View of a park with figures admiring a statue

With its rapid, energetic brushstrokes and great freedom of execution, this lyrical landscape can be dated to Fragonard's first stay in Italy around 1760. It may be one of his first landscapes combining black chalk, brushwork and brown wash, and belongs to a group of small-scale landscapes based on the same model, as Eunice Williams first demonstrated already in 1978, before Diederick Bakhuÿs did so again in 2006 (Drawings by Fragonard in North American Collections, exhib. cat., Washington, National Gallery of Art, and Massachusetts, Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, New York, The Frick Collection, 1978-1979, p. 34; and Bakhuÿs, op. cit. p. 203). Further drawings from this group of densely composed landscapes, richly heightened with brown wash, are in the Cleveland Art Museum (inv. 1925.1006; Bakhuÿs, op. cit., 2006-2007, p. 204, fig. 1), in the Baltimore Museum of Art (inv. 13.104; see Williams, op. cit., 1978-1979, no. 4) and in the collection of Jean Bonna collection, Geneva (op. cit., 2006-2007, no. 47).