by Maria Tsaneva (Author)
Jean-Honor Fragonard was a French Rococo painter and print-maker whose style was remarkable by cheerfulness and hedonism. His most popular artworks are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism. Fragonard has been ranked with Watteau as one of the two great lyrical painters of the 18th century in France. An extraordinary active artist, he produced more than 550 paintings, several thousand drawings, and 35 etchings. His style, based primarily on that of Rubens, was express, forceful, and effortless, never tensed or fussy like that of so many of his contemporaries. Although the greater part of his active life was passed during the neoclassical period, he continued to paint in a Rococo manner until shortly before the French Revolution.