Satyrs Dancing from Bacchanales, or Satyrs' Games
<p>Fragonard may have copied the relief within his <em>Satyrs Dancing</em> from an ancient bacchic sarcophagus. The swaying nymph holds a noise-making rattle, and the artist implies that, however improbably, this sculptural figure has deposited her pinecone-topped thyrsos outside the frame. It leans at a jaunty angle in the bacchic vessel at left, which is decorated with a smirking face and grapevine crown. The thyrsos was one of the wine god Dionysos’s main attributes. These figures could well all be part of the bacchic entourage, including the nymph’s satyr spouse and three children.</p>
Catalogue
- Year
- 1763
- Dimensions
- Image: 13.2 × 20.3 cm (5 1/4 × 8 in.); Plate: 14.3 × 20.9 cm (5 11/16 × 8 1/4 in.)
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Artist
- Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Artist
Painting
Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings, of which only five are dated. Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism.
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More by Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Rinaldo, Astride Baiardo, Flies Off in Pursuit of Angelica
1795 · black chalk with brown wash and touches of pen andbrown ink on laid paper
Rinaldo is Welcomed by the Monks
1780 · pen and brown ink with brown and gray wash over black chalk on laid paper
Astolfo Sails off with Andronica and Sofrosina
1780 · Black chalk, with pen and brush and brown ink and brush and brown wash, on off-white laid paper
Don Quixote Attacking the Windmill
1780 · black chalk with brown and gray wash on laid paper
Don Quixote Attacking the Biscayan
1780 · brush with brown and gray washes over charcoal on laid paper
Don Quixote Defeated by the Windmill
1780 · brush with brown and gray washes over charcoal on laid paper
Record
Verified by WattsOS- Artist
- Jean-Honoré Fragonard
- Year
- 1763
- Dimensions
- Image: 13.2 × 20.3 cm (5 1/4 × 8 in.); Plate: 14.3 × 20.9 cm (5 11/16 × 8 1/4 in.)
- Watts ID
- WW-1763-112722
Source
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Source
- aic
- Reference
- View at source
- Status
- verified