Stop and Look – Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing (1767)
This very famous painting is one of the stars of the Wallace Collection, that gem of an art gallery nestling just off Oxford Street in central London. Unless you’ve been there, you’ll never have seen it in the flesh, or rather the pigment.
Sir Richard Wallace was the illegitimate son of the 4th Marquess of Hertford. The two men assembled a superb collection of paintings, drawings, armour and silver which Wallace’s widow bequeathed to the nation in 1900. She stipulated that no item should ever be lent.
There are famous Italian and Dutch pictures to be seen, English watercolours too, but Hertford was particularly enamoured of the French eighteenth century. This picture encapsulates the mood of the French court in the decades immediately before the French Revolution. The Wallace has plenty of pink nudes by Boucher, but as a social document, for me, this image is both more entertaining and more telling.
The very trees in this imaginary garden are conspiring to surround the figures with a rococo froufrou. When we can manage to isolate the characters from their bosky background, we see two men in light-grey suits helping a young woman to enjoy herself on a swing slung from the branches. One of them, in the background, is pulling on ropes to make her rise higher and higher, while the other, somewhat younger, is ‘ensnared with flowers’ and has fallen back so that he looks up – into the interior of her pink dress.
It’s clear that the young lady is happy to allow this to happen. Her enjoyment is such that one of her shoes has flown off, and she certainly doesn’t object to the apparently fortuitous liberty the young man is taking. She is also unconcerned, as is he, that he’s a priest in holy orders, like the man beyond – a Bishop indeed – who is encouraging both of them.
Whatever next? A young clergyman upskirting a young lady? The original title of the picture is “The Happy Accidents of the Swing”, so we are not in any doubt as to what our response should be. Of course, in the 1760s, there was no militant feminism to assert the girl’s real interests and protect her from these predatory males.
Well, we know better now, don’t we? We still tolerate young people enjoying themselves promiscuously, when lockdown allows it. But there is a creeping puritanism abroad today that sits in judgment over quite natural human instincts. How are we to balance the conflicting demands of our new, rather curious sexual morality, and the urges to which we are all subject?
Fragonard spoke for a very different civilization. We wouldn’t wish to revert to the values of Louis XV and his court, perhaps. But this celebration of exuberance, of green and pink froufrou and youthful enjoyment, is not to be sneered at: its beauty as an image resides at least partly in the fact that it’s an icon of something in human nature I for one hope hasn’t entirely been expunged by social and political righteousness.
In 2019, the Trustees of the Wallace Collection obtained permission from the Charities Commission to lend works occasionally. So, in due course there will come, not a revolution, perhaps, but an occasional opportunity to see The Swing in places other than Hertford House, Manchester Square, London W.C.I.
