Jean-Honoré Fragonard, (born April 5, 1732, Grasse, France—died August 22, 1806,
Paris), French Rococo painter whose most familiar
works, such as The Swing (1767), are characterized by delicate hedonism. (…)
Fragonard’s art was too closely associated with the
pre-Revolutionary period to make him acceptable during the Revolution, which
also deprived him of private patrons. At first he retired to Grasse, but he
returned to Paris in 1791, where the protection of the leading Neoclassical
painter Jacques-Louis David obtained for him a post with the Museum
Commission, but he lost this position in 1797. He
spent the rest of his life in obscurity, painting little. His death in 1806
passed almost unnoticed, and his work remained unfashionable until well after
1850.
Fragonard has been bracketed with
Watteau as one of the two great poetic painters of the 18th century in France. A prodigiously active artist, he produced more than
550 paintings, several thousand drawings (although many hundreds are known to
be lost), and 35 etchings. His style, based primarily on that of Rubens, was
rapid, vigorous, and fluent, never tight or fussy like that of so many of his
contemporaries.
Although the greater part of
his active life was passed during the Neoclassical period, he continued to
paint in a Rococo idiom until shortly before
the French Revolution. Only five paintings by Fragonard are dated, but the
chronology of the rest can be fairly accurately established from other sources
such as engravings and documents.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Honore-Fragonard
