.jpg?w=1)
拍品專文
L’Amour is one of a series of bust-length decorations of seductive young models, usually in allegorical guise, a vein that Fragonard had been working successfully throughout the 1770s: in addition to L’Amour, a Buste de jeune fille in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard (Cuzin, op. cit., no. 219), and another in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Cuzin, op. cit., no. 230), there are at least a dozen similar pictures known today (Cuzin, op. cit., nos. 218-224, 227, 228). As with the present painting, most of these have been dubiously identified as depicting one or other of the three Colombe sisters, the beautiful Venetian-born actresses who appeared in the Comédie italienne during the final years of the Ancien Régime and were among the more celebrated demi-mondaines of their era. Rather than actual portraits, the subjects of these pictures are fictive creations that served as emblems of the joyfulness, vivacity and inviting sensuality that were hallmarks of a popular reputation that the Colombe sisters made great efforts to cultivate.
L’Amour dates from the mid-1770s, a period when the mature Fragonard first began experimenting with neoclassical imagery – here, a feminine-looking ephebe portrayed as Cupid is evoked in a simple and emphatic outline that is rendered less severe with the application of thin, limpid washes of glowing color. While the identification of L’Amour as Marie-Catherine Colombe is speculative at best, the association of the celebrated courtesan with the God of Love would be typical of Fragonard’s irreverent sense of humor, and would necessitate the delicate grace with which the artist imbued this most seductive of his works.
L’Amour dates from the mid-1770s, a period when the mature Fragonard first began experimenting with neoclassical imagery – here, a feminine-looking ephebe portrayed as Cupid is evoked in a simple and emphatic outline that is rendered less severe with the application of thin, limpid washes of glowing color. While the identification of L’Amour as Marie-Catherine Colombe is speculative at best, the association of the celebrated courtesan with the God of Love would be typical of Fragonard’s irreverent sense of humor, and would necessitate the delicate grace with which the artist imbued this most seductive of his works.