L'Etable

1760

Travels through Italy with Hubert Robert

Together with Hubert Robert he traveled across Italy, making numerous sketches of the local scenery. In the romantic gardens with their fountains, grottoes, temples and terraces, Fragonard found the imagery he would later embody in his art.

c. 1761

Studio in the Louvre

On his return to Paris he received a studio in the Louvre palace, where he lived, and was put in charge of the decoration of the Galerie d'Apollon.

1761

Return to France via Venice and southern Italy

Having lived in Rome until April 1761, he left the Eternal City with his patron the Abbé de Saint-Non and Hubert Robert: he visited Florence, Bologna and Venice, where he studied Tiepolo, made a journey to southern Italy, and returned to France.

1765

"Coresus and Callirhoe" at the Salon: admission to the Academy

He exhibited at the Paris Salon the painting "Coresus and Callirhoe" (now in the Louvre), for which the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture admitted him as a member. Diderot devoted a lavish panegyric to it, and the king bought the painting and ordered it reproduced at the Gobelins manufactory.

second half of the 1760s

Abandoning history painting for "gallant scenes"

Despairing of attaining the position of first painter in the classical genre, he abandoned it for erotic genre scenes, which enjoyed the greatest success at the court of Louis XV. He soon became a fashionable artist — a master of pastoral landscapes, female portraits and small-format "cabinet pictures."