Rinaldo in the Gardens of Armida

In 1761 the Paris Opéra brought back Armide, the opera that the composer Lully and his librettist Quinault had written 75 years earlier, and it was staged again in 1764. Its story comes from Jerusalem Delivered, Torquato Tasso's epic of the First Crusade. The sorceress Armida carries the crusader knight Rinaldo off to an enchanted garden so that he forgets the war. The Louvre dates Fragonard's picture to around 1761 to 1765, the years of those revivals, and scholars connect the two.

It is a small canvas, under a metre wide, and the garden fills most of it. The figures seem to grow into the trees and foliage around them, so the whole place reads as something Armida has conjured. The painting came to the Louvre from the Veil-Picard collection as a dation, a work of art the French state accepts in payment of tax.