ヴィーナスの誕生

When Fragonard painted this Venus rising from the sea he was barely 21, still a pupil in the Paris studio of François Boucher, the reigning decorator of Louis XV's court. You can see the debt plainly. Boucher had painted his own Triumph of Venus a few years earlier, all pink flesh and foaming water, and the young Fragonard reworked that same warm, weightless world. He was already a restless composer. A surviving red-chalk study for the picture, now in Massachusetts, shows him flipping the scene and shifting the figures around before he settled on this arrangement. He had just won the Prix de Rome, and within a few years he would leave to study in Italy, carrying this frothy Rococo manner with him for the rest of his life.