.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
La Coquette Fixée is among the most appealing, of the many oeuvres de jeunesse of Fragonard to have been rediscovered in the last three decades.
Our understanding of Fragonard's early style has been based largely on two documented but anomalous history paintings: the victorious Grand Prix submission from 1752, Jeroboam Sacrificing to the Idols (École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris), and Christ Washing the Feet of the Apostles, an enormous altarpiece painted in 1755 for the Cathedral of Grasse (where it remains).
It seems likely, as Pierre Rosenberg has suggested, that Fragonard was employed surreptitiously as an assistant in Boucher's studio even after his admission to the prestigious École Royale des Elèves Protégés - in violation of the strict rules of the school, to be sure, but Fragonard was poor and Boucher needed the talented and facile painter to work on the many commissions ordered from his workshop. This would account for the fact that many of Fragonard's early genre paintings - including La Coquette Fixée - are executed quite consciously in the 'goût Boucher', and that more than a few were, early on, misidentified as the work of Fragonard's master.
The young painter, who had so skillfully learned to emulate Boucher's distinctive style, naturally enough sought early success with independent works in Boucher's most commercially appreciated genre. The flirtatious subject matter, lush garden setting, and extravagantly dressed shepherds and shepherdess of the charming La Coquette Fixée all have precedents in Boucher's decorative pastorales. Beseeched by two suitors, Fragonard's heroine crowns with a wreath of roses the boy who has won her heart; he holds a target on which two of Cupid's arrows have struck the bull's-eye. Yet already one can see the distinctive characteristics that mark the art of Fragonard: his preferred palette of powder blue, lemon yellow and rose; his thicker and more fluent application of paint; a deeper sense of emotional and sensual longing than that found in the pastoral paintings of his teacher.
La Coquette Fixée was engraved under that title, in reverse, by Jean Couché and Jacques Dambrun, and published with a dedication to the Marquis de Boisandré, governor of the Château de Raincy. Identified as reproducing an original painting by Fragonard, the print was announced in the Mercure de France and several other journals in the spring and summer of 1785. Despite the later date of the engraving, there can be no doubt that the painting itself was made in 1752-5: it is remarkably similar in subject, scale, palette, composition and handling to The Musical Contest (The Wallace Collection, London), a painting that is now dated universally to the early 1750s.
The present painting has never been publicly exhibited and has, until recently, been known to scholars only through a black and white reproduction in the 1935 catalogue of the Surmont sale. Although it appears in all of the modern catalogues raisonnés of Fragonard's paintings, it had often been given to the artist tentatively and with reservations, and was occasionally described as a possible copy (see Wildenstein, 1960 and Cuzin 1987). The first scholar to have seen the painting in person since the 1930s was Pierre Rosenberg, who fully endorsed its attribution to Fragonard in 1989 (op. cit.); although Rosenberg had suggested that the present painting was an oil sketch for a lost final version of the composition, all current scholars now believe it to be the definitive version of La Coquette Fixée. Upon seeing the painting in the original, Cuzin joined Rosenberg in confirming unhesitatingly its attribution to Fragonard (see Cuzin 2001).
Our understanding of Fragonard's early style has been based largely on two documented but anomalous history paintings: the victorious Grand Prix submission from 1752, Jeroboam Sacrificing to the Idols (École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris), and Christ Washing the Feet of the Apostles, an enormous altarpiece painted in 1755 for the Cathedral of Grasse (where it remains).
It seems likely, as Pierre Rosenberg has suggested, that Fragonard was employed surreptitiously as an assistant in Boucher's studio even after his admission to the prestigious École Royale des Elèves Protégés - in violation of the strict rules of the school, to be sure, but Fragonard was poor and Boucher needed the talented and facile painter to work on the many commissions ordered from his workshop. This would account for the fact that many of Fragonard's early genre paintings - including La Coquette Fixée - are executed quite consciously in the 'goût Boucher', and that more than a few were, early on, misidentified as the work of Fragonard's master.
The young painter, who had so skillfully learned to emulate Boucher's distinctive style, naturally enough sought early success with independent works in Boucher's most commercially appreciated genre. The flirtatious subject matter, lush garden setting, and extravagantly dressed shepherds and shepherdess of the charming La Coquette Fixée all have precedents in Boucher's decorative pastorales. Beseeched by two suitors, Fragonard's heroine crowns with a wreath of roses the boy who has won her heart; he holds a target on which two of Cupid's arrows have struck the bull's-eye. Yet already one can see the distinctive characteristics that mark the art of Fragonard: his preferred palette of powder blue, lemon yellow and rose; his thicker and more fluent application of paint; a deeper sense of emotional and sensual longing than that found in the pastoral paintings of his teacher.
La Coquette Fixée was engraved under that title, in reverse, by Jean Couché and Jacques Dambrun, and published with a dedication to the Marquis de Boisandré, governor of the Château de Raincy. Identified as reproducing an original painting by Fragonard, the print was announced in the Mercure de France and several other journals in the spring and summer of 1785. Despite the later date of the engraving, there can be no doubt that the painting itself was made in 1752-5: it is remarkably similar in subject, scale, palette, composition and handling to The Musical Contest (The Wallace Collection, London), a painting that is now dated universally to the early 1750s.
The present painting has never been publicly exhibited and has, until recently, been known to scholars only through a black and white reproduction in the 1935 catalogue of the Surmont sale. Although it appears in all of the modern catalogues raisonnés of Fragonard's paintings, it had often been given to the artist tentatively and with reservations, and was occasionally described as a possible copy (see Wildenstein, 1960 and Cuzin 1987). The first scholar to have seen the painting in person since the 1930s was Pierre Rosenberg, who fully endorsed its attribution to Fragonard in 1989 (op. cit.); although Rosenberg had suggested that the present painting was an oil sketch for a lost final version of the composition, all current scholars now believe it to be the definitive version of La Coquette Fixée. Upon seeing the painting in the original, Cuzin joined Rosenberg in confirming unhesitatingly its attribution to Fragonard (see Cuzin 2001).