Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Jean-Honoré Fragonard was the last great painter of the French Rococo, and his style went out of fashion so completely that he died forgotten during the Napoleonic era. Born in Grasse in 1732 to a glovemaker, he was sent to Paris as a boy and apprenticed briefly to a notary, who noticed he drew constantly and recommended he be trained as an artist. He studied under Chardin for a short period and then under François Boucher, whose manner he absorbed thoroughly. He won the Prix de Rome in 1752 and spent five years in Italy, where the villa gardens at Tivoli and the drawings he made there shaped his handling of foliage and light. He was received by the Academy in 1765 with a large history painting, the route to official prestige, and then effectively abandoned that career. He turned instead to private commissions for collectors and financiers — decorative panels, landscapes, and erotic subjects — which paid better and allowed him complete freedom of handling. The Swing, painted around 1767, is the definitive Rococo picture: a young woman in pink swung by an elderly man while her lover, hidden in the bushes, looks up her skirts as her shoe flies off. It was commissioned to those specifications. His brushwork became increasingly rapid and loose, and paintings such as The Bolt and the series The Progress of Love show a technique that anticipates the nineteenth century. The Revolution destroyed his clientele, and Neoclassicism made his subjects politically suspect. Jacques-Louis David, who admired him, found him a post administering the new national museum. He died in 1806 and was largely ignored until the 1860s.

• Lived: 1732 CE – 1806 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: painter