AHIS Short Answer essay

AHIS Short Answer essay Order Description Read Posner’s article carefully. It is helpful to take notes while reading in order to organize your thoughts. Answer the prompt in the format of a two-page, double-spaced, typed essay. Remember to edit and check your so that it reads as nicely as possible. I recommend reading your work aloud or to a friend, this process often catches many errors. Requiment and the articles are all in the Additional materials. The Swinging Women of Watteau and Fragonard Author(s): Donald PosnerSource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Mar., 1982), pp. 75-88Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3050195 .Accessed: 03/11/2014 17:35Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp .JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. .College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The ArtBulletin.http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 204.140.185.228 on Mon, 3 Nov 2014 17:35:21 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions When Penn's Treaty was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1772, the painting was well received. Engravings executed three years later by John Hall and published by John Boydell were quite popular in England and America. In the years that followed, a wide variety of copies and reinterpretations made West's epic painting into an American icon.68 To understand the work's original message fully, however, one must look beyond the William Penn legend. Because the painting suggested the succession of Indian treaties and the problems of Thomas Penn's proprietorship, it spoke on many levels. Peace had come to Pennsylvania in the early 1770's. Friction over elections, Indian raids, land transactions, and even the campaign to unseat the proprietary government appeared to have ended. The Penn family wanted to strengthen its authority by suggesting that merchants, Quakers, and Indians could now live and work without dissension. West, therefore, used the familiar legend of William Penn's treaty to celebrate the return of peace to Pennsylvania. Ironically, that peace would soon be obliterated by a document written in Philadelphia only five years later. Consequences of that Declaration would virtually eradicate the disputes and differences of Penn's proprietary government. In the aftermath of the revolutionary era, the initial meaning of West's painting would become shrouded by legend. Eventually it would enter the annals of American lore as a symbol of those tranquil Colonial days that had been blessed by decades of peace and racial harmony. National Museum of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington, D.C. 20560 Bibliography Galt, John, The Life, Studies and Work of Benjamin West, 2 vols. (London, 1820), repr. Gainesville, Fla., 1960. Hanna, William S., Benjamin Franklin and Pennsylvania Politics, Stanford, 1964. Hutson, James, Pennsylvania Politics 1746-1770, The Movement for Royal Government and Its Consequences, Princeton, 1972. Myers, Albert Cook, ed., William Penn's Own Account of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians, Somerset, N.J., 1970. Sellers, Charles Coleman, "The Beginning: A Monument to Probity, Candor and Peace," Symbols of Peace: William Penn's Treaty with the Indians, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1976, n.p. 68 For an account of the exhibition at the Royal Academy, see Sellers, and for the replicas of Penn's Treaty, see Symbols of Peace (as in n. 3). The Swinging Women of Watteau and Fragonard Donald Posner Everywhere and always women and girls must have enjoyed the game of swinging, and they are seen on swings in pictures or statues made in ancient Crete and Greece, pre-Columbian Middle-America, the Near and Far East, and postmedieval Europe. Occasionally children appear on swings in art and, infrequently, men do too. Women swinging are almost the rule, however, and nowhere and at no time were they so much or so brilliantly depicted as in eighteenth-century France. Some years ago Hans Wentzel made a survey of swinging scenes in Western art.' He noted that that they virtually disappeared during the medieval and Renaissance periods, when they could not be absorbed very usefully into the realms of religious and philosophical imagery that dominated those times. After some antique examples of the theme, he found none dating before the seventeenth This paper was originally read in a slightly different form at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, in 1975. Many people who heard it then or later were interested and generous enough to call my attention to additional literature and imagery concerning swinging, shoes, feet, or hats. A few such items are cited in the notes below. Because most of them seemed to confirm, without qualifying, my arguments, I have chosen to maintain a semblance of brevity and not cite all of them. I hope I will not therefore appear ungrateful; indeed, I would probably not be publishing this paper were it not for the enthusiasm shown by friends and colleagues, some of whom went to considerable trouble to send me material related to swinging. I thank them all. I wish to single out for particular thanks some people who worked with me or helped in special ways at various stages in the research for the essay: Christine Baltay; Kim de Beaumont; Robert Chambers; Mary Tavener Holmes; Leslie Jones; Elizabeth Nicklas. 1 Wentzel, 187-218. This content downloaded from 204.140.185.228 on Mon, 3 Nov 2014 17:35:21 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 76 THE ART BULLETIN MARCH 1982 VOLUME LXIV NUMBER 1 century, when swinging reappears, but mainly in prints and, almost always, in emblematic contexts. These works were not meant to convey the pleasures of the sport. Instead, they show it in order to symbolize one of various things or qualities: for example, the element of air (Fig. 6), in which swinging takes place; or, because it is an aimless activity that produces nothing tangible, "idleness";2 or again, because it involves constant going back and forth, "inconstancy" or "fickleness."3 An engraving made after a now-lost painting by Watteau (Fig. 1) bears an expository poem. The concluding verses tell us that though the youth may use his every means to satisfy this girl, "he will soon discover that she is too fickle for his liking."4 It was at the beginning of the eighteenth century in France that the woman on a swing started to appear regularly in painting. Joseph Christophe painted the theme as part of the redecoration undertaken at the Versailles Menagerie in 1699, and Jacques van Schuppen used it for a picture he exhibited in the Salon of 1704.s Within a few years the woman swinging became one of the established motifs in France for depictions of the leisurely life. The main force in shaping its use was Watteau and his followers.6 One has not often appreciated the extent to which many fetes galantes and related images were iconographically programmed. In fact, most were carefully constructed from pictorial patterns and motifs that conveyed narrative, psychological, or allegorical meanings. And swinging, like many other everyday activities seen in art, carried a varied freight of connotation and innuendo, which we must understand and respond to if we are fully to appreciate a group of pictures that includes several masterpieces. Women's inconstancy in affairs of the heart was one of the most popular associations made with swinging, which in part explains why one rarely sees any but women on swings in eighteenth-century art. Watteau's Swing (Fig. 1) does not convey the idea of inconstancy in pictorial terms, but the poetaster who provided the text for the print after it felt justified in his assumption about the woman's temperament. I think we can be sure that Watteau would have expected as much. In more ambitious works where he shows swinging, he weaves the idea of inconstancy into the fabric of their content. In the left background of the great painting called The Shepherds (Fig. 2) a girl with her back to us is seen on a swing. Her head is turned just slightly towards the young man who accompanies her. Is she encouraging him or re- (I(P, \Ifi T4 a ,. , -I.. 4i,': . - " . ,' .1 0 1i. E " -" d o' +..t. '+. . . . ? I , . .. '"' -` L,); , .. .. .. •, . . ..