Upon a table beside a bunch of roses let us allow the leaves of his work to be ruffled by the wind of a lovely day:  from landscapes where robes of satin are escaping in coquettish flight, our glance skips to meadows guarded by Annettes of fifteen years, to granges where the somersaults of love upset the painter’s easel, to pastures where the milk-maid of the milk-jug reveals her bare legs and weeps like a nymph over her broken urn, for her sheep, her flocks, and her vanished dream.  Upon another page a maiden in love is writing a beloved name on the bark of a tree on a lovely summer evening.  The breeze is always turning them over:  now a shepherd and shepherdess are embracing before a sun-dial which little Cupids make into a pleasure-dial.  It keeps on turning them; and now we have the beautiful dream of a pilgrim sleeping with his staff and gourd beside him, and to whom appears a host of young fays skimming a huge pot.  Does it not seem that your eye is upon a vision of a fete by Boucher, shown by his pupil in Tasso’s garden?  Adorable magic lantern! where Clorinde follows Fiammette, where the gleams of an epic poem mingle with the smiles of the novellieri!  Tales of the fay Urgele, little comic jests, rays of gayety and sunshine which one might say were thrown upon the cloth upon which Beroalde de Verville made his cherry-gatherer walk.  Tasso, Cervantes, Boccaccio, Ariosto (Ariosto as he has drawn him, inspired by Love and Folly), it recalls all his genii of happiness.  It laughs with the liberties of La Fontaine.  It goes from Properce to Grecourt, from Longus to Favart, from Gentil-Bernard to Andre Chenier.  It has, so to speak, the heart of a lover and the hand of a charming rascal.  In it the breath of a sigh passes into a kiss and it is young with immortal youth:  it is the poem of Desire, a divine poem!

It is enough to have written it like Fragonard for him to remain what he will always be:  the Cherubino of erotic painting....

He leaped into success and fame at one bound, with his picture of Callirhoe, that painting of universal approbation, which caused him to be received into the Academie by acclamation; that painting which aroused public enthusiasm at the Salon in the month of August, and which had the honour of a Royal command for its reproduction upon Gobelin tapestry.

Imagine a large picture nine feet high by twelve feet long, where the human figures are of natural size, the architecture in its proper proportion and the crowd and sky have their own space.  Between two columns of a shining marble with its iris-coloured reflections, above the heavy purple of a tapestry with golden fringe spread out and broken by the ridge of two steps, opens the scene of an antique drama which seems to be under the curtain of a theatre.  On this tapestry, on this pagan altar-cloth, stands a copper crater near an urn of black marble half veiled with white linen.  A column cuts in half a large