BERNARD D'AGESCI - b. 1756 Niort, d. 1829 Paris

French painter, originally Jean-Charles-Henri-Auguste Bernard. His father was a shopkeeper in Niort, a town of considerable importance during the Revolution, located some eighty kilometres west of Poitiers. He was second of the eighteen children of his parents. His first master was Jean Drouart, who died in 1780 on Niort. He went to Paris in 1772 where around 1772 entered the studio of Jean-Bernard Restout (1732-1797), the son of the famous Jean Restout. By 1785 he was documented in Italy.

Returning to Niort he mainly painted religious and mythological subjects as well as portraits in Neoclassical style. His name is memorialised in the Musée Bernard d’Agesci in Niort, the town of his birth.

Lady Reading the Letters of Heloise and Abélard

For most eighteenth-century critics (e.g. Jean-Jacques Rousseau), novel reading by proper young women was to be discouraged. The dangers of reading are explicit in Bernard d’Agesci’s painting: it is a stark testament to the erotic wantonness brought on by the novel, which in this case is slipping from her fingers in her distraction.

Until 2001 the painting was attributed to Greuze.

Inscribed: HELOISE, ABEL (on the leaves of the open book); LART / DAIME / DE / BERNA (on the spine of the closed book).