Deserved Sorrows
1788-1789
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 45 × 55 cm (17 11/16 × 21 5/8 in.)
Classification
Painting
Department
CF
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Gift of Edwin L. Cox – Ed Cox Foundation, Chester Dale Fund, and Patrons' Permanent Fund
Accession Number
2025.29.2
Art Historical Context
Marguerite Gérard’s *Deserved Sorrows*, painted between 1788 and 1789, captures the intimate emotional world of late-eighteenth-century French genre painting. Created on the eve of the French Revolution, the small-on-canvas work invites close, personal viewing, its modest scale of 45 by 55 centimeters suggesting it was intended for a private interior rather than a grand public space. Gérard, one of the most successful women artists of her era, specialized in tender domestic scenes that blended Dutch seventeenth-century realism with the refined sensibility of her own time. Working in oil allow...