•.. .. .. , ....." e... .. .. •, ,. ,, , .," -.,. 1 After Watteau, The Swing, engraving (photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert N. Straus, 1928) jecting his overtures? The poor boy holds his arms open as if uncertain whether to give her a push or to keep his distance. Inconstancy, teasing changes of mind if not of heart, is a large part of the flirting game. A swinging scene in a painting by Pater that is based on Watteau's composition was explained in much this way in verses appended to the 1739 print after the picture.7 In them the swinger is contrasted to seated couples who supposedly exchange heartfelt words of love; the girl on the swing prefers to play. Pater's painting has a pendant which incorporates a 2 Wentzel cites an example, 193, n. 10. 3 Ibid. 4 "Tel un Galant adroit met tout l'art en usage:/ Mais bient6t il la trouve a son gr' trop volage." For the painting see Rosenberg and Camesasca, No. 36. 5 Cf. P. Marcel, La Peinture frangaise au debut du dix-huitieme sikcle, Paris, n.d., 267f. 6 Wentzel, 195, notes that Lancret represented the subject at least eight times, and Pater nine times. 7For this painting and its pendant, and for the verses on the prints after them, see Wallace Collection Catalogues, Pictures and Drawings, 16th ed., London, 1968, 233f. Pater's model may have been Watteau's earlier version of the composition at Chantilly (Rosenberg and Camesasca, No. 150). This content downloaded from 204.140.185.228 on Mon, 3 Nov 2014 17:35:21 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE SWINGS OF WATTEAU AND FRAGONARD 77 2 Watteau, The Shepherds. Berlin, Charlottenburg Castle (photo: Verwaltung der Staatlichen Schl6sser und Garten) -3 c v ,, ? ?~ *\;~ar~i~PP&as~%i~a~'- ~ i ,? ~B -1 I " ' Ir~ Z~ :'? ~~ )..~B~p~a~aP?l~~~s~?IPI~ - . ,' ii : r? ~BA~ -AI~Q~I ~ IFF" c:t~?' .~. C~~ ?t ~a.~ cu ri . _~? r i.? ~~,~aBL~- ?, varied form of Watteau's dancers. The verses on the print say that the dance was invented by Love to teach young people its movements. The perfection of the dance is said to be the union of happy youth. These readings are not just poetic conceits superimposed on realistic genre scenes. They elucidate meanings or associations that must have been plain to the artist and his audience, and that gave much of genre painting its sense. Watteau's Shepherds, even more obviously than most of his works, is no transcription of any reality of eighteenth-century life. It is an unlikely assembly he shows, mixing rude, Rubensian peasants with elegant people playing "pastoral." But they compose a wonderfully rich set of variations on the theme of love and desire. Physical stimulus and desire inform the group alongside the musician with a musette, an instrument whose phallic form readily suggests its symbolism.8 The women display voluptuous bosoms. A peasant seizes the woman beside him, groping lustfully at a breast. The solitary youth gazes at the couple dancing. The dog's action is possibly meant to suggest the boy's state of arousal and longing; in any event, the dog is an appropriate, if rather vulgar, symbolic adjunct to the group. In the other figures desire is seen as restrained, shaped by civilized social activities. But the point is not in the contrast of states so much as in the social coexistence of the figures who experience them. Watteau has, in a sense, turned a patch of countryside into a garden of love. The musette player calls the tune and each member of the company responds in his own way. Still, love has a rhythm of development. It underlies the varied activity in the picture. Love moves from shadowy beginnings in flirtation, with its playful inconstancies, to the warm quickening of desire, and, finally, to the sunny splendor of happy union. In another painting Watteau placed the woman on a swing at center stage. The original of this work is lost, but it is known from a print of 1732 entitled The Pleasures of Summer (Fig. 3),9 a name that reflects an allegorical association of swinging and the summer season.10 The theme here is also related to fickleness, now based on the notion of the feminine will to waver 8 For musettes see R. D. Leppert, Arcadia at Versailles, Amsterdam, 1978, esp. 59f. for an apt analysis of the erotic content of the Shepherds. 9 H. Adhemar (Watteau, Paris, 1950, 235, No. 246) attributed the composition to Pater on the basis of its supposed similarity to pictures by that master also called Les Agrements de l'ite. The similarity seems to me remote, and the quality of the invention of the present work beyond Pater's powers. The history of the original strongly supports the attribution to Watteau. The painting was owned by Jean de Jullienne's cousin, Claude Glucq, who collected paintings and drawings by Watteau and who is known to have owned a copy of Jullienne's "Recueil" (which includes Joullain's print [Fig. 3]). The original seems traceable until 1788, and the composition was never doubted before Adhemar. (For the picture's history and for Glucq, see E. Dacier and A. Vuaflart, Jean de Jullienne et les graveurs de Watteau, Paris, 1922-29, I, 208f., III, 49, No. 102.) 10 Cf. Wentzel, 194, n. 10. This content downloaded from 204.140.185.228 on Mon, 3 Nov 2014 17:35:21 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 78 THE ART BULLETIN MARCH 1982 VOLUME LXIV NUMBER 1 3 After Watteau,T he Pleasureso f Summer,e ngraving (photo: Giraudon) 4 After Watteau, The Swinger (detail), engraving (photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert N. Straus, 1928) between competing suitors. The swing in this picture is the kind that is guided by being pulled instead of pushed. Generally, when swings are pulled in eighteenthcentury pictures, it is by one man working a rope attached to one side of the swing, as shown, for example, in an engraving after another design by Watteau (Fig. 4). One suspects that this unbalanced method of swinging resulted in rather giddy-making lateral oscillations, but it seems to have been the favored method when the "pull principle" was employed - on the grounds, no doubt, that one boy should be sufficient to one girl. In The Pleasures of Summer, however, the swing has two very noticeable ropes, and the obvious suggestion is that the girl wants two boys. One youth has already taken up a rope and waits poised to pull. The girl waits too, and looks inquiringly towards the not-yet romantically engaged group at the right. There men outnumber women. Surely, one of them will take up the other rope. One must emphasize that in this picture, as in Watteau's Shepherds, the artist has not treated the swing merely as an emblem; he has built the symbolic connotations of the