Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings, of which only five are dated. Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism.
Paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard
A Young Girl Reading (1770)
Young Girl Reading, or The Reader (French: La Liseuse), is an 18th-century oil painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. It depicts an unidentified girl seated in profile, wearing a lemon yellow dress with white ruff collar and cuffs and purple ribbons, and reading from a small book held in her right hand. The painting is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard had an extensive career. After he won the 1753 Prix de Rome with a painting titled Jeroboam Sacrificing to Idols, he became one of the foremost French painters in the Rococo style, which was filled with light colors, asymmetrical designs, and curved, natural forms. The Rococo style emerged in Paris during the eighteenth century, more specifically during the reign of Louis XV, when the French upper class experienced a new social and intellectual freedom. As Petra ten-Doesschate Chu stated, "Aristocrats and wealthy bourgeois focused on play and pleasure. Grace and wit were prized in social interactions. A new intellectual curiosity gave rise to a healthy skepticism toward well-worn truths." Fragonard was most drawn to the playful lives and loves of the aristocratic youth of his day.
The Stolen Kiss (painting) (1787)
The Stolen Kiss is an oil painting on canvas executed in 1787 and located in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. It has been historically attributed to the French Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806). At 45 by 55 centimetres (18 in × 22 in), the painting is a genre scene influenced by Dutch Golden Age painting, depicting a young couple in a secretive romance, set in the foreground – a subject that was favoured before the French Revolution among French aristocrats.
In the late 18th century, The Stolen Kiss belonged to Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last monarch of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and was hosted in the Lazienki Palace in Warsaw. With the acquisition of the palace in the early 19th century by Tsar Alexander I, the painting effectively became part of the Russian imperial collections. It was transferred in 1895 to the Hermitage Museum, where it remains.
The Swing (Fragonard) (1767)
The Swing (French: L'Escarpolette), also known as The Happy Accidents of the Swing (French: Les Hasards heureux de l'escarpolette, the original title), is an 18th-century oil painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard in the Wallace Collection in London. It is considered to be one of the masterpieces of the Rococo era, and is Fragonard's best-known work.
The painting depicts an elegantly dressed young woman on a swing. A smiling young man, hiding in the bushes below and to the left, points towards her billowing dress with hat in hand. A smiling older man, who is nearly hidden in the shadows on the right, propels the swing with a pair of ropes, as a small white dog barks nearby. The lady is wearing a bergère hat (shepherdess hat), as she flings her shoe with an outstretched left foot. Two statues are present, one of a putto, who watches from above the young man on the left with its finger in front of its lips, the other of two putti are on the right beside the older man.
The Bolt (Fragonard) (1777)
The Bolt (French: Le Verrou), also known as The Lock, is a galant scene painted by Jean-Honoré Fragonard in 1777. It is one of the most famous paintings by the painter. The common interpretation suggests that the scene depicts two lovers entwined in a bedroom, the man locking the door. The painting is preserved in the Louvre Museum, in the section of the Department of Paintings devoted to eighteenth-century French painting on the second floor of the Sully wing. It stands together with some of the most famous pictorial masterpieces of the same period, in a chronologically organized path. This painting, a true symbol of the libertine spirit of the 18th century, reflects the state of mind adopted by the painters of the era, notably that of François Boucher, one of Fragonard's teachers and a great representative of rococo painting.
The work was commissioned in 1773 by Louis-Gabriel Véri-Raionard, Marquis de Véri (1722–1785). Having been produced for such a reputable and demanding collector, this erotic painting, ostensibly light but asserting a real ambition, formed part of a collection of depictions that were amorous, at times coarse and yet eminently representative of the spirit of French society at a time when the Enlightenment movement was about to waver. The canvas seemed to unveil a profound revitalization of Fragonard's inspiration that first distinguished itself in historical paintings, in particular Jeroboam Sacrificing to Idols, first prize of Rome 1752. The obtaining of this distinction allowed Fragonard to enjoy a great fame. His scenes of gallantry were extremely popular, and the nobility offered him many commissions, like that of Baron Saint-Julian for The Swing (1767).
Blind Man's Bluff (Fragonard, 1750) (1760)
Blind Man's Bluff (French: Le collin maillard) is a painting by the French Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, produced around 1750 in oil on canvas. It is held by the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio, United States, which purchased it with funds from the Libbey Endowment, a gift of the glass manufacturer Edward Libbey who founded the museum in 1901.
The artist also produced another work of the same title some time between 1775 and 1780, which is held in the Samuel H. Kress Collection. Eighteenth-century engravings were produced of both paintings, showing that they may have originally been as much as a foot higher at the top.
