Seduction and Duplicity in a Sumptuous Painting

Amorous intentions in Fragonard’s famous masterpiece

L’escarpolette or ‘The Swing’ (1767) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Oil on canvas. 81 × 64.2 cm. Wallace Collection, London, UK. Image source

Few paintings in the history of art are as intensely rich as this one. Few are as strange either.

It shows a woman dressed in suggestive peach-pink, frolicking on a swing attached by ropes to a tree. In the shadows behind her, a man pulls on the ropes, propelling her higher and faster.

Meanwhile, another man crumpled in the bushes of a flowerbed surreptitiously peers up her dress. The higher she swings, the more that the rakish gentleman in the lower corner gets to see.

Given the subject matter, looking at and thinking about this painting leaves you with a dilemma, born out of our modern-day scruples over complicity and manipulation in matters of sex.

Do you lean towards discomfort at the thought of a painting that was originally made to indulge a male audience’s lascivious fantasy of glimpsing at a woman’s underwear?

Or do you see it from another point of view, as a gloriously whimsical and jubilant painting, perhaps even aligning with the woman on the swing who stands as the centrepiece of the composition?

I hope to do justice to both sides of the argument. Let’s see where we land…