Before, during, and after - a selection of portraits by Marguerite Gérard

 

Portrait d'un homme dans un manteau croisé - presumed to be a portrait of the painter Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, circa 1787.

Portrait d'un homme avec un grand livre, circa 1785.

Portrait de madame Ledoux et ses filles, circa 1787.

 Portrait de l'architecte Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, 1788.

Portrait présumé Marguerite Bon et son fils, circa 1787-91.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, circa 1787-91 (?)

Un architecte et sa famille, circa 1787-90.

Portrait d'homme assis sur une banquette, circa 1789-91.
The date of this portrait is unknown, but the tricolore cockade on his hat signifies that it would have been painted after the beginning of the Revolution.

"Les Expéditeurs" - portrait of an unknown couple, circa 1792.

Portrait du député de la Convention nationale, François Yves Roubaud, circa 1797.

Portrait d'un gentilhomme avec une lettre (attributed to), circa 1795-1800.

Portrait présumé Cécile-Charlotte-Marguerite, comtesse de la Tour du Pin et sa petite-fille de dix-sept ans Charlotte, circa 1813.

Dame inconnue, circa 1810-20.

Portrait d'une dame et d'un gentilhomme dans un intérieur, 1818.

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Marguerite Gérard (28 January 1761, Grasse – 18 May 1837, Paris), French painter and print-maker. The daughter of a perfumer and the youngest of seven children, at the age of fourteen, on the death of her mother, she took up residence in the Louvre with her sister Marie-Anne, a miniature painter, and her sister's husband, the celebrated artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard; she would live there with the couple for nearly thirty years. By the age of sixteen, she had begun training with Fragonard, studying painting, drawing, and printmaking under his tutelage. And, living in the Louvre, surrounded by the great artworks in the collection, she was particularly drawn to and inspired by the Dutch genre scenes - like those of Ter Borch and Metsu - which she would later emulate in her own work. She worked closely with her brother-in-law and mentor, and in an effort to give her early work credibility, it was advertised with the phrase "sous les yeux de Fragonard", something which has caused art historians to probably overestimate his involvement in her work. Her association with Fragonard's circle allowed her the freedom to remain unmarried without becoming a financial burden on her family, thus allowing her to devote her life to becoming an artist. And by 1785 she had established a reputation as a gifted genre painter. And by the end of the decade, though she hadn't the royal connections of the other celebrated female artists of the period - Anne Vallayer-Coster, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun - she was a successful working artist, her work being purchased by wealthy collectors, while engravings of her paintings were popular among the middle class. Even so, she was denied membership to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture due to its rules limiting the number of female artists to four at any one time. The Academy also denied women the free training offered to men at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, or the right to compete for the prestigious Prix de Rome. Despite these obstacles, she went on to exhibit widely, particularly following the French Revolution. Her work would be exhibited at the Salon between 1799 and 1824, during which time she won three medals, including a Medaille d'Or in 1804.


Besides her genre paintings, she was also in demand as a portrait painter and miniaturist. Between 1787 and 1791 she painted at least thirty-five small scale portraits - large miniatures, really - of artists, architects, performers, and others; several of these are featured in this post..