Enfilade

From Reaktion Books and the University of Chicago Press:

Satish Padiyar, Fragonard: Painting Out of Time (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-1789142099, £35 / $55.

At the time of his death in 1806, the rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard had not painted for two decades. Following a period of huge public success, the painter’s reputation fell. Fragonard: Painting Out of Time takes this prolonged artistic silence as a point of departure to investigate the maverick personality of Fragonard within the lively society of eighteenth-century France. Personally secretive, Fragonard nevertheless created revealing images that undermined a normal sense of space and time. Satish Padiyar investigates the life and work of the last of the libertine painters of the ancien regime, a contemporary of Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and presents dramatic new perspectives on works such as The Progress of Love, painted for Madame du Barry, the infamous The Bolt, and the ever-popular The Swing.

Satish Padiyar is Honorary Research Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art. His previous publications include Chains: David, Canova, and the Fall of the Public Hero in Postrevolutionary France (2007).

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1  Secrets
2  Surprise
3  Dreams

References
Select Biography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index