Jean-Honoré Fragonard (Grasse 1732-1806 Paris)

This portrait depicts the son of the better-known fermier général Pierre-Jacques-Onésyme Bergeret de Grancourt (1715-1785), patron, collector and close friend of Fragonard, with whom he travelled through Italy in 1773-1774. The artist also had the habit of visiting the Bergeret family’s country estate of Cassan near L’Isle-Adam, where his only daughter, Rosalie, died prematurely in 1788. Another circular portrait of Bergeret fils is in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Besançon (inv. D. 2874; see exhib. cat., Besançon, 2007, op. cit., no. 96); it belongs to a group of seven sheets from the collection Huot-Fragonard and that of Camille Groult, bequeathed in 1986 to the Louvre, including, among others, three self-portraits, a portrait of Fragonard’s wife, of Rosalie, of his son Alexandre-Evariste, and of Marguerite Gérard (Fragonard, exhib. cat., Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987-1988, nos. 287-289, 292-294, 296, ill.).