French painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard to be on display at Kimbell Art Museum

It's on loan to the Fort Worth museum March 11-June 17.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Warrior (detail), c. 1769, oil on canvas. © Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.

FORT WORTH — French Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard's piece The Warrior will be on display at the Kimbell Art Museum March 11-June 17, 2012. The dramatic painting will be part of the exhibition The Age of Impressionism: Great French Paintings from the Clark and will be free to view.

“It will be prominently displayed with French Rococo paintings in the Kimbell’s permanent collection, which includes works by two other highly regarded artists of the era and Fragonard’s former teachers, Jean Siméon Chardin and François Boucher,” said the Kimbell’s director, Eric M. Lee.

The painting was loaned to the Kimbell by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

The museum explains more about the painting:

French Rococo paintings are known for their dramatic, playful, and romantic subject matter. Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) was among the most prolific of the Rococo painters, producing more than 550 works in his lifetime. The Warrior was executed in the late 1760s as part of a 14-work series of fantasy portraits. The most impressive aspect of this series is the dazzling brilliance of the artist’s technique — he braggingly inscribed one of the portraits “painted by Monsieur Fragonard in one hour.” In The Warrior, rich paint has been applied with speed and control. In the face, strong colors are placed side by side without transition. Small blue-gray dashes emphasize the forehead, the eye and the mouth; red accentuates the nose, the cheek, and the chin. The subject’s forceful physical presence is enhanced by the dramatic appearance of the elaborate 17th-century costume, with its large neck ruff, slashed sleeve and black-and-red mantle rippling in what has been called a “heroic wind.”

Source: Kimbell Art Museum