#jean-honoré fragonard

[artystyczny-nieporzadek]

Art Details Series: Women & Books  | Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, Victor Gabriel Gilbert, Lilla Cabot Perry, Louis Emile Adan, Thomas Benjamin Kennington, Seymour Joseph Guy, Delphin Enjolras, Ethel Porter Bailey |

[beautyofaphrodite]

The Birth of Venus

I’ve been making posts where I dive into certain artworks depicting Lady Aphrodite (or Venus)! I’ve covered the Birth of Venus (Both the ones by Botticelli and Cabanel), Venus Victrix, Venus Anadyomene, and Venus Verticordia. Today’s painting is the Birth of Venus by Fragonard.

Fragonard

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, a French painter and printmaker, was born April 5, 1732 in Grasse, France and died August 22, 1806 in Paris at the age of 74. He painted in the Rococo style, with many of his paintings showing off his beliefs in hedonism. Fragonard painted more than 550 paintings in his lifetime, with notable works including The Swing, A Young Girl Reading, and The Bolt. Not much is known about many of his paintings.

Description of the Painting

Venus sits on a wave, tended to by many women. All appear to be nude, and some appear to have fish tails. Some hold flowers or shells, while most hold nothing.

About

The Birth of Venus was painted c. 1753-1755

Medium: oil on canvas

Dimensions: 54 cm × 83 cm (21 in × 33 in)

Located in the Musée Grobet-Labadié, Marseille

Hope you learned something! Let me know if there’s a painting you’d like to see.

[psikonauti]

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (French,1732-1806)

The Fountain of Love, 1875

Oil on canvas

[diogxnxs]

A redraw of the The Happy Accidents of the Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard starring the human version of The Big Three: Donald, Mickey and Goofy. This took me too long to finish but it came out alright.

[leatherandmossprints]

‘The Progress of Love: Love Letters’ by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, c. 1771-72.

[artsandculture]

The Swing (1767) 🎨 Jean-Honoré Fragonard 🏛️ The Wallace Collection 📍 London, England

The painting is Fragonard's most famous work, and one of the most emblematic images of eighteenth-century art. Its genesis is reported by the writer Charles Collé. According to his journals and memoirs for 1767, the history painter Gabriel-François Doyen was commissioned by an unnamed ‘gentleman of the Court’ late in 1767 to paint his young mistress on a swing, pushed by a bishop with himself admiring her legs from below. Doyen, who had just had a major success at the Salon as a religious history painter, refused and suggested Fragonard. Fragonard was at that time about to completely change his career from a history painter with important royal commissions to a painter of small and highly sophisticated cabinet pictures. This was at least in part a reaction to his problems with payments from the royal arts administration. The commission might have in part triggered that change or might simply have come at the right moment.The painting marks the re-launch of Fragonard's career with paintings for a small, well-informed circle. Those could either be highly erotic works, like P430, or works that required an advanced knowledge of art history and old master painting. Fragonard's move was highly successful.

Compared with the original brief, in the finished painting, the older man is no longer a priest, a barking dog has been added, and Falconet's sculpture of 'L'amour menaçant (Menacing Love)' comments on the story. Fragonard answers the libertine intentions of his patron by picking a Rococo style. Fragonard often employed different styles or languages at the same time, and he seems to have seen a Rococo idiom as particularly apt for an erotic scene. This move has fundamentally shaped perceptions of Rococo art. With Fragonard's famous work, the style changed its associations. Fragonard combines a backward-looking Rococo element with a pre-Romantic rendering of a forceful and uncontrollable, often obscene nature.

The name of the work derives from an engraving by Nicolas de Launay after the painting that was published in 1782. It has been used as a template for countless caricatures and is increasingly popular with contemporary artists and designers.

[peaceinthestorm]

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806, French) ~ Le Chiffre d'amour, 1775-80

[Source: artvee.com]

[piranya]

digital repaint of Messer as Jean-Honoré Fragonard's "The Swing", inspired by photography by Austin Taylor Macedo x

[daydreambeauty]

 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, “The Swing” , 1778, Oil on Canvas, 81 cm × 64.2 cm, The Wallace Collection, London, England

[artthatgivesmefeelings]

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (French, 1732-1806) Pastoral Landscape with a Shepherd and Shepherdess at Rest, n.d.

[exist-for-love-1000]

[catladychronicles]

"Le chat angora", Collaborative painting by Marguerite Gérard (1761–1837) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806)

[thisisjohannasstuff]

[psikonauti]

Denise Stewart-Sanabria

Jolene

oil on linen

[shannonmnart]

I was assigned number 10, which is Jean-Honoré Fragonard's "The Swing", a timeless and culturally relevant artwork despite its dated origin in 1767. In my research I discovered five new facts about this painting and its painter.

1. The painting began as a commission from a French gentleman of the court who wanted to depict himself admiring his mistress being pushed on a swing (Bruckbauer).

2. Playful works such as these were frequently commissioned by the elite that Fragonard served. They would be displayed in intimate settings.

3. In contrast to popular historical works of the era, The Swing greatly subverted societal norms  for personal interests.

4. Jean-Honoré Fragonard had an illustrious career as a painter for some of the wealthiest people in France just before the French Revolution.

5. The Swing today lives in London amongst somewhat contrasting religious depictions of angels and leisure.

   My initial impression of this artwork has greatly changed since the first time I looked at it, now knowing the intimate details of how this piece was intended to be used has altered my perspective the most. I have seen The Swing many times in other references depicting different characters in the same pose as the focal point of the painting. For the first time admittedly, in the first Frozen movie as a kid. Which is slightly mind-boggling because it originated as a private commission that playfully challenged cultural norms while remaining hyper-feminine and aesthetically pleasing to the eye. A tradition consistent in many of Fragonard's works. Despite its critiques as a symbol of the moral decay of the French aristocracy, The Swing and similar artworks saw rampant popularity during the eighteenth century (Bruckbauer). I never used to deeply look into the expressions of people in paintings until I got older and could understand things with more context. With my most recent observation of The Swing, I couldn't help but notice the theatrical presentation of the men fawning over the subject of this piece. One of which is hoisting the woman in the air, and the other underneath the lady admiring her with his arms stretched almost like that depiction of The Creation of Adam.

Bruckbauer, Dr. Ashley. "Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing," Smarthistory, Feb 26 2021, https://smarthistory.org/jean-honore-fragonard-the-swing/

[desolatus]

The Stolen Kiss, C. 1787

Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Marguerite Gérard