Le Rocher

Clouds drift, leaves tremble, young women ride past a great rock. For generations Fragonard's Le Rocher was thought to be the twin of another landscape, until a laboratory showed they were painted years apart.

The story behind the painting

Jean-Honoré Fragonard painted Le Rocher around 1780. For a long time it was presented as the pendant, the matching partner, of another landscape, L'Abreuvoir, the watering place. The two were kept together as a pair in the collections of François Hyppolyte Walferdin, then Gaston de Lauverjat and finally Arthur Veil-Picard. In 2012, however, the Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France examined both canvases and found that their preparations differ: that of Le Rocher dates from around 1780, while that of L'Abreuvoir goes back to the 1760s. The famous pair was not born together after all.

What to look for

The painting is an oil on canvas, signed at the lower left. Fragonard makes us feel the barely perceptible movement of the clouds with broad, rapid brushstrokes in a very fluid paint. The trembling of the leaves is given rhythm by small, compact touches. The meadows have a foamy, translucent texture, while the rocks are built with thick, pressed strokes. Take time to follow how the handling changes from sky to foliage to stone: each surface has its own kind of brushwork, and together they make the landscape seem to breathe.

Meaning and intent

The small figures bring a gallant tone typical of Fragonard. The painting invites us to imagine the relations between the young women on their mounts and the men close to them, without telling us more. It is a landscape first, but one in which people and nature share the same lively, light mood. The French Wikipedia article sees in it the painter's ability to turn wind, foliage and rock into pure movement of paint, with the human story left as a gentle suggestion for the viewer to complete.

Legacy

Le Rocher was classified as a national treasure together with L'Abreuvoir. In 2013 the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon acquired both paintings with the support of the Club du musée Saint-Pierre, a group of patrons, while two other European museums were also interested. The purchase filled a gap: the museum had few French eighteenth-century paintings and few landscapes of that period. The work had already been shown in Paris in 1860, at the Royal Academy in London in 1954 to 1955, in Zurich in 1955, in Tokyo in 1980 and at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1987 to 1988.