The hunt for the bishop in one of the most risqué paintings in the western canon is set to begin.
An unprecedented conservation project is to start on one of the country’s most cherished paintings in an attempt to solve some of its many puzzles. Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing, which is held by the Wallace Collection, is to be subjected to an extensive battery of scientific tests and archival research for the first time in its 250-year life.
The painting, which depicts a lover looking up the skirt of his mistress while a mysterious older man pushes the swing, is thought to have been commissioned in the 1760s by a “gentleman of the court” who had requested that a bishop be seen pushing the swing carrying the lover. The whereabouts of the painting — now regarded as a masterpiece of the rococo movement by an artist who was a crucial influence on the impressionists — in its early years are unknown but when it appeared publicly there was no bishop.
Yuriko Jackall, curator of French painting at the Wallace Collection, has discovered under-drawings on another Fragonard masterpiece. She said it “would be interesting certainly” to see if a bishop had originally been included. “Fragonard was perhaps resistant to the idea of bringing the church into this scenario so he ended up replacing the bishop with the elderly man dressed in regular clothing,” she said.
As part of the project, funded by the Bank of America’s art conservation programme, Jackall is to conduct archival research in France while Martin Wyld will oversee the conservation. Wyld, a former head of conservation at the National Gallery, who has restored works by Leonardo da Vinci and Diego Velázquez, described The Swing as “incredibly subtle, incredibly distinguished, but clearly not looking quite its best”.
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Scientific tests will be conducted, then Wyld will begin removing varnish and retouching parts. “It should not be complex,” Wyld said. “But because it is such a famous picture and has so much detail, it is obviously something you deal with inch by inch.”
