Jean-Honoré Fragonard - The New Model. 1760s. Oil on canvas. 34 x 65 cm. Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris, France.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (called "the Amiable Frago" by his friends) was born on April 5, 1732 into a solidly middle-class family. They resided in the city of Grasse in the hills of southeastern France, not far from the Mediterranean. His father, François Fragonard, was a glove manufacturer. Somewhere around this time he invested heavily into a business plan to supply Paris with its first fire pump, in which he lost his money. In an attempt to recover it, he moved with his family to the capital, where the matter ended in a ruinous lawsuit. Honoré was about six at this time.
The family had rather standard ambitions for their only child, and by his mid-teens they obtained for Honoré a desirable clerkship with a notary, an official status in France. Unfortunately, this career soon came to an end when his employer fired the young clerk on the grounds that he did nothing but draw pictures.
Taking the complaints of their son's ex-employer to heart, Fragonard's mother, Françoise Fragonard, enlisted him as a pupil in the one of the leading ateliers in Paris, the studio of François Boucher, who was then Royal Painter of the French king and held an appointment as one of the twelve professors at the Royal Academy. However, Boucher turned down the Fragonards, saying that he only took students who already knew how to paint. Instead he directed them to Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, a painter specializing in the still life genre.
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Blessings and best wishes - S.