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Artist
Jean Honore Fragonard
Title
Blindman's Buff
Date
ca. 1775 – 80
Culture
French
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
62.5 x 45.1 cm (24-5/8 x 17-3/4 in.)
Accession Number
1954:001
Credit Line
Jean Honore Fragonard, Blindman's Buff, ca. 1775 – 80, oil on canvas, 62.5 x 45.1 cm (24-5/8 x 17-3/4 in.), Putnam Foundation, Timken Museum of Art
Full view of Blindman's Buff
Description

Jean Honore Fragonard trained in the studio of François Boucher, who painted Lovers in the Park, hanging nearby. Although he was accepted into the French Academy, he declined to pursue a public career as a history painter. Preferring, instead, to work for private clients, Fragonard developed a style that lauded the charm and beauty of the private moments of the French aristocracy. In Blindman's Buff, well-dressed men, women, and children play the familiar game in the kind of picturesque overgrown garden that was popular with the aristocracy. This and similar lighthearted amusements were among Fragonard's favorite subjects, and he may have viewed the games as symbolizing the game of courtship. 

Related Information / Media

Provenance: 

Hippolyte Walferdin, Paris, his sale, Hotel Drouot, Paris, April 3, 1880, lot 12; bought by Beurnonville; Paris; Camille Groult, Paris, by 1889; Wildenstein & Co., New york, 1954; acquired by the Putnam Foundation, 1955.

Exhibited: 

Paris, Musée de Louvre, 1885, Exposition de tableaux, statues et objets d’art au profit de l’oeuvre des orphelins d’Alsace-Lorrain, p. 60, no. 199; Minneapolis Institute of Arts and New York, Wildenstein & Co., 1954, French Eighteenth-Century Painters, no. 11; The Art Institute of Chicago, extended loan, 1956-65; Paris, Grand Palais, and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987-88, Fragonard, pp. 352-53, no. 166, ill. (exhibited in New York only).

Literature:

Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, L'Art du dix-huitième siècle, 3d ed., 3 vols. (Paris, 1882), 3:335; Roger Portalis, Honoré Fragonard: Sa Vie et son oeuvre (Paris, 1889), p. 273; Pierre de Nolhac, ].-H. Fragonard (Paris, 1906), p. 150; Georges Grappe, Fragonard: La Vie et l'oeuvre (Monaco, 1946), p. 75; Louis Réau, Fragonard (Brussels, 1956), p. 158; "Countrywide loans from California," Art News 55 (November 1956): 33; Georges Wildenstein, The Paintings of Fragonard (London, 1960), pp. 297-98, no. 446, fig. 188; P. du Colombier, "Nouvelle Jeunesse pour Fragonard," Connaissance des Arts, no. 120 (February 1962): 73, ill.; Agnes Mongan and Elizabeth Mongan, European Paintings in the Timken Art Gallery (San Diego, 1969), pp. 98, 99,132, no. 37, ill.; Daniel Wildenstein and Gabriel Mandel, L'opera completa di Fragonard (Milan, 1972), pp. 102, 103, no. 379, ill.; Jean-Luc Bordeaux, "Baroque to Neo-Classicism," Apollo 1:15 (June 1982):454,456, pl. IV; Timken Art Gallery: European and American Works of Art in the Putnam Foundation Collection (San Diego, 1983), pp. 44-45, 119, no. 14, ill.; Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Jean- Honoré Fragonard: Life and Work (New York, 7 988), p. 310, no. 264, ill.; Dare Ashton, Fragonard in the Universe of Painting (Washington, D.C., 1988), p. 172, fig. 41; Pierre Rosenberg, Tout l'Oeure peint de Fragonard (Paris, 1989), pp. 106-7, no. 316, ill.

Note

This record has been reviewed by Timken Museum of Art staff and may be incomplete or contain errors. Our records are constantly revised. Inquiries about provenance are advised to contact the Director of Curatorial Affairs: curator@timkenmuseum.org.