Meanwhile the quarrels between priests and parliaments had grown very bitter. The king took first one side, then the other. It was in 1756, Louis having got foul of his Parliament, that the unfortunate and foolish Damiens stabbed the king with a penknife slightly under the fifth rib of his left side, as he was stepping into his carriage at Versailles, and suffered by consequence the terrible tortures and horrible death that were meted out to such as attempted the part of regicide.
This was the year when, at twenty-four, Fragonard was entitled to go to Rome at the king’s expense—the Italian tour being a necessary part of an artist’s training who desired to reach to academic distinction, and honours in his calling. He started on his journey to Italy with Boucher’s now famous farewell advice ringing in his ears: “My dear Frago, you go into Italy to see the works of Raphael and Michael Angelo; but—I tell you in confidence, as a friend—if you take those fellows seriously you are lost.” (“Lost” was not the exact phrase, Boucher being a Rabelaisian wag, but it will pass.)
(In the Louvre)
The picture of a young woman sometimes known as “L’Etude” (but perhaps better known as “La Chanteuse” or “Song”) at the Louvre is another of those little canvases painted by Fragonard under the strong influence of the Dutch school, as we may see not only in the handling of the paint, and in the arrangement of the figure, but in the very ruffle about the girl’s neck, the lace cuffs to the sleeves, and the treatment of the dress.
Arrived in Rome, Fragonard, like his master before him, was torn with doubts and uncertainties and warring influences. For several months he did no work, or little work; and though he stood before the masterpieces of Michael Angelo and Raphael, stirred by the grandeur of their design, and eager to be busy with his brush, he was too much of a Frenchman, too much in sympathy with the French genius, too much enamoured of the art of his master, to be affected creatively by them. His hesitations saved him, and won France a master in her long roll of fame. He escaped the taint of learning to see through the eyes of others, evaded the swamping of his own genius in an endeavour to utter his art in halting Italian. Rome was not his grave, as it has been the grave of so many promising young sons of France; and he came out of the danger a strong and healthy man. Tiepolo brought him back vision and inspiration, and the solid earth of his own age to walk upon. And the French utterance of his master Boucher called back his dazed wits to the accents of France. At last the genius that was in him quickened and strove to utter itself.
The bright colours of Italy, the glamour of her landscapes, these were the living lessons that bit deeper into his art than all the works of her antique masters; and the effort to set them upon his canvas gave to his hand’s skill an ordered grace and dignity that were of more vital effect upon his achievement than the paintings of the great dead.
So it came about that Natoire, then director of the royal school in the Villa Mancini, having written his distress to Marigny at the young fellow’s beginnings, was soon writing enthusiastically about him, and procured a lengthening of his stay in Rome.