How Grasse lost its Progress of Love

In 1772, Grasse’s greatest artist, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, finished a sequence of four paintings in his established ‘rococo’ style for Jeanne Bécu, known as the Comtesse du Barry. She had succeeded Madame de Pompadour in 1768 as the principal mistress (‘maîtresse en titre’) of Louis XV. The pictures were installed at her chateau in Louveciennes, near Paris.

Unfortunately for Fragonard, but no doubt an occupational hazard for a court painter, the Comtesse rejected them. Perhaps because the pavilion where they were installed was in the new ‘neoclassical’ style, influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, she had them removed and then she refused to pay for them. Maybe the artist eventually took some consolation from her ending up under the guillotine in 1793!

The Music Pavilion in Louveciennes where Fragonard's paintings were first installed (photo Jean-Marie Hullot). With its clearly neoclassical and relatively austere design, it's perhaps not surprising that Fragonard's more fluffy rococo did not fit with it. In this photo, modern Paris can be seen in the background to the left.

Fragonard rolled up the four canvases and placed them in a forgotten corner of his studio. But in 1790, when he left revolutionary Paris to visit his home town of Grasse at the invitation of his cousin, Alexandre Maubert, he brought them with him. Fragonard was commissioned to decorate the Villa Maubert on the edge of the old town. He, his sister-in-law Marguerite Gérard, and his son Alexandre-Evariste, a budding artist who was nineteen at the time, painted freemasonry and revolution themed images and symbols all over the hallway and the grand staircase. The aim was no doubt to demonstrate to visitors the revolutionary enthusiasm of their hosts. The work can still be seen in what is now the Musée Villa Fragonard (see my post here).

Possibly with personal relief, for Maubert’s more private salon, Fragonard was able to return to the rococo style with which he had had so much success in Paris. He had the Comtesse’s four paintings mounted there and, to make use of the available space, he created two more. Then he added a number of smaller images, over doorways, on top of a fireplace and in narrow crevices in between, to complete a series of paintings customised to the entire room.

In 1791, twenty years after he had started, Fragonard was finally paid for his work by his cousin, as a receipt shown at the Frick Collection in New York attests. The price was 3,600 livres (francs), or about £150 in contemporary British currency.

The Salon at Musée Villa Fragonard, photographed during Grasse's Perfume Week in 2025. Clockwise from bottom left: The Encounter (part of one of Fragonard's narrow additional images can be seen behind the adjacent door); Cupid as 'Love the Avenger (another added picture, this one painted to fit over a door); Love-Friendship; and The Abandoned Woman

The principal six pictures and their related paintings appear today in the salon of the Musée Villa Fragonard, just as the painter placed them. In sequence they are The Encounter (‘La Rencontre’), The Pursuit (‘La Poursuite’), Love Triumphant (L’Amour Triomphant’), Love-Friendship (‘L’Amour-Amitie’), Love Crowned (‘L’Amour Couronne’), and finally, The Abandoned Woman (‘L’Abandonnée’). Not exactly politically correct by modern standards, at least they are not as blatant as Fragonard’s famous ‘The Swing’ (‘L'Escarpolette’). Together they comprise ‘The Progress of Love in the Heart of a Young Girl’ (‘Les Progrès de l’Amour dans le Coeur d’une Jeune Fille’).

The only problem is that, like Rubens’ ‘Raising of the Cross’ (‘L'Élévation de la Croix’) in Grasse’s cathedral, what you see today are all copies.

Love Triumphant (L’Amour Triomphant’), Frick Collection, New York

After Alexandre Maubert’s death, the paintings eventually passed to his great-grandson, Louis Malvilan (1818-1903). From 1850 onwards, the French state tried periodically to buy them from him, but failed to do so during the regimes first of Napoleon III and then the post-1870 Third Republic. Malvilan was praised for guarding and resisting offers for them from other potential buyers, especially those from England. His drawing room at the Villa Maubert became an important attraction. Aristocracy saw it as almost a pilgrimage to see these relics of the Ancien Régime, and contemporary painters (certainly Cézanne and Berthe Morisot, and probably Renoir) came to learn from Fragonard’s pieces.

Malvilan’s mistake was to have engravings made, which brought them even wider publicity. Prints of the panels were completed in 1888 by an innovative engraver named Marcellin Desboutin. They were a commercial failure but the wider art world saw more of the Progress of Love.

The Pursuit (‘La Poursuite’), Frick Collection, New York

By the 1890s, the national newspapers had begun to speculate anxiously about foreign buyers. Malvilan was by now in his seventies, and he suffered tragedy in the loss of two of his grandchildren in 1894 and 1895. Perhaps he had become anxious about his family’s financial future. In an echo of similar situations in both France and the UK in modern times, the French state and especially the head of the Louvre, one Georges Lafenestre, failed to act, and in 1898, the paintings’ sale to ‘an English buyer’ for £50,000 was announced. The purchaser was one of London’s then (and still today) most powerful art dealers, Agnew & Sons.

There was an air of triumphalism in London. Agnews exhibited them in their Old Bond Street gallery (which they only vacated in 2008) and their catalogue said that "London has just been granted a rare privilege which even Paris has never been able to enjoy during this century". The comment was widely reported in the English newspapers. One French newspaper, by contrast, described the sale as ‘an artistic Waterloo’!

One of three images of 'Hollyhocks' painted to fill narrow spaces between the major works in the Villa Maubert's salon. Hollyhocks are not exactly common in the Cote d'Azur, but Fragonard needed to reproduce a narrow upright plant!

But the works were not to remain in London. In the following year, Agnews sold them on to the legendary American banker and collector, John Pierpont Morgan, the founder of today’s JPMorganChase, then and now the largest bank in the USA, for £62,000. Quite a nice turn for them!

At the time, Morgan typically spent several months each year in London, which was the centre of his European banking business and where he had ready access to dealers, like Agnews, who were busily selling off aristocratic art collections from all over Europe. For several years, the paintings hung in Morgan’s opulent town house at 14, Princes Gate – still a haunt of billionaires in London.

In 1912, he sent the Progress of Love to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, anticipating that they would be hung in a new wing which now bears his name. But he died in 1913 before the project was realised and his son Jack chose to sell them. The purchaser was another super-wealthy collector from America’s so-called ‘Gilded Age’, Henry Frick. He paid $1.25m (nearly $200m at current values) and installed them in his New York mansion in a ‘Fragonard Room’, although three narrow canvases of hollyhocks which did not fit were relegated to storage.

Before the works left Grasse, Malvilan commissioned copies by two artists (father and son) named de La Brély, who charged 25,000 francs (seven times what Fragonard had been paid for the originals and about £1,000 at the time) for them. These copies are what you can see today in Musée Villa Fragonard.

(Above) The 'Fragonard room' in what was once Henry Frick's mansion on East 70th Street in New York (Frick Collection: still from YouTube video). Rather different (below) from the salon of the Villa Maubert! (publicity photo by Provence Cote d'Azur Tourism).

The original works can be seen in New York as part of the Frick Collection. The art world considers them Fragonard’s masterpiece. They are most unlikely ever to be seen here again.

Note on sources: Two YouTube videos by Xavier Salomon, then deputy Curator of the Frick Collection, here and here are worth watching, although they were made in 2014. Among other sources, I also recommend Christian Zerry's ‘Les Fragonard de Grasse’, Editions Campanile, 2017.