Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Jean-Honoré Fragonard – Apprenticeship in Paris with François Boucher; focus on the erotic

Jean-Honoré Fragonard was born in Grasse on 5 April 1732. His father worked with limited success as a perfumer but still enabled his son an apprenticeship with François Boucher, court painter to Louis XV. Fragonard followed his teacher’s example but continued to develop his painting style which he fine-tuned further on a trip to Rome before crowning his return to Paris with acceptance into the academy. This was mostly thanks to his magnificent and dramatic history painting Coresus and Callirhoë in which his mastery was already clearly evident. Jean-Honoré Fragonard did not however remain in the historical métier, but turned increasingly in the years that followed to eroticism – with great success, he navigated the safe terrain of the zeitgeist in line with his famous colleagues Antoine Watteau and François Boucher, eventually succeeding the latter as court painter. 

Rise and fall in absolutist France; return to Grasse

Jean-Honoré Fragonard loved to set attractive young women frivolously amidst the wilds of nature, following models of elaborate depictions in nature he had made in the open air during his study trip to Italy. His insinuations struck a chord with the public but sometimes proved too risqué: The infamous Madame du Barry thus finally refrained from presenting an erotic series of pictures by Fragonard to her guests. The artist also impressed as a subtle illustrator of classical literature, producing drawings for Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Cervante’s Don Quixote. Politics ultimately marked his downfall: with the fall of the old Bourbon Empire in the bloody turmoil of the French Revolution, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, the celebrated star of the Ancien Régime, lost his position, home and his accumulated wealth. With many pf his paintings packed in his luggage, he fled to Grasse where he was respectfully received and found private clients. 

Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s pictures are coveted collector’s pieces

Jean-Honoré Fragonard died on 22 August 1806 in Paris. In 1999, an asteroid spotted by the Netherlands astronomers Cornelis Johannes van Houten and Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld was christened (8235) Fragonard after the great master of French Rococo. The perfume which carries his name, however, has nothing to do with the family business but was founded in 1926 by Eugène Fuchs and named after the artist he so revered. Jean-Honoré Fragonard left behind a son, Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard, who also trained as a painter and at least came close to matching his father’s success. The famous French anatomist and taxidermist Honoré Fragonard was a cousin of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and both men were members of the National Art Jury I 1793. Fragonard’s work is much loved by collectors and is thus mostly found in private hands - even the museum dedicated to him in his hometown of Grasse only has high-quality copies, as the original paintings were sold at the end of the 19th century.