The Little Park

Jean Honoré Fragonard

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Little Park is one of Fragonard’s most famous and enigmatic subjects. He treated it six times—in two red chalk drawings, a counterproof re-worked in brown wash, an oil painting, a gouache, and the present work--an etching. Although it does not seem to depict an actual site, the composition and motifs relate closely to drawings he had made in the gardens of the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, outside Rome. Done on an intimate scale and in a delicate technique of silvery black lines, the print alternates planes of sunlight and shadow to create the effect of spatial recession in the formal, and somewhat overgrown, garden.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art