A Game of Horse and Rider, c. 1775/1780

As with so many of Fragonard’s paintings, the original destination of A Game of Horse and Rider and A Game of Hot Cockles  [fig. 1]   [fig. 1] Jean Honoré Fragonard, A Game of Hot Cockles, c. 1775/1780, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1946.7.6 remains mysterious; the paintings made their first public appearance only in the late nineteenth century.[1]  [1]
See Pierre Rosenberg, Fragonard (Paris, 1987), 348 – 349.  They were undoubtedly intended as pendants, however, and meant to be installed in boiseries as part of a larger decorative program. The paintings are equal in size and have similar color schemes and compositions, and their subjects are perfectly complementary; each focuses on richly verdant gardens in which groups of figures have gathered to enjoy games in the outdoors. In style and theme they can be compared to the larger canvases of Blindman's Buff [fig. 2]   [fig. 2] Jean Honoré Fragonard, Blindman's Buff, c. 1775/1780, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.16 and The Swing [fig. 3]   [fig. 3] Jean Honoré Fragonard, The Swing, c. 1775/1780, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.17, works that include similar figures that appear in the present paintings. For example, the dashing couple — the man in blue suit, the woman in red dress, their white lapdog beside them — seated on the bench to the left of the game in Hot Cockles seem to have wandered over from The Swing, where we see them lounging at the left, about to dip a similar white dog into the fountain. Despite the differences in size, the four garden paintings in the National Gallery of Art were very likely painted about the same time, probably between 1775 and 1780.

The similarities among the four paintings have often been noted, but whether they were intended as part of the same decorative scheme that also included another monumental garden scene, Fête at Saint-Cloud [fig. 4]   [fig. 4] Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Fête at Saint-Cloud, c. 1775–1780, oil on canvas, Banque de France, Paris, France. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo: Gérard Blot, is still an open question.[2]  [2]
Pierre Rosenberg first advanced the hypothesis (Pierre Rosenberg, “Les mystères d’une fête,” L’Objet d’art 1 [Nov. 1987]: 62 – 67) that the present paintings, along with the three larger garden scenes, formed a suite of decorative pictures belonging to the Maréchal de Sainscy that appeared in the sale of his estate in 1789 (see Pierre Rosenberg, Tout l’oeuvre peint de Fragonard [Paris, 1989], 130).  The figures in Horse and Rider and Hot Cockles are more carefully finished and richly detailed than those in the larger garden scenes, perhaps a function of their better state of preser­vation, with the impasto of the brushwork and the delicate glazes applied to the figures still mostly intact. Nevertheless, the canvases are probably fragments, as Jean-Pierre Cuzin first suggested.[3]  [3]
Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Fragonard, Life and Work (New York, 1988; French ed. Paris, 1987), 203.  The branches and trunks of the towering trees are somewhat arbitrarily cropped at the top edge, and technical evidence suggests that the paintings have been cut down.[4]  [4]
X-radiographs show no evidence of cusping at the top edges, indicating that these works have probably been cut down at the tops, as Jean-Pierre Cuzin thought (Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Fragonard, Life and Work [New York, 1988; French ed. Paris, 1987], 203). Other Fragonards also suffered this fate, including his early pendants, The Seesaw (Madrid, Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza) and Blindman’s Buff (Toledo, Ohio, Toledo Museum of Art), which, judging from eighteenth-century engravings, were similarly cut down at the top; see Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Fragonard, Life and Work (New York, 1988; French ed. Paris, 1987), nos. 43, 44. I am grateful to Elizabeth Walmsley, conser­vator of paintings at the National Gallery of Art, for her help in interpreting X-radiographs of the paintings.  The two paintings may originally have been much taller, perhaps equal in height to Blindman’s Buff, The Swing, and Fête at Saint-Cloud (about 216 cm). The resulting compositions, while extremely tall and narrow, would not have been unusual for decorative painting, which often was conceived to fit into established wall paneling.[5]  [5]
For example, see Katie Scott, The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, 1995), 158, figs. 164, 165. Many garden scenes by Hubert Robert (French, 1733 - 1808), for example, combine a soaring landscape and cloud-filled skies with groups of figures occupying themselves in the lower section of the painting [fig. 5]   [fig. 5] Hubert Robert, Jet d'eau, 1783, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo: Daniel Arnaudet / Gérard Blot.[6]  [6]
For example, Robert’s Jet d’eau, painted in 1783 as part of a decorative ensemble, suggests what the proportions of Fragonard’s landscapes may have been before their alteration (oil on canvas, 168 × 59.5 cm, signed and dated 1783, Paris, Musée du Louvre). Fragonard’s four canvases of hollyhocks (New York, Frick Collection; Pierre Rosenberg, Tout l’oeuvre peint de Fragonard [Paris, 1989], nos. 447 – 450), painted around 1790 as additions to The Progress of Love cycle, are also extremely attenuated compositions intended as wall decorations.

