The Vow to Love

From the mid-1770s, as Paris taste moved toward feeling and sincerity, Fragonard began a run of small allegories that speak about love in the language of the temple. Lovers swear oaths before statues of Cupid, roses are offered up, and altars stand in dark groves. This panel belongs to that series, and it is a sketch. A young woman in white throws herself up the steps toward an altar with her arms stretched out, and almost everything around her is left as loose brown and green shadow. The Louvre dates it to around 1780. The finished painting it prepared is in a private collection, and in 1938 it was in New York. The sketch stayed in Paris. It belonged to the physicist Hippolyte Walferdin, who collected Fragonard on a large scale, then to Léon Tabourier, and Dr Maurice Audéoud gave it to the museum, where it arrived in 1907.