The Visit to the Wet Nurse

The Visit to the Wet Nurse at Waddesdon Manor depicts the common eighteenth-century French practice of sending infants to rural wet nurses, a custom widespread among the bourgeoisie and aristocracy that would later be attacked by Rousseau as an unnatural derogation of maternal duty. The painting captures the emotional dynamics of this social arrangement — the fashionably dressed parents visiting their infant in a rural domestic setting quite different from their Parisian world, the transaction between social classes implicit in the nursing relationship. Fragonard's treatment brought his characteristic warmth and observational acuity to a subject that was simultaneously a social custom, a medical practice, and an index of changing attitudes toward childhood and maternal feeling in the later eighteenth century. The bravura brushwork and warm palette that characterized all his work here serve a subject of unusual social specificity. Waddesdon Manor holds this alongside other important French Rococo works as part of one of the finest English collections of eighteenth-century French painting.

The rural setting contrasts with the fashionable dress of the visiting parents, creating a visual dialogue between city and country. Fragonard's warm palette and empathetic figure handling infuse the scene with sentiment.