Gabriel François Doyen Baron Louis-Guillaume Baillet de Saint-Julien commissioned The Swing from Fragonard with salacious intentions. Saint-Julien wanted a picture of his mistress that also featured him looking up the lady’s skirt. Initially, the Baron tried to hire history painterto make the work. Given the sordid nature of the task, Doyen refused. Fragonard had no such qualms—and his career benefited from it. After all, austerity was hardly in vogue throughout Marie Antoinette’s France. With the success of The Swing, Fragonard was able to successfully transition from a history painter frustrated by royal bureaucracy to a favored artist of the upper class—members of which, ostensibly, were more willing and able to pay on time.

Not only did Fragonard not mind the commission’s sleazy underpinnings, the artist also had fun with the assignment. In Heaven and the Flesh: Imagery of Desire from the Renaissance to the Rococo (1995), scholars Clive Hart and Kay Stevensoncall The Swing a “disguised representation of inverted sexual intercourse.” More colloquially, they see the painting as a cheeky implication of a sex act that situates the woman on top. Hart and Stevenson argue that the mistress actively participates in—even initiates—the flirtatious game that she and her lover are playing: As she swings back and forth, he passively gazes in adoration as he extends a long, phallic arm.