motif into the dramatic and narrative structure of the scene. It is, of course, easy to see what is happening in The Pleasures of Summer. When it is viewed, however, in the light of the associations that the swing had for people at the time, the scene acquires a special psychological coloration. We sense the lovely excitement of the beginning of a game of love: invitation and flirtation will be followed by the playful vacillations of a young girl's heart; and the game will end, presumably, in a happy embrace, like that of the couple at the lower left. It would be wrong to insist too much on the connection of the idea of inconstancy and the image of the swing, for they were not always meant to go together. What is more important to stress is that, with or without an allusion to inconstancy, swinging in eighteenth-century French pictures, with relatively few exceptions, is associated with romantic or erotic feeling. Swinging was, of course, in real life one of the pastimes of young lovers, and it is easy to see that the passivity of the woman on the swing, and the control exercised by the man in initiating and continuing her ride made the image a natural metaphor for traditional courtship behavior. In a charming painting by Nicolas Lancret (Fig. 5) the boy slowly starts to draw the girl to him. She does not resist, but she turns her head away demurely and seems to blush slightly, as she allows him to begin their game. Will she become fickle as she swings back and forth, or will she surrender to him and let herself be pushed, literally and figuratively, to ever greater heights of pleasure? With this question we touch upon another layer of meaning that is often found in pictures of girls on swings. This content downloaded from 204.140.185.228 on Mon, 3 Nov 2014 17:35:21 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE SWINGS OF WATTEAU AND FRAGONARD 79 5 Lancret, The Swing. London, Victoria and Albert Museum (photo: Museum) 7 After Watteau, The Swinger (detail), engraving (photo: MetropolitanM useumo f Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. HerbertN . Straus, 1928) 6 H. Bonnart, Air, engraving (from P. L. Duchartre, Imagerie parisienne, 60) (Kawnt ceaz h e arawoddw aowhyck&twf S el romw .da 4 -;. - *ac&yt wwyome4,D Se~~Mc-n.-M -L- -- adrrcretl bt9ascvt dLu ruma Swinging not only quickens the amorous heartbeat; it even more obviously sets the body in rhythmic motion. Naturally, it came to serve as a quite specific erotic metaphor. On a print made at the very end of the seventeenth century, where the girl on a swing is presented as an emblem of the element of "Air" (Fig. 6), some verses tell us that the girl riding through the air makes one think right off of "other" movements. The poet who commented on the fickleness of the girl in the print after Watteau's Swing (Fig. 1) also alluded, by double-entendres in his first verse, to the specifically sexual symbolism of swinging. He speaks of the youth who "excites and stimulates" the girl, and who watches her become ever more "buoyant" under the pressure of his urgings." That Watteau himself had such connotations in mind is indicated by the symbols of lasciviousness with which he ornamented the design: the bagpipe and satyr's head at the bottom, and the goat and ram heads at the top and on the vases in the lower corners. In another picture showing a youth swinging a girl (Fig. 7), Watteau made his meaning equally clear by setting the scene alongside a leering statue of the god Priapus, seen among the trees at the right. He also placed a branch of a tree across the statue in such a way that it calls attention to what it hides. Swinging as symbolically synonymous with lovemaking eventually became established in the popular culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the meaning has persisted into our time.12 After Watteau, swinging women began to appear with some frequency in French art and, as a result of French in- "1 "Au Jeu d'Escarpolette, Acis voit sa Bergere/ Prendre d'un air dispos, ses innocens Ebas: / Ii l'Excite, il l'anime, il l'aide de ses Bras; / Trop content de la voir encore plus legere." 12 Fuchs, Biirgerliche Zeit, ii, 177f., 260f. for the 19th century. Among the 20th-century examples I know of is the comment of Bertold Brecht that "being on a swing [is] as beautiful as making love" (Time Magazine, August 9, 1971, 62); and the use of a swinging scene in a recent advertisement for Conceptrol Birth Control Cream (independently brought to my attention by Mr. Robert Baldwin and Professor Walter Cahn). This content downloaded from 204.140.185.228 on Mon, 3 Nov 2014 17:35:21 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 80 THE ART BULLETIN MARCH 1982 VOLUME LXIV NUMBER 1 8 Fragonard, Blindman's Buff. Washington, National Gallery of Art Samuel H. Kress Collection (photo: National Gallery) 9 Fragonard, The Swing. Washington, National Gallery of Art Samuel H. Kress Collection (photo: National Gallery) fluence, they entered the arts elsewhere in Europe.13 Some works, like Lancret's Swing (Fig. 5), elaborated on the imagery, but none showed a quality or originality of conception comparable to Watteau's Shepherds or Pleasures of Summer until Fragonard's women swung onto the artistic scene. Fragonard made three paintings of women on swings, and one that shows a girl on a similar vehicle, a seesaw. What might be called the most innocent of the group in appearance is the large picture in the National Gallery in Washington (Fig. 9). The figures are very small in this sweeping view from a height. The clouds rise into the brilliant expanse of the heavens. As the woman rides on a swing attached high in the trees above her and waves to her companions - one of whom, at the right, looks into the limpid distance through a telescope - we are reminded that swinging was allegorically attached to the element of air. Indeed, this ethereal view of open sky and limitless horizons seems the perfect context for the symbolic expression of "air." But the picture is also about love and romance. It shows a fete galante, and its specific meaning only becomes clear in relation to what goes on in its companion piece, Blindman's Buff (Fig. 8).14 In this painting a group is at play at the left. A blindfolded girl reaches out, trying to tag and identify another player. A man, presumably her boyfriend, is on his hands and knees, hiding, but keeping close to the girl. He is hard to see in photographs. The game of blindman's buff appears in art as early as medieval times, when it was probably meant to symbolize the folly of love.15 In the 13 Two German examples are mentioned in n. 37 below. For another by Norbert Grund, see the reference given in n. 10 above. The subject seems to have been introduced into England by the expatriate French artist Philip Mercier in one of his earliest conversation pieces, Viscount Tyrconnel with His Family, which is strongly influenced by Watteau and his circle (cf. M. Praz, Conversation Pieces, University Park [Pa.], 1971, 138, fig. 99), but probably, because of the romantic, even erotic, vein of meaning associated with swinging scenes, the activity was considered improper for representing adults in portraits of family groups. In fact, I know of only one other English conversation piece that shows anyone swinging, Zoffany's Children of the Fourth Duke of Devonshire (see Treasures from Chatsworth; the Devonshire Inheritance, exh. cat., Washington, D.C., 1979-80, No. 276, pl. 8. Professor David Young brought this picture to my attention.) Not comparable, but perhaps sufficient indication of the meaning of the motif at the time, are two pornographic works by Rowlandson showing people on swings (see G. Schiff, The Amorous Illustrations of Thomas Rowlandson, n.p., 1969, pls. 17, 33). 