Young Girl Reading, c.1776 Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Jean-Honore Fragonard also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Young Girl Reading is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A ridge of scraped white along the ruff catches the light, its tiny grooves cut with the butt of a brush. From that crisp edge the profile unfolds: a young reader sunk into silence, her head bowed, ribbons trembling into lilac bows, hands cupping a small book whose scarlet edge flares against the yellow of her dress. Cushions bloom behind her in mauve and rose, propping the body set in a gentle leftward sweep.
Color does the narrative work. Jean-Honoré Fragonard sets lemon and saffron against cool teal and shadowed umber; violet ribbons and pillows tingle as chromatic foils. Ochres mass along the sleeve, then dissolve into thin, fawn-tinted washes where ground shows through. Consider how the lemon dress is built: bold, unblended planes sit beside scraped passages, so that fabric feels simultaneously weighty and quick. Impasto flashes at the knuckles and at the ruffle’s peaks; elsewhere, the paint thins until the gray ground breathes through, lending air to the shadows. Her profile is built from air and interval, more pause than outline.
Composition is spare and exact. A diagonal runs from book to lips to ribboned crown; the back cushion forms a counter-curve that returns the gaze to the page. Set against a near-vertical backdrop, the figure becomes a still flame. Notice the gray lines incised into the collar and fichu: they are not drawn but revealed, the tool cutting down through wet white to the underlayer. That small act—both painterly and artisanal—animates the lace, like whispered speech at the edge of hearing.
History presses faintly through the surface. Technical studies at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., revealed an earlier arrangement beneath: the sitter once faced outward, wearing a beaded, feathered headdress. With time, a ghost of that previous head has re-emerged as pentimenti around brow and plume—two moments in one canvas. Perhaps Fragonard reconsidered drama for absorption, turning a theatrical “fantasy figure” into a private scene of reading. The adjustment links the portrait to the figures de fantaisie that Jean-Honoré Fragonard painted for friends and patrons in Rococo France.
Brushwork here is not merely descriptive; it becomes subject. The dress is mapped with quick, lateral strokes that refuse to blend, while the face receives a flurry of soft, warmed touches, as if heat gathered along the cheek. Across the pillows, loaded bristles leave ridges that catch light like stitched seams. By contrast, the background is a dissolved field—thin, pooled, almost stained—so the figure reads forward with clarity. One might imagine the faint rasp of a page turning, the hush of a salon thick with upholstery and powder.
Compared with the high-spirited theatrics of The Swing, Fragonard’s restraint feels unexpectedly modern. The girl does not perform; she concentrates. Reading becomes an interior landscape, and paint—scraped, dragged, and laid on in luminous chunks—becomes a way to picture thought. Linger, and the scene slows to the tempo of breathing. In that quiet, Fragonard shows how an hour’s bravura can hold a lifetime’s habit of attention.