Portrait of Marie-Anne-Éléonore, Comtesse de Grave, formerly called Portrait of Marie-Madeleine Guimard

For a long time this woman was taken for Marie-Madeleine Guimard, the most celebrated dancer of the Paris Opéra, and the mistake was easy to make. Guimard and Fragonard really were connected. In the early 1770s she hired him to decorate the salon of her new Paris townhouse, and after a dispute the work passed, unfinished, to the young Jacques-Louis David. A Fragonard portrait of her seemed only natural. The Louvre now names the sitter as Marie-Anne-Éléonore, comtesse de Grave, born in 1730, which would make her nearly 40 when it was painted around 1769, while Guimard was in her mid-20s. The picture's history fits the new name. It stayed first with the sitter herself, then with her son or her granddaughter, and appeared in public only in 1857, at the sale of the collector François Marcille. Somewhere along that road it picked up the dancer's name. The French state accepted it in 1974 in settlement of inheritance tax. She wears a dark red costume with green sleeves, a white ruff and flowers in her powdered hair, and leans on a ledge strewn with papers, looking down to her right.