequest brought it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1965.