The Music Lesson, 1788 (oil on panel) (pair to 347760)

La Jeune Musicienne As with most of Garnier's paintings, the present pair are keenly observed illustrations of the costumes, furnishing and manners of fashionable society on the eve of the Revolution. In La Jeune Musicienne, a pretty girl wearing a stylishly plumed coiffure and silk gauze fichu flips through a musical manuscript as she prepares to play the harp. Proficiency in playing an instrument was one of the skills required of an educated lady in 18th century France and was intended to provide a decorous diversion for both the hostess and her guests. The young woman who peers around the door in Le Jeu de Cache-Cache is playing hide-and-seek with a small child in the next room. Surrounded as she is by a doll, a fan and a toy pony, Garnier's infantalized heroine reveals more about the status of well-bred women in French society near the end of the century than the artist may have intended. In both paintings Garnier's accuracy in reporting the precise appearance of Louis XVI chairs, a brass-fitted circular table, and pale wood-panelled walls is prodigious, and his mastery of shimmering silk demonstrates his finest 'Metsu Manner'.