Imaginary View of a Roman Villa 1773 - 1776

This 18th-century drawing by the French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard, "Imaginary View of a Roman Villa," depicts a picturesque scene of a Roman villa nestled amidst a grove of trees. Executed in sepia wash on paper, the drawing captures the tranquility of a Roman villa, and is a testament to Fragonard's skill in capturing the beauty of the natural world. This drawing, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, showcases Fragonard's stylistic predilection for Romanticism, a movement that celebrated emotion, imagination, and the individual's subjective experience.