Jean-Claude Richard, abbé of Saint-Non

The man in the plumed hat was Fragonard's friend and patron, the abbe de Saint-Non, a churchman far more devoted to art than to the Church, who had taken the young painter along on a long working tour of Italy. Around 1769 Fragonard painted a group of friends in what he called fantasy costume, some of them famously dashed off in a single hour, the brush moving so fast the paint almost seems still wet. This one shows the abbe dressed a l'espagnole, a look eighteenth-century France called Spanish though it really came from the courtly fashion of Henri IV's day, a hundred years before. He lounges beside a fountain where his horse stoops to drink, all swagger and flourish, got up for a masquerade that never happened.