''Blind Man's Buff'' is an oil-on-canvas painting by

Jean-Honoré Fragonard Jean-Honoré Fragonard (; 5 April 1732 (birth/baptism certificate) – 22 August 1806) was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific art ...

, produced ca. 1775–1780 after the artist's second journey to Italy in 1773–74. It is now in the

Timken Museum of Art The Timken Museum of Art is a fine art museum in Balboa Park in San Diego, California, close to the San Diego Museum of Art. It was established in 1965. History The groundwork for the museum was laid in 1951 when Walter Ames helped sisters A ...

San Diego San Diego ( , ) is a city on the Pacific coast of Southern California, adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a population of over 1.4 million, it is the List of United States cities by population, eighth-most populous city in t ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. Well-dressed men, women and children play the familiar game in a picturesque overgrown garden. Fragonard's favorite subject, he may have viewed the game as symbolizing the game of courtship. According to eighteenth-century

engraving Engraving is the practice of incising a design on a hard, usually flat surface by cutting grooves into it with a Burin (engraving), burin. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or Glass engraving, glass ar ...

s of the painting and another earlier version of the subject both may have originally been as much as a foot higher at the top.

References

1770s paintings Paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard Paintings in the Timken Museum of Art {{1770s-painting-stub

See also

References