Jean Honoré Fragonard

Jean-Honoré Fragonard was born on 5 April 1732 in Grasse, the son of a glover, and moved with his family to Paris in 1738. After brief notarial training, he entered the studio of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and then, around 1748, became a pupil of François Boucher, whose Rococo manner deeply influenced him. In 1752 he won the Prix de Rome with Jeroboam Sacrificing to the Golden Calf, which led to three years at the École Royale des Élèves Protégés and then a pensioner's stay at the French Academy in Rome from 1756 to 1761.

There he copied Baroque masters, toured Italy with Hubert Robert and the Abbé de Saint-Non, and absorbed the coloristic freedom of Venetian painting. Returning to Paris, he achieved a sensational success in 1765 when the Royal Academy accepted his history painting Coresus and Callirhoë, now in the Louvre; King Louis XV purchased it, and expectations ran high that Fragonard would rescue official history painting. Instead, he turned to smaller cabinet pictures and private commissions, cultivating a loose, rapid brushwork and shimmering palette perfectly suited to gallant subjects.

In 1767 he painted The Swing, now in the Wallace Collection in London, depicting a young woman on a swing whose pink shoe flies toward a hidden lover while an older man pushes from the shadows. Around 1770 he produced A Young Girl Reading, a saffron-robed figure absorbed in a book, now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, part of his so-called figures de fantaisie painted with bravura strokes. In 1777 he completed The Lock, or The Bolt, a charged interior scene of lovers securing a door, which entered the Louvre.

He married the miniaturist Marie-Anne Gérard in 1769, traveled to Italy again in 1773–74 as companion to the fermier général Bergeret de Grancourt, and later attempted to adapt his style to Neoclassicism. After the French Revolution his work fell from fashion; he held administrative posts at the Louvre but died in relative obscurity in Paris on 22 August 1806, leaving more than five hundred paintings and thousands of drawings.