Fragonard’s Progress of Love Series (Part 2)

Welcome to this episode of Cocktails with a Curator. I am Xavier Salomon, the Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at The Frick Collection in New York. Last Friday, we looked at the first phase of the decoration of the Fragonard Room at The Frick Collection. Here you see the room at 1 East 70th Street. And last week we spoke about how four of the main canvases, three of which you see in this photograph, on the left is the Meeting, in the center the Pursuit, and on the right, Love Letters, were painted in 1771 for Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV, and how in 1773, after less than a year hanging at the Pavilion at Louvre-Cien, for which they were created, Madame du Barry rejected them, and Fragonard took them back to his house and studio at the Louvre. Today we will talk about the second part of the story and how Fragonard went back to this project twenty years later to complete the room for a very different setting. And so when we look at the room today at The Frick Collection, we should think that four of the large canvases were made in the 1770s for Madame du Barry, but at least ten more canvases were made subsequently for a different patron and for a different location. And that is precisely what I will be talking about today. To pair these paintings, last week we had a very simple glass of champagne. And so this week instead, we'll have a champagne cocktail. This is, of course, champagne with brandy, sugar, and a cherry. Cheers. So we left Fragonard in 1773 when the paintings for Louvre-Cien are rejected and then substituted with four canvases by the artist Joseph-Marie Vien. Fragonard must have been particularly hit by this rejection. And, of course, this would have been one of the most prominent commissions he would have executed at this point in his life. And while the trajectory of his career went better and better all the way till the commission of Madame du Barry in 1771, in a way this creates a lull in his career. And effectively it's sort of the beginning of not quite a downfall, but a series of smaller commissions for a series of very faithful patrons. Fragonard never makes it to become the great court painter that, for example, Boucher had been as the great favorite of Madame de Pompadour. And so in 1773, in October 1773, Fragonard decides to leave France and move back to Italy for a trip of at least a year and comes back in 1774. And this is probably due to the great hit of having Madame du Barry reject the four canvases. The later career of Fragonard is really a career made out of paintings for private patrons, none of the great commissions, the altarpieces, the great history paintings that other painters were commissioned or aspiring to. And then, of course, like the last phase of Madame de Barry's life, Fragonard's life is also very much affected by the French Revolution. Many of the patrons Fragonard had either escaped from France or met their death on the guillotine in Place de la Concorde, as Madame de Barry did at the end of 1793, in December 1993. So in the early months of 1790, Fragonard decides to leave Paris and to take refuge in a house in his birthplace in Provence, in Grasse. And this is the so-called Villa Fragonard, which was acquired a few decades earlier by Fragonard's first cousin, Honoré Maubert, who was the son of Fragonard's paternal aunt, Madeleine Fragonard. And Honoré, with his son Alexandre, worked in the perfume industry in Grasse, which was a very well-developed industry in the city then, as it is today. And the group, the family group of Fragonard, his wife, his son, and his sister-in-law, Marguerite Gerard, who Fragonard himself was training as a painter, take refuge in this house belonging to the Mauberts for at least a year, between 1790 and 1991. You can imagine that, with all the horrors happening in Paris, with the revolution starting, these were incredibly unsettling times. We're not quite in the years of the Terror. 1793 is the year where the king and queen will be beheaded, as will Madame de Barry. But this, you know, we're a couple of years earlier, but clearly the situation in Paris is very difficult. And so Fragonard moves to Grasse and moves to this beautiful house, which is surrounded by a lovely garden with jasmine plants and fruit trees and hollyhocks and a number of different plants and flowers. And it's beautifully set just outside the center of town, just a few-minute walk from the center of town, and overlooking the valley below Grasse, all the way, as you can see in this photograph, to the Mediterranean Sea. And while he's living here, Fragonard starts to do a series of paintings. And we have this receipt at the Frick Collection, a receipt of March 1791, which is a receipt for 3,600 livres, which were received by Fragonard from mon cher cousin Maubert, my dear cousin Maubert, presumably Honoré or his son Alexandre. And we don't really know what this receipt is for. There are really two options. The first option is that this is for the staircase of the house. So this is a large space. You enter the house, and the first space you encounter is the staircase, which connects the ground floor with the upper floor of the house. And this was decorated with these wall paintings. These are not real, true frescoes, but painted as secco, so it's oil painting on the walls, done single-handedly by Fragonard in that period of 1790-91. And they show a series of gods and goddesses from antiquity, and so here you see, for example, the upper level, the goddess Minerva, and a series of various symbols. Below it, there is a group of weapons and the inscription La