The See-Saw (Fragonard, Madrid) (1757)
The See-Saw is an oil-on-canvas painting by French Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard, created c.1750–1752 during the artist's early career. It is currently in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. The painting forms a pair with another Fragonard work entitled Blind Man's Bluff. Blind Man's Bluff focuses on courtship while The See-Saw, and the metaphor of the rocking motion of the seesaw, suggests the relationship has been consummated.
The See-Saw depicts young children playing with a seesaw in a forest grove. It is seen as an important precedent to Fragonard's masterpiece The Swing.
The Birth of Venus (Fragonard) (1753)
The Birth of Venus (French: La Naissance de Vénus) is an oil-on-canvas painting by the French Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, produced between 1753 and 1755. It is held by the Musée Grobet-Labadié in Marseille.
A sketch for the painting is in the Smith College Museum of Art. In the sketch, Fragonard used a mix of red chalk and other media to study the composition before transferring it onto canvas. The Birth of Venus and its sketch are an example of Fragonard's habit of reversing scene direction and changing figure positions in order to achieve an ideal composition.
La Gimblette (1770)
La Gimblette is one of the most famous paintings by the French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard and one of the most famous Rococo paintings. Like other paintings by Fragonard, such as The Swing, La Gimblette also has a frivolous component.
"The lovers' paradise of the mid-eighteenth century is no longer ours at the end of the twentieth. It is therefore not surprising that these pictures should, in some respects, remain strange to us."
Jeroboam Sacrificing to Idols (1752)
Jeroboam Sacrificing to Idols (French: Jéroboam sacrifiant aux idoles) is a history painting by the French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, in oil on canvas. It won him the highly prestigious Prix de Rome for painting on 26 August 1752, shortly after he turned 20 years old; this "precocious triumph" was even more remarkable as he had not received the usual training at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. The painted surface measures 111.5 by 143.5 centimetres (43.9 in × 56.5 in). It was retained by the Académie until that institution was abolished in the French Revolution and is now part of the collection of the successor Académie des Beaux-Arts.
The subject had been chosen by the judges of the competition, and was the unusual but dramatic Old Testament subject of King Jeroboam in 1 Kings 12:26–30 and 13:1–5. This lay well outside the range of light-hearted Rococo scenes of pastoral romance, flirtation and erotic mythology that Fragonard was already developing at the studio of François Boucher. The moment depicted is when Jeroboam, at right in the white turban, is about to sacrifice to pagan idols, when an unnamed prophet (standing, at left) intercedes:
The Raised Chemise (1770)
The Raised Chemise or The Shift Withdrawn (La Chemise enlevée ) is a small c.1770 oil-on-canvas painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, now in the Louvre in Paris, to which it was left by Dr Louis La Caze in 1869. Its earlier but similarly small pendant Fire to the Gunpowder (Le Feu aux poudres) was in Carlos de Beistegui's collection and is now also in the Louvre.
It was exhibited in Paris in 1860, helping the frères Goncourt rescue Fragonard from the obscurity into which he had fallen after the French Revolution, albeit only as a frivolous painter – his skill as a history painter was not recognised until the 20th century.
The Music Lesson (Fragonard) (1770)
The Music Lesson is an oil-on-canvas painting by the French artist Jean Honoré Fragonard, created c. 1770, now held in the Louvre, in Paris, to which it was donated by Hippolyte Walferdin in 1849.
The subject was a frequent one in the Dutch Golden Age, most famously Vermeer's work of the same title, and was a common allegory for the five senses in Baroque art. Fragonard converts the subject into a fête galante scene of dreamy love, with the young music teacher courting his pupil and looking at her cleavage.
Psyche Showing Her Sisters Her Gifts from Cupid (1753)
Psyche Showing Her Sisters Her Gifts from Cupid is an oil painting by the French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard, painted in 1753, in the National Gallery in London. Its dimensions are 168.3 by 192.4 cm (66.3 by 75.7 in).
The painting was executed by Fragonard at the age of 21 when he was still a student at the École des Élèves Protégés, which was under the direction of Carle Vanloo. Students at the academy were required to prepare an artwork for presentation to the King of France at Versailles; Fragonard's painting was one of several presented to Louis XV in 1753. It was highly successful, but fell in critical esteem for a period when it was also attributed to Vanloo. In 1752–1753, before enrolling in the academy, Fragonard had studied with François Boucher, and the influence of his master can be seen in some details of this work.