Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Progress of Love is one of the great painted ensembles of French eighteenth-century art and is considered to be the artist’s masterpiece. For more than seventy-five years, the panels have been a highlight of The Frick Collection. Colin B. Bailey’s keenly awaited and beautifully illustrated book published in September by the museum in association with D. Giles Limited provides an invaluable and engaging resource on the sequence and meaning of the panels in the series. It explores the history of the work from its conception in France to its rediscovery by two great American collectors more than one hundred years later and tells the fascinating story of how the group of canvases found a permanent home in the New York City mansion of Henry Clay Frick, where the museum’s visitors enjoy them today.

The tale, however, has resonance and appeal beyond the walls of the institution. A study of these beautiful panels offers a window into the complex world of art and architectural taste-makers and patronage in eighteenth-century France, as well as the history of collecting in Europe and America during the two centuries that followed their creation. Fragonard’s Progress of Love at The Frick Collection was written by Bailey, the Frick’s Associate Director and Peter Jay Sharp Curator. In celebration of the early September release of the book, the Frick will host a free public lecture and book-signing as well as a scholarly seminar.

This publication is the result of several years of new—and heretofore unpublished—research by author Colin B. Bailey. The richly illustrated book features more than 135 color images of the masterpiece and details thereof, much of it new photography; as well as archival and contemporary views of the rooms that Fragonard’s series has occupied, plans, original sketches, and comparative images.

Comments Bailey, “To write a history of the Fragonard Room was a challenge I considered taking on shortly after arriving at the Frick in October 2000. It has always been my favorite gallery in any museum, and I have studied the pictures and taught eighteenth-century French art from them for longer than I care to remember. When the Frick renovated the room and its lighting system in 2007, we had the opportunity to view the pictures afresh, which renewed my commitment to publish their complete story. But this book simply could not have been written without the support of almost every colleague in the curatorial department. Indeed, the book is reflective of the deep resources and expertise of the Frick’s curatorial and library staff and draws on a great body of research materials, new photographs and photomontages, x-rays and site plans, and archival materials relating to J. P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick as collectors. For the first time, it will be possible to visualize the different arrangement of Fragonard’s series in its three homes prior to the move to East 70th Street in 1915.”

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) was commissioned in 1771 to complete four large canvases for the comtesse du Barry, the consort of Louis XV. They were installed in 1772 in the pavilion in Louveciennes built for her outside of Paris by the king. By 1773 the canvases—The Pursuit, The Meeting, The Lover Crowned, and Love Letters—had been rejected by Du Barry and returned to the artist. In 1790, Fragonard moved the canvases to his cousin’s house, the Villa Maubert, in Grasse, and over the course of the year, he painted ten additional panels: two large-scale works, Love Triumphant and Reverie; four narrow canvases depicting hollyhocks, and four overdoors of putti. Sold by the Maubert estate to the dealer Agnew’s in 1898, the panels subsequently decorated a drawing room in the London home of financier and art collector J. P. Morgan. With his death, the works passed through the hands of dealer Joseph Duveen, who in 1915 brokered their sale to industrialist and collector Henry Clay Frick, and arranged for their installation in the Fifth Avenue museum that now houses the celebrated museum.

Fragonard’s Progress of Love at The Frick Collection (192 pages; hardcover $44.95, member price $40.46; softcover $25.00, member price $22.50) will be available starting this fall at the Museum Shop of the Frick, on the institution’s Web site http://www.shopfrick.org/index.htm, and by phone 212.547.6848.

Colin B. Bailey is Associate Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator of The Frick Collection, New York, and an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He is organizing a major upcoming exhibition and catalogue at the Frick, Renoir, Impressionism, and the Full-Length Format (2012). Other recent publications include Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection (2009); Renoir Landscapes, 1865–1883 (2007); and The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of Eighteenth-Century French Genre Painting (2003). His book Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris was awarded the Mitchell Prize for the best art history book of 2002–3.