Art: Visions of A Rococo Master

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In their pioneering biographical sketch of 1865, the Goncourt brothers set the fashion for dismissing Fragonard as a rococo pasticheur, gifted but aesthetically frivolous. "Fragonard was a master of a dream world," they wrote. "His painting is a dream -- the dream of a man asleep in a box at the opera." Today that judgment seems true only in part. A quality of reverie does pervade Fragonard's erotica, even in the case of the risque Young Girl in Her Bed, Making Her Dog Dance, circa 1768, which seems like the titillating fantasy of a peeping Humbert Humbert. The Goncourt apercu applies in a different way to such large-scale works as the mysterious The Fete at Saint- Cloud (on a rare loan from the Banque de France), painted just before 1773, and two companion pieces owned by Washington's National Gallery, Blindman's Buff and The Swing. In all three paintings the tiny aristocratic figures at leisure are dwarfed by the Italianate landscapes in which they cavort. The contrast in scale is strikingly dramatic, and yet man is not seen as threatened by overweening nature. There is a sense of lightness and harmony in these strange pictures, like visions of Arcadia.

. The paintings neither celebrate nor condemn the ancien regime. "Fragonard did not give lessons," observes Katharine Baetjer, the Metropolitan's curator for the show. "He painted life as he saw it." Both his realism and his dramatic power are apparent in the so-called fantasy portraits, eleven identically sized half-length figures of men and women in rich costumes, which were probably painted over nearly a decade, and are displayed together here for the first time. In the 18th century sense, these are not portraits at all but hastily done oil sketches. (Fragonard boasted that each was done "in one hour's time.") Some of the figures can be identified: Denis Diderot, the philosopher, for example, or the Abbe de Saint-Non, Fragonard's friend and patron. Meanwhile, many of the titles -- The Actor, The Writer, The Warrior and so on -- suggest an underlying symbolic scheme whose meaning is now lost. The artifice of the poses and the theatricality of the costuming look back to Rubens and Rembrandt. But the psychological truth of the subjects' moods, conveyed in hurried slashes of thick paint, are eerily prophetic. They look a century ahead, to the dawning of impressionism.