The Good Mother

This composition exists in more than one version, and the Museum of Fine Arts thinks this oval is Fragonard's own repeat of a picture now in a private collection, painted around 1777 to 1779. A young mother in a white cap and a rose-pink bodice sits on a stone bench in a garden, a small girl leaning at her knee and a baby asleep in a wicker cradle beside her, with flowers spilling in at the lower right. The museum reads the moment as the mother about to wash her daughter's face. The picture's early history runs through the Paris art trade. It was very probably the oval Good Mother in the sale of the dealer Pierre-Joseph Lafontaine in February 1798. In April 1806 it came up again and was bought by Alexandre Paillet, the auctioneer who had run both sales. Fragonard died that August. By 1913 the canvas belonged to Samuel Bertron in New York, and it came to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1944 with the bequest of the Boston collector Robert Treat Paine.