Jean-Honoré Fragonard
(05/04/1732 - 22/08/1806)
Born on 5 April 1732 in Grasse (Provence), the son of a tradesman. He moved to Paris with his family c.1738. He studied briefly under Chardin c.1748 before becoming the pupil of Boucher c. 1748-52. In 1752 he won the prix de Rome (Jéroboam sacrifiant aux idoles; Ecole des Beaux-Arts), and he attended the Ecole royale des élèves protégés under Carle van Loo, 1753-6.
In 1756 he joined the Académie de France at Rome whose disciplines were irksome: Natoire told Marigny that Fragonard was very talented but impatient, careless in his copies and constantly changing his ideas. In 1760 he met in Rome the abbé de Saint-Non with whom he toured in Italy before returning with him to Paris in 1761.
In 1765 he was agréé by the Académie and his Corésus se sacrifie pour sauver Callirhoé (Louvre) was well received at the Salon. In 1766 he was commissioned to paint a ceiling canvas for the galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre, two overdoors for Bellevue and in 1770 two unspecified works for Versailles, but none was completed. At his second and last Salon in 1767 his exhibits were slight, and henceforth he turned for patronage to fermiers-généraux, content 'de briller dans les boudoirs et dans les garde-robes'.
Later, in 1788, the Académie finally accepted that they would never receive a morceau de réception from him, because of his 'légèreté et insouciance'. He painted landscapes. portraits and genre scenes with equal assurance and the set of four panels, The Progress of Love (Frick Collection) rejected by Mme. du Barry in 1773, reveal an accomplished decorative talent. He visited the Netherlands, perhaps c. 1763-4 and c. 1772, and returned to Italy with the banker Bergeret in 1773-4.
From 1778 he had his sister-in-law, Marguerite Gérard, as his pupil and assistant, while his wife exhibited miniature portraits of children between 1779 and 1782. A number of his genre scenes became widely known in the 1780s through engravings, but the emergence of neo-classicism effectively ended his success. He drew illustrations for editions of La Fontaine, Cervantes and Ariosto in the late 1780s, and became a conservateur at the Muséum 1793-1800. His final years were spent comfortably but unproductively and he died in Paris on 22 August 1806. His son Evariste (1780-1850) was a successful pupil of David. Fragonard never fulfilled his early academic promise: 'il s'est délire de l'imagination qu' à l'exacte vérité'.
