Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
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.
Due to rights restrictions, this image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.