Progress of Love: The Rendezvous Fragonard

The Progress of Love: The Rendezvous by Jean-Honore Fragonard, c. 1773, is a large oil on canvas painting of a young man and women meeting in a luxuriant, French garden setting, clad in elegant costumes of the Louis XV period. Towering over them is a weathered sculpture of the goddess Venus, with Cupid. The young lady looks about with a startled gesture while her young man scales the garden wall on a ladder. Fragonard constructs a playful, frivolous image of life that epitomises the attitudes of the French Rococo period, with painterly brushwork, subtle tones of lush colour and astonishing technical dexterity with the oil painting medium. Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) was a late Rococo painter of the French Ancien Régime whose works were distinguished by painterly facility and exuberance. Originally a pupil of Chardin, Fragonard produced a large number of works until the growing fashion of neo-classicism and the French Revolution forced him to flee into obscurity. Fragonard’s reputation revived in the late 19th century, when his sense of colour, relaxed hedonistic subject matter and painterly brushwork inspired new generations of the Impressionists such as Renoir.