Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) was among the most prolific Rococo painters of eighteenth-century France. *The Swing* (in French, *Les Hasards Heureux de l'Escarpolette*, 'the happy accidents of the swing') was a small private commission: an anonymous aristocrat wanted a painting of his mistress on a swing, with himself shown watching from the bushes. Other painters had refused; Fragonard accepted.

The scene is textbook Rococo grammar. In a sunlit garden a young woman is pushed on a swing by her older husband — originally specified as a bishop, in a deliberate anticlerical provocation Fragonard turned into an ordinary servant. A young man peers from the shrubbery; one of her pink slippers flies into the air. The erotic signals are almost overstated: the lifted petticoats, the kicked-off shoe, the cupid statue on the tree pressing a finger to its lips.

Fragonard's technical innovations are easy to miss inside the genre's lightness. The brushwork is exceptionally rapid; the small canvas (81 × 64 cm) may have taken only a few weeks. The light on the leaves and the layered pinks of the dress, half-built from translucent glazes, depend on a confident hand. The supposed 'superficiality' of eighteenth-century French painting actually rests on demanding technique.

The French Revolution (1789) declared Rococo morally decayed and politically culpable; Fragonard lost his commissions and ended his life in poverty. *The Swing* entered the Wallace Collection in 1865 and is still housed there in London. It remains the most recognised painting of the Rococo — loved or loathed, but remembered.