A Brush With Life

Sometimes a painting from the distant past elbows its way into the present, demanding, “Hey! Look at me.” A persuasive claim gets staked upon the modern imagination.

“Head of an Old Man,” painted in Paris about 230 years ago by Jean-Honore Fragonard, is such a work. First at the eye-opening Fragonard retrospective organized for Paris and New York in 1988, and now in the traveling show “From the Sun King to the Royal Twilight: Painting in 18th Century France From the Musee de Picardie, Amiens,” which is concluding its American tour at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the picture dazzles for its libidinous technique. One of a number of heads of elderly people Fragonard painted after his return from a sojourn to Italy, the picture feels like a wild experiment.

The painting is small, an oval just 21 inches high and 17 inches wide. A balding, bearded old man, looking very much like a biblical prophet (he’s been claimed, without much evidence, to represent St. Peter), is shown in bust-length, three-quarter view. His lips are slightly parted, his brow subtly furrowed, his dark irises tucked into the corners of his eyes. The voice of ancient wisdom seems poised to speak.

Fragonard has loaded his brush with wet oil paint and let it rip. Every mark reads loud and clear--quick, layered, translucent, sensuous. It’s a full-bodied painting, not a tentative sketch.

The marks describe the figure, while also providing a visible diary of its creation. Above the right temple, for one stunning example, seven short, parallel diagonal strokes of white are butted up at right angles with four others, carving a hatched pattern that helps gently furrow the old man’s world-weary brow.

Flickers of ruddy umber, violet, royal blue and red float like irradiated mist through the painting’s dominant tones of mustardy gold and gray. They’re dramatized with little patches of velvety black and broad passages of bright and creamy whites. Rembrandt meets Titian and Veronese here, in a brilliant synthesis of Northern and Southern styles.

As with his other elderly heads, Fragonard painted this one shortly after having been elevated to the French Academy, thanks to an elaborate, moralizing and suitably obscure history painting. Meant as a tapestry design to be executed at Gobelins (it never was), “The High Priest Coresus Sacrifices Himself to Save Calirrhoe” features a florid suicide-by-stabbing at stage left, and it includes a number of elderly figures as metaphorical spear-carriers. The big, operatic canvas was a huge success with the academic crowd.

Fragonard could have cared less. With increasing frequency he turned away from state-sanctioned art and toward something relatively new in late 18th century France; he turned to private patronage. Pitching his work toward the emergent market gave him a measure of freedom that the rule-ridden academy wouldn’t allow. “Head of an Old Man,” with its experimental fervor, embodies that unrestrained sense of latitude.

Not for nothing are old men taken as the subject of these amazing experiments. Their status as traditional symbols of hard-earned wisdom gives the agreeably bumptious pictures gravity. Fragonard’s use of them asserts his faith in the lush power of color, paint and light. Sensuality is extolled as an earnest form of knowledge--a lesson that resonates in the post-Conceptual art world today.

There are 74 other paintings in the exhibition, and if few of them reach quite the level of intensity of this extraordinary picture, together the diverse array does suggest the degree to which the 18th century was the site of complex crosscurrents in the formation of the modern world. The Musee de Picardie in Amiens, north of Paris, was one of many French provincial museums founded in the wake of the revolution, and it’s especially rich in 18th century French painting. The core collection was formed through the nation’s dispersal of royal commissions and, in the 1890s, through a bequest of about 250 paintings assembled by two brothers, Ernest and Olympe Lavalard.

The show is organized chronologically, according to royal lineage. Each section opens with a portrait of the king, borrowed from the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Orleans.

Six paintings dating from the transformative reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715) introduce the century. (The Sun King’s portrait, made in the studio of Hyacinthe Rigaud, is one of many copies of the famous court picture of the ermine-and-velvet swathed monarch; another copy is in the Getty Museum’s collection.) Louis XV (1715-1774) reigned for most of the century, so 52 paintings--the bulk of the show--are included in the second section. It closes with 14 paintings from the era of Louis XVI (1774-1792).

The show is without examples by some crucial figures, especially Antoine Watteau, Maurice Quentin de la Tour and Jean-Baptiste Greuze. (The picture of a young woman loosely attributed to Greuze is weak.) Still, there are some gems.

An exotic group of hunting scenes is highlighted by Francois Boucher’s monumental “The Leopard Hunt” and Carle Vanloo’s imposing “The Ostrich Hunt,” the latter centered on a gangly, ferociously screeching bird. Made for an elaborate game room at Versailles, the hunt paintings sport dramatic gilded frames by the room’s designer, Jacques Verberckt.

Two tiny panels by Hubert Robert use Italian commedia dell’arte to chide emerging bourgeois sensibilities. A Neoclassical personification of “Melancholy” by Constance Charpentier embodies loss through a stylishly handled invocation of the vanished classical world (the woman’s body also droops, her hair cascading in tendrils that rhyme with the sagging boughs of a background willow). Another magnificent Fragonard, acquired by the museum just nine years ago, chooses to portray the apocryphal gospel story of “The Education of the Virgin” as an apparition, suffused in a halation of rosy golden light.

It’s Jean-Simeon Chardin, however, who reaches the high bar set by Fragonard’s “Head of an Old Man.” Three nice kitchen still-life paintings are on view, but it’s a fourth--showing two dead rabbits, a game bag and a powder horn--that takes your breath away.

This is no showy hunt-picture designed for an ostentatious palace. The Chardin is instead a stripped-down essay on the power of visual simplicity.

The upper half of the picture is virtually empty, save for the gray-brown fog of color that lowers like a shroud over a stone slab below--a funerary platform rendered mostly through subtle shifts in tone. The picture’s palette derives from the animals’ fur, soft and lifeless and laid out on the slab. The dusky light seems to be fading, as it has for them.

Because the composition is weighted toward the bottom of the picture, your eyes get cast downward, your head is surreptitiously bowed. Chardin’s emotionally moving picture moves you physically as well, locating its solemn reflection on mortality in your bones.

* “From the Sun King to the Royal Twilight: Painting in 18th Century France From the Musee de Picardie, Amiens,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., (805) 963-4364, through June 17. Closed Mondays.