Art: Visions of A Rococo Master

In popular reputation, Jean-Honore Fragonard is often dismissed as a purveyor of teasingly erotic marzipan: images of rose-cheeked, button-eyed demimondaines in leafy bowers, often dallying with wan, wigged swains. The extraordinary exhibition of Fragonard's works that opened last week at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and that can be seen there until May 8, amply demonstrates the limiting inaccuracy of that view. In reality, Fragonard was probably the most versatile of the great masters of 18th century French art.

Astonishingly, the exhibition is the first major retrospective in North America for Fragonard. (The show, organized with the Louvre, appeared at the Grand Palais in Paris last fall with a slightly different roster of works.) Welcome though it is, this display of 90 paintings and 131 drawings might best be summed up as authoritative rather than definitive. In an introduction to the sumptuous, scholarly catalog, Pierre Rosenberg, the Louvre's chief curator of paintings, acknowledges that several treasures in London's Wallace Collection were unavailable, as were the four famous panels called The Progress of Love, 1771, which the artist created for Madame du Barry. Fortunately for residents of and visitors to New York, the panels are on permanent display at the Frick Collection, a short walk down Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan.

To the curator as well as the biographer, Fragonard is an exasperating puzzle. He rarely signed his works; dating them is still a cause of scholarly spats. In early 19th century biographies, "the good Papa Frago" was often described as a cheerful, round-faced little man, ever smiling and carefree -- a kind of idiot savant of the easel. Yet it seems that he was also riven with self-doubt, constantly redoing canvases and often failing to complete commissions. But Fragonard's inner self remains inscrutable. Contemporary references are surprisingly few and unrevealing. If he wrote any letters, none survive. And he stares out enigmatically in only a handful of self-portraits, done in middle age.

What is known is that Fragonard was born in Grasse, in Provence, in 1732. His father, a glovemaker, apparently moved the family in 1738 to Paris, where young Honore was apprenticed to two distinguished and influential artists, Chardin and Boucher. At the latter's suggestion, Fragonard applied for (and won) the Prix de Rome. He returned to Paris after his studies in Italy, was admitted to the Academy in 1765 -- membership entitled him to an apartment at the Louvre -- and became a commercial success.

Fragonard's rococo style and subject matter eventually lost favor with the public, which came to prefer the cool, luminous approach of Jacques-Louis David and other neoclassicists. Shortly after the Revolution began, Fragonard left Paris for Provence, but returned to the capital in 1792. By then, with many of his former patrons dead or exiled, he had virtually ceased painting. David, his friend and protege, found him a post with the arts commission that established what is now the Louvre Museum, but a Napoleonic decree of 1805 ousted Fragonard and other artists from their residences there. A year later he died, impoverished, at his new home in the Palais-Royal -- according to one story, after eating ice cream on a hot August day.