After his marriage Fragonard’s brush turned to the glorification of family life; and one of the most beautiful designs he conceived in this exquisite series was the picture of the schoolmistress and her small pupils—here chasteness of feeling has taken the place of levity; and purity of statement is evidenced even in the half-nude little fellow who is receiving his first lesson in culture.
You shall look in vain for the affected innocence, the naïve mawkishness, the chaste sentimentality of Greuze in the master-work of Fragonard. He knew nothing of these things—cared less. His was an ardent brush; and he used it ardently; but always you shall find him using his subject, however naughty, as the mere excuse for a glorious picture of trees. He is one of the great landscape-painters of France.
He had many qualities that go to make a decorative painter. Indeed, it is to the Frenchmen of the seventeen-hundreds to whom we may safely go for pictures that make the walls of a drawing-room a delight. Unlike the Italians, they are pleasing to live with. His painting of “La Fête de St. Cloud,” in the dining-room of the Governor of the Bank of France, is one of the decorative landscapes of the world.
He was now producing works in considerable numbers—it is his first, his detailed period, somewhat severe in arrangement and style as to composition and handling—the years of “Love the Conqueror,” the “Bolt,” the “Fountain of Love,” of “Le Serment d’Amour,” the “Gimblette,” “Les Baigneuses,” the “Sleeping Bacchante,” the “Début du modèle,” and the like.
His master, Boucher, was grown old; he could not carry out the commissions for the decoration of rooms and for paintings with which he was overwhelmed; and it was in order to help forward his brilliant pupil, his “Frago,” that he now introduced him to his old friend and patron the farmer-general Bergeret de Grandcour—a man of great wealth, a lover of art, and an honorary member of the Royal Academy—who became one of Fragonard’s most lavish patrons and most intimate friends. Bergeret de Grandcour commissioned several panels in this, Fragonard’s thirty-fifth year—the year of his painting the superb “Fête de St. Cloud.” This is towards the end of that period of minute and detailed painting which he did with such consummate skill, yet without bringing pettiness into his largeness of conception.
Meantime, Choiseul’s masterly mind, having secured peace abroad, saw that France, if she were to keep her sovereign State, must be first cleansed from the dangers that threatened from within. He turned to the blotting out of the turbulent order of the Jesuits, whose vindictive acts against, and quarrels with, the Parliaments, and whose galling and oppressive tyranny, had roused the bitter hatred of the magistracy and of the people throughout the land. Choiseul they treated as their bitterest enemy. He decided to blot them out, root and branch, from France. The popular party closed up its ranks. Choiseul had not long to wait. The chance came in odd fashion enough. An attempt by the Order to end the Pompadour’s scandalous relations with the king was the quaint thing—the match that started the explosion. With all his skill of state-craft, Choiseul leaped to the weapon. In secret concert with the king’s powerful favourite he struck at them through the bankruptcy of their banking concerns in the West Indies, caused by their losses in the wars with England; and Louis abolished the society out of the land, secularising its members, and seizing its property.
The Pompadour lived but a short while to enjoy her triumph. Worn-out by her vast activities, and assailed by debt, she fell ill of a cough that racked her shrunken body. She died, transacting the king’s business and affairs of State, on the 15th of April 1764, in her forty-second year.
Whatever may be said of this cold-blooded, calculating, grasping woman, who crushed down every nice instinct of womanhood to win a king’s favour, who knew no scruple, who was without mercy, without pardon or forgiveness, without remorse; bitter and adamant in revenge; who turned a deaf ear to the cries from the Bastille; whose heart knew no love but for self; it must be allowed that at least for Art she did great and splendid service. She not only encouraged and brought out the best achievement of her age; she did Art an even more handsome benefit. She insisted on artists painting their age and not aping the dead past.
To Fragonard personally she rendered no particular service. His real achievement began on the eve of her death, when she was a worn-out and broken woman. Nor had Fragonard ever that close touch with the royal house or its favourites during any part of his lifetime that meant so much to the fortunes of his master, Boucher.