What connects a 1767 painting of a woman losing her shoe to the guillotine, a headless sculpture in African wax-print fabric, and Disney’s Frozen? The answer is Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing, or The Happy Accidents of the Swing, now in the Wallace Collection in London. This episode decodes every inch of the canvas: the young man hiding in the rose bushes, the oblivious older man pulling the ropes, the barking dog symbolizing fidelity, and the shushing cherub statue.

We trace the commission from a courtier who originally wanted a bishop pushing his mistress, through the 1782 engraving that mirrored the image and helped it go viral, the Enlightenment philosophers who saw it as a symptom of a diseased society, and its first confirmed owner, a tax farmer who was guillotined in 1794. Then we follow it to a Paris auction, to London, through the 2021 conservation that removed centuries of yellowed varnish, and into K-pop, Harley Quinn, Tangled and Frozen.

• Why history painter Gabriel François Doyen rejected the commission and passed it to Fragonard
• The intaglio printmaking process and the blue-dress and Versailles workshop copies
• Tax farming explained: the privatized extortion racket that doomed Ménage de Pressigny
• The chemistry of oxidized resin varnish and the solvent tests used to restore the painting
• Yinka Shonibare’s The Swing (after Fragonard) and what a headless figure says about revolution and empire