Les hasards heureux de l'escarpolette (The Swing)

The painting is Fragonard's most famous work, and one of the most emblematic images of eighteenth-century art. Its genesis is reported by the writer Charles Collé. According to his journals and memoirs for 1767, the history painter Gabriel-François Doyen was commissioned by an unnamed ‘gentleman of the Court’ late in 1767 to paint his young mistress on a swing, pushed by a bishop with himself admiring her legs from below. Doyen, who had just had a major success at the Salon as a religious history painter, refused and suggested Fragonard. Fragonard was at that time about to completely change his career from a history painter with important royal commissions to a painter of small and highly sophi...