Live Auction 21459Old Master and British Drawings and Watercolours
JEAN-HONORÉ FRAGONARD (GRASSE 1732-1806 PARIS)
Lot 74 Property of an American Collector

JEAN-HONORÉ FRAGONARD (GRASSE 1732-1806 PARIS)

View of a park with figures admiring a statue

Closed4 July 2023

Estimate

GBP 20,000–25,000

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JEAN-HONORÉ FRAGONARD (GRASSE 1732-1806 PARIS)
View of a park with figures admiring a statue
with inscription 'frago' (lower left)
black chalk, brown and grey wash, pen and brown ink framing lines
17.3 x 23.3 cm (6 3/4 x 9 1/4 in.)

with Galerie Cailleux, Paris, by 1981 (Rome 1760-1770. Fragonard, Hubert Robert et leurs amis, 1983, no. 22, ill.; Aspects de Fragonard. Peintures, dessins, estampes, 1987, no. 44, ill.).
Juan de Beistegui, Château de Groussay, Montfort-l’Amaury, by 1987; Sotheby’s, Château de Groussay, 2 June 1999, lot 64.
with Pandora Old Masters, New York (Recent Acquisitions, 2004, pp. 24-25, ill.).
Private collection, U.S.A.

Specialist note

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).