Study

The Louvre gives this young woman two titles. She is usually called L'Étude, Study, and sometimes Le Chant, the Song, and the picture supports either reading. She sits behind a table with both hands spread on a large open book with red-edged pages, a second pile of books at her left hand, and turns her head aside with a small smile, as if someone had just interrupted her. Her yellow dress and stiff white ruff are the old-fashioned costume Fragonard gave his fantasy figures, quick half-length paintings of people in theatrical dress. For several of them the sitters are known. For this one names have been proposed, but the museum gives none. Even the date is loose. Most writers place the group around 1769, while the Louvre catalogues this canvas only in the third quarter of the 18th century. It came to the museum in 1869, one of four fantasy figures in the bequest of the Paris doctor Louis La Caze.