Jean-Honoré Fragonard was the preeminent painter of the French Rococo, a style defined by lightness, pleasure, and the intimate pleasures of aristocratic life in the decades before the Revolution swept it away. Born in Grasse in 1732, he won the Prix de Rome and trained under both Boucher and Chardin, absorbing their very different approaches to color and domestic subject matter. When the Revolution arrived, his patrons lost their wealth and their heads, and Fragonard — now stylistically obsolete — spent his final decades in obscurity, dying in 1806 largely forgotten, his reputation only fully restored in the twentieth century.
