At the time of his death in 1806, the rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard had not painted for two decades. Following a period of huge public success, the painter’s reputation fell.
Fragonard: Painting Out of Time
takes this prolonged artistic silence as a point of departure to investigate the maverick personality of Fragonard within the lively society of eighteenth-century France. Personally secretive, Fragonard nevertheless created revealing images that undermined a normal sense of space and time. Satish Padiyar investigates the life and work of the last of the libertine painters of the
ancien regime
, a contemporary of Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and presents dramatic new perspectives on works such as
The Progress of Lov
e, painted for Madame du Barry, the infamous
The Bolt
, and the ever-popular
The Swing
.