Jéroboam sacrifiant aux idoles

A king in a white turban reaches out to seize a prophet, and the altar between them splits open. With this painting a twenty-year-old Fragonard won the Prix de Rome in 1752.

The story behind the painting

Fragonard painted Jeroboam Sacrificing to Idols, oil on canvas, for the Prix de Rome, and won the prize for painting on 26 August 1752, shortly after turning 20. The triumph was all the more remarkable because he had not received the usual training at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. The judges chose the subject: an unusual, dramatic Old Testament story from the First Book of Kings. It lay far from the light Rococo scenes of pastoral romance, flirtation and mythology that Fragonard was already developing in the studio of Francois Boucher.

What to look for

Jeroboam stands at the right in a white turban, about to sacrifice to pagan idols, when an unnamed prophet, standing at the left, cries out against the altar at Bethel. The king stretches out his hand and orders his men to seize him, but the hand shrivels so that he cannot pull it back, and the altar splits apart, pouring out its ashes. Look at the centre: infrared images show many pentimenti, changes of mind, around the broken altar, a hard thing to imagine and paint, over which Fragonard clearly took great trouble. Wikipedia gives the painted surface as 111.5 by 143.5 cm, while Wikidata lists 115 by 145 cm.

Meaning and intent

The story is about a king's defiance punished on the spot. To meet the demands of history painting, Fragonard adjusted his usual softer style, moving away from Boucher and closer to Carle van Loo, under whom he would now train, and to Jean Francois de Troy, director of the French Academy in Rome, who had died there in January 1752. A related subject, King Solomon sacrificing to idols under the influence of his foreign wives, was slightly more popular with painters and belonged to the Power of Women group.

Legacy

The Academy kept the painting until it was abolished during the French Revolution, and it now belongs to the collection of its successor, at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Despite having had a single owner since it was painted, it has travelled widely: Rome in 1904, Moscow and Leningrad in 1978, Kyoto, Malibu, Bayonne, New York and Tokyo in the 1980s, Warsaw, Budapest and Bucharest in 2004 to 2005, Barcelona and Madrid, then Oklahoma City, Albuquerque and Naples, Florida, in 2014 to 2015, as well as many shows in Paris.