The Fountain of Love

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The Fountain of Love: Jean-Honore Fragonard

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Jean-Honore Fragonard Oil Painting - The Fountain of Love

Keywords: Fountain, Love

Work Overview: The Fountain of Love
Jean-Honore Fragonard
Date: c.1785
Style: Rococo
Genre: allegorical painting
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 63.5 x 50.7 cm

The melting chiaroscuro and classical figures contrast with Fragonard's earlier cheerful informality and anticipate the classicism which came to dominate French painting in the 1790s.

The painting is part of a group of allegorical depictions of love, painted by Fragonard in the 1780s. Another version of the same composition, begun before P394, is at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. A print by Nicolas François Regnault after the composition appeared in 1785 and seems to have used both versions as models. It therefore provides a terminus ante quem for the paintings. Technical evidence suppoorts the idea that they were painted at the same time. A smaller oil sketch for the composition is in a private collection. The two main versions are strikingly different in their mood and style - the Wallace Collection painting more neo-classical, the Getty version more Rococo. It is typical for Fragonard that he chose to switch between different styles at the same time of his career.
The scene depicts love as a natural force and uncontrollable passion, stronger than the people affected by it. This perception of love was still recent around 1785 when Fragonard painted the two versions.While the image of a fountain of love was known, e. g. from Ariost, the image is Fragonard's pictorial invention without a direct literary source.

An allegory on the theme of love. This painting has a riveting sense of drama, heightened contrasts of light and shadow, and a restricted palette redolent of nocturnal mystery—characteristics that indicate a new Romantic sensibility. Fragonard's intimate allegories are among the earliest and most eloquent expressions of a new vision of romantic love as an all-consuming experience of near-mystical communion—a vision that was worlds apart from the blithe, libertine spirit of the Rococo era.

In the midst of a verdant forest, a young man and woman eagerly rush forward, their feet just reaching the edge of a fountain's basin. Putti frolic in the fountain's waters and billowing spray, and one of them offers a cup of the magical liquid for the young lovers to drink. The story of the Garden of Love, an allegory of the nature and progress of love that has its origins in the poetry of classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, centers on this Fountain of Love. The fountain brings forth the water in which Cupid dips his arrows or from which lovers drink and fall in love. In nearly every period, artists have painted this romantic motif. During the 1700s, artists came to treat the Fountain of Love almost as a genre subject, with lovers in contemporary dress flirting in a garden around a decorative fountain. With this version, Jean-Honoré Fragonard returned the allegory to its classical origins and imbued it with the thrilling rush of those first beguiling moments of love. The quintessential Rococo artist, Fragonard responded to the Neoclassical movement in an extremely inventive manner, adding a soft, steamy atmosphere to his cameo-like figures.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard painted two versions of 'The Fountain of Love' around 1785. One version of this iconic image was part of the Wallace Collection bequest, London, in 1897; the other was rediscovered in the United States in 1996, and subsequently acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

The Wallace Collection painting has now been cleaned and restored by Mark Leonard, visiting conservator from the Getty Museum. Comprehensive technical study of the two versions was carried out when the paintings were brought together in the National Gallery, and yielded much new information about Fragonard’s radically different technique for each work, elucidating their evolution and relationship.

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Jean-Honore Fragonard

Work Overview