Roman and Egyptian antiquities

According to the diary of Fragonard’s patron, the Abbé de Saint-Non, with whom the artist travelled throughout Italy between 1759 and 1760, on the 5th of December, 1759 the two travelers ‘returned to Portici early in the morning to see this interesting collection a second time’ (Saint-Non and Fragonard, Panopticon Italiano. Un diario di viaggio ritrovato 1759-1761, ed. P. Rosenberg, Rome, 2000, p. 112). The objects depicted on this sheet were most likely copied at that time from the antiquities discovered in Herculaneum and kept in the museum in Portici, a building founded in 1738 by King Charles of Bourbon (op. cit., p. 279, note 189).

Three drawings with the same arrangement of objects and the same mounts are in the British Museum, but they represent antiquities seen in Florence (A. Ananoff, L'Oeuvre dessiné de Fragonard, II, Paris, 1963, nos. 1128, 1129 and 1132).

This sheet, a counterproof reworked by Fragonard in black chalk, bears inscriptions in the Abbé de Saint-Non's hand. Although the composition is not known in print, some of the individual objects can be found in drawings by Pierre-Adrien Pâris, engraved by Pierre-Philippe Choffard, for the second volume of the Abbé de Saint-Non's Voyage pittoresque ou Description des Royaumes de Naples et de Sicile (P. Lamers, Il Viaggio nel Sud, Naples, 1992, pp. 310-333).