The games of blindman’s buff and swinging have remained popular with children today, but horse and rider and hot cockles may be less familiar. Yet both were common in Fragonard’s time, and they appear with some frequency in works of art produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[7]  [7]
For a history of the games, including numerous illustrations, see Henry René d’Allemagne, Récréations et passe-temps (Paris, 1905), 230 – 243; Gaston Vuillier, Plaisirs et jeux depuis les origines (Paris, 1900), 199 – 200, 214 – 218.  Fragonard’s paintings marvelously evoke the spirit of both activities. In Horse and Rider (in French the game is called “le cheval fondu,” or melted horse), the players have divided into two teams, one acting as a multilegged “horse,” bracing itself against a tree; the second team consists of “riders” who run and leap, one by one, onto the back of the “horse.” Once they are all aboard, the horse team tries to shake them off. In Fragonard’s painting two of the riders already seem to be losing their grip as they anticipate the charge of a teammate. Hot cockles (“la main chaude” or “frappe main”), by contrast, is a less physical game in which sleight of hand and close attention are rewarded. One player, the “penitent,” hides his face in the lap of a second (called the “confessor,” a referee who monitors the game) and places his hand flat behind his back. In turn, the other players slap the penitent on the hand, and he tries to identify who hit him. The player who lets himself be discovered becomes the penitent. This moment apparently is captured in the painting, as we see the penitent gesturing toward the person he has identified (either the standing woman in the light blue dress or the recoiling young man behind her). Fragonard records with his usual prescience the expressions, gestures, and body language that convey a sense of their amusement and absorption in the game.

The genesis of Fragonard’s paintings is as mysterious as their original purpose. Although the landscapes and figures in Horse and Rider and Hot Cockles are among the artist’s most accomplished inventions, no preparatory studies for them exist.[8]  [8]
Colin Eisler, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: European Schools Excluding Italian (Oxford, 1977), 331, thought that two drawings (Alexandre Ananoff, L’oeuvre dessiné de Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 4 vols. [Paris, 1961 – 1970], 1: nos. 336, 357, pls. E, F) showed similar groupings of figures to those in Horse and Rider and Hot Cockles, but the relationship is tenuous.   As with much of his oeuvre, it is as if Fragonard created them directly on the canvas, with little of the preparation and planning that one usually expects in such elaborate productions. Yet he did not invent these scenes out of whole cloth, for there was an established tradition for representing games in landscape settings; Fragonard undoubtedly had access to this tradition, and the National Gallery’s paintings are clearly indebted to it. For example, Fragonard certainly was aware of the series of prints representing games published by Jacques Stella (French, 1596 - 1657) and Gabriel Perelle (French, 1603 - 1677) in the seventeenth century [fig. 6]   [fig. 6] Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella after Jacques Stella, Hot Cockles (La Main Chaud), 1657, engraving, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.[9]  [9]
Jacques Stella, Games & Pastimes of Childhood, engr. Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella, trans. Stanley Appelbaum (1657; reprint New York, 1969), nos. 23 (Le Cheval Fondu), 28 (Le Frappe Main).  But, as with the larger canvases showing Blindman’s Buff and The Swing, the present paintings owe a debt to Jean-Baptiste Oudry (French, 1686 - 1755), whose designs for a tapestry cycle on the theme of Amusements champêtres include representations of Horse and Rider and Hot Cockles that are closely related to Fragonard’s compositions [fig. 7]   [fig. 7] Jean Baptiste Oudry, Hot Cockles (La Main Chaud), 1728, black and white chalk, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Cecilia Heisser, www.nationalmuseum.se.[10]  [10]
See H. N. Opperman, “Observations on the Tapestry Designs of J.-B. Oudry for Beauvais (1726 – 1736),” Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin 26 (Winter 1968 – 1969): 50 n. 4, 57 – 59; Hal N. Opperman, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, 2 vols. (New York, 1977), 396 – 397, nos. P95 – P102.  Despite their extraordinary inventiveness and incomparable technical mastery, these paintings continue a convention of decorative pastoral art that has its roots in the fête galante of the earlier eighteenth century.

