While there’s plenty of intrigue in the story of its making, The Swing ultimately revels in fun, fantasy, and the idealized haut monde. The decadent composition all but shouts: “Let them eat cake!” The Swing isn’t particularly relatable to the 21st-century viewer or anyone unaffiliated with the court at Paris or Versailles, nor does it offer serious truths about human nature. ![]() In the shadows behind her, an older man-perhaps her cuckolded husband-pulls the swing’s reins. Her paramour wears a pewter-hued suit, extends a black tricorne hat into the brush, and looks up the woman’s skirt with what can only be described as the goofiest, most love-struck grin possible. She flings her kitten-heeled shoe towards a mischievous cupid sculpture while she gazes at the man sprawled in the bushes beneath her. ![]() ![]() At the center of the work, a young woman clothed in a billowing, ruffled, ballet-pink dress floats in a dramatically lit clearing, rocking above the ground on a crimson-cushioned swing. ![]() In the history of painting, Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing (1767) is unmatched in its frivolity and over-the-top romance.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |