Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Shepherd and Sheep on a Sunny Hillside
Jean Honoré Fragonard French
Not on view
In this luminous landscape, Fragonard interprets nature through the lens of seventeenth-century Dutch artists, such as Jacob van Ruisdael, whose pictures he copied. From such sources he freely appropriated various compositional features, including the diagonal slope of the terrain, the dramatic silhouettes of the trees, and the miniscule scale of the shepherd and his flock. Fragonard’s painterly technique, however, distinguishes the work from its Dutch precedents. The surface of the drawing seems to vibrate with daubs of brown wash that mimic dappled sunlight.
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