Les hasards heureux de l'escarpolette (The Happy Accidents of the Swing)

Sunlight filters through the dense canopy of trees. A young woman in a pink silk dress soars through the air on a swing. Slipping from her left foot, a small shoe flies through the air. In the bushes below to the left, a young man lies hidden—in the perfect position to look up under her skirt. In the shadows to the lower right, an older man smiles as he pulls the ropes of the swing.

This work, an icon of 18th-century French Rococo art, was long said to have been born from the mischievous, almost frivolous request of a court aristocrat. For centuries, the narrative held that the man pulling the swing in the dark was a bishop, representing a satirical demand to make a clergyman complicit in an immoral tryst. It was also widely accepted that the patron who commissioned it was the 54-year-old Baron de Saint-Julien.

Yet in recent years, research and scientific analysis have overturned these long-held theories one after another. In 2021, the Wallace Collection undertook the painting’s first conservation treatment in nearly a century, stripping away a thick layer of yellowed varnish. Scientific analysis revealed that the older man on the lower right was not dressed in black clerical robes at all, but in vibrant blue secular attire. A bishop was never painted there in the first place.

Behind this masterpiece was a defining, high-stakes choice by the painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard. In 1765, Fragonard achieved grand acclaim from the Royal Academy for a monumental history painting, which was even purchased by King Louis XV. He had secured a brilliant career as an official history painter—a position of prestige that anyone would envy. However, reality was not so forgiving. Payments from the royal treasury were frequently delayed, and he resented being tied down by heavy, labor-intensive history paintings.

It was around the autumn of 1767 when a courtier brought forward a bizarre request, as recorded by the playwright Charles Collé. The commission was first offered to the history painter Gabriel-François Doyen: "Place my mistress on a swing, and have a bishop push her." "Hide me in the bushes so I can look up at her legs." Doyen refused, taking the request as an insult to his dignity as a history painter. And so, the commission was passed on to Fragonard.

While the patron was long believed to be the 54-year-old Baron de Saint-Julien, recent scholarship has shifted this view. Because the suitor depicted in the painting is a young man in his twenties, it is now considered far more likely that the buyer was his 18-year-old son or another young court aristocrat.

Fragonard accepted this scandalous commission. Producing a private piece for a wealthy patron offered immediate, handsome compensation—even if it meant straying from the Academy’s official path. Yet he didn't simply do as he was told. Depicting a clergyman aiding an illicit affair posed a real risk of censorship. And so, he subtly replaced the bishop with the man in blue.