Fragonard

The Love Letter

Hello My Dear Friends! I do hope the holidays treated you well. My family & I had a beautiful Christmas as it was my sons First birthday (he's a Christmas baby) it was especially magical! It seems as though Christmas has a whole new meaning, everything is more special and our family traditions even more meaningful and important! I wish you all a very happy and love filled New Year!! Thank you deeply for the beautiful comments and well wishes left for me!

The Two Sisters

I have always loved Jean~Honore Fragonard. He has long been a favorite of mine. A copy of his painting The Swing hung in our foyer for years and I remember being a little girl looking at it (my mother also a lover of all things French and an interior designer). After reading a wonderful post by Lauren of Marie~Antoinette's Gossip Guide to the 18th Century about The Pursuit by Fragonard, I thought I would post some of my favorite works. Enjoy!

A Woman with a Dog

Although it is very hard to pick my all~time favorite painting by Jean~Honore Fragonard (1732-1806), it was so fun to browse his works and learn more about the man, the painter, and his legacy.

French painter of the rococo age, Jean~Honore Fragonard, was popular in the courts of Louis XV and Louis XVI for his delicately colored scenes of romance, often in garden settings. Born in Grasse on April 5. 1732, Fragonard moved with his family to Paris in 1738. He spent some time in the busy studio of François Boucher before successfully competing for the Prix de Rome in 1752. In 1756, Fragonard was sent to Italy as a pensioner of the crown; he remained at there until 1761. From the numerous black chalk copies he executed there, it is clear that he held masters of the Baroque in the highest esteem. He also produced brilliant red chalk drawings of the gardens of the Villa d'Este and painted small cabinet-size paintings for French private collectors living in Rome. The Stolen Kiss was painted for the bailiff of Breteuil, French ambassador to the Order of Malta in Rome.

The Swing

The Portrait of a Woman with a Dog is related to an inventive series of imaginary portraits referred to collectively as the Figures de fantaisie. They feature archaic costumes and brushwork so rapid and undisguised that it would have previously been associated with oil sketches rather than finished works.

Fragonard's masterpiece is the series of large panel paintings commissioned by Madame du Barry, for the château de Louveciennes. While the iconography of the series continues to be debated by scholars, the subjects can generally be described as lovers in various stages of romantic involvement in lush, overgrown gardens full of mythological statuary, and cascading flowers. A dispute with du Barry led to the paintings being returned to him and replaced by another artist. After the French Revolution, he held administrative positions at the Louvre, but his work had fallen from favor and he died in relative obscurity and penniless in 1806.

The Stolen Kiss

His paintings are largely known for the scandal they created. For example, The Swing became an immediate success, not merely for its artistic excellence, but for the scandal behind it. The young nobleman is getting an interesting view up the lady's skirts, not only that, but she is being pushed by her priest-lover, shown in the rear.

The Meeting

In the same spirit are some other famous pictures, The See-Saw, Blindman's Bluff, The Stolen Kiss, and the Meeting. After his marriage in 1769, he began painting children and family scenes and even painted religious subjects. He stopped exhibiting publicly in 1770 and all his later works are commissions from private patrons.

Blindman's Bluff

To me, Fragonard embodies the spirit of the ancien regime on the eve of the revolution. The soft palate and mutes tones, the images of love, courtship, frivolity, coquettish young ladies in voluminous clothes, and frothy flowers in lush gardens. What a wondrous and fantastical place these paintings can take us!

Bisou Mon Amis!