Fragonard

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) was a French painter whose late manner is distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. A prolific artist, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings. The J. Paul Getty Museum's Fragonard masterpiece, The Fountain of Love, is part of a series of his most striking works called the Allegories of Love, exquisite paintings that convey an atmosphere of intimacy and eroticism. This lavishly illustrated book compares and analyzes the compositions, iconography, and sources of the Allegories in the context of ancien régime Preromanticism. The author discusses the transcendental aspect of love in the Allegories and the concept of Romantic love and painting on the eve of the French Revolution. The book accompanies Consuming Passion: Fragonard's Allegories of Love, an exhibition of the artist's work that opens at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute on October 28, 2007, and at the J. Paul Getty Museum on February 12, 2008.

A fresh interpretation of the group of Fragonard?s paintings known as the ?figures de fantaisie?, Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure: Painting the Imagination reconnects the fantasy figures with neglected visual traditions in European art and firmly situates them within the cultural and aesthetic contexts of eighteenth-century France. Prior scholarship has focused on the paintings? connections with portraiture, whereas this study relocates them within a tradition of fantasy figures, where resemblance was ignored or downplayed. The book defines Fragonard as a painter of the imagination and foregrounds the imaginary at a time when Enlightenment rationalism and Classical aesthetics contrived to delimit the imagination. The book unravels scholarly writing on these Fragonard paintings and examines the history of the fantasy figure from early modern Europe to eighteenth-century France. Emerging from this background is a view of Fragonard turning away from the academically sanctioned ?invention?, towards more playful variants of the imaginary: fantasy and caprice. Melissa Percival demonstrates how fantasy figures engage both artists and viewers, allowing artists to unleash their imagination through displays of virtuosity and viewers to use their imagination to explore the paintings? unusual juxtapositions and humour.

A study of the works of Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806). The author reveals the extent to which Fragonard's paintings were informed by such diverse artists as Rembrandt and Ruisdael, Pietro da Cortona and Solimena, Rubens and Jordaens. The text offers an account of the artist's life and work.

At the time of his death in 1806, the Rococo artist Jean-Honore Fragonard had not painted for two decades. Following a period of huge public success, the painter's reputation fell. Personally secretive, Fragonard created revealing images that undermined a normal sense of space and time. Satish Padiyar investigates the life and work of the last of the libertine painters of the ancien regime, a contemporary of Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and presents dramatic new perspectives on works such as The Progress of Love, painted for Madame du Barry, the infamous The Bolt and the ever-popular The Swing.