FRAGONARD
Chardin for but a few months, and Boucher for two years, were the masters who taught Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) before, having gained the Prix de Rome in 1752 and worked three years under Van Loo, he set out for Rome, where under Natoire’s guidance he applied himself to the copying of old masters. More important for the formation of his style were the sketches he made in the company of his friend Hubert Robert in the romantic gardens of the Villa d’Este, and the deep impression created upon his mind by Tiepolo’s decorative paintings in Venice, which city he visited before his return to Paris in 1761. He scored his first great success in 1765 with the large and still somewhat academic composition Coresus and Calirrhoë (No. 290), which was bought by Louis xv. for 24,000 livres for reproduction at his tapestry works.
PLATE XLI.—JEAN-BAPTISTE SIMÉON CHARDIN
(1699–1779)
FRENCH SCHOOL
No. 92.—GRACE BEFORE MEAT
(Le Bénédicité)
In the centre of a room, by a round table with a white tablecloth, stands a woman, about to pour the soup from a saucepan into a plate. She turns her head to the left towards her two little girls, who, with folded hands, are saying grace. A drum is suspended from the back of the chair on which the younger child is sitting. In the background, on the left, a dresser with pewter and crockery; on the right, a shelf with a canister, a bowl, and some bottles.
Painted in oil on canvas.
1 ft. 7¼ in. × 1 ft. 3½ in. (0·49 × 0·41.)
Patronised by Mme. du Barry, the dancer Marie Guimard, and other priestesses of Venus, Fragonard now devoted his exceptionally facile and spontaneous talent to subjects that in licentious frivolity, voluptuousness, and suggestiveness had never been equalled even by his master Boucher. It is only his marvellous technique, ranging from the liquid transparency of his swift oil sketches to the rich luminous impasto of the Sleeping Bacchante (No. 294); from the elegant arabesque of the Bathing Women (No. 293), so full of joie de vivre and youthful fire, to the almost brutal strength of the portrait of a writer or poet, known under the title of Inspiration (No. 298). But in all these, as well as in the charming Music Lesson (No. 291, [Plate XLII.]), The Student (No. 297) and the Young Woman (No. 300), Fragonard proves himself one of the greatest colourists produced by the French School. It was Fragonard’s sad fate to outlive his fame, to witness the collapse of the ancient régime and the triumph of his pupil David’s classicism, and to die in obscurity and neglect.
GREUZE
Twenty-three paintings represent at the Louvre the art of Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805), who trod the safe path of flattering the taste of the multitude by the mawkish sentimentality of his genre-pieces and the prettiness and half-concealed sensuality of his “fancy portraits” of young women, which in their suggestiveness are perhaps more insidious than the frank improprieties of Boucher and Fragonard. The sentimental and melodramatic side of Greuze’s art is strikingly revealed in The Village Engagement (No. 369), in The Paternal Curse (No. 370), and in The Punished Son (No. 371), which aroused the enthusiasm of that singularly misguided critic Diderot. But it is the painting of pictures like The Broken Pitcher (No. 372, [Plate XLIII.]), The Milkmaid (No. 372a), and The Dead Bird (No. 372c; a replica of the picture in the Scottish National Gallery), that has made him the idol of a certain undiscriminating section of the public, and established him among the world’s most popular painters.