The Swing

Les Hazards heureux de l'Escarpolette (known in English as The Swing) is an etching by the French engraver Nicolas de Launay, made around 1782 after the celebrated composition by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. In an era before mass photography, engravings like this one were the primary way an iconic image circulated beyond the private collection of the patron who commissioned it — carrying Fragonard's playful Rococo vision of a young woman on a garden swing, her admirer hidden in the bushes below, into homes across Europe. De Launay was among the most sought-after reproductive engravers of 18th-century Paris, prized for translating the delicate light and movement of Rococo painting into the more restrained vocabulary of etched line — a technical achievement that made this image one of the most widely disseminated of its century, and one that continues to define the visual language of French Rococo art. This museum-quality canvas print reproduces the etching held in the Drawings and Prints