Jean-Honoré Fragonard
The playful storyteller of the Rococo.
Fragonard painted love, flirtation and play for the French upper classes. The Revolution made his style old-fashioned overnight.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard was born in 1732 in Grasse in Provence. The family moved to Paris when he was small. He began as a clerk to a notary, but his talent for drawing led to his studying painting, briefly under Chardin and then under François Boucher. In 1752 he won the Prix de Rome, and after further study in Paris he lived at the French Academy in Rome from 1756 to 1761.
In Italy he drew gardens and ruins, among them those of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli, often in the company of the painter Hubert Robert. Back in Paris he had success with a large history painting, Coresus and Callirhoe (1765), which was bought for the king and is now in the Louvre. But he soon left weighty history painting behind and turned to private patrons who wanted sensual, playful pictures.
His best-known work is The Swing (1767), in which a young woman swings high and kicks off a shoe while an admirer gazes up under her skirt. It is in the Wallace Collection in London. Another major work is the series The Progress of Love, painted for Madame du Barry in the early 1770s. She rejected the paintings, which are now in the Frick Collection in New York. The Bolt, a charged love scene in a bedroom, hangs in the Louvre.
Fragonard often painted very quickly. In his so-called fantasy figures the brushstrokes are plainly visible, and some are said to have been done in an hour. The colours are light, with pink, yellow and green, and nature is lush and airy. In 1769 he married Marie-Anne Gérard. Her sister Marguerite Gérard became his pupil and a successful painter.
The Revolution made the Rococo unfashionable. Jacques-Louis David helped Fragonard to a post on the commission for the new museum in the Louvre, but as a painter he was forgotten by the time he died in 1806. Only in the mid-19th century was he rediscovered, and later the Impressionists saw him as a forerunner with his quick, free brush.