Young Woman

Young Woman (c. 1769), in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, is one of Fragonard's informal portrait studies, capturing a young woman with the fluid brushwork and warm palette that characterize his most spontaneous work. The Dulwich Picture Gallery, Britain's first purpose-built public art gallery (1817), includes French eighteenth-century paintings that document the Rococo tradition alongside its stronger Dutch and Flemish holdings. Fragonard's figure paintings — his bravura portraits and studies of women and children — demonstrate his extraordinary facility with the brush and his gift for capturing the quality of life and movement in a figure. His "fantasy portraits" — informal figure studies in which the sitter is given costume and attitude but whose status as formal portrait is ambiguous — were among his most original contributions to French eighteenth-century painting, combining the traditions of portraiture, genre painting, and costume study in images of unprecedented liveliness. His technical speed was legendary: some of these studies were reportedly painted in an hour, yet they have a quality of sustained observation that belies their apparent spontaneity.

The confident brushwork builds up the figure in bold, directional strokes, with the costume rendered in thick impasto while the face is treated with greater delicacy. The warm golden palette unifies the composition.