The Small Park (Le petit parc)

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The Small Park (Le petit parc): Jean-Honore Fragonard

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Jean-Honore Fragonard Oil Painting - The Small Park (Le petit parc)

Keywords: Park, petit, parc

Work Overview: The Small Park (Le petit parc)
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
probably c. 1762 - c. 1764
Oil on canvas
Image size: 36.6 x 45 cm

Painted after his summer spent sketching in Italian parks during a trip to Italy with the Abbé de Saint-Non in 1760/1, this is one of Fragonard's most beautiful landscape paintings. The leafy landscape may have been inspired the Dragon Fountain and gardens at the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, where Fragonard made a large number of drawings. However, the final image characteristically owes more to the artist’s imagination than faithfully recreating the original reference.
Six related variants of the composition are known: two red chalk drawings (New York, private collection), a counter-proof (Sacramento, Crocker Art Gallery), an engraving (dated 1763), this painting, and a gouache (New York, Morgan Library and Museum). The works were probably made in this order and illustrate how Fragonard explored the motif by changing direction, medium and scale of the image. Rather than clearly distinguishable as preparatory studies, finished work and copies, these works seem to have been made without a clear development in mind. Especially later in his career Fragonard often produced sketch-like works which were never meant to be translated into a 'finished' work. These 'experiments' appealed to a well-informed group of connaisseurs collecting his work.
The Abbé de Saint-Non and Franz Edmund Weirotter also produced etchings after the same composition, and drawings by Hubert Robert with the same motives exist, illustrating a regular exchange within this group of amateurs and artists.

Fragonard used light and atmosphere to absorb people and objects until one is left with an airy, empty but still vibrating, surface; it is as if a conjuring trick had been played over some painting by Boucher, from which so much 'reality' has been abstracted. For both Fragonard and the Guardi, this is an escape from the discipline represented by Boucher and Tiepolo, but it is given an additional twist by Fragonard's knowledge and admiration of Tiepolo - the wilder genius anyway, but one become wilder and more romantic in Fragonard's interpretations of his compositions. Just as Veronese had provided Tiepolo with material out of which to build his own fantasy, so Tiepolo stimulated Fragonard.

Fragonard is a romantic rococo painter, inspired more perhaps by the picturesque aspects of nature than by people, who are usually dwarfed into insignificance beside the foaming trees which shoot up like great jets in his landscapes. When this Francesco Guardi-like diminution does not take place, Fragonard seems to produce a version of Gian Antonio's style, in which figures become mere arabesques of paint, animated but often faceless, tight balls of energy that shoot about the canvas under the impulse of his brush. In both styles they remain the painter's puppets, and one is always conscious of manipulation. Although capable of doing so, he is really too eager to stop and record natural appearances, actual textures, or facial expressions.

This charming parkscape is composed from drawings made in the gardens of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli in 1760.

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Jean-Honore Fragonard

Work Overview