For two years thereafter he essayed the academic style.
But the praises of Diderot and Grimm failed to fill his pockets; and he decided to paint no more academic pieces for the critics’ praise. He had indeed no taste for such things, no sympathy with ancient thought nor with the dead past. He was, like his master, a very son of France—a child of his own age, glorying in the love of life and the beauty of his native land.
Having done his duty by his school, he turned his back upon it gleefully, as Boucher had also done before him, and set himself joyously to the painting of the life about him.
His great chance soon came, and in strange guise.
It so happened that a young blood at the court, one Baron de Saint-Julien, went to the painter Doyen with his flame, and asked him to paint a picture of the pretty creature being swung by a bishop whilst he himself watched the display of pretty ankles as the girl went flying through the air. Doyen had scruples; but recommended Fragonard for the naughty business.
Fragonard seized the idea readily enough, except that he made the frail girl’s husband swing the beauty for her lover’s eyes, using the incident, as usual, but as the trivial theme for a splendid setting amidst trees, glorying in the painting of the foliage—as you may see, if you step into the Wallace galleries, where is the exquisite thing that brought Fragonard fame—the world-famous “Les hazards heureux de l’Escarpolette.”
The effect was prodigious. De Launay’s brilliant engraving of it popularised it throughout the land. Nobles and rich financiers, and all the gay world of fashion besides, now strove to possess canvases signed by Fragonard. Boucher was grown old and ailing; and just as Boucher had been the painter of the France of fashion under the Pompadour, so Fragonard was now to become the mirror of the court, of the theatre, of the drawing-room, of the boudoir, of the age of Du Barry.
Finding a ready market for subjects of gallantry, he gave rein to his natural bent, and straightway leaped into the vogue. Pictures were the hobby of the nobility and the rich; and France under the Pompadour, and particularly at this the end of her reign, was madly spendthrift upon its hobbies and fickle fancies. The pretty house, delicately tinted rooms, fine furniture, dainty decorations, and charming pictures, were a necessity for such as would be in the fashion.
(In the Wallace Collection)