Männliches Bildnis, Vorstudie zum Bild des St. Non

Male Portrait Study (c. 1760s), recorded at the Munich Central Collecting Point, is a preparatory portrait study, possibly related to Boucher's depiction of the Abbé de Saint-Non. The painting's passage through the Central Collecting Point documents the displacement of art during World War II. 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 sketch-like quality reveals Fragonard's working process, with bold preliminary strokes establishing the head's form and expression before refinement.