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| Roman Interior |
Artist:Jean Honoré Fragonard (French, Grasse 1732–1806 Paris)
Date:ca. 1760
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:19 1/4 x 23 3/8 in. (48.9 x 59.4 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1946
Rather few eighteenth-century French artists would have painted a laundry, which is evidently what we see here. The canvas dates to about 1760, toward the end of Fragonard's first trip to Italy. His impetuous technique falls between the usual stages of preparatory sketch and finished work. The surface has suffered wear and damage, but the central figure group is intact. Fragonard paints the chaotic scene with warmth and feeling.
Catalogue Entry
Both Fragonard and Hubert Robert were fascinated by the unrestored ancient ruins of Rome in which boarded off interior spaces were used for stables and laundries. People lived in the ruins too, as this painting and others appear to demonstrate. The picture is first recorded in 1884, in the catalogue of a public auction, as the interior of an Italian house; in 1955, it was retitled The Italian Family. Neither is accurate, as the building is not a house and the figures are too many and not of the right ages for a family group. The enormously high columns and stone platform, as well as an antique altar in the right foreground, indicate an ancient structure that has been adapted to a practical day to day use. The figures include two infants, one in a cradle, three little girls, and several young women. Clearly, at least two of the latter are laundresses.
Other paintings and drawings by the two artists show cavernous interiors with peasants tending cauldrons of boiling linen. The evaporating moisture rises in clouds while the women and girls spread out the laundry or hang it up to dry. The tenebrous lighting must in part reflect sights Fragonard saw in Rome. The influence of Rembrandt and other northern artists, of Neapolitan painting, and of the Bolognese school have also been suggested. While the date proposed for the painting is very likely, it is not certain that all the works by Fragonard that depict subjects of the kind were painted in Italy. The Met's picture should be associated with a similar painting (private collection) in which the central figure, also brilliantly illuminated, holds two babies in her arms.
Whatever the setting or implied narrative, the young mother in the yellow skirt and her baby wrapped in white, fixed in a blaze of light, are the real subject. Fragonard’s wide, viscous strokes convey their warmth and corporeality, and the physical intimacy between them. The brown dog and the white cat impart an echo of domestic harmony.
Katharine Baetjer 2011
Copyright Image
https://images.metmuseum.org
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