Loi, the Law. These have decorations with fasci, with different shields, with ancient objects and ancient symbols. Here is, for example, a lion, but then also Masonic symbols. Grasse, during the Revolution, was a particularly strong Republican center, and it's likely that the Mauberts were part of the group of Republicans in Grasse. And so the decoration very much reflects the new regime that is being instituted in France at the end of the Ancien Régime. The staircase is the one large enterprise that Fragonard executes in 1790-91, but he also goes back to decorate the central room of the house. There you see the back facade of the house towards the garden, and the central two windows are a grand... look into a grand salon, which is the main room of the main floor of the house, just next to the staircase I just showed you. And here Fragonard installs the four canvases for Madame de Barry. We don't quite know, did he travel with them? Did he bring them with him when he moved from Paris to Grasse? Did he ask for them to be sent over? Was this an idea that was there all along between Fragonard and the Mauberts? Or is it an idea that developed while he's redecorating the house? Clearly, Fragonard didn't know what to do with the four Lucienne canvases. They were probably just stored, maybe rolled up at the Louvre. So this is the moment in the 1790s, almost 20 years after he's painted them, where he takes them out and reinstalls them. And the Mauberts reshaped their salon to accommodate the canvases. They had two doors in this room that were originally further towards the windows, and those are centered on the walls so that the two canvases on each side, the two pairs, could be effectively displayed with a door in the middle. So here you see the Pursuit on the right and the Meeting on the left. And on the opposite wall, you see the Lovers' Crown and the Love Letters. These, of course, currently are copies of the original paintings, but they give you a sense of what this room would have looked like. And again, this room, like the salon in Madame de Pompadour's château, or pavilion at Louvre-Siennes, was much, much smaller than the Fragonard Room at the Frick, so much more condensed and compressed feeling. And in the same way that at Louvre-Siennes you would have this small room looking out to the garden, to the Seine, to the outskirts of Paris, here you would have had this room looking out through two windows to the valley below Grasse and the sea. Now, because this room is somewhat larger than Madame du Barry's pavilion and because it's constructed in a slightly different way, there is space for more canvases. And so Fragonard produces ten more canvases for the space to fill every corner of the space. And you've seen in the previous slide and in this one how over the two central doors he places two square canvases. And then there are two more walls. And so here is the entrance wall. The two doors lead to the staircase, the Fragonard frescoes. And here you see, again, two more cupids over the doors, a central canvas and two thin canvases on the sides. And the opposite wall, this is more or less a squarish room, you have the central painting in between the windows. And again, two thin stripes of canvas in the corners. This central canvas, as we'll see in a second, was originally placed over a fireplace. The fireplace, unfortunately, is now gone. But where you see that piece of furniture below it, between the two windows, there was originally, we know from old photographs, a fireplace. And the effect of this painting was somewhat created with the location in mind. So what does Fragonard add? He adds two large canvases. And the first one, of course, in the nineteenth century, was very cruelly and somewhat romantically viewed as the finale of the story. And finally, at the end of the parable of the Slav affair, the woman is left by the man. And so this was supposed to be a reference, of course, to Madame de Barry's fate, to the fact that the king died and she was effectively left alone. But we now know that that's actually not the case at all. This is another painting very much in that same mode, erotic mode, as the other canvases. Here is the woman dreaming of her boyfriend, husband. The little Cupid at the top points to the time of day to midday, which in the eighteenth century was considered one of the most erotically charged times of the day. And the girl sits in reverie and dreaming-like pose, thinking about her lover. On the opposite wall, as I've just said, over the fireplace, and you can see that because the bottom of this canvas has this sort of great sort of flames and rich red colors, was the god Hymen holding two torches. And Hymen is the god of marriage. So you see the Cupid's kissing, you see the Cupid with the tambourine and with the crown of flowers, and of course the central figure with the two torches represents the union of two people. So very much these two large canvases are still following in the footsteps of the four canvases of Madame de Barry. But you can see that the colors are different. The paint is looser, the colors are more golden, yellowy, and this is particularly apparent when you see them all together at the Frick Collection. You notice immediately that there are two different phases and painted in slightly different ways. Over the four doors at the Villa Maubert, Fragonard paints four Cupids. And these four Cupids are all doing different things, and they represent different types of love. So there is a Cupid pursuing a dove, and this, of course, is the idea of love that chases, love that follows when you're in love with someone and you keep following them and going after them. There is then love the avenger, and this is a much more cruel idea of love, love that avenges himself by stabbing, in a so very dramatic way, a dove. There's then love the jester, and the idea of sort of a more fun and more comic type of love. And finally, love the sentinel. And this is the idea of sort of secret love. At this point, Cupid is behind the bush of roses and he is encouraging all of us, the viewers, to keep silent. So these are sort of different comments, again, to different types of love, which are very much part of the progress of love as a series. My favorite part of this room, in fact, are the very small, thin, long canvases that were put in the corner of the two walls, the entrance wall and the opposite wall with the windows. And you see here the copies in grass on the two sides. And these are four beautiful canvases showing hollyhocks. And so these are purely decorative, but again, they give you the sense as if in the room in grass, you're looking out of the window and you're surrounded by the garden and grass. And in the same way that grass has these beautiful flowers, the perfume industry in grass is mainly based on the fact that so many flowers grew in that area, especially jasmine. But hollyhocks would have grown in the garden as well. And so the same way you would have had hollyhocks in the summer outside, here you have them inside the room. And so there is almost a sort of balcony painted at the bottom, a sort of grill. And beyond that are the hollyhocks set against a distant view of a garden with trees. When you look at these in detail, they're almost abstract paintings. Each flower is so beautifully painted, with the leaves, with the sort of white, pinkish petals of each flower. And these sort of bushes grow in the corner, effectively, of the room. One of the great tragedies of the Fragonard Room is that in 1898, it is finally dismantled and sold by the heirs of Maubert to J.P. Morgan, who brings the room to London, to his house in Princess Gate. And only a few years later, in 1915, after Morgan's death, Frick will buy the panels and install them at the Frick Collection. The problem is that the room as we know it today, the Fragonard Room, is not created for the Fragonards. It's a pre-existing room which had to be adapted to house these canvases. So the four main canvases for Madame du Barry are actually shown on two walls, adjoining walls, not in the right order, as they would have been seen in Grasse or, before that, in Lucienne. And the four overdoors, for example, were placed, two of them, over doors that existed in the Fragonard Room at the Frick, so one leading on to the dining room and the opposite one leading to the living hall. The other two were placed in between the windows, there were three windows in the room, over mirrors. And there was no space for the hollyhocks. So, in fact, only one of these canvases was placed in the room. And it's very difficult to see because it's behind the door that leads to the living hall, which is often somewhat closed. I mean, when it's open, it's into the corner, so it sort of covers the canvas. And the other three have been in storage ever since. And they've been occasionally on view at the Frick, but very rarely. And I think it's been at least 15 years, if not more, that they haven't been on view. So one of the things that I'm very excited about about our upcoming move to Frick, Madison, is that we will be able to display all four of the hollyhocks for the first time since 1915. And I'm very much hoping that we will find a way to have them on view, not in the Fragonard Room, but somewhere else in the museum in the future, because these are at least three great works by Fragonard that we cannot usually display. The 1790s for Fragonard become a very difficult period. As I said, his patrons were not around anymore. He seems to have worked more in a series of jobs to do with the running of the museum, of the Louvre, later, beyond the Revolution, and in the early years of Napoleon. And he almost sort of gives up painting. And the second part of the Fragonard Room is really his great swan song. So this is the largest and most monumental that Fragonard is before the end of his life. He will die on the 22nd of August, 1806, and by that point he is almost forgotten. The whole generation of artists and painters who worked for Louis XV and Madame du Barry. Gouthière dies around that time bankrupt, not working anymore, and Fragonard also has given up his career as a painter. His funerals, a very modest affair, will take place in the Church of Saint-Roch, just across from the Louvre, where he lived. And he was buried in the cemetery of Montmartre. But he dies in such penury and unknown circumstances that even his tomb cannot be found anymore. So when you visit the cemetery of Montmartre, where great other painters, like, for example, Degas, are buried, Fragonard's tomb cannot be found. And there is only a small inscription near a staircase that reminds us that Jean-Honoré Fragonard, born in 1732, died in 1806, was buried in this cemetery somewhere. We don't know where. So even though there is no memorial, neither for Fragonard or, as we've seen last week, for Madame du Barry, who is buried under the roses of the Chapelle Expiatoire in Paris, the great monument for Fragonard, for us in New York especially, but in the world, remains, his wonderful room, the story of which is so complex and complicated. But we're so happy to be able to display it at the Frick Collection and remember Fragonard through one of his greatest works of art. Thank you for joining me this evening, and look forward to seeing you next week.