Landscape with Shepherds by Fragonard Postcard

Landscape with Shepherds and Flock of Sheep by Jean-Honore Fragonard, oil on canvas c. 1765, is a monumental landscape painting of lush trees, hills and foliage silhouetted against bright blue sky and clouds. In the distance a shepherd moves his flock down the steep hillside to join the busy farm activity with cattle in the foreground. Fragonard’s enormous technical facility and painterly brushwork constructs a pleasant image of man living harmoniously in pastoral nature, a common theme among the later Romantic French painters and Impressionists. Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) was a late Rococo painter of the French Ancien Régime whose works were distinguished by painterly facility and exuberance. Originally a pupil of Chardin, Fragonard produced a large number of works until the growing fashion of neo-classicism and the French Revolution forced him to flee into obscurity. Fragonard’s reputation revived in the late 19th century, when his sense of colour, relaxed hedonistic subject matter and painterly brushwork inspired new generations of the Impressionists such as Renoir.