Jean-Honore Fragonard

From New World Encyclopedia

Inspiration (Self-Portrait), 1769.


Jean-Honoré Fragonard (April 5, 1732 – August 22, 1806) is known as one of France's most unique painters and printmakers of the eighteenth century. Fragonard was one of the favorite creators at the courts of both Louis XV and Louis XVI. His Rococo style was characterized by a fluid technique, exuberance, spontanteity, and hedonism. Painting over 550 works (only 5 of which are dated), not including his various drawings and etchings, Fragonard's canvases were often delicately colored scenes of gardens, nature, and romance.

His works were prolific in the last decades of the ancien régime, and Fragonard's portrayal of intimacy and eroticism were among the popular works of the time period. His imagination, creativity, and brilliance are evident in each work he painted.

Early Life and Education

The Swing, 1767.

Jean-Honore Fragonard was born on April 5, 1732, in the French region of Provence. His home, for the first part of his life, was located in the small town of Grasse, Alpes-Maritimes. Fragonard's father was a glover, and a poor one at that. It became necessary, after several failed business speculations, for Fragonard to be sent away from home as an apprentice to a Parisian lawyer and notary in 1747. During his brief time as an apprentice, Fragonard displayed such a talent and appetite for drawing and art that the lawyer suggested he be apprenticed under an artist.

At the age of eighteen, Fragonard was taken to the well-known painter, François Boucher. Boucher was able to recognize the potential within Fragonard, but he was not willing to teach him the basic principles. Thus, he sent Fragonard away to gain some experience. He began studying the elements of painting under Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin, where he learned the basics of mixing colors and forming shapes and dimensions. After six intense months learning under the great luminist, Fragaonard again returned to Boucher. Finally, Boucher was prevailed upon to accept him as a pupil, and it was under his tutelage that Fragonard's distict style and methods began to take shape.

Apart from developing his own style, Fragonard became a master at copying other artists' styles. He was able to imitate Boucher's style so completely and flawlessly that eventually Boucher entrusted him with the execution of replicas of his own paintings. This was most obviously a sign of complete trust and evidence of just how talented Fragonard proved to be.

In 1752, Boucher recommended that Fragonard enter as a competitor in the Prix de Rome. The Prix de Rome was a scholarship for art students at the time. The various artists were required to prove their talents by completing a rigorous elimination process. The grand prize winner would receive a stay at the Mancini Palace in Rome, all expenses paid by the King of France. The contest was organized by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and was generally open to their own students only. Fragonard was not a pupil of the Academy, yet was still allowed to enter (perhaps because of Boucher's endorsement). Winning the prize meant studying under the court painter to Louis XV, Charles-André van Loo, in Paris, as well as attending the Academy in Rome.

Fragonard gained the Prix de Rome with his painting of "Jeroboam Sacrificing to the Golden Calf." After his win, and before proceeding to Rome, Fragonard studied for a period of three years under the direction of Van Loo. One year before leaving for Rome, Fragonard painted the famous "Christ washing the Feet of the Apostles" now housed at Grasse cathedral in Provence. On September 17, 1756, Fragonard moved to Rome to claim his prize for the competition, he moved into the French Academy in Rome, with Charles-Joseph Natoire acting as head of the school.

Education in Rome

Fragonard spent six years altogether in Italy. He began his work at the Academy by copying and imitating many famous paintings by various Roman Baroque artists. At the beginning of his studies, he met a lifelong friend, Hubert Robert, a fellow painter. Fragonard was also educated in the workings of other painters. Among the group he admired most were the masters of the Dutch and Flemish schools, including Rubens, Hals, Rembrandt, and Ruisdael. But perhaps on of his greatest influences was the Venetian master Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. He studied Tiepolo's works in depth while in Venice, noting the vast and florid sumptuousness of his work.

Over the course of his studies, Fragonard learned much at the Academy, but not enough to satisfy his artistic appetite. When his scholarship ended in July 1759, he was able to obtain permission to stay on in residence until November. At that time, he met a wealthy, but amateur artist, the Abbé de Saint-Non. Saint-Non eventually became one of Fragonard's chief patrons. Early in the year of 1760, Saint-Non took Fragonard and Robert on a prolonged tour of Italy.

The two artists set off to sketch the countryside of Italy. Through their travels, Fragonard executed hundreds of sketches, drawings, and paintings of the scenic towns and villages of Italy. He was particularly drawn to romantic gardens, accented with fountains, grottos, temples and terraces. Fragonard became an expert at fluid looking flowers and flowing foliage. His figures had an air and grace about them that no other artist of the time could rival, they seemed calm, yet in a constant state of motion and love. He loved painting couples on the verge of newfound romance, as well as peasant mothers with their children. It was his traveling that solidified his favored subject matter and original style, however, he would not fully commit to this style for another five years.

Painting Career

In 1761, Fragonard returned to Paris. As Fragonard made his way as an artist, he began with religious and historical paintings similar to the one that had won him the Prix de Rome.

After 1765, however, he worked in the rococo style then fashionable in France. These later paintings, the works for which he is best known, reflect the gaiety, frivolity, and voluptuousness of the period. They are characterized by fluid lines, frothy flowers amid loose foliage, and gracefully posed figures, usually of ladies and their lovers or peasant mothers with children. The French Revolution (1789-1799), which destroyed the nobility on which Fragonard depended for commissions, ruined him financially. Although befriended by Jacques Louis David, the leading painter of the new French classical school, Fragonard did not adjust to the new style and died poor in Paris on August 22, 1806.


A Young Girl Reading, c. 1776.

In 1765 his "Coresus et Callirhoe" secured his admission to the Academy. It was made the subject of a pompous (though not wholly serious) eulogy by Diderot, and was bought by the king, who had it reproduced at the Gobelins factory. Hitherto Fragonard had hesitated between religious, classic and other subjects; but now the demand of the wealthy art patrons of Louis XV's pleasure-loving and licentious court turned him definitely towards those scenes of love and voluptuousness with which his name will ever be associated, and which are only made acceptable by the tender beauty of his color and the virtuosity of his facile brushwork; such works include the Serment d'amour (Love Vow), Le Verrou (The Bolt), La Culbute (The Tumble), La Chemise enlevée (The Shirt Withdrawn), and The Swing (Wallace collection), and his decorations for the apartments of Mme du Barry and the dancer Madeleine Guimard.

A lukewarm response to these series of ambitious works induced Fragonard to abandon Rococo and to experiment with Neoclassicism. He had married in 1769 and had a son, who became one of his favourite models. In 1773-74 he again went to Italy, returning through Prague and Germany. Back in Paris, the artist fell in love with his wife's 14-year-old sister. The French Revolution deprived Fragonard of his private patrons: they were either guillotined or exiled. The neglected painter deemed it prudent to leave Paris in 1793 and found shelter in the house of his friend Maubert at Grasse, which he decorated with the series of decorative panels known as the Roman d'amour de la jeunesse, originally painted for Château du Barry. He returned to Paris early in the ninteenth century, where he died in 1806, almost completely forgotten.

Reputation

For half a century or more he was so completely ignored that Lübke in his History of Art (1873) omits the very mention of his name.[1] Subsequent reevaluation has confirmed his position among the all-time masters of French painting. The influence of Fragonard's handling of local colour and expressive, confident brushstroke on the Impressionists (particularly his grand niece, Berthe Morisot, and Renoir) cannot be overestimated.

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See also

  • History of painting
  • Western painting

Confusion

For the monk painter, see Fra Angelico.

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  • This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

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