Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures, a small, intimate, and captivating exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Art, suggests new interpretations for a series of portraits by Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) and reveals a great deal about the complexity of art-historical research.
Fragonard was a prolific painter and printmaker and a luminary at the French Academy. His best known work, The Swing, c. 1767 – 1768 (The Wallace Collection, London), has become representative of Rococo art. The works in this exhibit, however, are a departure from much of the artist’s other work and have remained enigmatic and surrounded with mystery for decades.
The exhibition is displayed in a single gallery and consists of fourteen portrait paintings that have been identified with Fragonard’s fantasy figures and one all-important drawing, now known as Sketches of Portraits, c. 1769. The drawing was discovered at a Paris auction in 2012 and the genesis of this exhibit begins there. In the accompanying exhibition catalogue, the drawing is called “The Key,“ with the potential to unlock the answers to the puzzle of these distinct and unusual portraits.
Art dealer George Wildenstein described these portraits as figures de fantaisie or fantasy figures, based on the eighteenth-century term tête de fantaisie—fantasy head—that described bust-length portraits of anonymous figures or models with allegorical associations, such as music, theatre, literature. The term aptly describes the series of portraits in this exhibit. While a few of the paintings bear the name of the sitter, others do not, such as Man in Costume, c. 1767-1768; The Vestal, c. 1769-1771; The Singer, c. 1769; and The Actor, c. 1769. The portraits considered to be part of the series—by some counts, fourteen, and by others as much as seventeen at this time—have common characteristics. The sitters are in masquerade dress or what was known in 18th-century France as à l’espanole (Spanish style), replete with extravagant flourishes of ruffs, plumed hats, ribbons and rosettes. Departing from the accepted portraiture of the times, Fragonard has, seemingly, executed these paintings quickly and with a sure but looser hand.
Scholars have proposed the identification of many of the portraits, where that information is lacking. The Actor is thought to depict the banker and naval officer, Gabriel Auguste Godefroy. The Singer is likely the music lover, Anne Pauline Le Breton and The Young Artist, c. 1769, has been associated with Charles Paul Jérôme Bréa, a miniaturist and art dealer.
The portraits have raised numerous questions. Were they to be viewed in private rather than public settings? Was Fragonard intentionally working outside the accepted refined and finished style that was the tradition of the Academy? Was financial gain the reason for paintings that were swiftly realized and sold for less than other of the artist’s more typical works? To what extent are the figures caricatures of a profession or social class or caricatures of a known, but unnamed, person?
Many hypotheses have been promulgated by scholars whose research has focused on the era and context in which the works were created. The exhibition catalogue includes, for example, an essay that examines the artist’s relationship to the world of finance, as it is known that Fragonard had some financial difficulties circa 1769 and that some affluent, upwardly mobile members of French society sought to better their status by associating with influential artists. Another essay, written by the exhibition curator, Yuriko Jackall, analyzes The Third Estate, or the circulation of information in the intellectually vibrant culture of Paris and considers the ways in which Fragonard may have sought to establish his standing as an artist.
For the most part, Fragonard has depicted people who are financially secure and exude an air of confidence, comfort, and theatricality. The expressive brushwork gives the paintings vibrancy, as do the lush colours—in particular, yellow—and the richness of the costume and accessories.
Sketches of Portraits has tantalizing clues to plausible answers for some of the questions surrounding these paintings. The drawing, owned privately, includes 18 small sketches laid out in three rows and several of the drawings relate to the group of fantasy figures. Most of the sketches are done in iron gall ink, on thin, laid paper, possibly intended for writing and probably of Dutch origin. They appear as faint, faded images, sketched in thin lines, with a variety of textual annotations including the names of all but one individual, and several are clearly sketches for the painted portraits in the series.
Perhaps the most significant discovery was the appearance in this drawing of a sketch that closely resembles the National Gallery of Art’s treasured Fragonard painting, Young Girl Reading, c. 1769. Although scholars saw similar characteristics in those portraits that came to be identified as Fragonard’s fantasy figures, none had considered Young Girl Reading among them until the drawing came to light and the similarity between one of the sketches in the drawing and the National Gallery of Art’s painting was recognised. Because the other painted portraits show figures aware of a viewer’s gaze—that is, their gaze is directed outward—and the figure in Young Girl Reading is intently looking at the volume in her hands, the relationship, if any, between the Gallery’s painting and the fantasy figures was, at best, ambiguous. The appearance of the drawing seemed to affirm the relationship and thus began two years of intensive research on the drawing and the Gallery’s painting. Since the Gallery’s painting had been x-rayed in 1985, researchers knew that Fragonard had painted over a portrait, possibly a man, whose face looked outward toward the viewer. In 2012-2013, using more advanced imaging techniques, such as hyperspectral imaging, they were able to get a better view of the underlying portrait, which shows a woman–not a man– wearing a large feathered headdress. Technology was vital to the experts’ conclusion that the figure in the Sketches of Portraits relates to the underlying portrait and not to Young Girl Reading, but they do not know why Fragonard repainted the canvas.
Despite the additional information that has been gleaned about Fragonard, his painting styles, and Parisian society in the artist’s lifetime, the discovery of the drawing has left unanswered questions and raised new ones. Does the drawing represent the artist’s layout for an exhibit of the group of paintings? Does Fragonard depict the figures in exotic costume because it was the fashion or because the costume is meant to reflect something about the person and their place in society? Although this exhibit presents few conclusions, it does reveal the complicated nature of art-historical research that is multi-disciplinary and collaborative and marries traditional research with a growing number of new technologies to understand and decipher works of art.
The bringing together of so many of the dispersed fantasy figures is a momentous event. In seeing the portraits as a thematic group, visitors are better able to appreciate and enjoy Fragonard’s skillful and facile execution of the figures. For those who wish to learn more, the exhibit catalogue is critical. It presents a considerable amount of information that cannot be succinctly shared on a museum label or gallery text, but that illuminates one’s understanding of the fantasy figures.
Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures was at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. from 8th October through 3rd December, 2017. It was accompanied by a handsome, richly-illustrated exhibition catalogue that includes several scholarly essays and two appendices, one dedicated to the scientific analysis and conservation research of the paintings, and the other to the same for the drawing.