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Jean-Honore Fragonard,  “The Fountain of Love,” about 1785, oil on canvas, unframed 24½ by 20¼ inches. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

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Jean-Honoré Fragonard, “The Sacrifice of the Rose,” 1770s, black chalk, graphite, brown, red, yellow, and gray washes, 21¾ by 181/8 inches. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Centennial Fund, gift of funds from Mr and Mrs Clinton Morrison.

FOR 10/12

‘CONSUMING PASSION’ WILL OPEN AT CLARK ART INSTITUTE OCT. 28 w/1 cut

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WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS. — On view October 28–January 21, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute will host the exhibition “Consuming Passion: Fragonard’s Allegories of Love.”

Exploring mysterious and evocative allegories of love produced in the 1780s and 1790s by the artist Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732–1806), this international loan exhibition features works from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Albertina in Vienna, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as from other museums and private collections. The exhibition is organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum.

“‘Consuming Passion’ marks the first significant exhibition in the United States of Fragonard’s works in 20 years,” said Richard Rand, senior curator at the Clark. “The exhibition presents one of the greatest and most prolific artists in the decades preceding the French Revolution from a new perspective, expanding the understanding of the art of this influential period.”

Best known as a painter of playful genre subjects, garden landscapes and fantasy portraits, Fragonard in his later years embarked on a series of dramatic reflections on the subject of romantic love.

Made largely from around 1775 until the end of the century, Fragonard’s later paintings and drawings personify the new ideas of all-encompassing romantic love that had emerged in the middle of the century — passionate abandon, endless love, the consummation of desire and the loss of virginity — in the form of classically draped figures rushing toward fountains of love, placing roses on altars or confessing their love before a statue of Cupid.

These works are characterized by a darker, more mysterious palette and a fascination with classical and literary themes. This change in Fragonard’s art reflected the influence of the emerging neoclassical style, but also anticipated the emotional and even irrational tendencies of the Romantic movement in the early Nineteenth Century.

The exhibition will be organized thematically into groupings of paintings, drawings and other ephemera that depict particular allegories: “The Oath of Love,” “The Sacrifice of the Rose,” “The Invocation of Love” and “The Fountain of Love.”

The exhibition also includes an introductory section, “Fragonard Between Fact and Fantasy,” which will feature works by the French artist from the Clark’s collection (including the great “fantasy portrait,” “The Warrior,” in addition to several loans). An additional gallery, “Printed Love,” will contextualize the works through a display of engravings, etchings and illustrated books — some first editions — from the collection of rare books in the Clark’s library.

A fully illustrated catalog, Fragonard’s Allegories of Love, written by Fragonard scholar Andrei Molotiu, will be published by the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Following its presentation at the Clark, the exhibition will be on view at the Getty February 12–May 4.

The Clark is on South Street. For information, 413-458-2303 or www.clarkart.edu.