Marguerite Gérard

J. Mignot, Paris, by 1960
Art market, London, 1983
The Keck Collection, La Lanterne, Bel Air, California
By whom sold, New York, Sotheby's, 17 January 1992, lot 59
There acquired

Paris, Musee Galleria, Femmes d'Hier et d'Aujourdhui, 14-20 October 1960, no. 68

S. Wells-Robertson, Marguerite Gérard: 1761-1837, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1978, II, i, cat. no. 86, p. 867
C. Blumenfeld, Marguerite Gérard 1761-1837, Paris 2019, cat. no. 235 P, pp. 166, 241, reproduced p. 164

In this tender depiction of a mother and her two daughters, an atmosphere of anticipation pervades the otherwise quiet and refined interior.  The mother, in a luxurious burnt orange gown, sits and carefully reads a letter while her two daughters await to hear the news.  The younger daughter comforts the elder with an arm around her back; both are dressed in fashionable white muslin dresses, straw hats tied around their arms with pink silk ribbon.  As was typical for the artist, Gérard includes a charming cat upon the footstool at lower left. 

Though Gérard is often credited with the resurgence of intimate genre scenes in the manner of seventeenth-century Dutch masters like Gabriel Metsu, by the end of the 1810s she had begun to abandon the elaborate glazing and meticulous brushstrokes of the Golden Age for a more summary treatment of textures and surfaces. Her subject matter, as well, shifted towards more contemporary scenes, both in mood and fashion.  La Correspondance Familiale, which Wells-Robertson dates to 1814-16 and Blumenfeld to 1814-18, falls precisely into this transitional stage of the artist's career.  The painting's superb condition reveals Gérard at the height of her artistic powers.