Jean-Honoré Fragonard

In 1767 a minor nobleman approached the painter Gabriel-François Doyen with an odd commission: paint him and his mistress, her on a swing pushed by a bishop, positioned so he could see up her skirt from a hiding spot below. Doyen turned it down and passed the job to his younger colleague Jean-Honoré Fragonard, who took it, replaced the bishop with a husband hidden in shadow, and painted what became 'The Swing,' now in the Wallace Collection in London.

Fragonard had trained under François Boucher, the leading decorative painter of the day, and won a scholarship to the French Academy in Rome in 1756, where he spent five years studying earlier masters. He returned to Paris able to paint serious history subjects, but it was the swirling pinks and greens of pictures like 'The Swing' and 'The Progress of Love,' commissioned for the royal mistress Madame du Barry, that made him famous and that his patrons kept asking for. He was also known for working fast: his series of 'fantasy portraits' from the mid-1770s, energetic head-and-shoulders studies of friends in imagined costume, were reportedly painted in about an hour each.

After 1767 he largely stopped submitting to the official Salon exhibitions, working instead directly for private collectors on scenes of gardens, lovers and stolen kisses. Tastes shifted hard toward severe Neoclassicism in the 1780s. After the Revolution, with his fortune gone, Fragonard spent his final years as a minor curator at the newly opened Louvre museum, installed in the same palace where the aristocratic patrons who once commissioned 'The Swing' had lived.