拍品专文
The attribution to Fragonard was confirmed in the 2001 catalogue by Eunice Williams who pointed out that the drawing is a study for the large wash drawing in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Besançon (P. Rosenberg, Fragonard, exhib. cat., Paris, Galerie Nationale du Grand Palais and elsewhere, 1987, no. 185). The Besançon drawing was bought along with another landscape by the architect Pierre-Adrien Pâris before 1806 and given to the town's Bibliothèque Municipale in 1819. The inventory of his collection drawn up by Pâris in 1806 mentions the other composition as having been drawn in Rome by Fragonard in 1773, which probably dates the present drawing. As so often with Fragonard the landscape does not quite show an identifiable site but a generic Roman garden embellished with statues.