Fragonard (1732-1806) was one of the leading figures - along with François Boucher, his teacher, and Jean-Antoine Watteau - of the French rococo style that came to prominence after the death of King Louis XIV in 1715. Under the Sun King, French art favored weighty religious and historical themes, but rococo's flirty pastoral, mythological, and boudoir scenes were as light and bubbly as champagne.
Two works here give a taste of Fragonard's rococo style. The faint ink drawing "The Waterworks" (c. 1765-'70) depicts three nearly naked ladies on a pair of beds being sprayed by water shot from a trap door in the floor. In the oil painting "Useless Resistance" (c. 1770), a young woman, who is having trouble keeping her nightgown on, prepares to whack a boy at the end of her bed with a pillow.
The Clark adds context with a saucy small companion exhibit, "Printed Love," featuring French prints from the second half of the 18th century. A boy climbs in a window to meet a half-dressed girl who holds a finger to her lips to warn him not to wake her parents, who are asleep in the next room. In another work, a young woman coupled with an old, paunchy man slips her calling card to a young man following behind her. It's deliciously naughty.
By the 1780s, though, Fragonard had begun to take on a new tone that comes across even in the titles of the paintings, drawings, and prints (by other artists copying Fragonard's original compositions) here: "The Oath of Love," "The Warrior's Dream of Love," "The Invocation to Love." The work remains sexy, but the characters change from friends-with-benefits to mythic soul mates.
Fragonard idealizes and ennobles the sexiness with high-flown allegory. A couple dash to drink from a cup Cupid has dipped in "The Fountain of Love." A woman swoons before a statue of a nude, winged Eros. A couple kiss while pressing their hands to a stone plaque inscribed with an "oath to love for one's entire life." Eros swoops out of the sky, thrusts his torch into a cracked-open sarcophagus, and amidst a flash of light and smoke, a kissing couple appear. Love - or at least passion - even conquers death.