14 Good color illustrations of both Washington pictures, including two details, appear in D. Wildenstein and G. Mandel, L'Opera completa di Fragonard, Milan, 1972, pls. LII-LV. 15 C. Eisler, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. European Schools Excluding Italian, Oxford, 1977, 329f. See also S. Hindman, "Pieter Bruegel's Children's Games, Folly, and Chance," Art Bulletin, LXIII1, 981, 451f., 455, 466ff., for blindman's buff as a courtship game as well as "folly." This content downloaded from 204.140.185.228 on Mon, 3 Nov 2014 17:35:21 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE SWINGS OF WATTEAU AND FRAGONARD 81 10 FragonardB, lindman's Buff. Toledo,M useumo f Art (photo: Museum) 11 Fragonard, The Seesaw. Lugano, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection (photo: Brunel) eighteenth century the meaning of the image changed less than the attitude towards that meaning. Society had become less censorious, readier to accept certain things as they are: like youth and love. Love indeed is blind, and probably a little mad. The young heart gropes, feels its way anxiously in search of a partner. Fragonard underscored the theme of youthful, innocent desire in this picture by ornamenting the fountain at the left with figures of vestal virgins, and by placing the scene under the watchful presence (on the terrace at the upper right) of a statue of Minerva, whose festival was marked by a procession of virgins.16 In the sequel to this picture, maidenly desire is transformed, in another game, into womanly fulfillment. The lady now has a partner, who gives her a ride. He is just visible between the two lion fountains.17 With a flower in her hand she waves to signal the happy finale of her love as she soars on the swing into the sky. The Washington pictures are primarily evocations of the beauty of the Italian landscape,18 and the symbolism of figural activity in them is unemphatic. The games appear as passing incidents during a day devoted to the enjoyment of nature. In a pair of earlier figure paintings, however, Fragonard has made an obvious and boisterous presentation of the symbolism of the juxtaposed themes of blindman's buff and that close analogue of swinging, seesawing. '9 The two pictures (Figs. 10, 11) were executed in the 16 Ovid, Metamorphoses ii. 711f. Eisler (as in n. 15) suggests that the austerity of the vestals is meant as a contrast to the folly of the players. I think such an intention would be out of character for Fragonard and for 18th-century French culture in general. 17 The woman's swing has two ropes. The far one is held by a seated woman, who, rather like a "bride's maid," assists in the proceedings. The man, however, is in charge. 18 It is generally assumed that the paintings were in the Abbe de Saint- Non's collection. If so, they were described as "paysage d'Italie" or "vue de Tyvoli" (Eisler, as in n. 15, 331). The date of the pictures is debatable. I should place them towards 1780. 19 Before Fragonard, blindman's buff and swinging were used by Lancret as subjects for a beautiful pair of pictures now in the Stockholm Nationalmuseum. See Wildenstein, 1924, Nos. 229, 233, figs. 53, 54. The seesaw, incidentally, though often virtually synonymous with the swing in its symbolic sexual content (cf. Fuchs, Galante Zeit, I, 175; I1, 62), is seen in nonerotic contexts perhaps more frequently than the swing. This content downloaded from 204.140.185.228 on Mon, 3 Nov 2014 17:35:21 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 82 THE ART BULLETIN MARCH 1982 VOLUME LXIV NUMBER 1 early 1750's, when Fragonard was only in his twenties and still painting in the style of his teacher Boucher.20 They are at once scenes of a young couple's romance on a summer day and allegories of two stages in the universal adventure of love. Instead of the elegant city people who enjoy parkland pleasures in the Washington pictures, we see a country lad and lass, accompanied by playful children, in a rustic setting. It is a day for a picnic and for flirtatious games. The couple begins by playing at blindman's buff. The game is a pretence. Since only two grownups play, the girl knows she can only catch the young man. She reaches out happily in search of him. He helps her to locate him by tickling her cheek with a straw. Of course, young people eventually find a mate and then, naturally, enjoy their happy union. In the second picture we see the romantic climax of the day. The couple has constructed a makeshift seesaw. A log on a stone block serves as the fulcrum for the board on which the girl rides. A bottle of wine and an array of ripe fruits, traditional symbols of love and sensual enjoyment, lie in front of the seesaw. The youth, aided by cupid-like infants, bears down on one end of the plank. It is Love that lifts its object to heights of pleasure. The girl, in her excitement, almost loses her balance and seizes a branch to steady herself as she rises exuberantly into the air on the long plank - which one child straddles suggestively. This mischievous visual pun was almost certainly intended by the artist, who does such things in other pictures too.2' In these early works Fragonard already displayed the ready inventiveness of visual imagination that was to produce, in time, such triumphs as The Swing of 1767 in the Wallace Collection (Fig. 12).22 This work is probably the most popular of all Fragonard's paintings, and it is surely the most famous picture of a swinger in the history of art. It has acquired an even exaggerated fame insofar as some writers have presented it as the quintessential expression of the pleasure-loving, licentious spirit of the ancien rigime.23 Yet, aside from pointing to the prettily naughty conceit of the man in the bushes looking under the skirts of the swinging girl, no one has really explained the special appeal of the painting. Wentzel tried to locate it in the "naturalism" with which the artist communicated the pleasure of swinging.24 But this is not only a lame explanation, it is also erroneous, since, as will become clear, there is nothing at all naturalistic about this highly contrived representation. I think the problem is that until very recently the mores of art-historical criticism made it difficult really to think about, much less write about, the joyous sexuality of the picture's imagery. I believe, however, that spectators have always responded to that imagery, even without being entirely aware of doing so. We are fortunate in knowing a little about the circumstances in which Fragonard's Swing originated, for they were discussed in a conversation that the writer Charles Coll0 had with the painter Gabriel-Francois Doyen on October 2, 1767. Coll0 recorded the conversation in his journal the same month:25 "Would you believe," the painter said to me, "that just a few days after the exhibition of my picture [the Miracle of Saint Genevieve des Ardents] in the Salon, a gentleman of the Court sent for me in order to commission a painting of the kind that I'll describe? This gentleman was at his 'pleasure house' [petite maison] with his mistress when I presented myself to find out what he wanted. He started by flattering me with courtesies 20 Our understanding of these two works has been clouded by A. Ananoff's recent publication, in his Francois Boucher, Lausanne-Paris, 1976, II, 9f., of material related to them which implies that they are copies of two pictures from a suite of four painted by Boucher in collaboration with Fragonard. Several writers have already commented on the questions that this material raises (cf. A. Rosenbaum, Old Master Paintings from the Collection of Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, Washington, D.C., 1979, 139). I have myself not had the opportunity to study the originals of the works introduced by Ananoff, but I suspect, first, that his fig. 902 was not originally related to the other works, and, second, that his figs. 904 and 906 postdate the Toledo and Lugano paintings. I should add, however, that the meaning of Fragonard's pictures, as propounded here, could easily be accommodated by the putative four-part suite. 