FRAGONARD, Jean-Honoré (Grasse, 1732 – Paris, 1806)
Jean-Honoré Fragonard was born in Grasse on 5 April 1732. Around 1750, after a short period in a notary’s office, he was entrusted to Boucher who sent him to Chardin where he learned the rudiments of his craft. Soon, however, Boucher was impressed by his progress and took him back into his studio. Only two years later, in 1752, in spite of not being a student of the Académie, Fragonard was admitted to the competition for the Prix de Rome which he won with his painting, Jeroboam Sacrificing to the Idols.
Fragonard arrived in Rome in 1756. After a period of serious depression resulting from his sense of inferiority in comparison to the great masters of Italian art, and which prevented him from painting for months, he met the Abbé de Saint-Non with whom he visited Naples, and then Bologna, Venice, and Genoa on the way back to France. The whole of this Italian sojourn is documented by numerous drawings.
From 1761 Fragonard was once again in Paris where his very active career took off. The few surviving documents mention royal commissions, some of which—such as those for the palace of Versailles or for the Gobelins tapestry works—were never completed; they mention a single entry to the Salon of 1766; and his acquisition of numerous paintings that had belonged to Boucher who had died in 1770.
Besides his works painted on easel—executed for a wide variety of patrons among whom were Berget de Grancourt (with whom Fragonard travelled to Italy again and where he made many more drawings in 1773)—the artist must surely have painted various decorations for the palaces of the upper ranks of French society. Of these, only one has survived intact: the decorations executed in 1771 for the pavilion at Louveciennes of the Comtesse du Barry, now in the Frick Collection in New York. Fragonard painted one of his masterpieces for the dining room of the Duke of Penthièvre in 1775, The Party at Saint-Cloud. In the 1780s his period of greatest creativity came to an end. His popularity, however, continued as magazines and revues published a great number of engravings of his most celebrated works between 1784 and 1787. In addition, the allegorical and mythological works he painted in these years resulted in his later acquiring the epithet of “Romantic before the Revolution”. However, the Revolution of 1789 caught him by surprise. He left Paris for Provence, then returned to Paris in 1792 to find that he was without patrons. Thanks to David’s intercession, Fragonard became part of the committee entrusted with selecting works of art for Napoleon’s planned new museum. As a member of this committee, he lodged for free, first at the Louvre, then in the Palais Royal.
Fragonard died on 22 August 1806, while returning home from a restaurant, an obscure, forgotten figure, the survivor of a vanished society that had once idolised him.
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