Invocation to Love
c. 1781
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (French, 1732–1806)
Drawings
Invocation to Love, c. 1781. Jean-Honoré Fragonard (French, 1732–1806). Brush and brown wash with graphite squaring lines and underdrawing on cream laid paper; sheet: 33.5 x 41.6 cm (13 3/16 x 16 3/8 in.); secondary support: 37.6 x 47.8 cm (14 13/16 x 18 13/16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Grace Rainey Rogers Fund 1943.657 Fragonard used gardens as the setting for love and courtship in some of his most important works. One such scene, this drawing depicts a woman pleading for help from a statue of Eros, the god of love. He wears a blindfold, suggesting an uncertain outcome for the woman, as does a Cupid who indifferently leans on an orb nearby. Like other artists in 18th-century France, Fragonard was deeply influenced by historic imagery of the Garden of Love—a pastoral and idyllic contained landscape. He revisited the specific image seen here multiple times, in two oil paintings (Musée du Louvre and private collection, New York) and another drawing (Princeton University Art Museum). This drawing contains squaring—a grid underlying the image—suggesting it's a smaller drawn replica of a related oil painting.
- Maker/Artist
- Fragonard, Jean-Honoré
- Classification
- Drawing
- Formatted Medium
- Brush and brown wash with graphite squaring lines and underdrawing on cream laid paper
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 33.5 x 41.6 cm (13 3/16 x 16 3/8 in.); Secondary Support: 37.6 x 47.8 cm (14 13/16 x 18 13/16 in.)
- Inscribed
- Inscription: secondary support, lower right, in graphite: 62 [L?]3; verso of secondary support, center left, in graphite: Salon
- Departments
- Drawings
- Accession Number
- 1943.657
- Credit Line
- Grace Rainey Rogers Fund
- Exhibitions
- The Eighteenth Century: Art of France and England, Department of Prints and Drawings Opening Exhibition, French Drawings from American Collections: Clouet to Matisse, Italian and French Drawings, Aspects of Drawing, French Masters: Rococo to Romanticism, European Watercolors Through the 18th Century, Prints and Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art Collection, Drawings, French Master Drawings of the 17th and 18th Centuries in North American Collections, Rubenism, Drawings by Fragonard in North American Collections, フラゴナール展 (Fragonard Exhibition), 18th Century Master Drawings, French Prints and Drawings in the Age of the Bourbons, 1589-1792, Northern European Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art, Fragonard, Rococo, Revolution, Restoration, Object Lessons: Cleveland Creates an Art Museum, Visions of Antiquity: Neoclassical Figure Drawing, French Drawings from the Collection, Master Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art, Consuming Passion: Fragonard's Pictures of Love, Treasures on Paper from the Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Elegance and Intrigue: French Society in 18th-century Prints and Drawings
- Rights Statement
- CC0
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