Fragonard, Jean-Honoré (1732–1806)
French painter. He was the leading exponent of the rococo style (along with his teacher François Boucher). His light-hearted subjects, often erotic, include Les heureux Hazards de l'escarpolette/The Swing (c. 1766; Wallace Collection, London). Madame de Pompadour was one of his patrons.
Range of skills
Fragonard's range was extraordinary: he could successfully design a composition in the Grand Manner, as in
Corrhesus and Callirhoe 1765 (Louvre, Paris), and paint the most exquisite of
fètes galantes (aristocratic pastoral fantasy scenes), poetic landscapes, and playful yet beautifully executed genre pieces such as
L'Education fait tout about 1780 (São Paulo, Brazil), in which he showed his appreciation of the charm of childhood. He was a master of every technique – oil, pastel, miniature, gouache, etching, wash, and crayon drawing.
Life He studied art for six months with Jean-Baptiste Chardin and then with Boucher. Winning the Prix de Rome 1752, Fragonard spent three years in Paris under Carle van Loo (1705–1765) before travelling to Italy, where he stayed 1756–61, being much impressed by the art of Tiepolo. A successful and immensely productive career was virtually ended by the French Revolution 1789. During the last 15 years of his life, divided between Grasse and Paris, though befriended by Jacques-Louis David, he ceased to paint, as if in the revolutionary epoch his art had become an anachronism. |
Influences He was a serious student of the masters, and while borrowing from an astonishing number and variety of sources, not only from the rococo of Boucher, but from Rembrandt and Frans Hals, from Tiepolo and other Italian painters, he used them to entirely individual purpose. |
| His 500 paintings and thousands of drawings reveal a personality far transcending that of Boucher, and his vein of fantasy had its anticipation, as in his Fontaine d'Amour, of the spirit of Romanticism. |
Pupils His son Alexandre Evariste Fragonard (1780–1850), a decorative painter, and his sister-in-law Marguerite Gérard were his pupils. |
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