The Swing (French: L'Escarpolette), also known as The Happy Accidents of the Swing (French: Les Hasards heureux de l'escarpolette, the original title), is an 18th-century oil painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard in the Wallace Collection in London. It is considered to be one of the masterpieces of the Rococo era, and is Fragonard's best known work.
The Swing provides examples of:
- Eating the Eye Candy: The man on the left is looking directly under the woman's skirt, and his expression looks downright enraptured.
- Everyone Looks Sexier if French: This French painting was scandalous (and by extension, beloved) for the various sexual allusions going on in the picture. First, the two men covet the woman in the swing, who is wearing a pink dress and looking flirtatiously at one of them.
- Lighter and Softer: The painting is the poster child of the Rococo Movement, a later part of the Baroque Movement that shifted its focus to the leisure time of the French Aristocracy and a Romantic appeal to nature.
- Love Triangle: An aristocratic woman is swinging without care. Her husband, left in the shadows, is the one putting the swing in motion, while her lover is hidden in the bushes below her, openly admiring her beauty. This painting is meant as a depiction of how the higher classes don't see adultery as a sin but as a necessity born from having to marry for economical reasons.
- Pimped-Out Dress: The woman's billowing dress is made of silk. It has ruffled sleeves and hemline, at least two layers of cloth (a pink outer one and an inner white one), and a white, laced bodice.
- Pink Is Erotic: The woman's sexual allure is represented by her pink Pimped-Out Dress.
- Pink Means Feminine: The idly beautiful woman at the center of the painting is decked in an elegant pink frock and mounted on the titular swing. She's very much a Girly Girl, openly flirting with a man below her and ever so delicately throwing her shoe away.
- Swing Low, Sweet Harriet: The woman is portrayed on a swing dead-center in the picture and is feeling joyous. The reason is that she's being pushed by her husband, with her stretched-out legs being on display to her lover, who is hidden in the bushes. She looks quite pleased with herself because of that.
- Trope Codifier: It marked the tonal shift from intense, religious artworks commonly associated with the early Baroque to Lighter and Softer depictions of the aristocratic life of the Rococo.
- The X of Y: Its original French name is Les Hasards heureux de l'escarpolette (translation: The Happy Accidents of the Swing).
