The Swing

The Swing (French: Les Hasards heureux de l'escarpolette, 'The Happy Accidents of the Swing') was painted around 1767–68 on a private commission from a courtier whose identity has not been conclusively established; the dramatist Charles Collé's memoirs describe the patron requesting a portrait of himself and his mistress, with an ecclesiastic pushing the swing — a commission first offered to Gabriel François Doyen, who declined it as too frivolous and directed the patron to Fragonard, who replaced the bishop with a layman. The painting's documented provenance begins with the tax farmer Marie-François Ménage de Pressigny, who was guillotined during the Revolution in 1794, after which it was seized by the revolutionary government; subsequent owners included the Duc de Morny, at whose death in 1865 it was purchased at auction in Paris by the 4th Marquess of Hertford, the principal founder of the Wallace Collection. It was bequeathed by Lord Hertford to his natural son Sir Richard Wallace, whose widow in turn gave the collection to the British nation in 1897. Between August and November 2021 the painting underwent its first thorough conservation treatment in over a hundred years, reversing the severe yellowing of the varnish that had obscured the paint surface. Fragonard was born in Grasse on 5 April 1732 and trained in Paris first under Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and then under François Boucher, winning the Prix de Rome in 1752 and spending formative years at the French Academy in Rome. He was admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1765; his death in Paris on 22 August 1806 passed almost without notice, and his reputation remained in eclipse until well after 1850. The Swing is considered one of the defining masterpieces of the Rococo.