Objects of Note: The Swing

OBJECTS OF NOTE | ART & CULTURE | CABANA MAGAZINE

Although tame to the 21st century onlooker, when 'The Swing' was first unveiled before the court of Le Baron de Saint Julien, it was scandalous in the extreme. In this month's 'Objects of Note', where Big Cabana Family curators share objects and paintings that intrigue them, Charlotte di Carcaci discusses Jean-Honoré Fragonard's masterpiece and revisits the haunts of her childhood.

BY CHARLOTTE DI CARCACI | ART & CULTURE | 8 AUGUST 2024

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Les hasards heureux de l'escarpolette (The Swing), c. 1767 © The Wallace Collection 

I was an unusual kind of child, the kind who likes going to museums. My very favorite gallery until well into my teens, when I eschewed such high culture for an all-consuming interest in Northern Soul, was always the Wallace Collection in London. My mother had long been an intimate of the collection’s legendary curator, Sir Francis Watson, and so, on Nanny’s afternoons off, I would quite often find myself in the large mansion on Manchester Square being shown, by that celebrated expert, the great Rococo masterpieces that hung upon its walls.

I always looked forward to our visits and soon grew more accustomed than most girls of my age to the wanton lips and naked thighs of Francois Boucher’s nymphs. I adored the way Madame de Pompadour’s small Spaniel, in her portrait by the same artist, gazed up at its mistress, and I envied her flounced gown with its tight, beribbonned bodice. As I walked around the damasked rooms I was entranced by every depiction of a rosy-cheeked shepherdess or a fête champêtre, but above all the other paintings there I grew to love The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

As often happens in life, the haunts of childhood are rarely revisited by our grown-up selves, and so, last month, when I re-crossed the threshold of this most intimate of museums after more than a decade’s absence, I rushed up its wide staircase, past the nereids and gods I had once known so well, and made straight for my favorite work. Lately, and not without embarrassment, I have noted that many of the paintings I loved as a young girl seemed to verge on the mawkish, but this grand portrayal of 18th century seduction remained as alluring to me as it had been when I was 10 years old.

The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard in situ at The Wallace Collection, London © Alessandro Laraspata

When I had first viewed the picture as a child I was blissfully unaware of its sexual undertones, or even of its iconic status in popular culture. Indeed, in this century, it has almost reached the giddy heights of the Mona Lisa or Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in becoming an image so well-known that it can be referenced by cartoonists or contemporary artists safe in the knowledge that their audiences will understand the allusions being made about it. But, paradoxically, the effect of any artwork gaining that degree of celebrity often means that the spectator is unable to see the painting as it really is, the layers of present-day irony swamping the artist’s original intentions.

Although to the 21st century onlooker, used to a daily onslaught of near pornographic images, the goings-on in the painting seem pretty tame, when The Swing was first unveiled before the court it was considered to be scandalous in the extreme. The picture was commissioned from Fragonard by an unidentified gentleman, thought to be Le Baron de Saint Julien, who was Receiver-General for the French clergy. He wanted ‘a portrait of his mistress on a swing, which a bishop would set in motion.

'You will place me in a position,’ he wrote to the artist, ‘where I can see the legs of this beautiful child, even more, if you want to further enliven the painting.’ But the thought of a cleric being included in this profane scene so disquieted Fragonard that he insisted the official be replaced by the less irreverent figure of an older husband.

The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard © Alessandro Laraspata 

In the painting this poor cuckold is pulling the swing, itself a symbol of inconstancy, unaware that his wife’s lover lies sprawled in front of her half-obscured in the undergrowth, raising a phallic arm towards her nether-regions, and gazing adoringly up her skirts. As she swings, the beauty raises a leg, kicking ecstatically into the air, towards a statue of Cupid, a delicate pink-silk slipper. The husband meanwhile, remains oblivious to the warning barks of a little dog, an animal which in those days symbolised fidelity, and his adulterous wife is equally ignorant that the ropes which hold up the swing, on which she is cavorting with such abandon, have begun to fray.

This painting, like so many of Fragonard’s later works, which celebrate the frivolity and licentiousness of the era, seems to hint in an unconscious manner at the imminent destruction of the decadent society which is being depicted. For although the girl on the swing is bathed in sunlight, her husband and her lover are cast in shadow, and the woodland glade in which they find themselves is umbrous, almost menacing. Indeed, only a few years later, these carefree aristocrats who had previously thought only of their own pleasures, would find themselves, no longer attired in glittering finery, but rather, clad in filthy rags, bundled onto tumbrils for an assignation not with some eager paramour, but instead, with the steely blades of Madame Guillotine.