Young Girl Reading

The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC has investigated one of the choice paintings in its permanent collection, Jean-Honoré Fragonard's Young Girl Reading (c.1770), and discovered Fragonard's first attempt at this work, which it calls Portrait of a Woman with a Book. As you can see from the Gallery's simulation, the first attempt had the subject staring at the viewer. She looks older, shrewish and challenging and Fragonard obviously wasn't pleased with it. So he covered it with the young girl's profile (CLICK).