This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Jean-Honore Fragonard's The Swing, painted around 1767, stands as one of the most immediately recognizable images the Rococo produced, and it captures the style at the height of its confidence just before its rapid decline. The painting shows a young woman on a garden swing, her pink skirts billowing as an elderly man pulls the ropes from the shadows behind her and a young suitor, reclining in the bushes below, gazes up her skirt as her shoe flies off toward a statue of Cupid. The scene compresses much of what Rococo painting valued: playful, faintly scandalous eroticism, lush garden setting, fluid and confident brushwork, and a total absence of moral seriousness, all wrapped in decorative prettiness rather than presented as a lesson. Fragonard, who apprenticed briefly to a lawyer before Francois Boucher was prevailed upon to accept him as a pupil around 1748 and who won the Prix de Rome in 1752, became the last major French painter to work successfully in this idiom, producing well over five hundred paintings characterized by delicate hedonism and remarkable technical facility. But the taste that made The Swing possible was already fading. By the 1760s, critics and artists influenced by Enlightenment ideas about art's moral purpose had begun attacking Rococo's triviality and excess, calling instead for the seriousness and archaeological rigor that would define Neoclassicism. The shift accelerated through the 1770s and 1780s, and Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii, shown at the 1785 Salon, was understood by contemporaries as a final, deliberate repudiation of everything Rococo painting had represented. Fragonard outlived his own style's dominance: he lost his aristocratic patrons as taste turned, and after the French Revolution his old acquaintance David, by then the leading Neoclassical painter, appointed him a curator at the newly established national museum in the Louvre, a quiet coda for the artist who had painted Rococo's most famous image.