Who created the Rococo 'Fragonard Room' in the Frick Collection?

Jean-Honoré Fragonard created the paintings that give the Frick Collection’s Rococo Fragonard Room its name and character.

The room centers on Fragonard’s celebrated Progress of Love series, a group of large, vividly colored scenes filled with gardens, theatrical gestures, flirtation, and aristocratic leisure. Fragonard painted the original series in the 1770s for Madame du Barry, the favored mistress of Louis XV, but she rejected it after apparently finding the finished decoration unsuitable.

The panels later passed through major collections, including that of J. P. Morgan. Henry Clay Frick acquired them in 1915 and had a drawing room in his Fifth Avenue mansion adapted to display them. The room is therefore both a setting designed around Fragonard’s art and a showcase for the painter’s work.

The name can cause a small confusion: Fragonard created the wall paintings, while architects and decorators shaped the surrounding interior. The Frick Room is not named for a separate Rococo architect, nor should its artist be confused with François Boucher or Antoine Watteau, two other major French Rococo painters.