The Swing

The most perfect little shoe in the history of painting. This is "The Swing" by Jean-Honore Fragonard, painted in 1766. According to Laurie Schneider Adams, the Baron de Saint-Julien commissioned the portrait. He's the voyeur in the bushes, looking up the skirt of his mistress, who is painted in all her youthful erotic glory on the swing. The painting is classic Rococo, with its naughty aristocrats behaving scandalously. The cherub with his finger over his lips and the public/privateness of the complicit servant pulling the strings on the swing in a secret garden add to the tension in the painting.

And of course, there is her spontaneous, reckless shoe. Not only does this gorgeous and fashionable young woman glide through the air, she is the center of the universe in all her powerful sexuality. She commands the attention of the men. She is the locus of light and heat and energy. We see her captured at the furthest point forward in her glide, her skirts fluttering, her stockinged-legs bared, and her shoe sailing off into the bushes. One can imagine where this is going, right down to that servant on his hands and knees looking for that Manolo Blahnik in the undergrowth.

Hands down, this is my favorite painting. Althought they were decadent wastrels, you gotta hand it to the French aristocrats during the 18th century. I don't blame the masses for rising up and chopping off their heads in 1789-1793. But seriously, wouldn't YOU want to have been them? I can remember worshipping the sex and money and privilege and dresses of the Petit Trianon set as a kid, all partying like there was no tomorrow.

Until there was no tomorrow.

*sigh*

Still, even if we view this as a vanitas painting, which it most certainly does remind one of the passage of time, it still has that quality of eternal youth, of passion and lust and energy. I want to take that energy with me to my last breath, to the grave. And it will be a very very very long time from now. Sure, someday there isn't a tomorrow for any of us.

But like Supergrass wrote, "Life is a cigarette you smoke till the end."