View of a Park

Jean-Honoré Fragonard studied painting with Jean- Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and François Boucher and later in life became well known among collectors for his light-hearted mythological, romantic, and decorative paintings, which came to exemplify the Rococo style.

This drawing, in which abundant vegetation overshadows the architecture of a parklike setting, is based on Fragonard's experience of Italian gardens during his stay in Rome in 1756-61. In the summer of 1760, he was the guest of the amateur artist and collector the Abbé de Saint-Non at the Villa d'Este at Tivoli, near Rome, famous for its gardens since its construction in the sixteenth century. Fragonard made many red-chalk drawings there that summer, often using aspects of the gardens' complex architectural settings and overgrown greenery in later works.

The artist built up a number of small, delicate strokes in black chalk to create the complicated composition seen here, in which the white paper lends a strong sense of natural light, while areas of dark wash provide atmospheric shading. The work is an imaginary view that draws on elements of Tivoli's gardens and many of the motifs seen here-the circular temple, the flanking stone lions, the three urns replete with foliage, and the trellised arbor-are found in other of his works. The two arched spaces covered by trellising and connected by a rectangular doorway recall the work of fellow artist Hubert Robert, with whom Fragonard worked at this time, as well as Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whom he also knew.

The small figures enjoying the scenery- four by the basin and two lightly sketched under the right trellis-seem almost incidental. The real subject is the lush garden growth, and the discrete presence of a wheelbarrow at the right alludes to the constant upkeep such a location would have required. The drawing was in the collection of the poet and art collector the Comte de Montesquiou for years, with a presumed companion drawing of a similar scene, also entitled View of a Park, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.