Hi everyone, welcome to ArtStoryLab.
My name is Hyejin.
Do you guys remember my first episode? The one where I talked about the very first artwork that I remember seeing?
if you haven’t seen it, click on the card here to watch.
But if you HAVE seen it, you'd probably remember this painting,
The Happy Hazards of the Swing, that was at the heart of my first art story.
In that episode, I described how as a little girl,
I became totally captivated by the sight of the flying lady in her big poofy pink dress
and her dainty slipper flying off her tiny foot.
I loved looking at that painting on the cover of a CD
because I could vicariously feel the thrill of swinging in the air, not to mention her extra fancy costume.
I also touched briefly on the cast of characters depicted in the painting—
in addition to the swinging girl,
the older man pushing her in the background,
the finely dressed younger man in a very dramatic pose in the bushes looking up her skirt,
and the statue of Cupid holding his index finger at his lips.
This garden statue is actually based on the Menacing Cupid,
a sculpture by Fragonard’s contemporary, Etienne Falconet,
which shows the mischievous god of love in the same gesture calling for our silent cooperation.
He's reaching for an arrow in his quiver next to him, about to strike his next victim.
We’ll return to him in a little bit.
There are also two winged putti riding a dolphin in a sculptural group,
and a detail I didn’t notice until recently--
a little white dog, standing on its hind legs and barking at the action taking place above.
So cute!
This painting, created by Jean-Honoré Fragonard around 1767 and 1768,
was commissioned by a certain "gentleman of the Court,”
who wanted a picture of his mistress on a swing and
himself in a position where he would be able to see her beautiful legs.
She must have had quite the pair of legs and maybe pretty feet, because…
I mean, it’s kind of obvious.
Foot fetish, anyone?
(WHAT?!)
The picture was meant to hang in the love nest for the patron and his mistress
in the outskirts of Paris or in the countryside.
These pleasure pavilions, called petite maisons or “little houses,”
were retreats where wealthy men and their mistresses carried on affairs privately.
And that explains the small dimensions of the painting.
It wasn’t meant to be seen by a lot of people,
perhaps only the “gentleman” and his lover, along with a handful of others who could access this little house.
Now, the theme of the swing is itself an amusing subject,
a popular pastime for adults in eighteenth-century France.
During this period, there were swing sets in fairs, amusement parks, and in gardens of their grand homes.
But the swing also serves as an important metaphor for the suspense produced by the picture.
The word suspense comes from the Latin word “suspensus,” meaning “hovering" and “uncertain,”
and the picture leaves us hanging between so many possible meanings
What’s going on with these three people?
Are these two figures, the swinging lady and her admirer down below,
really portraits of the painting’s patron and his mistress?
Or are they just generic figures standing in for the couple?
Does the older man pushing the swing know about the existence of another guy in the scene?
Is he her cuckolded husband blindly pushing his cheating wife on the swing
while she’s really out to seduce another man?
Or is the older guy a knowing participant in this amusement?
Is this a love triangle?
And did the shoe slip off her foot accidentally?
Or is it part of her scheme to take advantage of the loss of bodily control that comes with riding a swing and
show off her legs that are usually hidden under her voluminous dress?
Is it just her legs that the man is ogling from below?
Or is he seeing OTHER BODY PARTS hidden deep inside her dress, wink wink?
(man whistling)
And who is menacing Cupid thinking about hitting with his arrow?
The lady?
The younger guy?
The older man?
And what kind of arrow? Because Cupid carries two types of arrows:
the sharp golden arrows that overwhelm their targets with uncontrollable love and desire for whom they see
AND the blunt lead arrows that fill their victims with disgust for anyone seeking their affection.
And this little white dog—
Is it a symbol for fidelity as dogs in paintings traditionally are?
Or is its frenzied barking a sign of the sexual excitement that permeates this picture?
Just like the lady swinging back and forth and her other slipper barely hanging on,
we’re put in a tenuous place, caught in between these different possibilities.
We’re invited to make our own guesses based on our experiences and expectations
and fill in the story with our imagination.
Like that momentary loss of bodily control that makes swinging so fun,
our lack of firm grip on the significance of the painting makes it all the more titillating.
And the art historian Jennifer Milam has made a brilliant observation
that the swinging motion also mirrors the viewer’s gaze across and around the composition.
The picture is framed by a giant reverse C-curve formed by the tree on the right and the leafy bushes on the left.
Strong diagonals send the viewer’s attention back and forth across the picture:
Starting from the upper left corner down the tree branches,
we go down the ropes,
and from the swinging lady and her lifted foot,
we pass through the airborne shoe to the menacing Cupid.
Alternately, her other leg points to 
her recumbent paramour.
And the ropes behind her lead us to the man in the shadow.
The gazes of Cupid and the two men direct our attention back to the flying lady,
and this multidirectional movement continues throughout the composition,
creating a dynamic viewing experience.
This, Milam explains, is how the artist Fragonard is engaging us in a visual and intellectual game,
we the viewers going back and forth through the multiple scenarios and pathways
that the artist created across his canvas that lead to different outcomes.
This open-ended and unbridled celebration of raunchy, yet intellectual fun
is a defining feature of eighteenth-century French aristocratic culture, called libertinage.
In the purest sense, libertinage is a philosophy of questioning authority and dogma.
In the 18th century, it became associated with debauchery and the pursuit of carnal pleasure.
But in essence it’s a philosophy of free thinking and free action.
And I’d say that the swing, with all its sexual connotations,
is a very apt metaphor for this cultural attitude,
for it privileges constantly shifting rather than fixed meanings and letting go of constraints
for a bit of vertiginous, naughty fun, as the one this painting so elegantly demonstrates.
Thanks for watching! See you next time on ArtStoryLab.
