Ode to a Lost World

• MAY 2, 2009

By HOWARD KISSEL

Only those who lived before the French Revolution could understand the sweetness of living, declared Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, the wily statesman who managed to play a decisive role in virtually every French government from the ancien régime to the early 1830s.

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Richard di Liberto

See more of Fragonard's "Progress of Love" paintings.

Few works testify more powerfully to the elegance, sensuousness and delicate beauty of that lost world than "The Progress of Love," the panels created by Jean-Honoré Fragonard for Mme du Barry, the last mistress of Louis XV.

Fragonard was born in Grasse, in the south of France, in 1732. When he was a child his father, a glove maker, moved the family to Paris, where the boy studied with two of the greatest painters of the early 18th century, Chardin and Boucher. He enjoyed early success. When he was 20 he won the Prix de Rome, which enabled him to study in Italy. At the age of 23 a historical painting of his was acquired by Louis XV, which entitled him to the honorary title, Painter to the King.

In 1769 the king, known during his reign as Louis the Beloved, made du Barry a gift of a chateau in Louveciennes, on the Seine northwest of Paris. The building itself dated from the previous century. In keeping with her reputation as a trendsetter, du Barry commissioned the fashionable architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux to create a neighboring pavilion in a more contemporary style for the express purpose of entertaining the king. And Fragonard was commissioned to decorate the room adjoining the dining room in that pavilion. He painted four wall-size oil-on-canvas panels.

Two scenes are of pursuit. In one the young woman being pursued is leaping over a short wall, the billows of her gown suggesting considerable anxiety.

The other two panels depict the tranquility>>>