This large drawing, executed from memory or imagination, is rendered almost entirely in transparent light brown washes—sometimes layered—over a very faint underdrawing in black chalk. It is a good example of Fragonard's superb facility for representing a subject using only brush and wash set off by the white of the paper. This technique is in some ways reminiscent of the drawing style of Giambattista Tiepolo, an artist whose work Fragonard (1732–1806) was familiar with and admired. Since the Crocker drawing was made as late as 1786, this view in a park must represent the artist's recollection of a scene from one of his two sojourns in Italy which ended twelve years before, or a scene invented from fantasy.

Fragonard won the Prix de Rome in 1755 and stayed at the French Academy, then located on the Corso, until 1761. During his time there he became friendly with Hubert Robert and the abbé de Saint-Non. Robert went there at about the same time as Fragonard in the company of Robert de Stainville, the future Duc de Choiseul. Although not officially a pensionnaire, Robert was given a room at the French Academy and was able to stay in Rome until 1763. It was on this first trip to Italy that both Robert and Fragonard developed a lifelong interest in outdoor subjects, an interest encouraged by the then Director of the French Academy in Rome, Charles-Joseph Natoire, who also drew many views of parks and Italian gardens. Fragonard also spent a summer at the Villa d'Este with the Abbé de Saint-Non. The abbé was beginning to collect material later published as his Voyages pittoresques, and invited Fragonard to accompany him on his leisurely way back to Paris. During his time at the Villa d'Este Fragonard drew many views in red chalk for which he is justly celebrated. He also drew many studies of paintings, sculptures, and art objects that he and Abbé saw on the trip back to Paris.

Later, in 1773–74, Fragonard accompanied his friend and patron Bergeret de Grancourt to Italy again, making both paintings and drawings of the picturesque people and places they visited. In the years following he continued to paint and draw Italian subjects but many of these late drawings of Italian subjects are capriccios rather than real views. One in the Morgan Library in New York dates to the late 1770s or early 80s, An Imaginary Italian Garden.(1) It, too, is an invention taken from Fragonard's memory of Italian parks and scenery and is executed on a fairly large scale, somewhat larger than the Crocker drawing, but also in brush and brown wash—with this difference, that the Morgan sheet bears a pronounced underdrawing in black chalk which carries almost as much weight in the design as the brush and wash.

Eunice Williams has described the Crocker drawing as primarily a study of light effects on ancient Roman monuments, and she was especially interested by the fact that it is one of the few dated drawings made after Fragonard's last trip to Italy in 1773–74. It shows that—contrary to some scholars' ideas on the subject—Fragonard was still very much in control of his art and drew and painted with as much brilliance at this time as ever. Williams also dismisses Ananoff's idea that the Crocker drawing is a late reworking of another drawing by the master as irrelevant since that drawing is in an unrelated style.(2) A list of other comparable drawings is given in Pierre Rosenberg's Fragonard exhibition catalogue of 1987-88. These include the Morgan drawing, a drawing in the Stanford museum and a drawing sold at Sotheby's, London, 26 November 1970, lot 74. Rosenberg remarked that another drawing of a very similar subject was sold in Paris in 1981, the authenticity of which he is not certain.(3)

Cara Denison, in William Breazeale, with Cara Denison, Stacey Sell, and Freyda Spira, A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, exh. cat. Sacramento and tour, 2010