Jean-Honoré Fragonard: The Complete Story
Jean-Honore Fragonard painted the most famous flirtation in art history for a client who wanted his mistress on a swing, watched his entire world go under the guillotine, and was saved by the sternest revolutionary painter in France. He died forgotten, two streets from the Louvre.
The fastest brush of the eighteenth century spent its last years cataloguing other people's paintings. Here is the whole arc, silk to silence.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard at a glance:
1732: born in Grasse, son of a glove merchant's assistant; the family moves to Paris when he is six.
1752: wins the Prix de Rome at 20 after training under Chardin, briefly, and Boucher, decisively.
1765: his Coresus and Callirhoe triumphs at the Salon; he then walks away from history painting entirely.
1767: The Swing, painted for a private client's private joke, becomes the century's most famous small picture.
1806: dies in Paris, remembered by almost no one; the rediscovery takes half a century.
Grasse, Chardin, Boucher, Rome
Fragonard was born in Grasse, the perfume town, on April 5, 1732. In Paris he lasted six months with the austere Chardin before Boucher took him, and at 20 he won the Prix de Rome.
In Italy from 1756 to 1761 he skipped the approved models to sketch the overgrown gardens of the Villa d'Este with Hubert Robert, and those cypresses and cascades furnished his imagination for life.
1765: triumph, then desertion
His enormous Coresus and Callirhoe was received with acclaim at the Salon of 1765 and bought for the crown; the Academy expected a history painter for the ages.
Instead Fragonard walked away from official careers entirely, painting for private collectors who paid faster and demanded joy. The Academy never forgave him, and posterity got The Swing instead of more marble deaths.
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The Swing, 1767
A courtier, the Baron de Saint-Julien, first asked the religious painter Doyen to paint his mistress on a swing with a bishop pushing; Doyen refused and passed the scandal to Fragonard, who kept the swing, softened the bishop into an elderly husband, and placed the client in the bushes below with a privileged view as her shoe flies off. The result, now in the Wallace Collection in London, is rococo's whole philosophy in three square meters of silk and foliage: pleasure, secrecy, and a garden doing the winking. The painting rewards a detail-by-detail reading, down to the little dog barking at the secret.
The du Barry rejection, and the myth of frivolity
In 1771 Madame du Barry commissioned the four Progress of Love panels for her pavilion at Louveciennes, then rejected them for cooler neoclassical replacements, the sharpest possible signal that taste had turned.
The panels hang today at the Frick in New York. The myth calls Fragonard empty froth; the correction is technical.
His portraits de fantaisie were each painted in about an hour and look it, deliberately, and that speed, all wrist and certainty, is what painters from Renoir onward went to study while the moralists looked away.
Saved by David, and where to see him
The Revolution erased his clientele, and the aging painter of swings might have starved; instead Jacques-Louis David, revolutionary and admirer, had him appointed a curator of the new Louvre museum in 1793.
Fragonard spent his last decade organizing the nation's confiscated paintings and died in Paris on August 22, 1806, barely noticed, to be resurrected by the Goncourt brothers sixty years later.
The Wallace Collection, the Frick, the Louvre, and the villa-museum in Grasse hold the essentials.
The fantasy portraits, one hour each
The fantasy portraits are his jazz: sitters in Spanish costume painted at speed, one sheet inscribed as done in an hour's time.
Whether the hour is literal hardly matters; the brushwork believes it. Collars whip, sleeves dissolve, faces arrive out of paint that never settled.
For a century some passed as portraits of Diderot and other famous men; scholarship keeps reshuffling the names while the speed remains the point.
The family firm
After his marriage the studio became a family business: his sister-in-law Marguerite Gérard arrived at 16, trained under him, and became one of the era's most successful women painters.
They collaborated on genre scenes, and connoisseurs still argue over which hands did what, a compliment to the teaching.
His son Évariste grew into a respected painter under David. Three careers came out of one lodging in the Louvre.
Tivoli, in red chalk
In the summer of 1760 he drew the overgrown gardens of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli: cypresses like fireworks, staircases drowning in green.
The Tivoli sheets made his name with collectors before the paintings did, and a second Italian journey in 1773 refilled the folder.
Museums now rank the drawings with the canvases: Fragonard with no client and nothing to flatter, just light to manage.
The Jean-Honoré Fragonard questions that keep coming up
Who painted The Swing? Fragonard, in 1767, after Gabriel-Francois Doyen refused the commission as indecent and sent the client to him.
What is the story behind The Swing? A courtier wanted his mistress mid-air with himself watching from below. Fragonard turned the bishop into a husband, kept the flying shoe, and made voyeurism weightless.
Why did Fragonard die forgotten? The Revolution destroyed both his patrons and his style's reputation. He survived as a Louvre curator thanks to David and died in 1806, out of fashion for decades after.
Where can I see Fragonard? The Wallace Collection in London for The Swing, the Frick in New York for the Progress of Love, the Louvre, and the Musee Fragonard in Grasse.
How much does a Fragonard cost? The fantasy portrait of the duc d'Harcourt brought 17 million pounds in 2013, his record. Nearly everything else of consequence is museum-locked.
Did he live at the Louvre? Yes, in artist lodgings from the 1760s until the Revolution's museum needed the space; David then arranged the curator's job that kept him housed and fed.
More secrets to unlock
Painters look after their own
The painter of aristocratic pleasure was rescued by the painter of the Revolution: David, whose friends were dismantling Fragonard's world, quietly gave him the Louvre job that kept him alive. Taste is partisan; painters look after their own.
