Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French painter, one of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Régime. Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy. Fragonard has been ranged with Watteau as one of the two great poetic painters of the 18th century in France. A prodigiously active artist, he produced more than 550 paintings, several thousand drawings, and 35 etchings. His style, based primarily on that of Rubens, was rapid, vigorous, and fluent, never tight or fussy like that of so many of his contemporaries. Although the greater part of his active life was passed during the Neoclassical period, he continued to paint in a Rococo expression until shortly before the French Revolution. Only five paintings by Fragonard are dated, but the chronology of the rest can be fairly accurately established from other sources such as engravings and documents. He died in 1806, almost completely forgotten.
