REVOLUTION

in a wooden box that she would make dance. Painted versions are in the Fogg Art
Museum, Cambridge, MA. (gift of Grenville L. Winthrop, inv. no. 1943.240); the
State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; Portland Art Museum, Portland,
Oregon (paired with A Little Boy with a ‘boîte de curiosité’ [peepshow box]); and in
a private collection (Cuzin, op. cit., 217; Rosenberg 1989, op. cit., 387).
As Pierre Rosenberg frst discussed at length in 1995 – before the present painting
had, in fact, reappeared — Fragonard created the painting on copper (a support
he rarely employed) to serve as the pendant for a painting on canvas of identical
dimensions by Jean Siméon Chardin, an artist whose genre compositions were
greatly appreciated by the younger painter. Chardin’s picture, probably dating from
the 1750s, depicted an old inmate of the Quinze-Vingts, a hospital founded by
King Louis IX (it remained in use until 1780) to house three hundred blind people.
Chardin showed the old man standing in the street beside a chair, wearing a
sleeveless coat (houppelande) upon which is embroidered a feur-de-lis, indicating
that he has royal permission to beg in the streets of the capital, and a tricorne hat;
in one hand he holds the leash of the pug dog at his feet and a staf, and with his
left hand he extends a tin cup to receive alms from passers-by. That work was a
replica on canvas of the Aveugle des Quinze-Vingt, the prime version of which the
artist had sent to the Salon of 1753. (During World War II, what appears to have
been Chardin’s original, a version in oil on panel, was accidentally destroyed by an
allied bomber in the English countryside.) Chardin apparently made three or four
versions on the composition but only one is known today, in the Fogg Art Museum,
Cambridge (fg. 1), where it is paired with a version on wood panel of Fragonard’s
Young Girl with a Marmot.
Fig. 2 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Portrait of Jean Antoine Hubert Vassal de Saint-Hubert, Private collection
In this charming, recently rediscovered genre painting by Fragonard, a young girl
wearing a tightly corseted dress, a slate-gray apron and a white scarf or fanchon
tied under her chin, cranks out a tune on a hurdy-gurdy. At her waist is a dark blue
sash to which the musical instrument is attached. The itinerant performer stands
between a large marble column and a stone post (borne) to which a horse or
carriage could be attached and around which hay and stones are strewn. A golden
light emanating from the left is focused principally on the comely woman’s head,
while two frisky spaniels play in the shadows at the base of the column. With her
body turned to the left and one foot in front of the other as if she were about to
start to dance, the woman turns her bright and smiling face towards the viewer.
Such picturesque characters were commonly seen in the streets of 18th-century
Paris.
The best-known of the female hurdy-gurdy players (vielleuses) in 18th-century
Paris was Françoise Chemin, nicknamed “Fanchon la vielleuse,” who was
apparently born in Savoy around 1737. Throughout the 18th-century, thousands
of men and women left the mountain regions of their native Savoy each desolate
winter to migrate to the large cities of France, Italy and Germany, where they
worked as chimney sweeps, knife-grinders, shoe-shine boys, or – like our
Hurdy-Gurdy player – street entertainers. In Paris, most lived in poverty in their
own communities, their primary concern being to send money back to their
families; in the warm weather they returned home to tend their farms. They were
popular subjects for French artists like Watteau and, later in the century, Greuze,
Fragonard and Boilly, who were interested in the sympathetic study of “exotic”
types. The attraction of picturesque entertainers who roamed the streets of Paris
would endure beyond the revolutionary period. As late as 1803, for example, a
popular three-act musical comedy entitled Fanchon la vielleuse—with words by
Jean Nicolas Bouilly and Joseph Marie Pain and music by Joseph Denis Doche—
was introduced to the public at the Théâtre du Vaudeville and was a popular
sensation.
The present picture is far from Fragonard’s only representation of a young
Savoyard girl wearing a fanchon, and both full- and bust-length oil paintings and
watercolors by the artist depict a similar female entertainer with a trained marmot
Fragonard was commissioned to paint The Hurdy-Gurdy Player as a companion
for the Chardin by one of his most important patrons, the chevalier Jean Antoine
Hubert Vassal, called Vassal de Saint-Hubert (1741-1782), a fnancier who had
a half-share in the ofice of comptroller of tax collection in the provinces of
Languedoc, Roussillon and the Pays de Foix. In 1769, he became a fermier général,
and two years later he purchased the mostly ceremonial ofice of maître d’hôtel
ordinaire to Louis XVI’s brother, the comte de Provence. The collector owned at
least two landscape paintings by Fragonard, including Pâtre jouant de la fûte, une
paysanne l’écoute (Musée-Château, Annecy) which was shown at the Salon of
1765 and a pair of paintings illustrating scenes from Jean François Marmontel’s
tale, “Annette et Lubin.” Only days before the fnancier’s death in 1782 at the age of
only forty-one, Jean Baptiste Greuze presented him with the bust-length portrait
of him that he had just completed (fg. 2; Private collection). Vassal had been an
important patron of Greuze, and he owned a signifcant number of the latter’s
drawings. Vassal de Saint-Hubert lived in a townhouse on the rue Blanche, which
was located in the village of the Porcherons at the foot of the Butte Montmartre.
His vast art holdings—paintings, pastels, drawings, prints and sculpture of the
Dutch, Italian and French schools—were dispersed in at least three anonymous
auction sales: one in January 1774 (see below), a second on March 29, 1779 and
days following, and a third, posthumously, at the Hôtel de Bullion on April 24, 1783.
When they were featured in the sale of a part of Vassal de Saint-Hubert’s
collection in early 1774, the two companion pictures were described with absolute
precision, as pendants, and the exact dimensions and copper support of the
present painting was cited. The auctioneer praised, in particular, the refnement
of Fragonard’s drawing, the delicacy of his palette and the superb and intelligent
efects of light in the painting. Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s personal copy of the
Vassal de Saint-Hubert sale catalogue, which was published in 1773 by Rémy and
the bookdealer Musier père (Bibliothèque nationale, Paris), contains one page with
40 tiny black-chalk sketches of both the Fragonard and Chardin pendants copied
in the book’s margins by Saint-Aubin.
Although The Hurdy-Gurdy Player is undated, it must have been made before
1774, when it frst appears at auction, and it probably dates from several years
prior. With its controlled brushwork, refned handling and radiant luminosity, it
bears comparison with several of Fragonard’s paintings of the later 1760s, notably
The Swing (The Wallace Collection, London) and the artist’s famous “omelet of
children’’ (as Diderot called it), the ‘Groupes d’Enfants dans le ciel’ (Louvre, Paris),
both of which can be reliably dated to 1767. A signifcantly larger, more freely
brushed version (Wildenstein, op. cit., no. 505; Cuzin, op. cit., no. 365; Rosenberg
1989, op. cit., 297) of the present composition, measuring 43 x 30 cm., is in a
private collection in New York. Rendered with a much looser and brushier handling
beftting its larger scale and canvas support, it appears to be a later version of the
subject, probably datable to the mid-1770s.