Fragonard’s L’Amour volé

Mounted pin-brooch, 2007 aterials: 20ct gold, pink/green baroque pearl, pink/green mother-of-pearl, silver, 18ct white gold pin

height (without pin): 38mm width: 38mm ount: mixed media Signed and dated artist’s no: 413.MP-B.07 hidden alche y: 211-12

Flying slippers, stolen glances and borrowed statuary: Fragonard’s delicious masterpiece The Swing (Les hazards heureux de l’escarpolette) [P430] offers – and fulfils – so many temptations, not least to the lover of puns. The full scheme and history of this great treasure is well-known, and beautifully recounted by Stephen Duffy and Jo Hedley in the Wallace Collection catalogue of paintings. Although we tend to think that the ‘quotation’, or appropriation, of the work of others is a post-modern phenomenon, it has long been practised – literally so in music – in the plastic arts. In order to focus his composition and to ‘people’ but not over-animate his intimate scene, Fragonard has employed the frozen, directive, forms of statuary. On the left of the painting (and its most elevated head) he has placed in line of trajectory with the famous projectile escarpolette a ‘hushing’ carved figure of L’Amour – a Love stolen, or at least borrowed, from Etienne-Maurice Falconet’s figure now to be found in the Louvre. A receiver of stolen goods, I have in turn appropriated this twilight figure, prompted by the pink-green glow of a Protean baroque pearl and, as Cupid is to Venus, child to parent, added feathers of a matching mother-of-pearl.