The Music Lesson

Fragonard painted this around 1770, near the end of the long reign of Louis XV, when French taste still ran to lightness, flirtation, and pretty interiors. A young woman sits at the harpsichord, absorbed in the keys, while her music master leans in over her shoulder. The lesson is plainly a pretext. Everything, the soft pinks and golds and the closeness of the two heads, is about courtship far more than music. Fragonard outlived this whole taste, dying nearly forgotten after the Revolution swept it away. The canvas resurfaced through the collector Hippolyte Walferdin, who gave it to the Louvre in 1849.