Enfilade

Fragonard, "The Meeting," from the Progress of Love, 1771-73 (NY: The Frick Collection)

The June issue of The Art Bulletin is dedicated to the memory of Anne L. Schroder, who passed away suddenly in December 2010. The issue includes her article, “Fragonard’s Later Career: The Contes et Nouvelles and the Progress of Love Revisited,” pp. 150-177.

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Abstract: Late in his career, which spanned the Revolution and beyond, Honoré Fragonard revived two major projects in limbo since 1773. His unsuccessful effort to have engraved his illustrations for La Fontaine’s Contes et nouvelles (17880-1809) demonstrates the dramatic upheavals in the post-Revolutionary print market and publishing industries and shifting reactions to his art. The unfinished series Progress of Love, expanded and recontextualized by the artist during the late 1790s and early 1800s, reveals Fragonard’s adaptation of his perennial subjects — flirtation, love, and picturesque nature — to changing cultural attitudes regarding the sexual power of women in the aftermath of the Revolution.