Born Grasse, France, 1761; Died Paris, France, 1837

When the Salons of Paris were opened to women artists in the 1790s, Marguerite Gérard was already an established and successful entrepreneur and sought-after painter. Over an illustrious 50-year career, Gérard created intimate domestic scenes, often showing maternal devotion, as well as finely rendered portraits of her contemporaries; both brought her social prestige and financial security—hard-won accomplishments for a European woman in the 18th century. Gérard exhibited frequently at the Salon, skillfully navigating the Parisian art scene and drawing notice and support from powerful figures, such as Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821); he himself collected her works.

For many women artists before the 19th century, access to formal artistic education and membership in academies that fostered professional networks was a challenge—if not outright prohibited. Gérard’s ability to work as a painter and engraver may be credited, at least in part, to the training and professional connections she had through family. As a young teen in 1775, Gérard moved from Grasse to Paris to live with her sister, Marie-Anne Fragonard (1745–1823), the painter of miniatures, and her brother-in-law, Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), also a painter. Although Marie-Anne’s brushy, Rococo works were long mistaken for those of her famous husband, paintings by Marguerite Gérard, produced at first as collaborative ventures in Fragonard’s studio in the Louvre, are markedly her own.

It is possible to trace Gérard’s movements as a young woman in Parisian artistic circles via the dozens of commissioned likenesses she made of fellow artists, architects, collectors, and their families in the last two decades of the 18th century. Her works reflect her familiarity with Dutch genre painting and typically include key attributes of the sitter’s profession and fine renderings of luxurious textiles, furniture, and pets. Gérard’s attention to detail, paired with the relatively small scale of her canvases, lends her work a sense of intimacy. This approach made her paintings popular as print editions, a shrewd entrepreneurial move that helped to solidify her fame throughout Paris and beyond.