The Bolt

The Bolt (French: Le Verrou), also known as The Lock, is a gallant scene painted by Jean-Honoré Fragonard in 1777. It is one of the most famous paintings by the painter, an authentic example of eighteenth-century painting.

The common interpretation suggests that the scene depicts two lovers entwined in a bedroom, the man locking the door. The painting is preserved in the Louvre Museum, in the section of the Department of Paintings devoted to eighteenth-century French painting on the second floor of the Sully wing.

It stands together with some of the most famous pictorial masterpieces of the same period, in a chronologically organized path.

This painting, a true symbol of the libertine spi...