Abstract: The article is dedicated to the problem of church patronage of fine arts in the 18th-century Paris. The predominance of secular art at the time did not lead to withdrawal between the Church and the artists who kept interacting with each other in the area of patronage, mainly of fine arts. In tracing documents and sources for this research the author deals with many academic aims, as follows: to classify church orders for the painters, to define its peculiarities, to value the meaning of church patronage for a painter at that time, to find a point of intersection of secular and religious artistic orders in the circumstances of a perpetual stream of luxurious secular orders. Meanwhile the author aims to distinguish different kinds of church assignments, such as small works for poor congregations, great altarpieces for Parisian cathedrals, paintings for monasteries usually based on sophisticated inventions (programs) understandable only by the ‘devoted’, and portraits of church leaders. Academic novelty of the article is determined by the exiguity of publications on the topic written by recent Russian researchers. In the meantime, French art historians are continually working with these problems and offer some of its solutions well-known to article’s author. The total investigation progress in this area is exemplified in the text by typical but semantically complicated works of art. The author of the article is led to a conclusion that church patronage took a considerable part of a Parisian artist’s carrier though church orders were not the main mover of artistic life of the time. Nevertheless religious painting was still an integral part of French fine art. During the 18th century the Church had been remaining to be a perpetual customer and a partner of painters settled in Paris who could fulfil a request for all kinds of high quality artistic production.

Abstract: The subject of the study is the issue of interaction between the artist – J.O. Fragonard - and an influential official institution, such as the Paris Academy of Painting and Sculpture in the XVIII century. From the standpoint of historical sociology and psychology, the author discusses why, having achieved significant success, won the Rome Prize and received the title of appointed, the artist preferred to move away from the Academy and deliberately refused to build an academic career. Analyzing the reasons for such a decision, the author draws on historical sources that allow to obtain data on the private life of the master, his relations with teachers, academic authorities, customers of various categories. Reconstructing the artistic environment of Paris of the period under consideration, the author places his hero in a broad cultural context, without which it is impossible to understand Fragonard's place among his predecessors and contemporaries. Of course, the author constantly checks with scientific works, where the problems of interest to him are touched upon.     For the first time in Russian historiography, the author examines in detail the main facts of the biography of J.O. Fragonard in the context of his relations with the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. However, the principal novelty of the study lies in the attention to how a new type of personality is formed in the French artistic environment of the middle of the XVIII century, unlike the type prevailing at the end of the previous century. Artists from the time of the foundation of the Royal Academy sought first of all to separate themselves from the craft environment, to prove their belonging to the creative elite and their equality with the advanced Italian masters. Now, the defense of creative freedom, including from the Royal Academy, comes to the fore, the search for one's own path, which is not always compatible with an academic career. According to the author, the experience of creative freedom gained by such Rococo masters as J.-O. Fragonard turned out to be especially important for the further development of French art.