Museum Masterpieces: The Louvre

Lecture 10: Boucher, Fragonard, and the Rococo in France
68
It has also been called Inspiration and Figure de Fantasie, the latter
title in keeping with a group of other similarly sized and composed
� gure paintings by Fragonard, all painted in the same rapid style.
Fragonard invited his friends to his studios to watch him paint.
These works, the so-called “Fantasy Portraits,” represent friends of
the painter and evoke the world of his studio, where friends would
don costumes, use studio props, and “pose” for the master. The true
subject of this and the artist’s other paintings is art itself, its intimacy
and spontaneity. In addition, Fragonard infuses these works with a
kind of active informality and virtuosity that are the true hallmarks
of Rococo painting in France.
This great painting, as well as many other masterpieces of French
Rococo art, came to the Louvre via the La Caze bequest in 1869.
The room built speci� cally for the bequest was visited by every
great French artist of the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries and
actually painted by Edouard Vuillard. One can easily imagine the
young Manet or Renoir standing enrapt in front of this Fragonard.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Born in 1732 in the south of France in the town of Grasse, known for its
perfumes, Fragonard was a generation younger than the famous Boucher.
Fragonard’s greatness as his true successor did not materialize until after
Boucher’s death in 1770, when Fragonard was 38 years old.
When the painter was in his early 30s, he began work on his � rst masterpiece,
The High Priest Coresus Sacri� ces Himself to Save Callirhoe, his reception
piece for membership in the Academy. The subject he chose was of daunting
obscurity and moral complexity, involving unrequited love, revenge,
madness, and a double suicide, all set in remote classical antiquity. The
young artist chose to represent the scene on a huge scale—more than 9 by 12
feet—set in the smoky darkness of a temple of Bacchus. The painting almost
emits the scents of pagan antiquity. The scene chosen by Fragonard was a
climactic moment in which the priest Coresus plunges the dagger of sacri� ce