Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Jean-Honore Fragonard was a French painter and printmaker, born April 5, 1732, in Grasse, France, and died August 22, 1806, in Paris. He trained briefly under Jean-Baptiste Chardin before studying with Francois Boucher, and won the Prix de Rome in 1752. Fragonard became Rococo's last major exponent, producing over five hundred paintings remarkable for their fluid technique and delicate hedonism, that captured the style's characteristic scenes of aristocratic leisure and garden fantasy. His most celebrated painting, The Swing, around 1767, exemplifies Rococo painting at its height. As taste shifted toward Neoclassicism, Fragonard lost his aristocratic patrons; after the Revolution his former acquaintance Jacques-Louis David appointed him a curator at the newly formed national museum in the Louvre.