21 Cf. D. Posner, "The True Path of Fragonard's 'Progress of Love,"' Burlington Magazine, cxiv, 1972, 530, n. 22. 22 The title, "The Happy Accidents of the Swing," comes from the engraving after the picture made by N. de Launay in 1782. 23 E.g., E. Hildebrandt, Antoine Watteau, Berlin, 1922, 154. 24 His conclusion about the picture, which he had printed in italic type (p. 210): "Nie vor ihm, nie nach ihm ist das jugendlich unbekiimmerte Vergniigen, auf einer Schaukel durch die Luft zu fliegen, so eindringlich, so deutlich, so voller Lebensfreude und vor allem so nattirlich dargestellt worden!" 25 Journal et memoires de Charles Colle [ed. H. Bonhomme], iii, Paris, 1868, 165f. The passage is conveniently reprinted in the several editions of the Goncourts' biography of the artist (L'Art du XVlle sikcle). My translation in the text above is reasonably literal. Colle's entry and the events it records are frequently dated to 1766, an error that seems to go back to the Goncourts and that has become deeply and inexplicably rooted in the literature. Wentzel, in what he presents as a translation of Colle's text, (207, n. 35) actually interposes a reference to 1766 that does not exist in the original. Colle's account is dated October 1767 and is prefaced by a paragraph (omitted by the Goncourts) that names the exact day of his conversation with Doyen and that fixes the year of the commission for The Swing: Je suis revenu a Paris le 1er de ce mois. Le lendemain de mon arriv&ej e rencontrai M. Doyen, peintre, dont un tableau ... vient d'etre expose dans le Salon du mois d'aofit dernier [Salon exhibitions occurred every other year, in odd years; hence there was no Salon in 1766], et il a remporte le prix. Le sujet de ce tableau est saint Genevieve des Ardents. ... Strangely, the 1968 edition of the Wallace Collection catalogue (as in n. 7), p. 118, gives the correct date for Colle's entry, but adds, apparently on the authority of Portalis's 1889 monograph on Fragonard, that the picture was painted in 1768 or 1769. Since the small picture (32 5/8" X 26") was, according to Colle, in progress already in October 1767, it seems unlikely that it was not finished by 1768 at the very latest. This content downloaded from 204.140.185.228 on Mon, 3 Nov 2014 17:35:21 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE SWINGS OF WATTEAU AND FRAGONARD 83 12 Fragonard, The Swing. London, Wallace Collection (photo: Wallace Collection) and finished by avowing that he was dying with a desire to have me make a picture, the idea of which he was going to outline. 'I should like,' he continued, 'to have you paint Madame (pointing to his mistress) on a swing that a bishop would set going. You will place me in such a way that I would be able to see the legs of this lovely girl, and better still, if you want to enliven your picture a little more. ..."' "I confess," M. Doyen said to me, "that this proposition, which I wouldn't have expected, considering the character of the picture that led to it, perplexed me and left me speechless for a moment. I collected myself, however, enough to be able to say to him almost at once: 'Ah! Monsieur, it is necessary to add to the essential idea of your picture by making Madame's shoes fly into the air and having some cupids catch them.' But since I was far from wanting to treat such a subject, which is so different from the genre in which I work, I referred this gentleman to M. Fagonat [sic], who has undertaken it and is at present making this singular work."26 This report informs us of some of the original terms of the commission. Evidently, the patron had additional ideas for "enlivening" the picture either that Doyen did not tell 26 It does seem odd that Doyen should have been offered this commission. A probable explanation is that in private life Doyen was something of a roue. See Wildenstein, 1960, 13, n. 3. This content downloaded from 204.140.185.228 on Mon, 3 Nov 2014 17:35:21 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 84 THE ART BULLETIN MARCH 1982 VOLUME LXIV NUMBER 1 to Coll or that Coll did not bother to write down. Whether, and how much, Fragonard contributed to the ideation of the picture we cannot know, but of course his genius is responsible for the effectiveness of its visual formulation. There was, for instance, nothing new about men in pictures peeping at women's legs accidentally revealed. It is a motif frequently found, for example, in paintings by Pater, in at least one instance in connection with a swinging scene. 27 Fragonard's patron may well have had Pater's composition in mind when he concocted the program for his picture. Unlike Pater, however, who designed a voyeur who merely steals a look at the woman's charms from a suitable vantage point, Fragonard conceived a figure who sees and responds, who expresses breathless excitement and, as we shall see, still more.28 The Swing is a far more highly programmed painting than is generally realized. The setting - staging is perhaps the better word - is calculated to carry specific meanings and so admits some naturalistic improbabilities. First of all, one doesn't swing in places like the one shown. There is hardly space for the swing, and the spot is so overgrown that it looks positively unsafe for swinging. But the artist wanted to establish a mood of tremulous excitement by the dense twisting and turning of trees and bushes, and by the sparkling activity of leaves shimmering silver in the blue-green atmosphere of what at first seems a forest glade. It is not, in fact, a forest, but a bit of garden that Fragonard has represented. Some low wicker fences used to mark borders are seen at the bottom of the picture, where there is also a rake. These and the sculptures are evidence that this is cared-for, protected property. Still, the look of a forest is clearly deliberate. I think it probable that Fragonard was inspired by Watteau's Pleasures of Summer (Fig. 3), where swinging takes place in a similar, if far more naturalistic, setting. Fragonard must have recognized that an image of nature's luxuriance and fertility would make an appropriate context for his amorous swinging scene too. Furthermore, the density and thickness of nature's growth seem to screen the figures and suggest a secret place for this curious lovers' tryst. The idea of something secret is made explicit by the cupid on the pedestal at the left. Fragonard has shown Falconet's famous sculpture of 1757. In the garden of our swinger Cupid commands silence as he watches Love's work being done. Cupid's silencing gesture is readily understood to