A young woman in a froth of pink skirts swings through a woodland glade, kicking off a dainty slipper; her lover, hidden in the bushes, gazes up at her while an older man, oblivious, works the ropes behind. This playful, provocative picture is the quintessential Rococo painting.
Key facts
- Artist
- Jean-Honoré Fragonard1732–1806 · French
- Date
- c. 1767
- Period
- Rococo1720–1780
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 81 × 64.2 cm
- Location
- The Wallace Collection London, United Kingdom
Actual size
Compared with an adult 170 cm tall
Palette
#4B5044#393C36#696F5B#1F1D20#A0987CBackground
According to the dramatist Charles Collé, a courtier asked the painter Gabriel-François Doyen to paint his mistress on a swing pushed by a bishop, with himself placed below where he could admire her legs. Doyen found the subject improper, declined, and recommended Fragonard.
Fragonard accepted but replaced the bishop with an older man, perhaps the woman's husband. The picture thus changed from an affront to the Church into a classic comedy of adultery.
In the nineteenth century the Wallace family, English collectors, acquired the painting; it still hangs in the Wallace Collection in London among other masterpieces of French Rococo art.
Technique & composition
Fragonard's brushwork is quick and fluid. is built of layer upon layer of pink that flickers like petals in the sunlight, and the dark green woods around her make it glow all the more.
The composition turns on a diagonal from at lower left, through the woman, to at lower right, while the ropes of the swing make the whole picture seem to sway.
Light falls on the woman like a stage spotlight while the rest dissolves into hazy green shade, creating the atmosphere of a secret garden.
Details
Symbolism
The flying slipper
The woman kicks into the air; in eighteenth-century France a lost shoe hinted at lost innocence, a daring erotic allusion.
The hushing Cupid
On the left, holds a finger to his lips, urging secrecy about a clandestine affair. It is modelled on a sculpture by Étienne-Maurice Falconet.
Worried putti and a barking dog
Below the swing, look up anxiously, while a small dog at lower right barks. Dogs usually symbolise fidelity; here the symbol is ironic, since fidelity has been abandoned.
The doffed hat
The lover holds out his hat towards the woman; in paintings of the time hats also carried sexual connotations.
Stories
- Did you know?
A restoration in the early twenty-first century removed yellowed varnish and revealed the brilliant pinks and greens once more.
- Did you know?
Its full French title is Les Hasards heureux de l'escarpolette (The Happy Accidents of the Swing), which spells out the flirtation more openly.
- Did you know?
The animators of Disney's Tangled are said to have drawn on this painting for Rapunzel's swinging scenes.
Legacy
The Swing distils everything about Rococo art: light colour, leisurely subjects, ambiguous eroticism and ornate decoration. For that very reason, after the Revolution it became a symbol of the decadence of the old regime, and Fragonard's reputation collapsed.
Since the twentieth century it has been rediscovered and is now one of the most quoted Rococo images in popular culture; the British artist Yinka Shonibare restaged the scene as a life-size sculpture.
