Abstract
A shallow wooden box, 46 centimetres wide, 37 centimetres deep and 10 centimetres high when closed. The inside is divided into nine small compartments. The six at the back contain eighteen cork-stoppered glass bottles, varying in shape, each hand-labelled with the name of the pigment that fills it: bleu de Prusse, sienne brûlée, carmin, and so on. The three compartments at the front are designed for tools, with central dividers curved so that utensils can rest without rolling away. The items left include an ebony stick, some blending stubs and a fine brush darkened at the tip.
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- 1.
Chemical analysis indicates that the box was used by an artist active in the late eighteenth century; its provenance via Fragonard’s family suggests a fairly conclusive attribution. François Delamarre and Bernard Guineau, ‘La boîte de couleurs dite “de Fragonard”: Analyse du contenu des flacons’, in Jean-Honoré Fragonard, peintre de Grasse, exh. cat. (Grasse: Villa-Musée Fragonard, 2006), 25–31.
- 2.
Pierre Rosenberg, Fragonard, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987), 15.
- 3.
On painters’ tools see the plates for ‘Peintures en huile’, in Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (eds.), Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers (University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, 2011), Robert Morrissey (ed.), http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu (accessed: 26 September 2013).
- 4.
Rosenberg, Fragonard, 70–71, 366–367.
- 5.
These regulations were issued later under the directorship of Joseph-Marie Vien in 1775, but it is likely that this was ratifying an established custom. Article IV, ‘Règlemens qui doivent être observés par les pensionnaires de l’Académie de France à Rome’, in Anatole de Montaiglon and Jules Guiffrey (eds.), Correspondance des directeurs de l’Académie de France à Rome avec les surintendants des bâtiments, vol. 13 (Paris: 1887–1908), 159.
- 6.
On the eighteenth-century colour trade see Sarah Lowengard, The Creation of Colour in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), http://www.gutenberg-e.org/lowengard/ (accessed: 26 September 2013).
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Williams, H. (2016). Art and Things: Fragonard’s Colour Box. In: Craciun, A., Schaffer, S. (eds) The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44379-3_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44379-3_18
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