Visions of A Rococo Master

By John Elson

In popular reputation, Jean-Honore Fragonard is often dismissed as a purveyor of teasingly erotic marzipan: images of rose-cheeked, button-eyed demimondaines in leafy bowers, often dallying with wan, wigged swains. The extraordinary exhibition of Fragonard's works that opened last week at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and that can be seen there until May 8, amply demonstrates the limiting inaccuracy of that view. In reality, Fragonard was probably the most versatile of the great masters of 18th century French art.

Astonishingly, the exhibition is the first major retrospective in North America for Fragonard. (The show, organized with the Louvre, appeared at the Grand Palais in Paris last fall with a slightly different roster of works.) Welcome though it is, this display of 90 paintings and 131 drawings might best be summed up as authoritative rather than definitive. In an introduction to the sumptuous, scholarly catalog, Pierre Rosenberg, the Louvre's chief curator of paintings, acknowledges that several treasures in London's Wallace Collection were unavailable, as were the four famous panels called The Progress of Love, 1771, which the artist created for Madame du Barry. Fortunately for residents of and visitors to New York, the panels are on permanent display at the Frick Collection, a short walk down Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan.

To the curator as well as the biographer, Fragonard is an exasperating puzzle. He rarely signed his works; dating them is still a cause of scholarly spats. In early 19th century biographies, "the good Papa Frago" was often described as a cheerful, round-faced little man, ever smiling and carefree -- a kind of idiot savant of the easel. Yet it seems that he was also riven with self-doubt, constantly redoing canvases and often failing to complete commissions. But Fragonard's inner self remains inscrutable. Contemporary references are surprisingly few and unrevealing. If he wrote any letters, none survive. And he stares out enigmatically in only a handful of self-portraits, done in middle age.

What is known is that Fragonard was born in Grasse, in Provence, in 1732. His father, a glovemaker, apparently moved the family in 1738 to Paris, where young Honore was apprenticed to two distinguished and influential artists, Chardin and Boucher. At the latter's suggestion, Fragonard applied for (and won) the Prix de Rome. He returned to Paris after his studies in Italy, was admitted to the Academy in 1765 -- membership entitled him to an apartment at the Louvre -- and became a commercial success.

Fragonard's rococo style and subject matter eventually lost favor with the public, which came to prefer the cool, luminous approach of Jacques-Louis David and other neoclassicists. Shortly after the Revolution began, Fragonard left Paris for Provence, but returned to the capital in 1792. By then, with many of his former patrons dead or exiled, he had virtually ceased painting. David, his friend and protege, found him a post with the arts commission that established what is now the Louvre Museum, but a Napoleonic decree of 1805 ousted Fragonard and other artists from their residences there. A year later he died, impoverished, at his new home in the Palais-Royal -- according to one story, after eating ice cream on a hot August day.

In their pioneering biographical sketch of 1865, the Goncourt brothers set the fashion for dismissing Fragonard as a rococo pasticheur, gifted but aesthetically frivolous. "Fragonard was a master of a dream world," they wrote. "His painting is a dream -- the dream of a man asleep in a box at the opera." Today that judgment seems true only in part. A quality of reverie does pervade Fragonard's erotica, even in the case of the risque Young Girl in Her Bed, Making Her Dog Dance, circa 1768, which seems like the titillating fantasy of a peeping Humbert Humbert. The Goncourt apercu applies in a different way to such large-scale works as the mysterious The Fete at Saint- Cloud (on a rare loan from the Banque de France), painted just before 1773, and two companion pieces owned by Washington's National Gallery, Blindman's Buff and The Swing. In all three paintings the tiny aristocratic figures at leisure are dwarfed by the Italianate landscapes in which they cavort. The contrast in scale is strikingly dramatic, and yet man is not seen as threatened by overweening nature. There is a sense of lightness and harmony in these strange pictures, like visions of Arcadia.

. The paintings neither celebrate nor condemn the ancien regime. "Fragonard did not give lessons," observes Katharine Baetjer, the Metropolitan's curator for the show. "He painted life as he saw it." Both his realism and his dramatic power are apparent in the so-called fantasy portraits, eleven identically sized half-length figures of men and women in rich costumes, which were probably painted over nearly a decade, and are displayed together here for the first time. In the 18th century sense, these are not portraits at all but hastily done oil sketches. (Fragonard boasted that each was done "in one hour's time.") Some of the figures can be identified: Denis Diderot, the philosopher, for example, or the Abbe de Saint-Non, Fragonard's friend and patron. Meanwhile, many of the titles -- The Actor, The Writer, The Warrior and so on -- suggest an underlying symbolic scheme whose meaning is now lost. The artifice of the poses and the theatricality of the costuming look back to Rubens and Rembrandt. But the psychological truth of the subjects' moods, conveyed in hurried slashes of thick paint, are eerily prophetic. They look a century ahead, to the dawning of impressionism.