Stair Sainty - Fragonard, Alexandre-evariste

ALEXANDRE - EVARISTE FRAGONARD

Grasse 1780 - Paris 1850

Alexandre Fragonard was the product of an extremely rich artistic background; he was the son of the great rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, the pupil of Jacques-Louis David, and the exact contemporary of J.-A.-D. Ingres. All these influences contributed to his artistic versatility and mastery as well as to the eclipse that his reputation suffered by comparison, and which is only recently being rectified. During his lifetime, from his beginnings as a child prodigy in the 1790’s until his death in the middle of the nineteenth century, Fragonard was a prolific and well-regarded artist. His accomplishments spanned a remarkable range of artistic endeavors, including easel and large decorative painting, sculpture, architecture, drawing, book illustration, and
designs for prints, costumes, and Sèvres porcelain.

Fragonard became a pupil of J.-L. David at the Academy’s Ecole des Elèves Protégés when he was only twelve and living with his parents and his aunt, the painter Marguerite Gérard, in the Louvre. In 1793, at the age of thirteen, Fragonard is first listed in the livret of the Paris Salon as an exhibitor. Fragonard’s works of the 1790s were mainly drawings of revolutionary republican subjects in a neoclassical style, many of which were engraved. These works show a clear renunciation of his father’s rococo style, then considered frivolous and a symbol of the ancien régime, in favor of the pared-down neoclassicism of his master. Later in his career, however, Fragonard assimilated many of the painterly techniques exemplified in his father’s work. By the first decade of the nineteenth century Fragonard was receiving important Napoleonic commissions such as designs for the Colonne de la campagne de Pologne. Although Fragonard did not send works to the Salon between 1812 and 1819 he was well recognized at the time and in 1815 received the decoration of the Legion of Honor.