mean that the relationship between the main figures is to be hidden from the elderly gentleman in the right background who controls the swing. According to Coll6, Fragonard's patron told Doyen that he wanted a bishop to push the swing. The patron was evidently the Baron de Saint- Julien,29 whose official position as Receiver-General of the French Clergy explains the conceit that his mistress comes to him as a kind of offering from a bishop. Many writers assume that the old man in the picture is a bishop, but in fact he does not wear ecclesiastical costume and cannot be identified as a clergyman of any rank. He was transformed into an unwitting husband or an ineffective guardian,30 apparently in the course of a larger decision to depersonalize the picture. Saint-Julien's idea to have himself and his mistress portrayed - recognizably, one assumes - was also abandoned, and in the final work the main actors are generalized types of young lovers and do not seem identifiable as specific persons. It is likely that Saint-Julien came to feel that the painting he had in mind was a little too irreverent, even in his libertine times. The changes were probably for the best; the picture escaped the limitations to comprehension and appreciation that a private joke would have imposed, and it developed into a universal image of the joy and gaiety of young love. Love and the rising tide of passion is the theme. It is stated by the sculptural group of a dolphin and two cupids riding the waves that appears like an emblem in the middle of the lower section of the painting. Because dolphins driven by cupids draw the water-chariot of Venus, they appear in art to denote the impatient surge of love. Boucher, for example, used the motif in a scene of Pomona's seduction by Vertumnus,31 and Fragonard used it again very aptly in The Pursuit, the second painting in his "Progress of Love" series in the Frick Collection.32 27 One version of the composition is in the StAidelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt (illustrated in Wentzel, fig. 148, and in Ingersoll-Smouse, fig. 149). Another version was recently on the art market (see Apollo, cx, Nov. 1979, advertisements, 28). 28 One cannot emphasize too much the quality of Fragonard's work in giving shape to the imagery, and in this connection it is instructive to compare his Swing to a picture of the same subject attributed to Lancret (Wildenstein, 1924, No. 237, fig. 192), where many of the same elements are present: a swinger, a man guiding the swing with a rope, a dog, a man looking at the girl's legs while he reclines on the ground, his arm upraised. If by Lancret, the picture must have been known to Fragonard or his patron. But I think that this painting, the earliest known reference to which is in a sales catalogue of 1891, is a 19th-century imitation of Lancret that builds on elements from Fragonard's picture. The original painting has disappeared, however, and it is not possible to judge it from the illustration in Wildenstein's monograph. Still, whatever the truth about the picture, it very neatly demonstrates how the iconographic program given to Fragonard could have been fulfilled without the slightest hint of the sensuousness and allusive richness of design of the Wallace Collection painting. 29 Saint-Julien was not named as the patron by Doyen as far as we know. The painting was, however, in his collection, and the iconographic conceit was so perfectly appropriate to his position that his patronage seems beyond question. 30 R. Neville ("Jean Honore Fragonard," Burlington Magazine, III, 1903, 56) already noted that the figure is not a bishop but an "ordinary individual." Recently, D. Wakefield (Fragonard, London, 1976, 9, 19) interprets this figure as a "husband." I think Wakefield is wrong when he proposes that this husband cheerfully and knowingly helps his wife to deceive him. M. Starobinski (The Invention of Liberty, Geneva, 1964, 76) refers to the figure as the "obscure accomplice in the background." Wentzel (p. 208f.), assuming that the rake in the foreground belongs to this figure, concludes that he is a gardener. His dress and activity, however, exclude such a possibility. 31 Ananoff (as in n. 20), II, 25, fig. 952. Watteau also used the motif. Cf. Rosenberg and Camesasca, Nos. 82, 110. 32 Posner (as in n. 21), 530, fig. 19. This content downloaded from 204.140.185.228 on Mon, 3 Nov 2014 17:35:21 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE SWINGS OF WATTEAU AND FRAGONARD 85 In the Wallace Collection picture the woman, as she rides towards the young gallant, leaves the shadowed corner where the old man sits. The suggestion of a change of location, of a move from one domain to another, is forcefully made by the picture's compositional and tonal movement, and it is underscored by the detail of the dog and small fence at the lower right. The dog barks at his mistress as if to call her back. The dog is fenced in; the woman flies over the fence where her heart is drawn. Among the elements that take on symbolic meaning in The Swing is the general quality of the color and light in the picture. What is suggested in the painting is the cool blue light of early evening.33 Now swinging is usually associated in art with the heat of summer and the bright sunlight of mid-afternoon, when the refreshing breeze that the activity creates is most appreciated. Watteau's Pleasures of Summer (Fig. 3) suggests to us a shady refuge in the woods at the height of a summer day. By changing the traditional hour of the game, Fragonard suppressed the naturalistic content of the theme and amplified its symbolic character. Swinging here is emphatically associated with activities that mostly occur after the sun goes down.34 Beneath the swinger, lying in a great bush, a tangle of leaves and roses, is a young man. The bush is, as it were, a private place, enclosed by little fences. But the man has found his way into it. The symbolic allusions are too obvious to require comment. As the man thrills to the sight offered him, he reaches out with his hat in his hand. It seems odd, under the circumstances, that he should be encumbered by a hat. Well-dressed gentlemen neither wearing nor holding hats appear in outdoor scenes in other works by Fragonard (Figs. 8 and 9, for example), so it cannot be that the artist considered it a requisite part of costuming. Certainly Fragonard did not include the dark gray hat for compositional or coloristic reasons. Evidently he intended it to mean something. At one level the man can be understood as doffing his hat in a show of appreciation of the lady's charms. But his attitude is appreciative enough by itself, and the hat, rather than just being a redundant flourish, is, I think, a discrete symbolic unit. A hat is a covering, and in eighteenth-century imagery it does not only cover heads. In Fragonard's amusing etching of 1778, The Wardrobe (Fig. 13), a girl's furious parents have discovered that their daughter, properly in tears now, has been up to no good. They have found her boyfriend's hiding place. As he steps out of it, even more embarrassed than fearful, his hat seems indispensable. Anonymous, popular prints of the period tend to be grosser and more explicit in using a hat as an erotic symbol or accessory. In one print, entitled The Cage and the Bird (Fig. 14), a man conceals the "bird" with his hat as he stands before a waiting woman who holds an open cage in her lap.35 The bawd in the background and the basket of overturned