Jean-Honoré Fragonard valuation
The Swing, the fantasy figures and some of the fastest brushwork of the eighteenth century.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) was born in Grasse, studied briefly with Chardin and then with Boucher, and won the Prix de Rome in 1752.
What a work by Jean-Honoré Fragonard is worth
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Bio
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) was born in Grasse, studied briefly with Chardin and then with Boucher, and won the Prix de Rome in 1752. In Rome, and on a tour of Italy with his friend Hubert Robert, he made red chalk drawings of the gardens of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli that are among the best known of the century. His Coresus and Callirhoe won him admission to the Académie in 1765, but he turned away from official commissions to work for private collectors. The Swing, of 1767, is in the Wallace Collection in London; The Progress of Love, painted for Madame du Barry, is in the Frick Collection in New York; and his quickly painted fantasy figures are in the Louvre. The Revolution ended the world he painted for.
Fragonard painted more than five hundred pictures and dated only a handful, so dating and attribution rest on style and documented history. His drawings are the most active part of his market, from red chalk landscapes and brown wash drawings to his illustrations for La Fontaine's Contes and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. His wife's younger sister, Marguerite Gérard, trained in his studio and worked closely with him, and his son Alexandre-Évariste was also a painter, so works have moved between their names in both directions. His rapid handling has been widely imitated, and a history through the French collections of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries carries great weight.
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