Young Girl Reading

The story

She has forgotten us completely. A young woman in a lemon-yellow dress sits by the light, leaning on a violet cushion, and reads a small book held lightly in her right hand. Her profile is calm, her lips are slightly parted – whatever is on the page has carried her far away from the room, and from the painter. Around 1769 Jean-Honoré Fragonard caught exactly that: the moment when reading makes a person disappear into another world.

Now look at how it is painted. The dress is not drawn but thrown onto the canvas in long, quick, creamy strokes of yellow; the cushion is only a few sweeps of the brush. In the white ruff around her neck Fragonard did something daring: he scratched into the still-wet paint with the wooden end of his brush to draw the pleats. Nothing here is fussed over – and yet everything is alive.

The picture is related to a famous group of about fifteen “fantasy figures” that Fragonard painted around the same time: half-length figures in theatrical, old-fashioned costumes, dashed off at astonishing speed. An old inscription on the back of one of them boasts that it was painted “in one hour”. They are not exact portraits but moods – inspiration, music, reading.

And the canvas kept a secret. In 2015 scientists and conservators at the National Gallery of Art in Washington published what X-rays, infrared light and X-ray fluorescence scans had revealed: beneath the reader lies an earlier portrait – a woman with her head turned towards us, looking straight at the viewer, wearing a large feathered headdress dotted with coloured beads. It had stayed like that for at least six months before Fragonard painted the quiet reader over it, her eyes lowered to her book.

Fragonard was the darling of Rococo Paris, then fell out of fashion after the Revolution and died almost forgotten. This quiet girl never lost her charm. More than two and a half centuries later she is still reading – a portrait not of a person, but of the pleasure of a good book.