Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure: Painting the Imagination by Melissa Percival (review)

The so-called portraits de fantaisie by Jean-Honoré Fragonard are widely held to be among the most mysterious works of this notoriously elusive artist. In her new book, Melissa Percival rejects the idea that his approximately sixteen half-length figures in fancy dress are susceptible of a single overarching explanation. Instead, building on Mary Sheriff ’s important revisionist account of the artist, Fragonard: Art and Eroticism (University of Chicago Press, 1990), she contends that the enigmatic qualities of the fantasy figures must be understood in relation to a complex of factors that grounds them squarely in the artistic and cultural context of eighteenth-century France. First and foremost among these is the pictorial tradition of such figures, which she traces back to the seventeenth century. Several early eighteenth-century French artists, notably Jean-Baptiste Santerre, Jean Raoux, and Alexis Grimou, specialized in this type of picture. Thus, far from being isolated productions, Fragonard’s fantasy figures are exercises in an established taste. They draw on a repertoire of stock figure types: artists, musicians, scholars, soldiers, and pretty women, all dressed in the fancifully retrospective style then known as Spanish dress. They do so, moreover, in a selfconscious way, at once referring back to earlier examples of this type of figure and transforming them through a vigorously sketch-like (and highly distinctive) technique. Fragonard’s playful pastiches thereby become the means to an assertion of self that helps to forge a modern conception of artistic originality. In making her case, Percival takes care to locate his work in the eighteenth-century French art market and the practices of collecting and connoisseurship. The fantasy figures are addressed, she emphasizes, to a sophisticated audience attuned to the artist’s visual games. Paintings of this type deploy a portrait format in order not to capture a likeness but to stimulate the imagination. The appeal of the fantasy figure lies in a combination of proximity and distance, availability and elusiveness, which invites projection and speculation. At the same time, the use of Spanish dress associates the figures with the refined and performative culture of the aristocratic elite, who cultivated politeness and practised masquerade. However, the fluidity and dynamism of Fragonard’s fantasy figures make them a performance in their own right; their ‘playful, extravagant artistry’ (p. 210) conveys the quirky, improvisatory brilliance that contemporaries called caprice or fantaisie. Although Percival’s claims are for the most part highly persuasive, some readings of individual works (such as the one traditionally known as Don Quixote) are a little contrived. In other respects, she could have pushed her argument further. Given that the fantasy figures are emphatically ‘other’, it would have helped to analyse more systematically their dialectical relationship to the normative identity of the wealthy art lover. It seems odd, too, that, despite having so effectively demolished the myth that they are portraits, Percival retains the titles by which they have since become known, such as Denis Diderot (I for one doubt that this painting has anything to do with the philosophe). Nevertheless, this is a conscientious and thoughtful piece of scholarship, which makes a valuable contribution to Fragonard studies.