El cerrojo

Fragonard painted this around 1777, near the end of the long reign of the rococo, when the fashion for frothy love scenes was already giving way to sterner, more moral pictures. He pushes all the action into one corner. A young man stretches to throw the bolt at the top of the door while he pulls a woman toward him, and the whole left half of the canvas is nothing but a great tumbled bed and shadow. On a table sits an apple, the old sign of temptation. What makes it stranger is where it ended up hanging. A collector named Louis-Gabriel Véri owned it as a deliberate pair with a religious scene by the same hand, the Adoration of the Shepherds, sacred love on one wall and this on the other. The two were made to be seen together.