Jean-Honoré Fragonard: The New in the Notions of “Sketchiness” and “Completeness”

Abstract

The second half of the 18th century was a time of active changes in the perception of art, rethinking many concepts and phenomena. One of them was the pictorial sketch, which transformed from a preparatory stadium work into an independent, complete piece of art. Many art theorists and critics, as well as painters themselves had contributed to this rethinking. Many young artists, bored of historical painting and indifferent to all the academic principles, were searching for new media of expressiveness, using the sketch-like pictorial manner to give their works a new dynamism and an impression of “easy production”. The article is dedicated to J.-H. Fragonard (1732—1806), an artist in whose works the “sketchiness” became a conscious artistic method used in small-format pieces, in large-scale canvases, and even in panels. The use of such a technique in grand scale works is considered to be an extreme unconventionality, which, however, was not appreciated by Fragonard’s contemporaries and even by scholars of the next two centuries. Fragonard’s series of ‘Fantasy Portraits’ attracted enough investigators’ attention, but his series ‘Progress of Love’ has only recently begun to be recognized by researchers as an unusual and bold for that time artistic experience. Based on the analysis of the artist’s selected works, the author builds her original research, designed to highlight Fragonard’s special role in the evolution of art on the way from the Modern Period to Contemporary History. The relevance of the present article is caused by too little examination of this topic: minimal in Russia and relatively small in France. Besides consultation with research literature, this required the author to constantly directly refer to the 18th-century sources, such as treatises by art connoisseurs and scholars, art criticism, and catalogues of exhibitions arranged by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture or the Académie de Saint-Luc.