Fragonard's Progress of Love

by Alan Hollinghurst, Xavier F. Salomon

Overview

An essay by Xavier F. Salomon paired with a contribution by award-winning novelist Alan Hollinghurst bring to life Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s (1732–1806) Progress of Love, a series of fourteen paintings considered by many to be the artist’s masterpiece. The paintings were commissioned in 1771 for the comtesse du Barry, to be installed in 1772 in Louveciennes, the pavilion outside Paris built for her by her lover, Louis XV. By 1773 the canvases, The Pursuit, The Meeting, The Lover Crowned, and Love Letters, had been rejected by Du Barry and returned to the artist. In 1790 Fragonard moved the canvases to his cousin’s house, the Villa Maubert, in Grasse, and over the course of the year painted ten additional panels: two large-scale works, Love Triumphant and Reverie; four narrow “strips” depicting hollyhocks, and four overdoors of putti. Sold by the Maubert estate to the dealer Agnew’s in 1898, the works were later purchased in February 1915 by the industrialist Henry Clay Frick. By May 1916 the panels were installed at Frick’s new mansion in New York in the present-day Fragonard Room in The Frick Collection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781911282983
Publisher:	D Giles Limited
Publication date:	01/11/2022
Series:	Frick Diptych , #8
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	7.25(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Alan Hollinghurst is an award-winning novelist, poet, short story writer and translator. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 1989 Somerset Maugham Award, the 1994 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 2004 Booker Prize for his acclaimed novel The Line of Beauty (2004). His next novel, The Stranger's Child, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011. Xavier F. Salomon is Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at The Frick Collection, New York.

Read an Excerpt

Not long after I’d first seen the Frick’s Fragonard Room, I was trying to describe the four great canvases of The Progress of Love to a friend. I was struck by how soon the narrative itself had blurred; it was now a mere impression, of gilded animation, surprise and success, only sketchily recalled. What I remembered, overwhelmingly, were the trees. Later, I kept four postcards of the paintings on the shelf above my desk, where they got shifted in and out of sequence, and always it was the trees that caught my eye and seemed, in their huge, almost unearthly forms, to bow and beckon to each other. Back in the room itself, years later, I regained the sense of scale. It is as if we look out into a fantastic parkland that fills the view; the paintings, more than ten feet high and closely spaced, become a frieze of eloquent gestures enacted in a setting of luxuriant strangeness and power. The darting and gesturing young lovers seem wholly unaware of this setting. They live only in and for themselves. But the viewer takes in the whole complex picture.

Editorial Reviews

Hollinghurst is an inspired choice of creative artist for the one part of the diptych and The Frick is to be congratulated on its stated mission in the Diptych series to open up its major works of art to critical dialogue.”—Satish Padiyar, H-France Review

From the Publisher