The Music Lesson

The Music Lesson (La Leçon de musique) is an oil painting on canvas by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, dated by the Louvre to about 1765–1770 and held in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, since it was given to the museum in 1849.

The music lesson was a favourite theme of Dutch Golden Age painters, Vermeer's picture of that title being the best known, and in Baroque art such scenes often served as allegories of the senses. Fragonard turns the subject into a galant scene. A young woman in a white satin dress sits at a harpsichord, her hands on the keys and her head turned towards her teacher, who leans over her shoulder in a dark plumed hat, holding open the score while his eyes drop to her neckline. A small white dog curls on the chair at the lower right. The handling is broad and summary, and specialists remain divided over whether the canvas is an early, unfinished work or a late sketch. The French art-history database Agorha also records it under the alternative title Le Duo.

The painting measures 109 × 121 cm. It came to the Louvre from François-Hippolyte Walferdin (1795–1880), a physicist, politician and collector who gathered some 80 paintings and more than 700 drawings by Fragonard and did much to revive interest in an artist who had fallen out of fashion after his death. The Louvre's inventory records the gift on 15 May 1849. In 1865 the picture was placed on deposit with a Monsieur Pietri on the rue de Rivoli, and it was restored by Jacques Roullet in 1974. It now hangs with the museum's other works by Fragonard in room 929 of the Sully wing.