flowers on the barrel in the center of the room complete this symbolic brothel scene. The man in the picture, and the youth in The Wardrobe, have their hats "on," so to speak. They represent, respectively, "before" and "after" the sexual engagement. Fragonard's man in the bush has his hat "off." This symbolic usage has a precedent in a painting that Fragonard certainly knew, The Lovers Surprised (Fig. 15), a work that Baudouin, Boucher's son-in-law, exhibited in the Salon of 1765, and that was engraved in 1767, the year of The Swing. In Baudouin's picture the girl's mother has arrived just in time to interrupt an action already begun. She angrily upbraids the girl who stands in a bed of trampled hay. At the left, the girl's lover pulls at his breeches while fleeing up a flight of stairs. Fragonard's later Wardrobe possibly took some of its inspiration from Baudouin's composition, while his symbolic use of the hat in The Swing may have been suggested by the hat that Baudouin's young man removed and that is pointedly displayed at the lower left in his picture.36 The feminine counterpart of the man's hat, in The Swing and in other paintings of the period, is the woman's shoe. The charming detail of the pink shoe flying off a pretty foot has mostly been thought just that and no more. Wentzel even tried to give it a naturalistic interpretation, 33Wentzel (p. 210) describes the scene as taking place in "ein dunkler Wald, blaugriin, ja abendlich blau." He remarks, too, that the sun in the picture seems very low. 34 For his Night in a series of the "Times of Day" (engraved by E. de Ghendt) Baudouin used a setting very similar to Fragonard's, including the statue of Cupid. He shows, however, not swinging, but an unambiguous scene of lovers embracing. Interestingly, Baudouin's original gouache, now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, was apparently owned by Saint-Julien. (See E. Bocher, Les Gravures frangaises du XVIIIe siecle, s.v. "Baudouin," Paris, 1875, No. 35.) 35 Fuchs, Galante Zeit, II, opp. 104, illustrates another anonymous print, where a girl holding a basket of eggs reaches behind a hat held by a young man. The print is captioned "Qu'en Pensez-vous?" 36 Another "hat off" appears in Fig. 17. See my comments below. There is also a man's hat below the players in Watteau's Swing (Fig. 1). Recently, C. Seerveld, in discussing this design, correctly recognized the emblematic character of the combination of bagpipes and doffed hat with the "abandoned silken shawl, flanked by a tipping basket of flowers." ("Telltale Statues in Watteau's Painting," Eighteenth-Century Studies, xiv, 1980/81, 155.) Any doubts that the hat is a man's are allayed by a comparison with Watteau's Le Denicheur de moineaux (Rosenberg and Camesasca, No. 71, pl. II). An Italian example is provided by a painting by Crespi in The Hermitage, where there is a hat on the ground between the legs of man who thrusts himself upon a woman whose shoe has fallen off her foot. (M. Liebmann, Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Dresden, 1976, pl. 11.) A 16th-century example occurs in an engraving by H. S. Beham (B. 176), where a peasant couple embrace. The man puts his hand under the woman's skirt and between her legs. In front of the figures, in the center foreground, is his hat. It is not certain, however, that the hat was meant symbolically, since most of Beham's male lovers keep their hats on while pursuing their amours. This content downloaded from 204.140.185.228 on Mon, 3 Nov 2014 17:35:21 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 86 THE ART BULLETIN MARCH 1982 VOLUME LXIV NUMBER 1 13 Fragonard,T he Wardrobee, tching (photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Roland L. Redmond Gift, Louis V. Bell and Rogers Fund, 1972) 14 The Cage and the Bird (from Fuchs, Galante Zeit, 11, 86) reasoning that "in all times women on swings probably lost a shoe easily.""3 That the motif has a symbolic meaning, and the kind of meaning it is, seems clear, however, from the fact that it was originally proposed by Doyen as a witty addition to an idea for a risque picture. It is clear too, both from the speed with which the thought occurred to Doyen and from the fact that apparently neither Saint- Julien nor Coll needed to have it explained, that the motif 15 After Baudouin, The Lovers Surprised, engraving (photo: Bibliotheque Nationale) was a current and perfectly comprehensible one. Possibly in the course of discussions between Saint- Julien and Fragonard it was decided to have the woman kick off one shoe, not two as Doyen had suggested, and to replace the real cupids with a statue, which would watch, not catch, the shoe. The single shoe and naked foot speak plainly enough. There are many French pictures of the period where an unshod foot is seen in a context that leaves no doubt about its meaning. In a print by Debucourt (Fig. 16), for instance, a milkmaid stands alongside a youth and weeps. She holds a broken pitcher, a familiar symbol of lost virginity. As if to underscore the point, she also has one bare foot. The missing shoe is in the hay, at the right, where she lost it. Another example is in a print (Fig. 17)38 in which, one might say, the action begun in The Lovers Surprised (Fig. 15) has been allowed to run its course before the parental discovery is made. At the upper right an old man, evidently the girl's father, 37 P. 199, n. 17. Wentzel was particularly puzzled by his discovery that in a swinging scene by Norbert Grund (his fig. 150), who worked in Prague and whose picture is clearly unrelated compositionally to Fragonard's Swing, the woman on the swing also drops a shoe. Oddly, he did not notice that in still another swinging scene that he illustrated (fig. 149), this one by Anna Therbusch and datable 1741, the lady again loses her shoe. Both paintings were strongly influenced by French art and their use of the "lost shoe" motif confirms its currency in France at the time. In these pictures the motif is not so sexually charged as in Fragonard's Swing, but its amorous meanings are quite clear. In Grund's painting the woman, who has dropped her shoe, watches a gentleman pick it up. In Therbusch's painting a man has been swinging a lady, when suddenly a rival snatches the guiding rope from his hand. The lady looks at the newcomer and lets her shoe fall off. 38 The print was published by Fuchs as after Baudouin. It is not listed in Bocher's catalogue (as in n. 34) and I have not located an impression of the original. This content downloaded from 204.140.185.228 on Mon, 3 Nov 2014 17:35:21 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE SWINGS OF WATTEAU AND FRAGONARD 87 16 Debucourt, The Broken Pitcher, color acquatint (photo: Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Laurent Sully Jaulmes) holds his head in shock and chagrin. The young man dresses. His hat is off. It lies on the floor in front of the chair and is filled with flowers that have tumbled into it. One of the girl's feet is bare. She looks ruefully at the symbolic shoe. The motif of the shoeless feminine foot appears most frequently in eighteenth-century art, but it occurs much earlier too. In the sixteenth century it is found as an attribute of a whore in a Netherlandish painting of the Prodigal Son in a brothel.39 Farther back in time, a 17 After Baudouin?, Remorse after the Deed, engraving (from Fuchs, Galante Zeit, 11, 125) Romanesque relief sculpture at Santiago de Compostella shows a lewd woman holding a cock between her legs; she has one bare and one shod foot.40 In these works the absence of a shoe reveals the iniquity of the woman without it. In the pictures by Debucourt and Baudouin it explains the nature of the women's misbehavior. In Fragonard's 39 The picture, which Mary Tavener Holmes kindly brought to my attention, is in the museum in Basel and is illustrated in J. De Coo, "Die Bemalten Holtzteller," Wallraf-RichartJz ahrbuch, xxxvii, 1975, 93. Titian uses the motif in a very original way in his Rape of Lucretia (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). The heroine's feet are bare, and one of her slippers is placed prominently in the right foreground. It speaks of the sexual nature of the violence being done, and of her loss of purity, though not of any iniquity by her. 40 This image and the closely related famous relief from St.