The Swing

Have you ever watch the most popular animated film, Frozen? I'm pretty sure you do. I'm sure that you've watch it several times, don't you? 

Well, Frozen is a 2013 American 3Dcomputer-animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures.

One of Anna's big numbers is "For the First Time in Forever." As she sings this, she leaps into a swing in a painting. This isn't just any painting, it is the Rococo-era French painting "The Swing" by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. The painting is depicted/copied in the film by Disney background artist Lisa Keene and is far from an exact duplicate, as you can see below. Clearly, it wasn't intended to be any kind of duplicate, not least because the original has some, er, connotations that don't really fit into a Disney animated feature film. It is what is known as an "homage."

The Rococo style of art was characterised by lightness, grace, playfulness and intimacy and emerged out of France around the beginning of the 18th century and in the following century spread throughout Europe.  The actual word rococo is thought to have been used disapprovingly by a pupil of Jacques-Louis David who ridiculed the taste, which was in vogue in the mid-18th century.  He combined the artistic genres of rocaille, which prospered in the mid 16th century and was applied to works that depicted fancy rock-work and shell-work, and barocco (baroque) genre. 

The featured for today is Jean-Honoré Fragonard, whose works are amongst the most complete embodiments of the Rococo spirit.   He has been described as the “fragrant essence” of the 18th century.  He was famous for the fluid grace and sensuous charm of his paintings and for the virtuosity of his technique.  The painting by Fragonard featured today is probably his most famous and is the oil on canvas work entitled The Swing which he completed in 1767 and which is now part of the Wallace Collection in London.

The Swing, also known as The Happy Accidents of the Swing, 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 painting depicts a young man hidden in the bushes, watching a woman on a swing, being pushed by an elderly man, almost hidden in the shadows, and unaware of the lover. As the lady goes high on the swing, she lets the young man take a furtive peep under her dress, all while flicking her own shoe off in the direction of a statue of the Greek god of discretion and turning her back to two angelic cherubim on the side of the older man.

The lady is wearing a bergère hat(shepherdess hat) which is ironic since shepherds are normally associated with virtue because of their living close to nature, uncorrupted by the temptations of the city.

According to the memoirs of the dramatist Charles Collé, a courtier (homme de la cour) asked first Gabriel François Doyen to make this painting of him and his mistress. Not comfortable with this frivolous work, Doyen refused and passed on the commission to Fragonard. The man had requested a portrait of his mistress seated on a swing being pushed by a bishop, but Fragonard painted an ugly layman.

This style of "frivolous" painting soon became the target of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, who demanded a more serious art which would show the nobility of man.

Notice by comparing the animated version to the original painting how, in her version, artist Lisa Keene emphasized the flying shoe but dropped the hidden lover in the bushes, and also retained the drone pushing her. The original painting is about the guy watching in the bushes, a voyeuristic quality that puts him and you the viewer in the same position, both watching the naughty but happy girl. The makes you - the viewer - part of the illicit transaction, with the oblivious gentleman pushing the swing unaware of both the hidden lover and you. Without the guy in the bushes, the painting is just about a free-spirited young girl having fun with her boyfriend. Its focus shifts completely so that it's all about the princess in a Disney Princess animated film. Very Disney-like changes.

As background, Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French painter and printmaker who lived from 1732 to 1806 in Paris. The man worked like a madman, painting some 550 quality paintings during the final years of the French Monarchy. "The Swing" is one of his more interesting paintings, because it shows a man pushing a lady on a swing while another man, hidden from the guy pushing the lady, is watching the lady fly up into the air. It is pretty clear that the hidden fellow is looking up the lady's dress, but she doesn't care, perhaps because they are having an affair and the first fellow - boyfriend/husband/whatever - is clueless. That may explain why she looks so happy. This kind of ribaldry was frowned upon in serious paintings back in the day, but Fragonard earned a good commission for it anyway. I mean, it's a good painting, and I'm not just saying that because it's old and respected. Fragonard clearly was pushing the limits with "The Swing" during that puritanical age, but Keene managed to tone it back down again.