Word: fragonards
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...Assembly, to view 700 works, few of which had ever been seen by the present generation. Covering the walls almost from floor to ceiling, the paintings ranged in time from a superb 14th century primitive (The Flagellation of Christ) through the works of Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Tintoretto, Vermeer, Fragonard, Rubens and Van Dyck, and on down to 1800. When Paris finally digests this show, another lot from the buried reserves, which som officials estimate to number as many a 2,000 items, will be put on display. And this month 22 new rooms at the Louvre will be opened...
MANAGE as best you can, said Nature, and pushed me into existence. Thus the mild genius of 18th century French painting, Jean Honoré 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...
...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...
...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...
...neither modesty nor sexuality seems the clue to Fragonard's art-though it has full measure of both-but simple happiness most...