Lover Crowning His Mistress

In 1771 Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV, opened a new pleasure pavilion at Louveciennes, west of Paris, built by the architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux in a crisp classical style. For its salon she had ordered four large canvases from Jean-Honoré Fragonard on the progress of love. She sent them back. Why is still argued over, whether his tumbling, frothy manner looked wrong against the new architecture or the scenes came too close to her own story. Fragonard's set is now in the Frick Collection in New York.

The replacements came from Vien, four tall canvases telling the same story in antique dress, and this one is signed and dated 1773. A young man in a red cloak sets a wreath on the head of his beloved, who stands in yellow, while a girl seated on the ground holds up another garland from a basket of flowers. A stone Cupid watches from his pedestal at the left.

The paintings stayed at Louveciennes until the Revolution, when they were seized with the rest of her collection. Madame du Barry herself was guillotined in Paris in December 1793.