REVOLUTION

Fig. 1 Jean-Honore Fragonard, Portrait of Madame Fragonard, the
Artist’s Wife, black chalk on paper, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Fig. 2 Jean-Honore Fragonard, Self-Portrait, black chalk on paper,
Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt collection, Paris
Fig. 3 Jean-Honore Fragonard, Portrait of Alexander-Evariste Fragonard,
the Artist’s Son, black chalk on paper, Musée du Louvre, Paris
As the creator of some of the most memorable erotic imagery of the 18th century,
Fragonard was long suspected of practicing a personal libertinage to match his
most licentious paintings. But no hint of scandal attached to his name during his
lifetime, and the critic Bachaumont’s famous barb that Fragonard “was content
to distinguish himself in the boudoirs and dressing rooms” of Paris addressed
not the artist’s personal morals, but his decision to work for lucrative private
commissions rather than contribute to the biennial Salon. Indeed, the criticism
came in August 1769, only two months after Fragonard married Marie-Anne
Gérard (1745-1823), a talented miniaturist from his native Grasse, in the church of
Saint-Lambert in Paris; the frst of their two children, Rosalie, was born six months
later. By all accounts, it was a companionable union and Fragonard proved himself
a dedicated family man.
Throughout the 1770s and early 1780s, Fragonard produced a series of paintings,
drawings and watercolors that depict joyful couples, engaged parents, devoted
mothers and large and happy families (including, on occasion, the Holy Family)
that seem to refect the contentment and satisfaction that he derived from his
own domesticity. These compositions are remarkable – perhaps unprecedented –
for the intimacy, informality and naturalism with which they portray undisguised
afection among members of the modern French family.
L’Heureux Ménage (‘The Happy Household’) depicts an aristocratic salon in which
a pretty, fashionably dressed young mother kneels on an enormous settee, her
contented gaze falling on her rambunctious little son as he fings himself across
the lap of his benevolent and playful young father. The scene is opulent: the family
wears fne silks and satins tailored in the height of style, the elaborately carved
and gilded canapé is upholstered in green damask, an enormous gilt-framed
painting on the wall behind them suggests the soaring height of the room they
inhabit, and a costly, red-plumed parrot faps its wings on top of the a cage beside
them. Yet Fragonard’s ‘Happy Household’ is nonetheless remarkably intimate
and tender in its afect. The mother stands protectively over her family, her body
leaning in to her husband’s side, her left hand resting on his shoulder, her right
afectionately brushing his arm. He throws back his head, smiling joyously as he
playfully wards of his little son’s eager embrace. The child propels himself into his
father’s waiting arms in an efort to kiss his face.
It seems likely that the addition of a son to Fragonard’s own ménage may have
been a source of inspiration for the painting (fgs. 1-3). Alexandre-Evariste
Fragonard (1780-1850) – who would grow up to be a painter of success and
distinction - was christened in Grasse on 26 October 1780. The apparent age
of the clamoring little boy in L’Heureux Ménage – seeming about three or four –
coincides almost exactly with Evariste’s age in 1784 when, we can surmise with
near certainty, the painting was executed.
Fig. 4 Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Happy Household, Private collection
Like most of Fragonard’s paintings, L’Heureux Ménage is neither signed nor
dated, but a painted oil sketch representing the artist’s frst idea for the
composition survives (fg. 4; private collection; formerly in the collection of M.
Penard y Fernandez), and is recorded as having been exhibited in the Salon de
la Correspondance in November 1783; there seems little doubt that Fragonard’s
revised, meticulously fnished, fnal version of the subject – the present painting
– would have been produced shortly thereafter. When it was included in the 1783
exhibition, the sketch – then owned by the painter Antoine Vestier, and later by the
British portraitist, Sir Thomas Lawrence – was described precisely, as “l’intérieur
d’un ménage où l’on voit un père caresser son enfant en présence de la mère,
esquisse” (“the interior of a household where we see a father caressing his child in
the presence of its mother, sketch”).