Marguerite Gerard

At the age of fourteen, Marguerite Gérard joined her sister and brother-in-law, the famous painter Fragonard, in Paris, where they lived in the artists’ quarters at the Louvre. There, she studied under Fragonard and absorbed the lessons of the museum’s magnificent collection. Gérard became the first French woman to achieve success as a painter of genre scenes; her meticulous technique applied to sentimental scenes of bourgeois women in domestic settings made her the equal of Labille-Guiard and Vigée-Lebrun. Gérard never married and remained a resident at the Louvre for thirty years.