[Music] we're in the Wallace Collection in London looking at fragonard's to swing this was commissioned by a member of the French royal court who asks dragon art to paint his lover on a swing being pushed by a bishop well he hid and looked up his mistress's dress but the time frackin off takes on the commission and render said the bishop is no longer really a bishop just an older man but he's barely visible in the lower right so this is a painting that was from the outset meant to be playful erotic sexually charged and there was a bit too naughty to be publicly displayed well like many rokoko paintings there was a private Commission it was for a private home and it was for a member of the aristocracy this is a transitional moment in reckon arts career he had been known for large-scale very formal history paintings and it's just at this moment when he's abandoning that kind of career for private patrons outside of the system of royal commissions in that system of royal commissions for the academy history paintings were primary scenes from mythology from French history from ancient Greek and Roman history so this couldn't be more different it wasn't just the subject that changed in frakkin house art it was also his technique his private commissions tended to be created quickly with rapid brushwork and we see that here look for instance at the edging of the woman's dress part of the energy that that dress achieves is a result of the rapid brushwork you can really see the oil paint for example in her bodice or in the white lace and the idea of secretive eroticism is built into this painting symbolically if you look at the left edge you see a painting of a sculpture this is by a Rococo sculptor named Falcon a an is known as menacing love and you can see that the cupid has his finger up as if asking us to keep a secret below that we see a lovely relief sculpture that looks like main ads or nymphs dancing and that's not the only sculpture we see here to the lower right we see two cupid figures it seems to be riding a classicizing dolphin part of a fountain and in fact you can see water spraying out towards the lower right of the painting but the star painting is the young woman and really heard fabulous pink silk dress lined with lace her bodice her decolletage her breasts her choker her hat and to me especially that pink slipper that she flips up into the air a way of understanding the Rococo is a style of art that comes out of the Baroque but has jettisoned a seriousness of the morality it has maintained a sense of energy its sense of movement look at that swing look at that forward momentum that actually carries the slipper off her foot and we know that the Baroque you used diagonal lines to create a sense of movement and energy and we see that here when we follow the rope of the swing through the female figure and down to her lover in the lower left who leans back on his right elbow and lifts up his left arm and seems overtaken by his love and desire for his companion she's sitting on red velvet that's got a gilded molding at the bottom of it we're not in the woods here we're in a cultivated aristocratic garden although an incredibly lush one nature is so abundant and fertile here it's clearly relating to the sensuality of the story and couldn't be more different than the spareness the severity the plainness they will see in paintings by Devi just a few years before the Revolution when we really have an opposition to this type of subject matter and when critics begin to call for an art that is very different that offers a moral instead of indulging this kind of sensuality and because this painting becomes a foil to paintings by DeFede with a style known as neoclassicism the Rococo becomes a bit of a villain and has looked back to historically recently by a Nigerian artist named Inka Shanna Bari who has created a three-dimensional representation of this painting but that deals with not sensuality but the costs of colonialism but that is all hindsight fragonard's the swing is such a perfect expression of the frivolity the luxury and indulgence of the Rococo [Music]