Jean-Honoré Fragonard

French painter

• Born: April 5, 1732
• Birthplace: Grasse, France
• Died: August 22, 1806
• Place of death: Paris, France

Fragonard was one of the foremost painters of the eighteenth century and has been particularly praised for the gaiety of his style and composition. He is renowned for his depictions of French high society in the years immediately preceding the revolution.

Early Life

The son of a Grasse merchant, Jean-Honoré Fragonard (zhahn-aw-naw-ray frah-gaw-nahr) was brought to Paris at the age of fifteen. His father had been ruined by bad investments, and Fragonard was apprenticed to a notary. Showing no talent for the law but already exhibiting signs of his artistic gift, he was taught by several important French masters, including the great landscape painter François Boucher. Boucher’s influence proved the strongest, and Fragonard’s work has often been compared to his teacher’s, especially in its delightful depiction of frivolous French court life and the pleasures of the flesh.

A precocious talent, Fragonard won the Prix de Rome (one of the most coveted prizes in France) when he was only twenty. Beginning in 1756, he spent six years in Italy drawing monuments, ruins, Italian gardens, and copying works by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and learning to emulate his sunny palette and sense of drama. For the most part, Fragonard was not drawn to Renaissance art but rather to landscapes and bacchanalian scenes.

Shortly after his return from Italy in the early 1760’s, Fragonard painted a series of landscapes in rather dark, realistic tones to presage a shift in public taste away from the elaborate and fanciful decorativeness of rococo art. It may have been in response to this new seriousness in the public mood that the artist searched for a safe subject that would guarantee his full membership in the French Academy.

Life’s Work

To become a member in the French Academy, Fragonard painted Corésus Sacrificing Himself to Save Callirhoé (c. 1761-1765), which was soundly praised by the critics and satisfied the Royal Academicians, who were looking for first-rate history painters to serve the needs of the state. Marion L. Grayson has called the painting “a scene of strange and violent pagan passions,” and R. H. Wilenski has referred to it as “rather simple and severe with few of the impetuous curves that characterise his later drawing.” Yet it is recognizably in Fragonard’s manner, rendered with his characteristic flair for presenting voluptuous women. The painting pleased Fragonard’s conservative contemporaries, but this stylish artist never returned to this kind of conventional work. Instead, he changed almost immediately to portraying risqué scenes from private life that made him something less than a respectable figure.

The Swing (c. 1766), perhaps Fragonard’s most famous painting, epitomizes the artist’s willingness to delineate titillating scenes that his contemporaries avoided. Gabriel-François Doyen had been approached by Baron de Saint-Julien to paint his mistress on a swing being pushed by a bishop, and the baron wanted himself put somewhere in the composition, where he could have a good view of the charming lady’s legs. Doyen was taken aback by the proposition and did not accept the commission, although he suggested the witty innovation of having the lady’s slipper fly into the air to be caught by cupids. Fragonard not only accepted the baron’s salacious conceit but also exaggerated it by showing the lady at the height of her swing kicking one leg high up against a cloudy background, sending her slipper upward toward a statue of a cupid while the baron (reclining on the ground) obtains a tantalizing glimpse of his lover. On the lady’s other side, her husband (who seems to be amused) thrusts his arms forward, having pushed her high into the air. The picture forms a neat triangle, with the lady at its apex, her companions below taking different sorts of pleasure from her own happy recreation.

This has been called a naughty picture. It is also a brilliant evocation of sophisticated French court society before the French Revolution, in which ladies and gentlemen indulged their fantasies, took lovers with considerable panache, and in general adopted a worldly attitude toward sin. If this painting was shocking, it was so only in the sense that an artist of Fragonard’s stature would indulge his patron’s whims so directly and flamboyantly. Technically, the artist’s contemporaries recognized that his painting was a tour de force. The setting is beautifully realized: The lady swings into the light out of the cozy shadiness of the bushes and trelliswork. In the flowing folds of her dress, she appears as an airy creature, suspended between the yearning arms of two men. Indeed, the entire effect of the painting is of lightness and of fancy—the playfulness of desire.

With The Swing, Fragonard gained a reputation for pandering “to the tastes of a morally and esthetically decadent few,” as Grayson puts it. His work provided elegant decoration for the residence of the rich and the highborn. Between 1770 and 1775, he painted the Progress of Love series of Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV. His portraits rival those of Peter Paul Rubens in their supple rendering of human flesh, yet Fragonard’s expressionistic brushwork gives his female figures an ethereal, almost spiritual quality—especially in portraits where a young woman is posed, quill in hand, about to write a letter, or is pictured with a letter in one hand while she places her other hand to her cheek as she reads with a serene, contented expression. In such works, the paint looks as though it has been swirled onto the canvas in one extremely graceful movement. Fragonard is said to have accomplished some of these portraits in an hour’s time, a stunning feat of artistic inspiration and control.

Fragonard married in 1769, an important step for a painter who could have continued to frequent the salons of his patrons and remain outside the realm of respectable domesticity. Instead, he chose to pursue a more conventional existence, which had remarkable consequences for his work. Beginning in the 1770’s, the painter turned to scenes of home life and family life. In The Good Mother (c. 1770-1772), for example, he took up Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conceit that the best education was to be got at home and that society should return to its origins in nature. Rousseau was reacting against the elaborate artifice of a society that had paid Fragonard handsomely for celebrating its sexual games and intrigues. Now Fragonard, with a home life of his own, and in a society moving toward the utter seriousness of a revolution that would overthrow the decadent court, was showing that he, too, had values that transcended what was merely fashionable. In a country that was gearing up for massive social change, The Good Mother emphasized continuity, security, and protectiveness. The subject is pictured in a luxuriant garden—more a fantasy or wish fulfillment than a real place—with a babe on her lap, another asleep beside her, and a third wide-awake, somewhat older child behind her pouring water into a bowl while the mother dips a cloth, evidently about to wash her infant’s face. The harmony and peacefulness of this scene is echoed in many other paintings—in settings where a motherly figure is portrayed with children gathered about her teaching them the alphabet, where daily life and domestic pursuits are given a uniquely sincere value.