As with Fragonard’s larger garden paintings, the possible meanings of these games have been a matter of debate among scholars. We may wonder whether Fragonard’s intention was to invest them with allegorical or emblematic meaning or whether he used them merely to enliven a pair of decorative landscapes. As Colin Eisler pointed out, Pieter Brueghel the Elder (?1525 / 1530 – 1569) included boys playing horse and rider in his painting Children’s Games, which has been interpreted as an evocation of the folly of youth.[11]  [11]
Colin Eisler, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: European Schools Excluding Italian (Oxford, 1977), 332. For Brueghel’s painting, see James Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, The Graphic Arts from 1350 to 1575 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., and New York, 1985), 498 – 499, fig. 565.  In Fragonard’s painting the rowdy play of the boys is juxtaposed with the older couple at the left, who, it is perhaps implied, enjoy a more adult game of flirtation. This activity is expanded upon in Hot Cockles, in which the amusement — like the related one of blindman’s buff — is an obvious allegory of courtship.[12]  [12]
Donald Posner, “The Swinging Women of Watteau and Fragonard,” Art Bulletin 64 (March 1982): 75 – 88.  This interpretation is emphasized by the sculptures included in the scene: at the right edge, surmounting a pedestal with a carved relief of dancing figures, is Étienne Maurice Falconet’s (1716 – 1791) Menacing Cupid, who holds a finger to his lips. This work, exhibited at the Salon of 1757, had already been used by Fragonard in his early version of The Swing (London, Wallace Collection); here it plays a similar role of commenting on the proceedings, for the success of the game of hot cockles depends on the participants remaining discreet. It is balanced on the left by a second sculpture, which Eisler understood to represent an altar to love, similar to the one depicted in Jean Baptiste Greuze’s painting The Offering to Love of about 1767.[13]  [13]
Colin Eisler, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: European Schools Excluding Italian (Oxford, 1977), 331. For the Greuze, see John Ingamells, The Wallace Collection: Catalogue of Pictures, 4 vols. (London, 1985 – 1992), 3:202 – 205, P441.

In conceiving A Game of Horse and Rider and A Game of Hot Cockles, Fragonard clearly meant for the viewer to measure one painting against the other, and he invested the landscape settings with a greater significance than is apparent in Oudry’s tapestry designs. Each picture depicts a corner of a vast parkland, with figures playing in the foreground and a view deep into the center distance. With typical sophistication and wit, Fragonard placed the two amusements in settings that comment on and amplify the activities. As with Blindman’s Buff, The Swing, and Fête at Saint-Cloud, Fragonard contrasts two different styles of garden design popular in the eighteenth century — the picturesque and the formal — and populates them with suitable figures enjoying activities proper for their nature.[14]  [14]
See Marry D. Sheriff, Fragonard: Art and Eroticism (Chicago, 1990), 85 – 89. In Hot Cockles the game is played by elegantly dressed young adults in a formal garden, with clipped hedges, smooth parterres, potted trees, and discreetly placed sculptures. In Horse and Rider, by contrast, the garden is natural, with no signs of human manipulation; its principal motif is a gnarled and twisted tree that acts to support the rowdy horseplay of the youths. Their roughhousing is appropriate to the rugged ground on which they play, so different from the well-maintained parterre on which the demure game of Hot Cockles is enjoyed. Fragonard created internal points of contrast as well. The craggy contour of the tree at the right in Horse and Rider is distinguished from the graceful stand of birches at the left, just as the carousing youths are opposed to the well-dressed couple reclining nonchalantly on the ground. In each painting there are half-glimpsed views into the further reaches of the garden, suggestive of hidden attractions and intriguing corners yet to explore. Garden paths lead off in several directions in each painting. Hot Cockles is dominated by a principal central path, on which two women have stopped to admire an unseen view off to the right. In Horse and Rider a large river or basin occupies the middle ground, and in the distance a gondola, unloading a group of promenaders, can just be discerned. The original extreme verticality of these two paintings, with their towering trees and monumental skies, would have visually complemented the emphatically horizontal formats of Fête at Saint-Cloud and, when taken together, Blindman’s Buff and The Swing, works that articulate the vast expanse of the landscape rather than the infinite heights of the sky.

This text was previously published in Philip Conisbee et al., French Paintings of the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Century, The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue (Washington, DC, 2009), 188–194.

Collection data may have been updated since the publication of the print volume. Additional light adaptations have been made for the presentation of this text online.

Richard Rand

January 1, 2009