The Curious Girls

This panel is barely 16 centimetres high, and its size is part of why it was overlooked for so long. It entered the Louvre in 1856, years before the large group of Fragonards in the La Caze bequest of 1869, so it is one of the first works by him the museum owned. It came with the gift of Charles Sauvageot, a former second violin in the Paris Opéra orchestra who had crammed his small apartment with medieval and Renaissance objects. His collection was shown as a group, away from the painting galleries, and the little Fragonard went largely unnoticed. Two girls peer out from behind a pearl-grey curtain that does not quite hide the bare breast of one of them. The more cheerful of the two tosses rose petals at us from a basket at the right. The Louvre's own note sums up the game in one line. We look, but are looked at. A pastel of the same composition was sold in Paris in 1780, described as two girls half hidden by a green curtain, throwing roses.