French (Provençal) history painter, pupil of Jean-Baptiste van Loo and Jean-François de Troy. He was the director of Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Marseille in 1754. He moved for good to Paris in 1755 where he became rector of the Acedémie in 1778. He produced several theoretical works, too.
This is a compositional drawing for the painting Adoration of the Skulls. It differs in a few significant respects from the painting.
The salons, places of conversations in sophisticated social circles in Paris and the provinces, played an important role in 18th-century cultural life. Artistic undertakings, problems of decoration, and literary endeavours all became topics in the salons. It is interesting to note that the term designating social gatherings was also applied to the dominant mode of artistic exhibition, the famous Salons of painting.
This drawing is probably a study to the painting Preaching of a Monk (Mus�e du Louvre, Paris).
The enigmatic subject matter of this painting and its pendant Preaching of a Monk (Mus�e du Louvre, Paris) have left room for different interpretations of their significance. The use of skulls and crucifixes in the meditation represented evokes a form of devotion that grew in popularity during the Counter-Reformation and that was closely associated with the Capuchin branch of the Franciscan order. It was also proposed that the pendants are imaginary capricci involving monks, in which the artist gave free play to his imagination. Such paintings can be found in the oeuvre of the contemporary Venetian painter Alessandro Magnasco, and it is likely that Dandr�-Bardon drew on his knowledge of this artist’s work to create his pendants.
Formerly the painting was attributed to Jean-Honor� Fragonard.
