Saint-Non, who held a degree in theology, took minor religious orders. Later he became an amateur artist, writer, and traveler and a congenial figure in Paris society. He was a friend and patron of Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), whom he met in Rome and with whom he traveled back to France in 1761. The Abbé’s gifts, as demonstrated here, were those of a highly skilled copyist. The pastel reproduces, with slight variations, a Fragonard painting also in The Met's collection as it looked before it was cut down to half its original size. The younger child rides a wheeled horse. Below is a Polichinelle doll—a masked clown in a bicorne hat.
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