A tranquil, quiet moment in a painting from the French Enlightenment period.

A Young Girl Reading is an example of Jean-Honore Fragonard’s proficiency in the art of painting human emotion. His use of paint directly informed the mood of the subject, a mark of the Baroque and Rococo artists whom Fragonard so admired. Indeed, whilst at the French Academy in Rome, Fragonard made copies of Baroque masterpieces in an attempt to bring to his work the characteristics of the movement. In this piece, the sumptuous folds in the girl’s clothing and the creases in the pillow echo the work of Baroque artists whilst giving way to the Romantic art that was to come. The rapid strokes employed here were intended to suggest a musical and poetical nature. Many regard Fragonard’s paintings of young girls in solitude as ‘evocations’ rather than portraits.

Fragonard’s brushwork was the major attraction of such paintings, rather than their subjects – an element that would later define the work of the Romantics and even more so, the work of the Impressionists, Expressionists and Abstract Expressionists.