Fragonard

A Seated Male Academy, in a Voluminous Coat with One Arm Raised and the Other Outstretched.

Red chalk. Laid down on an old blue mount, inscribed in pen and brown ink: par Fragonard.
510 x 340 mm (20 ¹/₈ x 13 ³/₈ in.)

Provenance: Sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 31 March 1914, lot 30; 200fr. to Leclerc ‘Etude probablement pour la figure principale de la composition du maître: ‘A la gloire de Franklin’; Georges Bourgarel, sale, Paris, 15-16 June 1922, lot 86, where acquired by Sacha Guitry, Paris; thence by descent to Lana Marconi Guitry, sale, Paris 24 November 1972, lot 37 (as French School), where acquired; Private collection.

Exhibited: Tokyo, The National Museum of Western Art and Kyoto, Municipal Museum, Fragonard, 1980, cat.159.

Literature: S. Guitry, Cent merveilles, Paris 1954, ill. P.130; G. Wildenstein, The paintings of Fragonard, Paris 1960, p.27, no.2; A. Ananoff, L’œuvre dessiné de Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), catalogue raisonné, Paris 1961-70, vol. I, p.117, cat.245, vol.II, under Addenda et Corrigenda, p.303, cat.245; exhibition catalogue, Pierre Rosenberg, Paris, Grand Palais and New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fragonard, 1988, under cat.12.

The grand scale of this impressive drawing demonstrates something of Fragonard’s ambitions as a young artist yet, while the sheet is entirely in keeping with the restricted academic tradition, which demanded the study of single, posed figures it has an amiability and liveliness of expression and style redolent of his inventive technique and irrepressible character. A testament to its grandeur, however, is the fact that it was formerly considered to be a preparatory study for the historic painting, Au Génie de Franklin. In fact it compares extremely closely with other academy studies from Fragonard’s early career, mostly of figures in ecclesiastical dress¹, considered to have been made whilst he was a pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome. It also has a marked similarity in style to another large drawing in red chalk, probably made out of doors, certainly in Italy², of a young woman and a little girl, which is now in the Musée des Beaux Arts, Besançon. This latter comparison itself helps to support the dating of the related academies to Fragonard’s time in Rome, an issue discussed by Pierre Rosenberg in the early pages of the catalogue for his monographic exhibition of 1988. Rosenberg cites an annotation on one of the associated drawings, now at Orléans, which dates the sheet to Fragonard’s stay at the Palazzo Mancini, then the Académie de France. He also reports that Natoire, the director of the Academy, had revived the practice of encouraging the academicians to draw ‘during the holidays .. draped figures, of various kinds and different dress, but above all in ecclesiastical type habits which produce the most excellent folds’³; Natoire came to appreciate the academy studies of his protégé, Fragonard, certain of which had a second life on their return to France, being used as models for engravings to illustrate the chapter on ‘dessein’ in Diderot’s Encyclopaedie⁴.

Fragonard arrived in Rome in December 1756; he remained there for four years but in the first year he was struck by a profound crisis of confidence despite having been warned by Boucher that he would be ‘a lost man’ if he dwelt too seriously on the works of Raphael, Michelangelo and their followers⁵. We are told that he fell into an indolent state, unable to work for months after seeing the beauty of Raphael’s work and it was only on forcing himself to study the paintings of artists such as Barocci, Cortona, Solimena and Tiepolo that he was able to revitalise himself. Natoire, was at first angry and then disappointed by Fragonard’s inactivity and his hesitant attempts to work again (his entrance presentations ‘les dispositions brilliant’ for the Academy having been so remarkable) but gradually, Natoire’s reports to Paris improve and the work sent for approval regains respect and by 1760, ‘Fragonard travaille avec success .. et promet beaucoup’. That year, he passed months working at Tivoli, in the company of the Abbé de Saint-Non and travelled to Naples with Ango before beginning the slow return journey to France, studying constantly, as his drawings of paintings, monuments, views and people record.

Although this drawing has been related to the figure of Benjamin Franklin in Fragonard’s drawing of 1778 Au genie de Franklin now in the collection of the White House, Washington D.C., which was used for an etching by Marguérite Gérard (498 x 315 mm (21 ½ x 17 ¼ in.), the similarity in the figure’s glorified pose is surely an echo rather than an actual connection⁷ as the drawing must be at least twenty years earlier. In fact and remarkably, the existence of an academy study of the same posed figure by Boucher’s fellow pensionnaire, Jean-Baptiste-Henri Deshays (1729-1765) gives a precise two year period in which it must have been drawn - 1756-58 - as these are the years that the two artists overlapped at the Palazzo Mancini. We are grateful to Louis Lamy for pointing out the existence of Deshays’s drawing in the Louvre, which is in black chalk heightened with white and shows the figure seen at a very slightly different angle with the upraised arm almost hiding the head – the two men must have been sitting close to one another with Deshays slightly to the left of Fragonard but otherwise the pose and the drapery make absolutely clear that the drawings were done at exactly the same time, although Fragonard, true to his ebullient character has made more of the model’s slightly pained expression and also added the laurel wreath. Most probably the two drawings were also kept together in the same drawer or portfolio as they are both folded in a similar manner, although the present work is on a significantly larger sheet. As so little of Fragonard’s official Academy work survives, except for the small number of individual academy drawings of heavily draped ecclesiastical figures⁶, the present work, with it’s powerful style and lively character, is an important record of these intense and formative early years and the Academy practices.

Jean-Baptiste-Henry Deshays                                          Fragonard, To the Glory of Benjamin Franklin,
Musée du Louvre, RF38568                                             collection of the White House, Washington DC.

Notes:

1. See exhibition catalogue, Pierre Rosenberg, Paris, Grand Palais and New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fragonard, 1988, cats. 11 and 12 and associated figs..
2. The confirmation that this drawing was made in Italy comes from the fact that Hubert Robert made a study of the same girls, whilst the two artists were clearly together, as they were in Rome at the French Academy (for both these drawings, see exhibition catalogue, J.H. Fragonard e H. Robert a Roma, Rome, Villa Medici, 1990-1991, cats.159 and 160).
3. ‘dans le temps de vacances … des figures toutes drapes, varies dans toutes sotes de genre et different habits, surtout des habits d’églises qui occasionnent de fort beaux plis’  in P. Rosenberg, Fragonard, op. cit., p.74, quitoed from a letter of 18 October 1758.
4. See Rosenberg, op. cit., pp.73-74.
5. ‘Tu vas voir là-bas, mon cher Frago, les ouvrages des Raphaël, des Michel-Ange et de leurs imitateur: mais je te le dis en confidence, et bien bas, sit tu prends au sérieux”ce-gens là” tu es un home perdu’, a warning reported by Fragonard’s grandson: see Rosenberg, op. cit., p.61.
6. See Rosenberg, ibid.,  p.63.
7. A. Ananoff, op. cit., I, no.450, fig.156 and exhib. cat. op. cit., 1987-88, cat.240; also see, Pierre Rosenberg, ‘Franklin and Fragonard’, Porceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol.150, no.4, 2006, p.588, fig.14.