Le colin-maillard

Blindman's Buff (Le Colin-maillard, c. 1769-73), in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, depicts the popular parlor game of blind man's buff in a garden setting. Fragonard renders the game with characteristic energy, the players' movements creating a dynamic composition that captures the excitement and laughter of social play. Jean Honoré Fragonard, Boucher's most talented student and the last great master of the French Rococo, combined his master's decorative sensibility with a technical facility that went beyond anything Boucher had achieved. His brushwork — rapid, assured, creating the illusion of movement and light through marks that are almost abstract at close range — was one of the technical wonders of the eighteenth century, and his color, warm and iridescent, achieved effects of atmospheric light that anticipate the Impressionists. Working primarily for private aristocratic patrons rather than the state or Church, he created images of amorous pleasure, pastoral reverie, and domestic intimacy that defined the Ancien Régime's visual self-image at its most pleasurable.

The dynamic composition captures the game's energy and movement, with figures arranged in spiraling patterns around the blindfolded central figure. Fragonard's rapid brushwork enhances the sense of playful motion.