Image: Palace of Versailles
The Palace of Versailles is highlighting Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s large-format paintings in ‘Jardins des Lumières, 1750-1800’, an exhibition scheduled to remain on view through 27 September 2026.
Fragonard’s canvases are presented as testimony to the rise, during the 1770s, of ‘tableaux de places’. The term refers here to paintings used to decorate interiors, attaching a specific decorative purpose to the historical development cited by the exhibition.
The Fragonard focus narrows the exhibition’s broader titular span of 1750 to 1800 to a development of the 1770s: the growing use of tableaux de places in interiors. Versailles identifies the artist’s large formats with that account of decorative painting.
