The Swing of the Affair: Fragonard, Infidelity, and the Art of Heedlessness
Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Swing, 1767, oil on canvas, 64.2 x 81 cm. London, The Wallace Collection.
If you suspect someone is cheating, chances are… they are. But catching them in the act can be the most gratifying part of the process (because, yes, it all goes downhill from there). If you are detached enough, it becomes a game, a scavenger hunt of sorts. You seek signs of sloppiness, be that a kicked-off shoe, a lascivious grin, or an eager lover waiting in the bushes. But you often know even before you find them. It’s all there. We’re talking about paintings, after all!
In its tendency to expose the world, art echoes the best—and worst—in us. Many paintings, therefore, depict the human tendency to lust, cheat, and betray. What’s surprising is they often do so in a playful, blaze way, smudging the seriousness of the matter. But perhaps that’s how cheating is, too. It is fun and exhilarating. It clouds our vision, dimming the moral gravity of the situation. Like Rococo figures, those involved are heedless until they’re finally caught in the act.
No artist captures this better than Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806). A French Rococo painter of the eighteenth century, Fragonard frequented the circles of the promiscuous, hedonistic bourgeoise. In joining Count de Grancourt for a trip to Italy, for example, he experienced the glamour and the depravity of eighteenth-century aristocracy. In painting for the time’s most indulgent patrons, including King Louis XV’s mistress, Madame du Barry, he encountered the juiciest gossip—and illustrated it.
Amid such endeavours, Fragonard discovered a world where desire trumped duty, where adultery was a thrill, and where love affairs were not only common but celebrated. Hedonism stood at the core of their culture, encouraging the performance of infidelity as a symbol of status and virility. This naturally seeped into Fragonard’s work and shaped his style and subject matter. In order to stay relevant an appeal to his patrons, his scenes had to take on an air of flirtation, secrecy, and mischief. Thus, with blots of eroticism and strokes of salacious humour, his scenes came to mirror the very nature of the lives he painted.
His most famous work, The Swing, was commissioned by a man who simply could not keep his affair to himself. He had to flaunt it. All other men had to know. But as overt expressions of adultery violated decorum, Fragonard had to be more subtle in conveying this. Impregnating the work with symbols, he realized, would do the job.
By setting the scene in a luscious garden, for example, he evoked the sensual connotations of the space. In Rococo art, gardens represent a carefree fantasy world where societal norms and moral constraints do not apply. They pose settings for transgression, indulgence, and clandestine affairs, emphasizing the wild, uncontrollable nature of human desire–exactly what the artist needed.
And that’s just the start. To intensify the affair, Fragonard populated the garden with blooming flowers and lush greenery–metaphors for passion and indulgence. Then, to point to the victims of these emotions, Fragonard rendered three figures in a triangular structure–no doubt reflecting the triangular nature of their relationship, a classic ménage-à-trois. A young, beautiful woman is placed in the center of the composition, swinging between her husband (the elderly man behind her back) and her lover (the charming youth at her feet). Both reach for her, with the former even attempting to pull her in his direction. But the woman only has eyes for her lover, as betrayed by the direction of her gaze.
Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Swing, detail.
The kicked-off shoe, a prime sign of cheating, reinforces this. Aimed towards her lover, the shoe reveals the woman’s affections. Compositionally, it also points to another triangular composition, this time between the woman, the lover, and the sculpture of Cupid on the left-hand side. Modeled on Menacing Love, a sculpture in Madame de Pompadour’s possession, Cupid embodies the God of desire, erotic love, and attraction. In this way, it exposes the nature of the emotions shared by the young figures; at the same time, the woman’s spread legs signal the consummation of these passions, becoming the climax of sin. It is in such visual metaphors that Fragonard distills the tension between discretion and exposure. While the act of infidelity hinges on secrecy, the symbols betray it—making the viewer complicit in the exposure of the affair. The result is a painting that both indulges and indicts.
Etienne-Maurice Falconet, The Menacing Cupid, bronze with gilding, 83.82 × 40.64 × 53.34 cm. Washington, D.C., The National Gallery
This obviousness was intentional. The painting’s patron, Baron Louis-Guillaume Baillet de Saint-Julien, wanted a picture that showed him looking up his mistress’ skirt. Though he first commissioned Gabriel François Doyen, the artist failed to execute the commission due to moral concerns—scruples Fragonard certainly did not have. When he finally asked Fragonard to render the scene, the patron got exactly what he wanted—a depiction of his mistress as the prime “perpetrator” behind the affair, her promiscuity and dominance reflected in her positioning atop the willing lover.
As brief of a description as this may be, Fragonard’s paintings don’t just depict infidelity; they revel in its allure. They tease out the tension between secrecy and obviousness, morality and indulgence, consequence and escape. They remind us that art, like life, becomes most exhilarating when we stand at the precipice and experience what the British novelist Graham Greene called “that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
And perhaps that is the true genius of Fragonard: his ability to make us complicit, to have us experience emotions and excitements parallel to his figures’. Because, in looking at his work, we are not passive observers. We are voyeurs and detectives, decoding symbols, piecing together illicit affairs, and indulging in shared mischief. We expose the sitters’ transgressions and, in the process, recall our own.