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The First Riding Lesson
Jean Honoré Fragonard French
Not on view
Playful scenes featuring the instruction of small children were a favored subject of Fragonard’s in the mid-1770s. He often treated the theme in the form of large-scale drawings built up of broad strokes of pale golden brown wash. The dog here is a patient stand-in for a horse, as young parents give their child a first "riding lesson." The figures are not, as earlier scholars believed, portraits of Fragonard’s family members but rather generalized types who appear again and again in his domestic scenes.
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