Satyrs Dancing from Bacchanales, or Satyrs' Games
Medium
Etching on ivory laid paper
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.)
Classification
etching
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
111931
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Fragonard may have copied the relief within his Satyrs Dancing 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 ...
About the Artist
Jean Honoré Fragonard · 1732–1806
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. Born in Grasse, he moved to Paris where he trained under Jean-Baptiste Chardin and François Boucher, winning the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1752. After studying in Italy alongside Hubert Robert, Fragonard returned to Paris in 1761 to fi...