REFLECTION OF YOUTH

MANAGE as best you can, said Nature, and pushed me into existence. Thus the mild genius of 18th century French painting, Jean Honore Fragonard, described his own beginnings. A child of Provence, Fragonard was raised in the soft sunshine, on vine-covered hills, with the Mediterranean and the mountains as his horizon. He studied under Boucher, came to fame in Paris, was a friend of Madame du Barry and American Ambassador Benjamin Franklin. Almost nothing more is known of Fragonard's life. With typical breeziness, he signed himself "Frago." and painted himself just thrice. One self-portrait is in the Louvre, a second in his native Grasse, and the third (see color page), newly acquired, in San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor.

The San Francisco Chronicle's Critic Alfred Frankenstein celebrated the acquisition with an unusual whoop of pleasure: "A good case could be made for this as the finest single painting in the Legion's permanent collection."

Fragonard was in his late 40s when he painted the picture, but he looks ageless, and appears to have been. Someone described him in his last years as "a youth in an old skin." Doubtless he painted the little canvas flat upon his desk, while gazing into a mirror before him. At the end, he lowered his painted eyes.

For all the frank eroticism of Fragonard's art, it is almost never vulgar. "His decency," said the brothers De Goncourt, "consists in the lightness of his touch." That seductive decency illuminated an exhibition of French drawings at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum last week which featured Fragonard. His Fireworks, as the De Goncourts noted, has "an unrivaled deftness ... its sparks darting here and there, upon a shoulder or a thigh, flickering all over the bed of the three charming heroines of the picture."

In the end, neither modesty nor sexuality seems the clue to Fragonard's art--though it has full measure of both--but simple happiness most of all.

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