2620. THE HAPPY MOTHER.
Jean Honoré Fragonard (French: 1732-1806).
The only poets who seized the spirit of the France of the eighteenth century were, said the brothers Goncourt, two painters: Watteau and Fragonard. It was Fragonard, says Sir Claude Phillips, "whose frank passion, whose irresistible élan lighted up the decline of the century much as the imaginativeness of Watteau, his reticence and wistful charm even in the midst of voluptuousness, lighted up its first years. He is the Ovid of French painting." He was born at Grasse near Cannes; and the pupil, in Paris, first of Chardin and then of Boucher (see 1258, 1090). Having won the Prix de Rome in 1752, he travelled in Italy, drawing all the sights and monuments, and studying the old masters. The works of Tiepolo (see 1192) especially attracted him, and something of their brilliant, flashing bravura was to be characteristic of Fragonard himself. Soon after his return to Paris, a picture of "Coresus and Callirhoë" made a sensation in the Salon, and inspired what Lord Morley calls "an elaborate but not very felicitous criticism" by Diderot. Fragonard did not return, however, to compositions in the classical style; he found his métier, and a highly lucrative practice, in pictures of sentimental genre, audaciously amorous in subject, and of masterly grace and lightness in execution. Some of his most famous works in this sort are to be seen in the Wallace Collection. The beautifully decorative canvases, the "Roman d'Amour de la Jeunesse," which were exhibited in London in 1898 and are now in Mr. Pierpont Morgan's collection, were a commission from Madame du Barry, who, however, for reasons which have not been clearly explained, declined them. From Mademoiselle Guimard, the dancer, and queen of the monde galant, Fragonard had received a like commission; and the story is well known of the revenge taken by the painter when he threw up the task, and transformed his portrait of the lady as Terpsichore into Tisiphone. In 1794 Fragonard retired for security from the Terror to Grasse, and on his return to Paris he found his vogue gone. The Revolution had killed the taste for his amorous trifles. The reign of the Classical School of David had begun; and Fragonard died in comparative oblivion and poverty.
In 1769 Fragonard had married Marie Anne Gérard, the miniature painter; and to the succeeding years belong, says his biographer (the Baron de Portalis), many pictures of which the theme is the cradle. Our picture is of that kind.