“Those who haven’t lived under the Ancien Régime,” Talleyrand once remarked, “will never know the sweetness of being alive.” Unless, that is, they have had the pleasure of inspecting the six main panels of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s “The Progress of Love” series (1771–91), which has been hanging in the Frick Collection since 1915. In them, the Ancien Régime, in all its ethereal reverie and antic refinement, lives on.

Now, for the first time in nearly a century, these panels have been removed from the dedicated room where they usually hang, a frilly affair of tassels and rococo boiseries, and can be seen, through September, in the Frick’s East Gallery. In either place, these paintings look very good indeed. But in the newer one they appear somewhat different from what many visitors may remember. Because the paintings are now illuminated from above by a skylight, rather than laterally by light from a window, they are more legible than before, and their colors, especially those of the earlier paintings, appear somewhat riper and more robust.

A case could be made that the six main paintings that make up “The Progress of Love” (together with seven smaller and tangential works that are not on display at this time) constitute Fragonard’s most representative masterpiece. In 18th-century France, the human age par excellence was not that of fully fledged adulthood, as in the Renaissance and the Baroque periods, but early adolescence. This fact is hardly belied by the gray periwigs worn by the barely pubescent boys and girls who populate these panels. There is a tremendous drama, a pulsating vitality, implicit in each scene, but that too is something of a sham, since in the end, everything resolves itself into the good fun of child’s play. Meanwhile, these enchanting children seem to move with balletic buoyancy through the ample spaces of the panel. And if we could hear them, they would doubtless speak to us in song, or at the very least, in perfect lines of alexandrine verse.

A visual unity is established among these rather tall paintings, especially the four earlier ones, by their uniform height (each roughly 10 feet tall) as well as by the way in which the green of the foliage and the grayish-blue of the air dominate the compositions. Also, a subtle play is afoot between the living, if porcelaneous child actors, and the statuary (whether of Venus, Cupid, or both) that recurs in each of the paintings.

It is remarkable that the four earlier paintings (“The Pursuit,” “The Meeting,” “The Lover Crowned,” and “Love Letters,” all executed from 1771–3), though quite perfect in their way, were rejected by the patron who commissioned them, Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV, in favor of works by a far inferior artist, Joseph Marie Vien (1716-1809). Looking to decorate a pleasure pavilion on the grounds of her chateau at Louveciennes, she appears to have found Fragonard’s works to be too much in the older Rococo style. Instead she opted for the neoclassical style that was then emerging, exemplified in the art of Vien. In consequence, Fragonard took back these paintings and installed them in his house in Grasse. Nearly two decades later, in 1790-91, he added “Love Triumphant” and “Reverie.” Ironically, this latter pair, painted in a kind of chalk-red grisaille and rendered in a new fangled, almost Republican simplicity, resembles the neoclassicism of men such as Vien to a far greater degree than was true of Fragonard’s earlier works.

At the same time, these later paintings are unmistakably the work of the author of such masterpieces as “The Swing” and “Young Girl Reading.” Fragonard is to painting as Ovid is to poetry: a supremely proficient virtuoso whose specialty is love and whose forms seem to fall effortlessly and miraculously into place. The most stunning perfection achieved in “The Progress of Love” cycle is compositional. What sets Fragonard apart from contemporaries such as Hubert Robert, Vien, Pierre Subleyras, and so many others is an absolutely intuitive and almost infallible sense of the placement of his figures within his invented world. You need only look at “The Pursuit” and the swift, heat-quickening drama of its fanning composition, to know that no one can surpass him in this respect. At the same time, like Ovid, he is so happy and so much at home flitting about the surface of life that he never goes very deep and never needs to do so. And just as Ovid’s poetry has a certain slick facility to it, it should be said that Fragonard’s paint textures rarely rise to the level of impasted life that is so conspicuous in the art of one of his foremost models, François Boucher.

When these paintings are returned to their traditional dwelling, at the end of September, they will benefit from new and improved lighting, which will also highlight several of the surrounding objects of decorative art, such as a newly acquired Lepaute clock, with a terra-cotta sculpture by the great Clodion.