The Happy Family

c. 1775

Jean Honoré Fragonard

Artist, French, 1732 - 1806

In a deeply shadowed room, two women and several children are gathered at the center of this wide, oval painting, looking toward a young man and donkey who peer in over a half-door to our left. The people all have light skin, and all of the children have blond hair. Light coming into the darkened room falls on a young woman holding a baby at the center of the composition. The woman sits facing our left in profile, looking at or toward the baby with brown eyes and parted lips. She has a long, straight nose, flushed cheeks, and her brown hair is pulled back into a bun at the back of her head. She wears a low-cut, ivory-white bodice with puffy sleeves, a black sash tied around her waist, and a voluminous crimson-red skirt. She props the baby so the child stands braced on chubby legs against her lap as the woman supports the torso and backside. One of the baby’s hands reaches for the woman’s neck and the other for her forehead as the head twists back to look to our left. The child wears a white garment. Two more children rest near the woman, with one leaning back against the woman’s shins and the other sitting with a white dog at the woman’s side, closer to us. Both children wear brown, white, and teal blue. Behind this group, another woman, seen mostly silhouetted against the shadows, reaches back and braces another child who seems to sit on a box or chest. The fifth and final child stands at the head of the donkey who peeks in over the half-door to our left. Above the donkey, a young, cleanshaven man wearing a wide-brimmed hat and baggy coat leans into the room and looks toward the central woman, a smile on his lips. His features are cast into shadow by the light coming in behind him but he has dark hair and dark eyes. The room beyond the women and children is draped with a gray cloth, as if hung over a low beam. The upper regions of the room are swallowed in shadow.

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Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on canvas

  • Credit Line

    Timken Collection

  • Dimensions

    overall (oval): 53.9 × 65.1 cm (21 1/4 × 25 5/8 in.)
    framed: 73.66 × 83.82 × 10.16 cm (29 × 33 × 4 in.)

  • Accession

    1960.6.12

More About this Artwork

Scholarly Article:  French Paintings of the Fifteenth through Eighteenth Centuries: The Happy Family, c. 1775

A young woman draws on an oval surface with white chalk while three winged, baby-like putti gather nearby, all on a bank of pale pink clouds in this horizontal painting. The woman and putti have pale, rosy skin, flushed cheeks, and hazel-brown eyes. To our left, the woman reclines with her upper body propped up on her far elbow, which rests on a steel-blue cushion as her legs stretch out to our right. Her light brown hair is braided and wrapped across the top of her head. She wears a loose, seafoam-green robe over a billowing ivory-white garment that has slipped off the shoulder closer to us. A round paint palette with brushes sticking out of its thumb hole and a roll of blue and white paper sit in the lower left corner, behind the woman. The woman and the objects are on a red cloth. In front of the woman is a rounded surface, perhaps a canvas, on which she draws. She holds up a gold-colored stylus with her right hand, closer to us, with a pointed piece of white chalk in one end and black chalk in the other. The canvas is taller than her head, so the child-like putto she draws on it is life-sized. The three nude putti on the far side of the canvas have copper or golden-blond, curly hair, flushed, rounded cheeks, short wings in white or peacock blue, pudgy torsos, and dimpled limbs. One putto, presumably the one the woman draws, sits back on the bank of clouds with a carnation-pink sash across his chest. He pulls his chin back and looks at her from under his eyebrows. He holds a gold-colored torch with a pink flame in one hand, and the other hand rests near a cylindrical quiver of arrows. Another putto peeks around the side of the canvas, and the third stands and props the canvas up. That third putto holds up a wreath of laurel leaves up over the canvas, above the woman’s drawing hand. The bank of clouds is parchment-brown with muted pink and blue highlights against a vivid blue sky. The artist signed and dated the lower right, “F Boucher – 1765.”

Scholarly Series:  French Paintings of the Fifteenth through Eighteenth Centuries

