Jean-Honoré Fragonard

This painterly watercolor on vellum is a reduced-scale replica of Fragonard's painting “The Small Park” (Le petit parc) in the Wallace Collection, London. It is part of a larger group of works in which the artist explored the theme of a park interior with a central group of figures in a lush, shady spot at the top of a low flight of stairs, dwarfed by immense trees. The trees framing the stone walk are derived from the landscape at the gardens of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli, which Fragonard visited in the summer of 1760. As Perrin Stein remarked of the artist's variations on the theme, “Fragonard, like a composer, circled around and repeated his formal themes of mirroring and reflection, always retaining elements of irregularity within the overall symmetry.”
A rough outline from one of Fragonard's Italian sketchbooks (in use 1759-61), now in the Harvard Art Museums (acc. no. 1968.42), records an initial idea for such a composition. The artist developed the scene further in three drawings and an engraving in the years following his return to Paris, ca. 1761-63. The painting seems to date later in the artist's explorations, perhaps around 1763-65, with the present gouache executed following its completion, likely ca. 1765.