La camicia tolta

Fragonard painted this around 1770, in the last easy years of Louis the Fifteenth's court, when a small private picture like this hung in a cabinet for a single owner to enjoy. It is barely larger than a sheet of writing paper. A young woman lies back on heaped fabric while a plump cupid tugs the last linen shirt from her shoulder, half play and half seduction. Within two decades this kind of lighthearted, frankly erotic scene would be dismissed by a sterner, Neoclassical taste as everything frivolous about the old regime. For a long time nobody recorded where it hung. It surfaced in the collection of Louis La Caze, a Paris doctor, who left it to the Louvre in 1869.