Jean-Honoré Fragonard
The Swing, 1767
Oil on canvas

Commissioned by a French nobleman who reportedly asked to be depicted beneath a swing on which his mistress was being pushed by a bishop — allowing him a view up her skirts — Fragonard transformed what was an explicit erotic request into a scene of exquisite, deniable coquetry. The composition is theatrically staged in a lush, overgrown garden, with the woman's slipper flying off toward a statue of Cupid, and the hidden gentleman gesturing upward with his hat. The soft, blurred brushwork and pastel palette of pink and green create an atmosphere of sensuality so refined it reads as innocence.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Jean-Honoré Fragonard was the preeminent painter of the French Rococo, a style defined by lightness, pleasure, and the intimate pleasures of aristocratic life in the decades before the Revolution swept it away. Born in Grasse in 1732, he won the Prix de Rome and trained under both Boucher and Chardin, absorbing their very different approaches to color and domestic subject matter. When the Revolution arrived, his patrons lost their wealth and their heads, and Fragonard — now stylistically obsolete — spent his final decades in obscurity, dying in 1806 largely forgotten, his reputation only fully restored in the twentieth century.