Jean-Honoré Fragonard

P. Rosenberg and B. Brejon de Lavergnée, Saint-Non, Fragonard, Panopticon Italiano, Un diario di viaggio ritrovato 1759-1761, Rome 1986, p. 358, no. 97, reproduced

Sold in an attractive carved and gilded frame. The drawing has been laid down on an old mount with two sets of brown ink framing lines. There are some very silght, pale scattered fox marks and a very slight yellowing at the upper and lower edges from the mount. However, these are barely noticeable and overall the drawing is in excellent condition, the paper clear and the chalk strong.
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Fragonard spent five years in Italy, from 1756 until 1761.  His first years were spent as a pensionnaire at the Academy in Rome, but in the spring of 1760 he met the Abbé de Saint-Non, whose enthusiastic patronage allowed him to travel extensively throughout the country.  The Abbé simply asked Fragonard to record the most important works of art that he encountered.  The result is an extraordinary group of three hundred copies after old master paintings, in addition to a number of views of famous sites.  On his return to Paris, Saint-Non reproduced many of the drawings (including the present sheet) as a series of aquatints, which, although the project was never realized, were probably intended to illustrate a published journal of his travels.¹ 

In this particularly fine sheet Fragonard combines details from three paintings in the Galleria Borghese, Rome.  Although the Abbé de Saint-Non has identified the Venus as by Veronese, it is in fact taken from Luca Cambiaso's painting, Venus and Cupid upon the sea.  The pair of chickens are after a detail in the Bassano workshop painting Spring, and the Madonna and Child are taken from a Sacra Conversazione by Lorenzo Lotto.  Unusually, Fragonard's study alters the position of the Madonna: in the painting her head is turned away from the Christ Child, and her expression is more severe.²  

1. P. Rosenberg, Fragonard, exhib. cat., Paris, Grand Palais and New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987, pp. 118-9
2. See P. della Pergola, Galleria Borghese: I Dipinti, vol. I, Rome 1955, pp. 72, 101-2, 117, nos. 123, 178, 209