The goddess Aurora triumphs over night, announcing Apollo in his chariot, while Morpheus sleeps - a bozzetto

In Roman mythology, Aurora - the goddess of the dawn and sister of the sun and the moon - renews herself each morning and flies across the sky to announce the arrival of the sun. In Fragonard’s magical and luminous painting, a bare-breasted Aurora swathed in a swirl of brilliantly hued drapery, sweeps across the sky, pushing back the shades of night, as the sun god, Sol (or Apollo) drives the steeds that pull the golden Chariot of the Sun over the horizon in his sister’s wake. In the lower right corner of the composition, Morpheus, god of dreams, wearing the garland of poppies that is his attribute, remains sleeping, still shrouded in the mantle of night. The dynamic composition of the present painting, which allows it to be appreciated from any angle, its dramatic sotto in su perspective, and the marked foreshortening of the figures, all indicate that it was intended as the design for a painted ceiling. No such ceiling by Fragonard exists, but the artist was engaged on several decorative projects in the mid-1760s, none of which was completed, but for which the subject of Aurora would have been an appropriate addition. In May 1766, Fragonard (along with L-J-J Durameau) was awarded an official commission to decorate a ceiling in the Galerie d’Apollon at the Musée du Louvre. Fragonard and Durameau were to complete the décor depicting the Four Seasons, which had been left unfinished by Charles Le Brun. Durameau finally finished Summer, or Ceres and her Companions Imploring the Sun in 1774, while Fragonard seems to have abandoned the project before it had progressed very far. The subject with which he was entrusted is unknown – probably Winter or Spring – but the theme of Aurora would, of course, have been ideally suited for the intended site, as Cuzin and Rosenberg have noted (op. cit.). The present sketch, Cuzin observed, with its ‘ambitious and sumptuous character, in the grand manner, may give some idea of the artist’s project.’

Aurora was a subject Fragonard turned to on several occasions in the 1750s and ‘60s. In another unrealised project from 1766, he was asked to paint two overdoors representing Day and Night for the gaming room of the Château de Bellevue, which belonged to the daughters of Louis XV. Although the paintings seem never to have been executed, the commission described the proposed program very specifically, noting that Day would be ‘represented by Apollo in his chariot, preceded by Dawn, who is scattering flowers, and followed by the Hours’. Fragonard’s earliest representation of Dawn, painted a decade earlier when the artist was just leaving Boucher’s studio and still deeply in the master’s debt, is a ravishing overdoor of Aurora, dating from the mid-1750s (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts). Painted in a rectangular formant, Fragonard divided his composition diagonally into two distinct zones, with the female figure of Night entombing herself in a dark blanket of sleep in the lower left, and Aurora rising above her, scattering flowers, and bathed in the breaking light of morning.

The present sketch, almost certainly painted at least a decade after the youthful Boston Aurora, reveals the artist’s greater maturity and sophistication in a composition that is daring in its dramatic decentralisation and vertiginous destabilisation. The viewer’s eyes are invited to dart around the canvas, brought still and focused only by the blazing brilliance of the soaring figure of Aurora herself, whose saturated colour and spotlight illumination anchor the whole dazzling scene.