Lady Reading the Letters of Heloise and Abelard

A young woman rests her chin on her hand and gazes into the middle distance, the pages of a letter open before her, a sheet of music and a book of verses on the table — a daydream prompted by the famous correspondence of the medieval lovers Heloise and Abelard, whose names are inscribed on the leaves. Bernard d’Agescy painted the picture in Paris about 1780 in the sentimental mode of Jean-Baptiste Greuze, whose authorship the work long carried until Pierre Rosenberg and Colin Bailey reattributed it to the young Niçois painter in 2001. The canvas belonged to the abbé de Véri by 1785, then passed through the David-Weill, Kobler, and Koenigsberg collections before the Art Institute purchased it in 1994. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.