Quotes

Let us look deeper into the behaviour and personality of this exceptional artist, with our collection of Jean-Honore Fragonard quotes, including both his own opinions plus also those of others whilst reflecting on his career.

Famous Quotes by Jean-Honore Fragonard

If necessary, I would even paint with my bottom.

I was in awe of Michelangelo's energy. I felt things that I could not express. When I saw the beauty of the Raphaels, I was moved to tears, and I could scarcely hold my pencil. For several months I remained in a state of apathy that I was unable to overcome, until I resolved to study the painters who I felt I had a chance of rivaling: and so I turned my attention to Barocci, Pietro da Cortona, Solimena, and Tiepolo.

Quotes about Jean-Honore Fragonard by Art Historians and Fellow Artists

Fragonard has been bracketed with Watteau as one of the two great poetic painters of the 18th century in France. A prodigiously active artist, he produced more than 550 paintings, several thousand drawings (although many hundreds are known to be lost), and 35 etchings. His style, based primarily on that of Rubens, was rapid, vigorous, and fluent, never tight or fussy like that of so many of his contemporaries. Although the greater part of his active life was passed during the Neoclassical period, he continued to paint in a Rococo idiom until shortly before the French Revolution. Only five paintings by Fragonard are dated, but the chronology of the rest can be fairly accurately established from other sources such as engravings and documents.

Encyclopaedia Britannica

Embodying the freedom and curiosity of the French Enlightenment, Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) developed an exuberant and fluid manner as a painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Prolific and inventive, he abandoned early on the conventional career path dictated by the hierarchical structure of the Royal Academy, working largely for private patrons. His work constitutes a further elaboration of the Rococo idiom established by Antoine Watteau and François Boucher, a manner perfectly suited to his subjects, which favored the playful, the erotic, and the joys of domesticity.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings (not counting drawings and etchings), of which only five are dated. Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism.

Wikipedia