The fact was that the Du Barry was of the gutter. She had the crude love of fineries of the girl promoted from the gutter. She loved display. But into her home she brought the vulgar singers of the lowest theatres, where the Pompadour had brought the wits and leading artists of her time. The old culture was gone. Louis laughed now at ribald songs, and was entertained by clowns.
It is part of the irony of life that Fragonard, who never entered into the favourite’s friendship, should have become the recognised artist of her day. It was a part of that grim irony that caused the Du Barry, whose age he honours, to reject the most exquisite work of his hands—in which his art is seen at its highest achievement, the tender half-melancholy of the thing stated with a lyric beauty that displays his genius in its supreme flight.
A search through the Du Barry’s bills—and there are four huge bound volumes of them—reveals the list of pictures painted by Boucher, by Vien, by Greuze, and by others, for the spendthrift woman; but of transaction with Fragonard there is no slightest hint.
IV
MARRIAGE
There lived in Grasse, with its rich harvests of flowers, and given to the distilling of perfumes therefrom, a family that had come from Avignon—its name, Gérard, and on friendly terms with the Fragonards. It so chanced that a young woman of the family, the seventeen-year-old Marie Anne Gérard, was sent to Paris, to the care of Fragonard, in order to earn her living in the shop of a scent-seller, one Isnard. The girl had artistic leanings, and fell a-painting of fans and miniatures. She had need of a teacher; and who better qualified for the business than her townsman, the famous Fragonard? What more natural than that Fragonard should become her master? She was a jovial girl. So they would talk of home, and the people amongst whom they had been bred. She was no particular beauty, as her picture by Fragonard proves; she had the rough accent of Provence; was thick-set and clumsy of figure, and of heavy features, but she had the youth and freshness and health of a young woman’s teens, that hide the blemishes and full significance of these coarsenesses. She and Fragonard fell a-kissing. Fragonard, now thirty-seven, married Marie Anne Gérard in her eighteenth year; and she bore him a much loved daughter, Rosalie—and ten years later, in 1780, a son, Alexandre Evariste Fragonard.
(In the Louvre)
This is an example of Fragonard in his grand-manner mood—a picture of the large decorative years that produced such masterpieces as the “Serment d’Amour,” in which we see him ever interested above all things in the painting of bosky leafage and the dignity of great trees for background.