Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Born April 5, 1732, Fragonard became one of the Ancien Régime's most prolific painters, producing over 550 works in a late Rococo style marked by exuberance and hedonism. His technique was swift, his subjects intimate: genre scenes that suggested more than they showed, eroticism delivered through atmosphere rather than exposition. Only five of his paintings carry dates, as if he worked too fast to bother. When the Revolution came, the world he'd painted so fluently was gone, and he died in Paris on August 22, 1806, decades after his moment had passed.