Les Hasards Heureux de L'escarpolette (1768)

Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Les Hasards Heureux de L'escarpolette (1768) or 'The Happy Accidents of the Swing' is considered to be one of the masterpieces of the eighteenth-century era, and is arguably his best known work. Although it hangs in London’s Wallace Art Gallery, it very much epitomises pre-Revolutionary, aristocratic France, with its subject’s gay and expensive clothing and her implicitly loose morals. Indeed, its original owner, Marie-François Ménage de Pressigny, was guillotined in 1794 and the painting became the property of the Revolutionary Government.

The giddy young woman swings between two men; the younger, who looks to her petticoats, is her lover; the older man is her husband, though an earlier attempt at commissioning the work asked that he be a Catholic bishop, which M. Fragonard refused. The lass is clearly enjoying herself, perhaps revelling in the husband’s provoked jealously, and the gigolo’s playful attentions. If the French word Hasards in the title, which we might usually translate ‘chances’ became ‘hazards’, we might have a clearer understanding of sin. The swing breaks, and down comes the lassie, petticoats and all. The hedonistic French aristos met their fate at the guillotine, but far worse awaits those who playfully swing between one evil and another.