Mountain Landscape at Sunset

c. 1765

Jean Honoré Fragonard

Painter, French, 1732 - 1806

The dark, forest-green canopies of trees to our right are silhouetted against a sky that warms from pale blue along the top edge of the composition to butter yellow along the horizon, which comes about a quarter of the way up this horizontal landscape painting. The scene is loosely painted so many details are vague and difficult to make out. Closest to us, a diagonal band of caramel brown leading from the lower left corner back to the dark green could be the thick trunk of a felled tree, indicating that we look along the trunk into the massive canopy of an old tree, or the light brown could loosely suggest a forest. The horizon beyond is lined with a band of smoky purple, which could be a mountain range in the deep distance. Pale plum-purple clouds edged with shell pink angle from the horizon to the upper right corner against the golden sky.

Media Options

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Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on paper

  • Credit Line

    Chester Dale Fund

  • Dimensions

    overall: 21.5 x 32.8 cm (8 7/16 x 12 15/16 in.)
    framed: 32.2 x 43.5 x 4.4 cm (12 11/16 x 17 1/8 x 1 3/4 in.)

  • Accession

    1997.22.1

More About this Artwork

Scholarly Article:  French Paintings of the Fifteenth through Eighteenth Centuries: Mountain Landscape at Sunset, c. 1765

A young woman draws on an oval surface with white chalk while three winged, baby-like putti gather nearby, all on a bank of pale pink clouds in this horizontal painting. The woman and putti have pale, rosy skin, flushed cheeks, and hazel-brown eyes. To our left, the woman reclines with her upper body propped up on her far elbow, which rests on a steel-blue cushion as her legs stretch out to our right. Her light brown hair is braided and wrapped across the top of her head. She wears a loose, seafoam-green robe over a billowing ivory-white garment that has slipped off the shoulder closer to us. A round paint palette with brushes sticking out of its thumb hole and a roll of blue and white paper sit in the lower left corner, behind the woman. The woman and the objects are on a red cloth. In front of the woman is a rounded surface, perhaps a canvas, on which she draws. She holds up a gold-colored stylus with her right hand, closer to us, with a pointed piece of white chalk in one end and black chalk in the other. The canvas is taller than her head, so the child-like putto she draws on it is life-sized. The three nude putti on the far side of the canvas have copper or golden-blond, curly hair, flushed, rounded cheeks, short wings in white or peacock blue, pudgy torsos, and dimpled limbs. One putto, presumably the one the woman draws, sits back on the bank of clouds with a carnation-pink sash across his chest. He pulls his chin back and looks at her from under his eyebrows. He holds a gold-colored torch with a pink flame in one hand, and the other hand rests near a cylindrical quiver of arrows. Another putto peeks around the side of the canvas, and the third stands and props the canvas up. That third putto holds up a wreath of laurel leaves up over the canvas, above the woman’s drawing hand. The bank of clouds is parchment-brown with muted pink and blue highlights against a vivid blue sky. The artist signed and dated the lower right, “F Boucher – 1765.”

Scholarly Series:  French Paintings of the Fifteenth through Eighteenth Centuries

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

(Sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 1996);[1] (James Mackinnon, London); purchased 14 February 1997 through (W.M. Brady & Co., New York) by NGA.
[1] According to a verbal communication from James Mackinnon, he acquired the painting in 1996 at a small auction at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris, where it was undocumented and uncatalogued.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1996

  • Aspects of Landscape 1760-1880, W.M. Brady & Co., Inc., New York, 1996, no. 1, repro.

2020

  • True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2020 - 2022, no. 57, repro.

Bibliography

2009

  • Conisbee, Philip, et al. French Paintings of the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Century. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 2009: no. 30, 156-159, color repro.

Wikidata ID

Q20178319

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