Artwork story
About Marie Emilie Coignet de Courson (1716–1806) with a Dog
The artist and artwork
Jean Honoré Fragonard painted Marie Emilie Coignet de Courson (1716–1806) with a Dog around 1769 in oil on canvas. A former student of François Boucher and winner of the 1752 Prix de Rome, he made this work as one of his Figures de fantaisie, or fantasy portraits: rapid performances in which costume, color, and visible handling matter as much as likeness. A recently discovered drawing allowed the Met to identify the sitter as an aristocratic salon hostess rather than an invented character.
The world around it
The portrait emerged in Enlightenment-era Paris under Louis XV, when the Royal Academy still ranked history painting above portraiture and domestic subjects. Fragonard had studied at the French Academy in Rome from 1756 to 1761 and won acclaim at the Royal Academy in 1765, but he chose private collectors over the conventional path of royal commissions. His quick, unblended surfaces extended the Rococo taste for movement, pleasure, intimacy, and display. The sitter's deliberately old-fashioned dress recalls Maria de' Medici's seventeenth-century court as painted by Rubens, pictures Fragonard knew from the French royal collections. The result is not a documentary record of 1769 fashion but an elite act of imaginative masquerade.
A detail to notice
Fragonard worked with such speed that the wet surface preserves his decisions. Broad mauve, gold, white, and blue strokes build the dress, jewels, ribbons, curls, and upright little dog; the Met notes that he even incised lines into the large white ruff. Marie Emilie turns her eyes sideways while the dog looks up toward her. Pearls loop through powdered hair, and blue ribbons recur around the animal and costume. The dog's pale head rises beside hers, making two alert faces against a muted ground. The Met suggests that Fragonard's painterly performance arguably outshines the sitter, making this portrait function almost like a self-portrait of artistic virtuosity.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is painting made in Oil on canvas and held in the European Paintings department.
Recorded dimensions include 32 x 25 3/4 in. (81.3 x 65.4 cm).
Subject terms include Portraits, Women, and Dogs. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Fletcher Fund, 1937.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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