Jean-Honoré Fragonard was the leading French Rococo painter, celebrated for his exuberant, erotically charged scenes of aristocratic leisure. The Swing (1767) — showing a young woman on a swing launching her shoe toward a hidden admirer — is the quintessential image of 18th-century French court culture at its most playful and decadent. The French Revolution effectively ended his career: his aristocratic patrons vanished, and the frivolous sensibility of Rococo gave way to the austere Neoclassicism of David. He died in obscurity.
