Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Apparently the enormous trees that turn up over and over in his landscapes get traced back to a stint in Italy filling sketchbooks with old villa gardens, or so I've read. Big decorative pictures like this were often ordered to fill a particular wall in somebody's house — furniture, more or less, for people who could afford painted furniture.

Another painter reportedly turned this commission down — a bishop pushing the swing while a nobleman peeks up a lady's skirt being too much for him — so Fragonard took the job instead.

Nobody knows who she was, from what I can find. She's usually lumped in with a run of quick 'fantasy figures' he knocked out — people in dress-up rather than portraits of anyone in particular. Scans of the canvas supposedly show a different figure underneath, facing straight out, before he painted over it.

Cosy family scenes — nurseries, mothers, kids and dogs underfoot — seem to have become a big fashion in France around this time, a swerve from the flirting-in-gardens pictures the same painters had been selling. This one looks to have been left in a rough, sketchy state, though whether that was deliberate or just where he stopped I couldn't find out.

Scenes of an ordinary household became fashionable late on — no gods, no mythology, just a room at night. There's a long-running muddle about which version is which: it was matched for years to a picture sold at auction in the 1780s until, according to Wikipedia, a closer match surfaced in a collection in Estonia around 2009.