Sometimes when we are reading in the library, it can be inspiring to look at a famous artwork that shows someone else reading. Opposite the photocopy service area on the U1 level of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus, is a reproduction of Young Girl Reading, or The Reader (La Liseuse), a painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. It was created in the 1700s, and is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., United States of America.

The Finnish art historian Tancred Borenius was among those who praised this painting for its soft, gentle imagery describing Young Girl Reading as a

quite perfect example of the graceful sentimentality of Fragonard, which at times acquires an almost Early Victorian flavor.

Professor Borenius meant that the cozy, sweet image of the reader was like the sensibility of a later era, when domestic values were more important. To show a young woman reading in a sweet way suggested that reading could be an elegant, intimate activity. By contrast, in Fragonard’s time, French society was concerned with social and intellectual freedom.

No one knows who posed for the portrait Young Girl Reading. The subject wears a lemon yellow dress with white ruff collar and cuffs and purple ribbons. She is shown in profile, reading from a small book. If she were reading a heavy, dusty old book, the effort of holding it and reading it would give a different message to viewers about the challenging aspects of study. Instead, she comfortably sits with her back against a lilac cushion. We can see some of the pages of the book she is reading, but not what is printed on the pages.

Modern analysis

TU students in scientific fields may be interested to know that famed paintings are often examined in laboratories now photographed using near infrared hyperspectral image (HSI) and x-ray fluorescence (XRF) scan for the element mercury. HSI combines the power of digital imaging and spectroscopy. Spectroscopy helps to determine the composition, temperature, density, and motion of an object. Infrared spectroscopy helps to identify the atoms and molecules in the object. XRF is an analytical technique that has been used for many years to determine the elemental composition of a wide variety of materials.

The results are that it is possible to see what is painted underneath the artwork as we know it. In this way, we can capture the artist’s first thoughts and see how they were changed as the painting developed into the valuable item it eventually became.

It turns out that Young Girl Reading was once an entirely different painting, which has been called Portrait of a Woman with a Book. Showing an older, less idealized woman who looks out at the viewer, this painting was finished six months before Fragonard decided to paint over it to create Young Girl Reading.

One of the surprizing aspects of art history is that even with extremely familiar works such as Young Girl Reading, new research developments can provide new information. The National Gallery website observed:

In 2012, a previously unknown drawing appeared on the art market. Covered with eighteen thumbnail-sized sketches that, but for one, were annotated—apparently in the artist’s hand—the drawing suggested that the fantasy figures were indeed portraits of identifiable individuals, members of the artist’s professional network of clients and models.

This suggests that although we do not know the person who posed for Young Girl Reading, the artist’s circle of friends and associated might have recognized her. Also, Young Girl Reading has some similarities to other works by Fragonard, showing people with different jobs posing. In the recently discovered sketch, Fragonard noted the names of every sitter for other portraits, but not for Young Girl Reading.

It is possible that the subject did not like the way she was portrayed, and so Fragonard painted over the work, creating an idealized, generalized image instead of the original one.

Among the other discoveries was that a famous portrait by Fragonard of the noted philosopher Denis Diderot turned out not to be of Diderot after all. The TU Library owns books by and about Diderot.

All TU students in the Faculty of Philosophy have heard the name of this author. Diderot was considered such an unusual writer in his time that Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia, once stated:

If I had believed [Diderot], everything would have been turned upside down… all would have been turned topsy-turvy to make room for impractical theories.

Among Diderot’s ideas is this one, from an article on political authority in the French Encyclopaedia:

No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.

It was natural for some art lovers to assign a subject to a portrait by Fragonard, but only in 2012 was it finally realized that the work which had been known as the Portrait of Diderot in the collection of the Louvre Museum in Paris did not in fact show the renowned thinker. Instead, it may show a forgotten writer and publisher, Anne-Gabriel Meusnier de Querlon (1702-1780).

Historical difficulties

Although we appreciate the art of Fragonard today, during his lifetime, he had many problems. One of the worst was the French Revolution. Many of the people who paid him to paint portraits were aristocrats who were either killed or forced into exile during this era. Although Fragonard was not a political artist, his association with the upper classes meant that he was advised to leave Paris in 1790, one year after the outbreak of the Revolution. He went into hiding at the home of a cousin in Grasse, a town in the South of France, in the hills north of Cannes.

Although Grasse is a pleasant place to visit, it was not a good center for launching an artistic career. By the time Fragonard decided it was safe to return to Paris early in the 1800s, he had been forgotten by most art lovers. For about fifty years after he died in 1806, his name was not mentioned in histories of art. Only in the late 1800s did historians begin to appreciate his work again.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)