Diana and Endymion
by Jean Honore Fragonard
Original - Not For Sale
Price
Not Specified
Dimensions
136.800 x 94.900 cm.
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Title
Diana and Endymion
Artist
Jean Honore Fragonard
Medium
Painting - Oil On Canvas
Description
This early masterpiece by Jean-Honoré Fragonard demonstrates his brilliant command — even at the beginning of his career — of the rococo pictorial idiom that was in its ascendancy in the 1750s and that he had absorbed through his close relationship with François Boucher (French, 1703 - 1770). On an ethereal mountaintop (the Mount Latmos of myth), the youthful shepherd Endymion, seminude, sleeps unaware, along with his dog. Several of his sheep lie beside him; one appears to notice the arrival of a glowing Diana, identified by a hazy crescent moon that surrounds her like a mandorla. Struck by Endymion’s great beauty, she leans back, her hand held out in wonder. She is accompanied by a rosy-fleshed Cupid, who mischievously aims an arrow at the object of her delectation. The cool night sky provides a shimmering backdrop for Endymion’s mountaintop, with its rocky ground enlivened by flowering shrubs.
With its pendant, Aurora (sometimes called Venus Awakening) [FIG. 1], Diana and Endymion clearly was intended as interior decorations, undoubtedly meant to be installed into the paneling of overdoors.[1] Both canvases have been extended from their original curvilinear shapes, which were scalloped at top and bottom, as was often the case with such decorations produced by Fragonard during these years [FIG. 2].[2] At some later date the canvases were made into rectangles and turned into easel paintings. Yet the low perspectives employed in both compositions work best if they are seen from below. In the National Gallery of Art’s painting, for example, the figure of the slumbering Endymion is angled away from the viewer, while Diana appears to float above, as if the expanse of sky reaches out over our heads. The composition of Aurora is essentially the mirror opposite of Diana and Endymion. The graceful figure of Aurora, or Dawn, identified by the morning star above her head, sails into the composition on a cloudburst as Night draws a heavy blanket over her form. When seen side by side, the two paintings present equally balanced and complementary designs — both organized around the perpendicular placement of the figures to each other — but for all its painterly virtuosity and scintillating color, Aurora betrays a more schematic solution than Diana and Endymion, in
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September 21st, 2020
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