A gangorra

Fragonard was still a teenager when he painted this, around 1750, working in the Paris studio of François Boucher, the reigning master of light Rococo pleasure scenes. A young man in a garden works the rope of a see-saw while a girl in billowing skirts rides high at the other end, her companions laughing below. It is all flirtation and motion and no meaning at all, exactly the decorative charm the aristocracy wanted for their walls. The picture has a twin, a game of blind-man's buff now in a museum in Ohio. The pair were split apart long ago on the American art market. Two years after this, Fragonard won the Prix de Rome and left Boucher's studio for Italy.