Fragonard E-Book

Haldane Macfall

• Herausgeber: Haldane Macfall
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

High up, amongst the Sea-Alps that stretch along the southern edge of France, where romantic Provence bathes her sunburnt feet in the blue waters of the Mediterranean, high on the mountain’s side hangs the steep little town of Grasse, embowered midst grey-green olive-trees. In as sombre a narrow street as there is in all her dark alleys, on the fifth day of April in the much bewigged and powdered year of 1732, there was born to a glovemaker of the town, worthy mercer Fragonard, a boy-child, whom the priest in the gloomy church christened Jean Honoré Fragonard.

Leseprobe

Fragonard

By

Haldane Macfall

ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHTREPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR

Table of Contents

I. THE BEGINNINGS

II. ROME

III. THE DU BARRY

IV. MARRIAGE

V. THE TERROR

VI. THE END

PLATE I.—CHIFFRE D’AMOUR.   Frontispiece

(In the Wallace Collection)

Fragonard, like his master Boucher, soon found that the pompous, historical, and religious pictures which the critics demanded of him, pleased no one but the critics. It was a fortunate day for him when he turned his back upon them, and employed his charming gifts upon the statement of the life of his day. And in few paintings that created his fame has he surpassed the fine handling of this scene, in which the girl cuts her lover’s initials on the trunk of a tree—the dainty figure silhouetted against the dreamlike background of sky and tree that he loved so well. There is over all the glamour of the poetic statement supremely done.

I. THE BEGINNINGS

High up, amongst the Sea-Alps that stretch along the southern edge of France, where romantic Provence bathes her sunburnt feet in the blue waters of the Mediterranean, high on the mountain’s side hangs the steep little town of Grasse, embowered midst grey-green olive-trees. In as sombre a narrow street as there is in all her dark alleys, on the fifth day of April in the much bewigged and powdered year of 1732, there was born to a glovemaker of the town, worthy mercer Fragonard, a boy-child, whom the priest in the gloomy church christened Jean Honoré Fragonard.

As the glovemaker looked out of his sombre house over the sunlit slopes of the grey-green olive-trees that stretched away to the deep blue waters of the sea, he vowed his child to commerce and a thrifty life in this far-away country place that was but little vexed with the high ambitions of distant, fickle, laughing Paris, or her splendid scandals; nay, scarce gave serious thought to her gadding fashions or her feverish vogues—indeed, the attenuated ghosts of these once frantic things wriggled southwards through the provinces on but sluggish feet to the high promenades of Grasse—as the worthy mercer was first in all the little town to know by his modest traffic in them; and that, too, only long after the things they shadowed were buried under new millineries and fopperies and fantastic riot in the gay capital. As a fact, the dark-eyed, long-nosed folk that trudged these steep and narrow thoroughfares were a sluggish people; and sunlit Grasse snored away its day in drowsy fashion.

But if the room where the child first saw the light were gloomy enough within, the skies were wondrous blue without, and the violet-scented slopes were robed in a tender garment of silvery green, decked with the gold of orange-trees, and enriched with bright embroidery of many-coloured flowers that were gay as the gayest ribbons of distant Paris. And the glory of it bathed the lad’s eyes and heart for sixteen years, so that his hands got them itching to create the splendour of it which sang within him; and the wizardry of the flower-garden of France never left him, casting its spell over all his thinking, and calling to him to utter it to the world. It stole into his colour-box, and on to his palette, and so across the canvas into his master-work, and was to lead him through the years to a blithe immortality.

The small boy with the big head was born in the year after François Boucher came back to Paris from his Italian wanderings on the eve of his thirties and won to academic honour. The child grew up in his Provençal home, whilst Boucher, turning his back upon academic art on gaining his seat at the Academy, was creating the Pastorals, Venus-pieces, and Cupid-pieces that changed the whole style of French art from the pompous and mock-heroic manner of Louis Quatorze’s century of the sixteen hundreds to the gay and elegant pleasaunces that fitted so aptly the elegant pleasure-seeking days of Louis the Fifteenth’s seventeen hundreds.

Gossip of high politics came trickling down to Grasse as slowly as the fashions, yet the eleven-year-old boy’s ears heard of the death of the minister, old Cardinal Fleury, and of the effort of Louis to become king by act. Though Louis had small genius for the mighty business, and fell thenceforth into the habit of ruling France from behind petticoats, raising the youngest of the daughters of the historic and noble house of De Nesle to be his accepted consort under the rank and honours of Duchess of Chateauroux. All tongues tattled of the business, the very soldiery singing mocking songs; when—Louis strutting it as conqueror with the army, got the small-pox at Metz, and sent the Chateauroux packing at the threat of death. He recovered, to enter Paris soon after as the Well-Beloved, and to be reconciled with the frail Chateauroux before she died in the sudden agony in which she swore she had been poisoned.

PLATE II.—THE MUSIC LESSON

(In the Louvre)

Fragonard had a profound admiration for the Dutch painters. Whether he went to Holland shortly after his marriage is not known; but he seems suddenly to have employed his brush as if he had come across fine examples of the Dutch school. “The Music Lesson” at the Louvre is one of these, and the Dutch influence is most marked both as to subject, treatment, and handling of the paint, if we allow for Fragonard’s own strongly French personality.

At thirteen the boy listened to the vague rumours of a new scandal that set folk’s tongues wagging again throughout all France. The king raised Madame Lenormant d’Etioles, a daughter of the rich financier class, to be Marquise de Pompadour, and yielded up to her the sceptre over his people.