-Sernin in Toulouse showing two cross-legged women with a lion and a ram are discussed in W. Weisbach, "'Ein Fuss beschuht, der andere nackt.' Bemerkungen zu einigen Handzeichnungen des Urs Graf," Zeitschrift fiur SchweizerischeA rchaeologieu nd Kunstgeschichte,I v, 1942, 120. The women from Toulouse also have one shoeless foot each and represent, in Weisbach's view, "sinfulness and hellishness." (I am grateful to M. Philippe Verdier for the reference to this article. The Urs Graf drawings mentioned in the title relate to a different, nonerotic set of meanings for shoe- or socklessness.) This meaning of the unshod foot was still current in France at the end of the 17th century, when Robert Bonnart made a print of Lust showing a woman with one shoe off. (Mary Tavener Holmes kindly told me about the print, an impression of which is in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Ed. 114 [in-fol.] No. 80.) The survival of this imagery into our own time is represented by the advertisement that Mr. Kim Whiteside designed in 1978 for the musical comedy, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. A pair of female legs is seen emerging from the map outline of the Lone Star State. One leg kicks upwards and a shoe falls off. Mr. Whiteside told me he had no special meaning in mind. I do not wish here to discuss the antiquity of the symbolism of shod and unshod feet, or its psychological and folkloristic bases. Interested readers may wish to consult W. Deonna, "Aphrodite, la femme et la sandale," Revue internationale de la sociologie, xLIv, 1936, 5-63; Dr. Aigremont,F uss- und Schuh-Symboliku nd -Erotik:F olkloristischue nd sexuel-wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen, Leipzig, 1909; and Vol. xxvI (1936) of Aesculape, which includes articles on foot symbolism in 18thcentury art and culture. (I owe these references respectively to Miss Carol Eliel, Professor Anne Lowenthal, and Mr. Robert Baldwin.) One additional point should be noted here. Insofar as the female foot is identified with the vagina (as in the saying "petit pied, grand con," on which Brant6me comments in his discussion of women's feet in the third essay of his Vies des dames galantes [Eng. ed., London, 1961, 209]), the shoe, like the man's hat, is a covering. This content downloaded from 204.140.185.228 on Mon, 3 Nov 2014 17:35:21 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 88 THE ART BULLETIN MARCH 1982 VOLUME LXIV NUMBER 1 18 Fragonard, The Small Swing. Private collection painting the motif has no moral connotation. His happy lady bestows her shoe - her favors - readily for the sake of love,41 and the artist records it as a symbol of an amorous decision or occurrence. But the flying shoe is something more still. It signals the moment of the event, and characterizes its quality, the thrill, the joyousness, of sudden, inevitable surrender to love. In Fragonard's Swing the verbal and visual content of symbols coincide, and amplify one another. This, I believe, accounts for its extraordinary distinction and riveting appeal. In other swinging scenes the motifs are meaningful, but the visual presentation suggests little more than an innocent, everyday pastime. Visually, Fragonard's Swing is intensely charged with the same erotic content that its symbolic motifs proclaim. Indeed, a straightforward description of what one sees proves to be almost embarrassingly frank: the woman is in motion, her legs are parted, her pink dress opens. The man is in the rose bush, hat off, arm erect and well-aimed. And suddenly, to her own delight, as she reaches the peak of her ride, the woman's shoe flies off her foot. The Wallace Collection picture has no rivals among swinging scenes in the eighteenth century. The artist's own large painting in Washington (Fig. 9) is an undoubted masterpiece, but it is only incidentally about swinging. One other work by Fragonard, the so-called Small Swing (Fig. 18),42 probably made in the mid- or late seventies, is a very fine, but relatively modest effort. Its interest for us comes mainly from the new emotional tone that pervades it. The Swing of 1767 is gay, ebullient, "rococo"; the Small Swing is subdued, warm, and full of incipient romantic sensibility. In the later painting the company is made up mostly of women. Richly dressed, they are gathered round a fountain-pool ornamented with sculptured dolphins and some cupids on a pedestal, one of whom is seemingly about to shoot an arrow, but not at anyone in particular. Here, in the shade and protection of the dense, leafy walls of an arbor, one woman swings. Another woman seems to call to her as she reaches up to push the swing, while still others sit and watch. There is no flirtation, no play with shoes or flowers. Unlike the swinging scenes that have been discussed before, it is not an anecdotal situation, but a mood that dominates this picture. The swing here, however, no less than in other pictures, defines the amorous atmosphere. Fragonard's women seem immersed in it. They obey the dictates of Love and ready themselves for a fulfillment that is yet to come. But the sentimental currents that flow into this work became mainstreams only in the nineteenth century,43 and with this painting the story of swinging in eighteenth-century French art comes to an end. New York University, Institute of Fine Arts 1 East 78th Street New York, NY 10021 Bibliography Fuchs, E., Illustrierte Sittengeschichte, 6 vols., Munich, n.d. (Vols. 3 and 4 = Galante Zeit, i, ii; Vols. 5 and 6 = Biirgerliche Zeit, i, ii.). Ingersoll-Smouse, F., Pater, Paris, 1928. Rosenberg, P., and E. Camesasca, Tout l'oeuvre peint de Watteau, Paris, 1970. Wentzel, H. "Jean-Honor4 Fragonards 'Schaukel.' Bemerkungen zur Ikonographie der Schaukel in der Bildenden Kunst," Wallraf-Richartz- Jahrbuch, xxvi, 1964, 187-218. Wildenstein, G., The Paintings of Fragonard, London, 1960. , Lancret, Paris, 1924. 41 Fragonard was not the first to use the motif in this way. See above, n. 37. 42 In size (19 3/4" X 2714?") it is not, in fact, much smaller than the Wallace Collection painting (see above, n. 25). I am grateful to M. Daniel Wildenstein for lending me a photograph of the Small Swing. 43 Victor Hugo's "Sara la Baigneuse" swings above the basin of a fountain, immersed in an imaginary perfume "qui fait aimer ... Et sans cesse se balance avec amour." In 1892 Fantin-Latour made a lithograph to illustrate Berlioz's musical version of Hugo's poem. See G. Kahn, Fantin- LaTour, Paris, 1926, 50, pl. 39. This content downloaded from 204.140.185.228 on Mon, 3 Nov 2014 17:35:21 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions