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Lot Essay
This newly rediscovered painting can be documented with considerable precision. It was included in the March 1776 sale that offered property belonging to the Comte du Barry, (whose brother was married to Madame du Barry, mistress of the Louis XVI) and its appearance was meticulously recorded in a margin illustration in the auction catalogue by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin. (The Du Barry catalogue illustrated by Saint-Aubin belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art; it remains unpublished, but the illustration after the present painting is reproduced by Rosenberg, 1989, op. cit., fig. 56A, p. 77). The Du Barry sale included property belonging to the count, but also a number of lots belonging to a variety of anonymous consignors, including his sister-in-law; one cannot be certain who owned the present painting. It was described in the catalogue as 'a sketch of several Cupids grouped together on clouds. Two can be seen who appear to be embracing each other. Canvas. 62.1 x 48.6 cm.'. In the same sale, offered two lots earlier, was Fragonard's famous Groupes d'enfants dans le ciel (c. 1767; Musée du Louvre), an extraordinary oval composition with dozens of putti gamboling among the clouds notoriously censured by Denis Diderot as 'a nice big omelette of children in the sky very fluffy, all yellow, all burnt'.
Little more than a month later this painting appeared in a second Paris auction whose catalogue specifically identified it as being of the same size as the picture in the Du Barry sale, with the same description, and as having been 'fait en Italie', or painted in Italy between 1756 and 1761 when the young Fragonard was a pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome. The catalogue goes on to describe the painting as 'of great merit, and worked like a Poussin'. It was next recorded in the massive art collection of Vassal de Saint-Hubert (sold, Paris, 24 April 1783), and subsequently belonged to the expert Pierre Remy, who exhibited it in the 1786 Salon de la Correspondance, no. 25 (where the artist was compared favorably to Solimena).
Even a cursory examination of the painting, which is richly colored and robustly executed, confirms the contemporary comparison of it to works by Poussin, in particular the seventeenth century master's very early, Titianesque mythologies from the 1620s. Nevertheless, evocations of Titian's own putti pictures could as easily be found in Fragonard's charming tribute to the imaginative world of Antiquity, or the young artist's memories of the full-blooded putti of Rubens that he had studied on the walls of the Luxembourg Palace.
Little more than a month later this painting appeared in a second Paris auction whose catalogue specifically identified it as being of the same size as the picture in the Du Barry sale, with the same description, and as having been 'fait en Italie', or painted in Italy between 1756 and 1761 when the young Fragonard was a pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome. The catalogue goes on to describe the painting as 'of great merit, and worked like a Poussin'. It was next recorded in the massive art collection of Vassal de Saint-Hubert (sold, Paris, 24 April 1783), and subsequently belonged to the expert Pierre Remy, who exhibited it in the 1786 Salon de la Correspondance, no. 25 (where the artist was compared favorably to Solimena).
Even a cursory examination of the painting, which is richly colored and robustly executed, confirms the contemporary comparison of it to works by Poussin, in particular the seventeenth century master's very early, Titianesque mythologies from the 1620s. Nevertheless, evocations of Titian's own putti pictures could as easily be found in Fragonard's charming tribute to the imaginative world of Antiquity, or the young artist's memories of the full-blooded putti of Rubens that he had studied on the walls of the Luxembourg Palace.