L'Amour embrase l'Univers

Love Inflaming the Universe (c. 1775-80), in the Louvre, is an allegorical painting depicting the cosmic power of love, personified as a torchbearer setting the world ablaze. The subject derives from the classical and Renaissance tradition of cosmic Eros — the creative force that animates all of nature. Fragonard renders this grandiose conceit with characteristic visual exuberance, the torch's light suffusing the composition with golden warmth. 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 radiates outward from the central figure of Cupid, with flames and clouds creating a turbulent cosmic setting. The warm palette is dominated by reds and golds appropriate to the incendiary theme.