On an otherwise unremarkable day in the spring of 2017, , a 27-year-old master of fine art student with no distinct technique, no discernible profile, and no particular prospects, climbed the Wallace Collection’s grand marble staircase and came down again, an hour or so later, fixed on the aesthetic that would make her the pre-eminent British painter of her generation. There, in among the Gouthière clocks and Jean Ducrollay snuffboxes, she’d come face-to-face with Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s , the inescapable French fancy that distills the 18th-century rococo movement’s frivolity and flirtatiousness into a titillating trio of figures: a Marie Antoinette-esque coquette, suspended aloft in billowing blush-silk skirts; her bewigged, cuckolded husband, lurking in the shadows of an Arcadian forest; and her ancien régime paramour, reaching for her as she suggestively sends a ballet-pink slipper flying towards him in the velvet undergrowth. “It felt like all these strands that I’d been looking at came together,” Yukhnovich tells me today of the 25-by-31-inch canvas, which has, in the centuries since a licentious French baron commissioned it, been reproduced everywhere from Disney’s to a fridge magnet on Etsy.
She’s perching on a rickety folding stool in her southeast London studio, her head tilted in a way that brings out her own resemblance to one of Fragonard’s subjects: copper hair, heart-shaped face, ivory skin, Cupid’s-bow lips. Until that point, she say.
