Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), Workshop of - The Death of Hercules

This remarkably fresh and spontaneous painting, which dates from around 1770, comes from the workshop of Jean-Honoré Fragonard. It is certainly a sketch for a larger-scale work that has never been realised. Fragonard, like other major French painters of the 18th century, used to develop his projects within the workshop, providing an input of ideas, and various hands intervened on the canvas. That said, a direct involvement of the master in the execution cannot be ruled out given the outstanding quality of the present sketch.

The story of Hercules's death is the subject of one of Sophocles' best-known tragic plays, "Trachiniae" or "The Women of Trachis". In common with other Greek tragedies. this play explored the disruptive and horrible consequences when gods and mortals interacted. Hercules dies as a result of a deception played on his wife Deianira by the centaur Nessus. Deianira sends Hercules as a gift a robe soaked in the blood of the centaur, which she believes to be a talisman of love. But the robe, once worn, corrodes the hero's flesh. Hercules, dying, orders a pyre to be prepared for him on Mount Oeta and lets his body be consumed by fire. However, his fate is among the immortals: the hero is welcomed into Olympus among the gods, where he has Hebe, the goddess of youth, as his bride.

Born in 1732 in Grasse, France, Jean-Honoré Fragonard is perhaps synonymous with the French Rococo style. Fragonard's family moved to Paris in 1738, where his talent for painting was recognized early on, and at the age of eighteen he joined the studio of François Boucher. In 1832, he competed for the Prix de Rome for the first time and won the prestigious competition. Shortly after this, and with the help of his accomplishments, he undertook formal training in history painting at the École Royale de Élèves Protégés, Paris, before undertaking further training at the French Academy in Rome between 1756 and 1761.

Fragonard returned to Paris in 1761, and his career began to thrive; he was so sought after that he was able to reject royal commissions to instead work for private collectors, a career choice that allowed him to freely develop his personal style. The bulk of his oeuvre is marked by a high level of decorativeness, liveliness, and even hedonism by way of his common use of classical and allegorical subject matter. Later in his career, tastes shifted to Neoclassicism, a style antithetical to his own, and his career fell into steep decline. The French Revolution further diminished Fragonard's prospects, and after the war he held several administrative positions at the Louvre before dying in relative obscurity in 1806.

Despite the tribulations of Fragonard's late artistic endeavors, his work has come to be treasured by many major collections, including the Frick Collection, New York; the Louvre Museum, Paris; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

See J.
-P. Cuzin, Fragonard, vie et oeuvre, Paris 1982; P. Rosenberg, Tout l'œuvre peint de Fragonard, Paris 1989.