The Love Letter

The Love Letter is an oil painting on canvas by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, dated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the early 1770s and part of the Jules Bache Collection given to the Met in New York in 1949 (accession 49.7.49).

A young woman sits at a writing table beside a tall window. She has just received a bouquet of flowers with a folded note tucked into it, and she turns from the papers on her desk to look over her shoulder at the viewer, as if sharing a secret. Behind her, a small white dog lies on a green-cushioned stool and stares out of the picture. Her blue silk dress, lace cap and high coiffure would have been the latest fashion when the picture was painted. The Spanish Wikipedia article stresses that this is a genre scene on the classic theme of receiving a love letter rather than a portrait.

The picture is often cited for Fragonard's colour, his handling of light and his speed of execution. Over a brown ground he laid in rapid strokes with the tip of the brush to pick out the sunlight falling through the window onto her cap, powdered face, the flowers, the blue silk and the dog.

The writing on the note has been read in different ways. It may simply refer to her cavalier; but if it reads 'Cuvillere', the sitter could be Marie Émilie Boucher, daughter of Fragonard's teacher François Boucher. Born in 1740 and widowed in 1769, she married her father's friend, the architect Charles Étienne Gabriel Cuvillier, in 1773. The canvas measures 83.2 × 67 cm.