Jean-Honoré Fragonard is best-known for his turgid contributions to the late Rococo, but when, during the 1760s, these works were met with an increasingly tepid response, he took up Neoclassicism and genre painting. Young Girl Reading is just this: a genre painting, rather than a portrait. The identity of the sitter is unknown. The light illuminating her face and body encompasses the act of reading in an almost religious aura, yet she is garbed in a luxuriant yellow dress and ruffed collar which reminisce of the courtly jubilation that Fragonard was, perhaps, too reluctant to leave behind. For later generations of French artists, the liseuse or "reader" genre would become a vehicle to explore female subjectivity, personal agency and the relationship between public and private.
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