Portrait of a Boy

This lively miniature, with its dynamic graphite underdrawing, quickly dashed watercolor, and gouache, was long thought to have been painted by one of eighteenth-century France’s most celebrated artists, Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806). Today, it is considered part of a group of extraordinary miniatures painted by Fragonard’s wife Marie Anne Fragonard, née Gérard, whose more celebrated sister, Marguerite Gérard (1761–1837), trained and even collaborated with Fragonard. Marie Anne was not alone among eighteenth-century women who drew in the shadow of more famous husbands. Francois Boucher’s (1703–1770) wife, Marie Jeanne Buzeau (1716–1796) drew and etched, apparently using her husband’s compositions as models.