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Possibly collection of Monsieur Servat, at least in 1777, or possibly (sale of Comtesse du Barry, Radix de Sainte Foy, La Ferré, et al., by Alexandre J. Paillet at Hôtel d'Aligre, Paris, 17 February 1777, no. 55);[1] purchased by Aubert.[2] Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt [1747-1827]. Poilleux collection, Paris. Eduardo Guinle [1878-1941], Rio de Janeiro.[3] (Wildenstein & Co., Inc., Paris and New York); sold 1919 to Nicolas Ambatielos, London.[4] William R. Timken [1866-1949], New York, by 1935;[5] by inheritance to his widow, Lillian Guyer Timken [1881-1959], New York; bequest 1960 to NGA.
[1] This provenance is a revised and clarified version of the provenance published in Philip Conisbee et al., French Paintings of the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Century, The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue, Washington, D.C., 2009: 176, no. 26.
Numerous variants and engraved versions of the painting exist, and in the absence of accurate size information and detailed descriptions, it is difficult to establish with certainty the early provenance. Georges Wildenstein (The Paintings of Fragonard, New York, 1960: 280, no. 368) identifies the NGA painting with the one that appeared in a February 1777 sale of works from several collections; dimensions are given in the sale catalogue and they are close to those of NGA 1960.6.12. Pierre Rosenberg (Fragonard, exh. cat., Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1987: 456-459, no. 222) suggests an additional possibility, that the NGA painting was the one after which Nicolas Delaunay made an engraving that was issued in 1777. According to the inscription on the print, the original painting belonged to "Monsieur Servat." The engraving gives no indication of the size of the painting, but the image agrees with the particulars of the NGA painting.
[2] Aubert is identified by Wildenstein (see note 1) as "the jeweller."
The Wildenstein provenance includes a Mesnard de Clesle sale on 5 January 1804, in which the painting was supposedly lot 22 as Un ménage rustique. However, Frits Lugt, Répertoire des catalogues de ventes publiques intéressant l'art ou la curiosité, 4 vols., The Hague, 1938-1964, lists no sales on this date. There was a Mesnard de Clesle sale three days earlier, on 2 January 1804 (Lugt no. 6728), but it only included a small number of paintings, none of them by Fragonard. Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Jean-Honoré Fragonard: Vie et oeuvre, Catalogue complet des peintures, Paris, 1987: 319, no. 311,
matches the Wildenstein reference to a drawing by that title in the 1804 sale, but does not correct the sale date. The painting did not appear either in an earlier Mesnard de Clesle sale on 4 December 1786, and days following (Lugt no. 4101).
[3] Guinle was the son of Eduardo P. Guinle, patriarch of the immensely wealthy Brazilian family whose company received in the late 19th century the concession to build and operate until 1972 the country's major port of Santo. Between 1909 and 1914, the younger Eduardo built in Rio de Janeiro the Palácio Laranjeiras, a Beaux-Arts mansion (now the residence of the city's governor) that housed an art collection that included paintings, furnitures, tapestries, and nearly two hundred bronze sculptures by Antoine-Louis Barye.
[4] The sequence of owners from La Rochefoucault-Liancourt to Ambatielos, minus Wildenstein, is first published in the catalogue of a 1936 exhibition that included the painting (Catalogue of the Twentieth Anniversary Exhibition of the Cleveland Museum of Art: The Official Art Exhibition of the Great Lakes Exposition, exh. cat., Cleveland Museum of Art, 1936: 32, no. 59, in which the final name is incorrectly spelled Ambaticlos). Wildenstein is included in the provenance thanks to Diana Kostyrko, who has kindly shared her suggestion that an entry in the dealer René Gimpel's diary (Journal d'un collectionneur, Paris, 1963: 112) dated 6 March 1919, in which he records receiving a letter from Nathan Wildenstein reporting a sale of four small Fragonards to Ambatielos, refers to the NGA painting and three others (see her e-mails of 15 and 17 July 2014, in NGA curatorial files). The painting was included in a 1912 exhibition at Wildenstein, so perhaps the painting was part of their stock from then until the sale to Ambatielos. Nicolas Ambatielos was a Greek ship owner who lost his fortune in the early 1920s as the result of a failed ship-building contract with the British government.
[5] The Timkens lent the painting to an exhibition in New York in 1935.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1912

  • Exposition de tableaux anciens principalement de l'école française du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siècle, Galerie Wildenstein, Paris, 1912, no. 16.

1935

  • French Painting and Sculpture of the XVIII Century, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1935, no. 49, repro.

1936

  • Twentieth Anniversary Exhibition of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Official Art Exhibition of the Great Lakes Exposition, The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1936, no. 59.

2003

  • The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Altes Museum, Berlin, 2003-2004, no. 79, repro.

Bibliography

1889

  • Portalis, Roger. Honoré Fragonard, sa vie et son oeuvre. 2 vols. Paris, 1889: 115, 121, 279, 280.

1901

  • Josz, Virgile. Fragonard: moeurs du XVIIIe siècle. Paris, 1901: 141.

1906

  • Nolhac, Pierre de. J.-H. Fragonard. Paris, 1906: 130.

1960

  • Wildenstein, Georges. The Paintings of Fragonard. New York, 1960: no. 368

1965

  • Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 52.

1968

  • National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 44, repro.

1972

  • Mandel, Gabriele. L'Opera completa di Fragonard. Milan, 1972: no. 390, repro.

1975

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 132, repro.

1984

  • Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 341, no. 461, color repro.

1985

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 158, repro.

1987

  • Cuzin, Jean-Pierre. "Jean-Honoré Fragonard: Vie et oeuvre." Fribourg, 1987. English edition New York, 1988: 188-189, 193, fig. 230, 319, no. 311, repro.

  • Rosenberg, Pierre. Fragonard. Exh. Cat. Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1987-1988. Paris, 1987: 456, 458, fig. 1.

1989

  • Rosenberg, Pierre. Tout l'oeuvre peint de Fragonard. Paris, 1989: no. 336, repro.

1991

  • Sheriff, Mary D. "Fragonard’s Erotic Mothers and the Politics of Reproduction.” In Eroticism and the Body Politic. Ed. Lynn Hunt. Baltimore, 1991: 15, 17, 19, fig 1.1.

2009

  • Conisbee, Philip, et al. French Paintings of the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Century. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 2009: no. 36, 176-181, color repro.

Inscriptions

On stretcher: label printed with "11517"; label with penciled inscription "63 Fragonard"; double impression of an inked stamp with a "7"

Wikidata ID

Q20178713

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