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At the time this portrait was painted, Denis Diderot was one of the most famous literati in Paris. As the editor and publisher of the Encyclopédie, and author of many articles, novels and pieces of art criticism, he had great reputation. His competence as a critic was founded on immense reading. From aristocratic Rococo culture to the bourgeois ethic of virtue, his books and articles accompanied the whole of French art production under the ancien regime.
Fragonard's portrait of Diderot is part of his series of 'figures des fantaisies,' which was being built up at this time and depicts people in particularly inspired moments. Diderot himself had, on the occasion of another portrait, demanded the "grace of action". He wanted an action appropriate to the activity of the sitter, one which characterized him. The supreme commandment here was truth and naturalness of presentation. The action and pose were to be demonstrated with natural gestures. The ideal, for Diderot, was solitude in an unobserved moment, and the portrait was to simulate this. And as an unobserved genius in a state of inspired thought-production is also how Fragonard depicts him. This is a familiar enough genre, but Fragonard stages the enthusiasm of literary ideas with his impulsive painting technique and this combines the interest of the sitter with that of the beholder, a central concept in Diderot's theory of art.
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