‘Le Verrou’ (The bolt)

Few pictures are as emblematic of French eighteenth-century art as Fragonard’s scene of a pair of youthful lovers locked in a passionate embrace next to the bed where their amorous struggle seems to have started - and where it is likely to continue. As a precaution, the young man endeavors to close the bolt on the room’s door, while the girl appears to feebly prevent him from doing so. This latch - verrou in French - gave its name to the scene from the publication in 1784 of an engraving by the printmaker Maurice Blot, which assured the wide popularity of the composition while the painting it was based on was hidden from public view. Only late in the twentieth century was it recognized in a canvas that reappeared on the market, later, in 1974, acquired by the Louvre and consecrated as the original of the famous composition in the 1987-1988 monographic show on the artist (fig. 1; inv. RF 1974 2; see Cuzin, op. cit., pp. 179-182, fig. 216, no. 336, ill.; Rosenberg, op. cit., no. 236, ill.; Schieder, op. cit., no. 84, ill.; and Faroult, op. cit., 2015-2016, no. 72, ill.). Today, Le Verrou forms, among other masterpieces, a cornerstone of the museum’s unsurpassed collection of French painting of the eighteenth century - one of the defining images of the time’s perceived lightheartedness and joie de vivre, indeed of its frivolity, as well as of its maker’s ambitions, even when working in a genre deemed inferior at the time.
The large canvas (73 x 93 cm) first appeared in the 1785 sale of the collection of Louis-Gabriel, Marquis de Véri Raionard (1722-1785), an important patron of contemporary French artists (C.B. Bailey, ‘Progressive Taste, Aristocratic Lineage: Louis-Gabriel, Marquis de Véri (1722-1785)’, in Patriotic taste. Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris, New Haven and London, 2002, pp. 101-130). Véri must have commissioned the picture from Fragonard shortly before his death, in the late 1770s, as a companion piece for a slightly earlier commissioned painting by the artist in the Marquis’ collection, an Adoration of the shepherds, today also in the Louvre (inv. RF 1988 11; see Cuzin, op. cit., pp. 178-179, fig. 215, no. 375, ill.; Rosenberg, op. cit., no. 234, ill.; and Faroult, op. cit., 2015-2016, no. 71, ill.). The surprising pairing - a scene of religious bliss and significance and one of flighty love and desire - would have seemed less odd in the context of the collection of Véri, who seems to have been fond of contemporary and somewhat risqué subject matter, and appears to have been a freethinker (see also Faroult, op. cit., 2015-2016, p. 208, under nos. 71-72). Fragonard refined the composition of the painting for Véri in a spirited oil sketch, which recently entered the collections of the Louvre Abu Dhabi (fig. 2; previously in the sale Christie’s, London, 17 December 1999, lot 95; see Rosenberg, op. cit., no. 237, ill.; and Schieder, op. cit., no. 83, ill.). This work, too, must date from the late 1770s, and corresponds in its mise-en-cadre and many of its details with the finished work.
But Fragonard first formulated a variant of the composition in at least two drawings which must date from years before, before his visits to the Low Countries, Italy and Germany in 1773-1774, a watershed moment in his career. One of these drawings is the present work, rarely seen in public since an exhibition in Paris in 1884, and brought together with the painting briefly in the twentieth century when in the Cotnareanu collection; the other is a work in pen and wash, formerly in the collection of Edmond de Rothschild, and only known from a black and white photograph (fig. 3; see Rosenberg, op. cit., p. 481, under no. 236, fig. 1). (A third sheet, also unlocated (ibid., p. 481, under no. 236, fig. 4), may be by a later hand.). The Rothschild drawing appeared in the Varanchan de Saint-Geniès sale in 1777. They fit, however, with a group of drawings of similar subjects, particularly close to contemporary works by Pierre-Antoine Baudouin, which are considerably earlier, such as the Girl’s dormitory at the Harvard Art Museums (inv. 1954.10; see Rosenberg, op. cit., no. 113, ill.), or the Dancing Lesson in Lisbon’s Museu Calouste Gulbenkian (fig. 4; inv. 2297; see ibid., no. 114, ill.; and N. Turner, with M. Fidalgo and J.A. Seabra de Carvalho, European Master Drawings from Portuguese Collections, exhib. cat., Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, Lisbon, Centro Cultural de Belém, and Porto, Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis, 2000-2001, no. 98, ill.; for the connection between Baudouin and Fragonard, see Faroult, op. cit., 2020, chapters 7 and 8). Often dated around 1770, a few scholars believe at least some of these scenes may be as early as 1765 (Dupuy-Vachey, op. cit., p. 26, caption of fig. 19; and eadem in Faroult, op. cit., 2015-2016, pp. 154-161, under nos. 46-49). Compared to the focus of the scene in the oil sketch and the painting for Véri, the two drawings of Le Verrou present the action with a greater attention to detail and to the anecdotal, in keeping with many of Fragonard’s works from the same years. Thus, the room is decorated with two works of art, including an oval portrait of what seems to be a stern military man witnessing the tryst of his descendants. The youth’s clothes are spread out over the floor, from his jacket at his foot, to his tricorn and rapier next to the chair at right. The furniture is Louis XV, in contrast to the Neoclassical pieces in the painting. The fan on the floor and the plate or bread on the table are absent in the picture, whereas the latter includes a fallen jug and a bouquet; in all three an apple appears, in which some have been tempted to see a religious allusion (compare the discussions in Cuzin, op. cit., p. 182; and Faroult, op. cit., 2007, p. 33).
What distinguishes the Getty sheet from most other lavis by Fragonard is its technique: instead of in the usual loose sketch in black chalk (compare the Harvard drawing mentioned above, as well as those in Rosenberg, op. cit., nos. 115-118, ill.), here, the composition is set up in a fairly precise, rather angular underdrawing in red chalk. Only the Dancing lesson in Lisbon (fig. 4), which was sadly damaged by water and later restored, displays the same technique. (The two drawings were temporarily united in the Josse collection, and sold in the same 1894 auction as lots 11 and 12.) For the Lisbon sheet, it has been suggested that the red chalk is the result of a counterproof (by Eunice Williams, followed in Turner, op. cit., p. 218); however, while the condition of that drawing makes it today more difficult to assess this statement, it is more likely to be the result of some kind of tracing, used to transfer the composition from an earlier drawing. Such a drawing may be recorded for the Lisbon Dancing lesson (see Rosenberg, op. cit., p. 240); for the Getty drawing, the model would probably be the version from the Rothschild collection, executed in pen and wash (fig. 3). Although the photograph through which the latter drawing is known today does not allow for a line-by-line comparison, it is clear that the red chalk in the sheet under discussion follows both its penwork and washes in many details; note, for instance, the folds in the young lovers’ clothes, or the touches of wash on the youth’s calves. Among the passages where Fragonard gave himself more freedom is the oval portrait painting, suggested in a few dashes that do not correspond to what appears in the Rothschild drawing.
One has to assume that Fragonard came up with the method involving red chalk in order to duplicate efficiently a composition he felt he could not improve on, perhaps to satisfy the request for a second version from an eager collector. With his supple use of wash, his usual technique to finish this type of drawings, he brought the bare sketch to life, producing the definitive version of the first iteration of his famous composition, before coming back to it for Véri’s later commission.