ALEXANDRE - EVARISTE FRAGONARD
Grasse 1780 - Paris 1850

L’Heure Fatale: Sujet Fantastique

Oil On Canvas: 46.5 x 38 cm (19.38 x 15.83 in)

Signed: A Fragonard

Provenance: Paris, Ader Picard Tajan, Sale, 12 Dec. 1989, lot 36.

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.

The rapidly changing political regimes of the early nineteenth century caused Fragonard’s work on several occasions to be destroyed or left incomplete. Under Napoleon he designed a sculptured frontal for the Chamber of Deputies (Palais Bourbon) which was replaced during the July Monarchy. Designs for the same building commissioned under the Restoration were aborted after the July Revolution of 1830. During the restoration, when he really came of age, Fragonard saw continued success as he changed his subject matter to suit current tastes. In 1819, already an accomplished artist, he ventured into the newly popular territory of historical genre painting. This change was well noted in contemporary criticism. Themes from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, recently reintroduced into fashion by the troubadour painters dominated Fragonard’s painting for the rest of his life. His style, however, with its rich palette, painterly flourish, dramatic gesture and light effects, was very different from that of the troubadour painters, and closer to the next generation of Romantic artists associated with Delacroix -- Colin and Bonington.

During the Restoration and July Monarchy Fragonard received important commissions for painted decorations for the Louvre (François I armé chevalier par Bayard, François I reçoit les tableaux rapportés d’Italie par le Primatice; Les Sciences et les Beaux-Arts rendent hommage à leurs dieux protecteurs), Versailles (Bataille de Marignan), and numerous churches including Strasbourg Cathedral, the Church of Ste. Geneviève, and Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. He continued to exhibit easel paintings though the 1842 Salon.

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The subject of this work is something of an enigma; while it clearly recalls the imagery of Goethe’s Faust, which had inspired Fragonard on other occasions , there is no scene in the play to which it absolutely conforms. It may have been inspired by a contemporary theatrical variation on Faust or it may have been a subject of the artist’s own invention. In the sale of Fragonard’s collection after his death a very similar composition was catalogued as: “L’Heure fatale, sujet fantastique. Le diable apparaît à un jeune seigneur à table avec une courtisane, et lui montre du doigt, sure le cadran, sa dernière heure qui va sonner. 56c de haut, 46 c de lang.” The most notable difference between the two versions is in the treatment of the figure of the devil; in the larger version he is clothed in sixteenth-century garb with only pointed ears to reveal his true character, while in this version he is a horned beast who appears in a cloud of smoke and flames. This painting shows both Fragonard’s talents as a draftsman (the legacy of his Davidian education) and as a colorist with a flair for theatrical lighting effects that recall the work of his father. Although this picture is not dated, comparison with other works suggests a date in the late 1820s.