Jean-Honoré Fragonard was born in Grasse in 1732 and became the quintessential painter of the French Rococo — an artist of dazzling technical virtuosity whose canvases capture the wit, sensuality, and pleasure-seeking spirit of the ancien régime. Trained under Chardin and Boucher, he won the Prix de Rome at twenty-one and spent five years in Italy, absorbing the lessons of Tiepolo, the Venetians, and the Dutch masters. Returning to Paris, he quickly established himself as a painter of erotic, playful, and brilliantly executed canvases for aristocratic patrons.
The Swing (1767) is his most celebrated image: a young woman kicks off her slipper in mid-air as she swings over a garden, her skirts billowing to reveal her legs to the young man hidden in the bushes below, while her elderly husband — or perhaps a bishop — pushes the swing from behind, oblivious. The painting is a masterpiece of flirtatious charm, lush colour, and feathery brushwork that seems to dissolve forms into pure light and movement.
The French Revolution destroyed the world Fragonard had painted. His aristocratic patrons fled or were guillotined, and his art fell out of fashion as David’s austere Neoclassicism took hold. Fragonard survived the Revolution thanks to David’s personal protection but died in obscurity in 1806. His reputation was fully restored only in the nineteenth century, when the Impressionists recognized in his fluid, light-filled brushwork a precursor of their own painterly revolution.