Jean-Honore Fragonard: 101 Masterpieces (Annotated Masterpieces Book 109)
(This Art Book with Foreword by Maria Tsaneva contains 101...)
This Art Book with Foreword by Maria Tsaneva contains 101 selected reproductions of paintings and drawings from Jean-Honoré Fragonard.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French Rococo painter and printmaker whose style was remarkable by cheerfulness and hedonism. His most popular artworks are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism. Fragonard has been ranked with Watteau as one of the two great lyrical painters of the analytical 18th century in France. An extraordinary active artist, he produced more than 550 paintings, several thousand drawings, and 35 etchings. His style, based primarily on that of Rubens, was express, forceful, and effortless, never tensed or fussy like that of so many of his contemporaries. Although the greater part of his active life was passed during the neoclassical period, he continued to paint in a Rococo manner until shortly before the French Revolution.
(JEAN-HONORE FRAGONARD Art Book contains 50+ reproductions...)
JEAN-HONORE FRAGONARD Art Book contains 50+ reproductions of portraits and genre scenes with title,date and interesting facts page below. Book includes Table of Contents, thumbnail gallery and is formatted for all Kindle readers and Tablets (use rotate and/or zoom feature on landscape/horizontal images for optimal viewing).
BORN: April 5, 1732 in Grasse, France.
DIED: August 22, 1806 in Paris, France.
MOVEMENT: Rococo
INTERESTING FACTS:
§ Fragonard studied under Francois Boucher who encouraged him to compete for the Prix de Rome in 1752.
§ In 1756, he and the other scholarship winners left for Rome after studying under Carle Van Loo, the court painter to Louis XV.
§ Fragonard received a studio at the Louvre Palace after King Louis XV purchased the painting, Coresus Sacrifices Himself to Save Callirhoe.
§ Fragonard was given a position in the Museum Commission by Jacques-Louis David.
NOTABLE WORKS:
Coresus Sacrifices Himself to Save Callirhoe, Young Girl Reading, The Bolt and The Swing.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French painter and printmaker from Grasse.
Background
Jean-Honoré Fragonard was born in Grasse, France on April 5, 1732; about 1738 his family moved to Paris. Fragonard was articled to a Paris notary when his father's circumstances became strained through unsuccessful speculations, but showed such talent and inclination for art that he was taken to François Boucher. Boucher recognized the youth's rare gifts but, disinclined to waste his time with one so inexperienced, sent him to Chardin's atelier.
Education
Jean-Honoré Fragonard studied for six months under the great luminist, and then returned more fully equipped to Boucher, whose style he soon acquired so completely that the master entrusted him with the execution of replicas of his paintings. Though not a pupil of the Academy, Fragonard gained the Prix de Rome in 1752 with a painting of " Jeroboam Sacrificing to the Idols, " but before proceeding to Rome he continued to study for three years under Van Loo. In 1755 he took up his abode at the French Academy in Rome, then presided over by Natoire.
Career
In 1756 Fragonard left for Rome, and he remained in Italy until 1761. His career at the French Academy in Rome was not particularly successful, and his professors were displeased with him. He turned to drawing and to making landscape sketches, and during 1760 and 1761 he traveled about Italy making numerous romantic drawings of great gardens and the Italian countryside.
After his return to France in 1761 Fragonard occupied himself primarily with painting decorative landscapes; some were based on his Italian drawings, some were derived from the Dutch landscape of the 17th century, and others were in the popular 18th-century "pastoral" taste, that is, imaginary landscapes with shepherds and shepherdesses. These paintings were successful, but he was not accepted as an important professional artist until he was admitted to the Royal Academy in 1765 on the basis of a serious history painting which was not typical of either his taste or his temperament.
The rococo style in painting, which was established in France by Antoine Watteau in the early 18th century and which Fragonard exemplified so brilliantly, was aristocratic in nature, sensuous, intimate, and designed to provide pleasure; stylistically it depended upon soft, luminous colors, complex surfaces, refined textural contrasts, free brushwork, and asymmetrical compositions based upon the interplay of curved lines and masses. Between 1765 and 1770 Fragonard executed several portraits in which the sitters wear fanciful costumes and many paintings of an erotic or suggestive nature. These works are characterized by the easy facility of his technique, rapid and delicate brushwork, glowing colors, a silvery or golden tonality of atmosphere, and an exuberant gaiety of mood. An excellent example of his painting from this period, and one which may be regarded as typical of the work usually associated with him is The Swing.
Pictures like The Swing brought Fragonard harsh criticism from Denis Diderot, a leading philosopher of the Enlightenment. Diderot charged the artist with frivolity and admonished him to have a little more self-respect. By 1765, indeed, the rococo style was under critical attack, had entered its last phase, and was gradually being replaced by a return to the relative severity of the art of antiquity. Fragonard, however, was unaffected either by criticism or by the encroaching neoclassicism. His work continued to be in demand, and during early 1770 he received many commissions both from the royal government and from private persons.
One of his most important patrons was the Comtesse du Barry, Louis XV's mistress, who commissioned several decorative paintings for Louveciennes. The most famous paintings done for her comprise a set of four panels entitled Loves of the Shepherds (now in Frick Collection, New York); they show a pair of elegantly dressed lovers in a parklike setting and have titles which are self-explanatory: Storming the Citadel, The Pursuit, The Declaration of Love, and The Lover Crowned.
In 1773 Fragonard made a second trip to Italy, one which lasted for a year. He painted some of his finest landscapes in 1775; the best of these, such as the Fête at Saint-Cloud, have a fantasy quality in which people are dwarfed into insignificance and the compositions are dominated by great fluffy green and golden trees melting into surging clouds. From about 1776 on Fragonard painted young girls reading, allegorical works on the theme of love, portraits, and rather sentimental genre scenes of family life. After about 1784 his production became relatively limited.
From 1794 to 1797 he helped to create and administer the new National Museum, established by the Revolutionary government in the palace of the Louvre; in 1799 he was dismissed from his museum position. He died in Paris on Aug. 22, 1806.
(Traces the life and career of the eighteenth century Fren...)
Politics
Fragonard's work was closely associated with the ancien régime in France, but he managed to make a successful personal adjustment to the French Revolution of 1789. His royal and aristocratic patrons were swept away in the political and social upheaval of the Revolution. He fled to his native Provence in 1790.
Connections
Jean-Honoré Fragonard married Marie-Anne Gérard, a painter of miniatures, (1745–1823) on 17 June 1769 and had a daughter, Rosalie Fragonard (1769–1788), who became one of his favorite models. In 1780, he had a son, Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard (1780–1850), who eventually became a talented painter and sculptor.