Horace Shipp has pointed out that these two phases of Fragonard’s work—his erotic portrayals of courtly society and his charmingly serious evocations of family life—constitute different veins of influence stemming from his apprenticeship to Chardin (the man of the people who found in their homely lives and scenes his inspiration) and Boucher (the fantastic colorist and decorator who gave a rococo flourish to the sexually titillating lives of the richly privileged). For a time, in other words, Fragonard was able to mirror and to capitalize upon the contradictions of his society that was, at turns, attracted to domestic stability, dignified and historical themes, moralizing stories based on pagan subject matter, romantic landscapes, and classical subjects (Roman ruins and sculpture). It was only in his last years, in the period of the revolution, that the artist’s complex attitude toward his paradoxical culture was incapable of coping with enormous, abrupt change.

Significance

In his last years, Jean-Honoré Fragonard came under the protection of Jacques-Louis David, who became, in Wilenski’s words, the “art-dictator” of the revolution. David believed that Fragonard had painted many masterpieces, and he was able to secure for his older contemporary a position as a museum curator. Yet the temper of the times had clearly turned against an artist who could easily, if unfairly, be accused of frivolousness and of idealizing the lives of the idle rich. The very gorgeousness of Fragonard’s technique, his extraordinary facility with paint, was condemned for its seductiveness. By 1806, when Napoleon decreed that all artists and their studios must be removed from the Louvre, Fragonard, then seventy-four, was forced to find a new home and place to work. On August 22, 1806, Fragonard, hot from a long walk, sat down at a café for some relief and died of a stroke.

In the years since his death, Fragonard has come to be valued for his style, for the way he is able to endow the slightest subject matter with elegance and wit. In discussing one of his great landscapes, The Fěte at Saint-Cloud (c. 1778-1780), Raymond Mortimer marvels at the witty, seductive, and kind look at nymphs, at a “Nature in gauze and feathers, a millinery of trees, under which to be private” and imagines a modern rake exclaiming, “Oh, to have lived when frivolity could be thus poetical.” Mortimer notes that Fragonard’s scenes never really existed, that they are highly idealized— expressions of fantasy, not reality. Fragonard’s work still has the power to disturb viewers who demand a politically engaged and socially responsible art and to indulge viewers who find satisfaction in admiring the artist’s technique and his ability to suggest a world where the art of living and where the artist’s talent predominate.

Bibliography

Bailey, Colin B., ed. The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2003. Comprehensive survey of eighteenth century French genre painting, with detailed descriptions of paintings, and 230 color and 60 black-and-white reproductions. Also features essays placing Fragonard and other artists within the context of their time.

Fragonard, Jean-Honoré. Fragonard Drawings for Ariosto. Essays by Elizabeth Mangan, Philip Hofer, and Jean Seznec. New York: Pantheon Books, 1945. The essays discuss Fragonard as draftsman, examines illustrated editions of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and discuss Fragonard as an interpreter of Ariosto’s long narrative poem that features the adventures of Roland and Charlemagne’s other knights in wars against the Saracens. Notes, a bibliography, and 137 black-and-white plates make this a comprehensive study of the artist as illustrator.

Grappe, Georges. Fragonard: La Vie et l’œuvre. Monaco: Les Documents d’Art, 1946. Contains thirty-two large black-and-white plates of the artist’s most important works. In French.

Grayson, Marion L. Fragonard and His Friends. St. Petersburg, Fla.: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982. A catalog of an exhibition, held November, 1982-February, 1983. Sixty black-and-white plates document the place of Fragonard’s art in his time, with examples of his painting and of engravings made by others of his work. Included in the exhibition is work by Boucher, Chardin, and many of Fragonard’s other contemporaries and teachers. Notes on individual plates explain the background of the work. Grayson’s biographical and critical introductions to Fragonard and his contemporaries are succinct and insightful and make this catalog an extremely valuable study.

Massengale, Jean Montague. Jean-Honoré Fragonard. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1993. Art historian Massengale provides a study of Fragonard’s life and work, comparing the artist’s gift and temperament to those of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, his near contemporary.

Muehsam, Gerd, ed. French Painters and Paintings from the Fourteenth Century to Post-Impressionism. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970. Contains two illustrations of Fragonard’s work and excellent excerpts from studies of his painting. A detailed bibliography and indexes help organize and structure this anthology of criticism.

Shipp, Horace. The French Masters: A Survey and Guide. London: S. Low, Marston, 1931. One of the older histories of French art, but still a competent and succinct treatment of Fragonard’s place in the context of his teachers and successors. Several black-and-white plates, a chronology of important dates in French history, and an index make this a convenient, accessible source of study.

Wilenski, R. H. French Painting. Rev. ed. Boston: Charles T. Branford, 1949. Contains an excellent section on Fragonard’s life, his oeuvre, and his accomplishments as an artist. Several black-and-white plates give a representative survey of his work. A judicious and well-indexed study.