Jean-Honoré Fragonard's 'The Swing'

18th century pleasures in the park, as he looks up her dress and she knows it, and the unwitting husband is at the back pushing the swing. This is Fragonard's famous The Swing. In French it is known by the more evocative Les Hasards heureux de l'escarpolette (The Happy Accidents of the Swing), its original title, from 1767. I think of it as the most representative painting of the Rococo era.

A few years later Fragonard was commissioned by Madame du Barry to paint wall canvasses at her home in Louveciennes - a series known as Progress of Love, which is tamer. However, as Rococo fell out of fashion he turned toward other styles and genres. He would survive the Revolution hidden away in Grasse, where he had been born. Before his death in Paris in 1806, one of his projects was to illustrate perhaps the greatest classic of libertinism of them all, Laclos' 1782 novel Dangerous Liaisons - a project Fragonard completed in 1796 - including the image below.

Also see François Boucher whom Fragonard trained with when he was young.