The Bolt, Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1770)
The painting shows a couple as they bolt shut a bedroom door in a bid for privacy. The Bolt also displays Fragonard’s mastery of light, this time presenting the scene with a theatrical contrast.
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 (not counting drawings and etchings), of which only five are dated. Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism.
