Portrait of a Young Artist

For a long time this young man was called Naigeon, after the family that owned the canvas in the 19th century. The Louvre now names him Charles-Paul-Jérôme Bréa, a miniaturist, pastellist and engraver working in Paris who also dealt in pictures. The trail runs through paperwork. The painting is listed in the inventory drawn up after Bréa's death in 1820, and Bréa had left his pictures to the painter Jean-Claude Naigeon, which is how the wrong name came to attach itself to the face.

Fragonard painted him around 1769 as one of his fantasy figures, the half-length portraits of friends and acquaintances in costume that he made in those years, and signed it at the bottom, in the middle, with a short Frago.

The same Bréa sat for the Swedish miniaturist Peter Adolf Hall, and Hall's first enamel, a portrait of him from 1771, is in the Louvre as well.