Lot 228: A Game of Horse and Rider by Jean Honore Fragonard

The genesis of Fragonard’s paintings is as mysterious as their original purpose. Although the landscapes and figures in Horse and Rider and Hot Cockles are among the artist’s most accomplished inventions, no preparatory studies for them exist.[8] As with much of his oeuvre, it is as if Fragonard created them directly on the canvas, with little of the preparation and planning that one usually expects in such elaborate productions. Yet he did not invent these scenes out of whole cloth, for there was an established tradition for representing games in landscape settings; Fragonard undoubtedly had access to this tradition, and the National Gallery’s paintings are clearly indebted to it. For example, Fragonard certainly was aware of the series of prints representing games published by Jacques Stella (French, 1596 - 1657) and Gabriel Perelle (French, 1603 - 1677) in the seventeenth century [fig. 6].[9] But, as with the larger canvases showing Blindman’s Buff and The Swing, the present paintings owe a debt to Jean-Baptiste Oudry (French, 1686 - 1755), whose designs for a tapestry cycle on the theme of Amusements champêtres include representations of Horse and Rider and Hot Cockles that are closely related to Fragonard’s compositions [fig. 7].[10] Despite their extraordinary inventiveness and incomparable technical mastery, these paintings continue a convention of decorative pastoral art that has its roots in the fête galante of the earlier eighteenth century. Professionally framed and matted with gilded frame.

32 x 26