Jean-Honoré Fragonard

The most celebrated of these is The Swing, a scene set in a lush arbor in which a beautiful girl kicks up her legs and petticoats, while swinging above her paramour who reclines on the garden floor. Four years later he painted a larger more ambitious suite of romantic rococo works for the duchesse du Barry, also depicting a young couple making love in a garden. These works, which have their origins in the fêtes champêtres by Giorgione (1478–1510) and then Watteau (1684–1721) were richly painted but usually showed more restraint and less flesh than the mythologies of Boucher, an exception being the paintings of a naked nubile girl toying with her dog. At the same time, Fragonard painted a series of ‘Fantasy portraits’ of friends and patrons, often wearing clothes in the Spanish style and usually painted with extraordinary freedom and at great speed. More than one of these portraits show an awareness of Rembrandt. Fragonard returned to Italy in the 1770s and when he arrived back in Paris two years later, he adopts a cooler, more polished style, even for works such as Le Verrou which have an overtly erotic content and dramatic subject. His very late works, such as the Fountain of Love (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) are more thinly painted and ethereal in their effect. With the outbreak of the French Revolution, Fragonard’s output slowed considerably. He collaborated on occasion with his sister-in-law Marguerite Gérard, painting sentimental cabinet pictures executed in a highly refined style. On the recommendation of the painter Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), he spent his final years overseeing the establishment of the new national museum, the Louvre.