Drawing Fragonard's 'The Swing' In my Style // Classical Art History & Redraw

Hey everyone, welcome back to another video. Today we have yet another episode of Piper Redraws Classical Paintings in her style and gives you guys an art history lesson. In the last episode, I, as per usual, gave you guys a little poll in the description box to vote on the next painting and you all voted for Jean Honoré Fragonard's The Swing. So that's what I'm going to be redrawing today. It's a lot, I know, I'll get into it. So yeah, I'm going to be doing a redraw of The Swing by Jean Honoré Fragonard and giving you guys like a bit of a, I don't know, an art history lesson about Fragonard himself and about the painting. So yeah, let's get into the speed painting, shall we? So as I mentioned earlier, today I will be redrawing the iconic painting, and bear with me on this pronunciation, Les Hazartes Heureux de l'Escarpolette, also known as The Swing by Jean Honoré Fragonard. This redraw took me a total of 8 hours and 55 minutes, which is quite a lot of time for me to spend on a digital painting. I feel like I'm a lot quicker doing digital art and I don't think I've spent this amount of time on a single drawing. I finished this one along the course of a few weeks and it sure did give me a run for my money with all these intricate details and foliage and just all this lighting. Just getting the rough sketch and composition down was a struggle as you can see here as I came to realize that there are so many elements to this piece that aren't even that obvious until you look at it up close. I paid special attention to make sure that the proportions of all the subjects and that the background were all correct and I wanted to stick as close to the original as possible. I still ended up having some of the subjects a little bigger than in the original, but I think that just boils down to the fact that I'm working digitally on a much, much smaller scale than Fragonard was. I will get into details about the painting itself, both the original and my redraw process, but first I want to give you guys a little information about Fragonard himself. So a lot of the information I got about Jean Honoré Fragonard in my research came from mainly three sources, which were the metmuseum.org, wikiart.org, and thebritannica.com. If you guys want to read more about Fragonard or read these articles, I will leave the links down there in the description, as always. So Jean Honoré Fragonard, born April 5th, 1732, was a French Rococo painter who was quote, best known for his flourishly hedonistic scenes, end quote, and is now considered one of the masters of French painting. For anyone who doesn't know, including me, I did learn this during my research, Rococo is an interior design style that stretches itself into the decorative arts, painting, architecture, and sculpture. It originated in Paris in the 18th century. It is usually characterized by quote, lightness, elegance, and an exuberant use of curving natural forms in ornamentation. In layman's terms, it is a very flourished style of art that exudes opulence and it showcased beauty in natural forms. Fragonard was the son of a haberdasher's assistant, and upon moving to Paris when he was a child, he began his apprenticeship as a lawyer, well not as a child, it was later in life, but you know. He showcased a big love for drawing and decided to be taught painting instead. He studied under the tutelage of Jean Siméon Chardin, and then François Boucher, a Rococo painter who soon enough trusted Fragonard's skills enough to paint replicas of his own works. He went on to win the Prix de Rome in 1752 and went on to pursue his studies at the French Academy in Rome until 1761. There he painted various landscapes of the Roman countryside and took great inspiration from Italian scenery, which I mean, wouldn't you as well, like, it must have been gorgeous. Once he finished his studies, he took odd commissions and jobs here and there before he completely abandoned, quote, conventional career paths dictated by the hierarchical structure of the Royal Academy, working largely for private patrons, end quote, which basically means that he didn't take the conventional career path after you finish the Royal Academy and actually just started being a freelancer and doing, you know, odd commission work. During this time, he focused more on landscapes with inspirations coming from a Dutch painter called Jacob van Rijsdael. So sorry about my Dutch pronunciation as well. He also focused on portraits and, quote, decorative, sensuous outdoor party scenes, end quote, like our lovely painting, The Swing, which he painted in the style of his early tutor, Boucher. Fragonard was heavily inspired by Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, Frans Hals, and Giovanni Tiepolo, and they were all artists he admired and carefully studied along his career. A few years later, upon his return to Paris, he made some, let's say questionable personal decisions, which I won't go too much into detail about, but basically, he fell in love with his wife's 14-year-old sister. Yikes. But yeah, speaking about his personal life, his blooming domestic life and his son, Evariste, played a big role in the shift in his subject matters. He actually started concentrating more on, quote, domestic scenes, or romantic novels, or scenes concerned with children's upbringings, end quote. He painted his son in too many of his paintings, such as The Schoolmistress, also known as Now Say Please, which he painted circa 1780, when Evariste was born. So that's quite cute, seems like he was quite a devoted father. I'll be a bad husband, I guess. He quickly realized that his style was no longer of any interest to the people of France during the French Revolution, as while he was out of the country in Italy developing his domestic bliss-like Rococo style, France was going through their struggles that shifted the art style and taste at the time completely. This meant that Fragonard was no longer getting commissions, and no longer getting work from patrons, as he once had in his prime. He first retired to Grasse, France, which is actually the town he was born in, but he ended up returning to Paris quite quickly again. Quote, he spent the rest of his life in obscurity, painting little, end quote. He was duly forgotten, and his death in 1806 was barely even noticed. His work continued to be forgotten until well into the 1850s, almost 50 years after his death. He is now considered one of the two great poetic painters of the 18th century in France. During his prime as an active artist, he produced over 550 paintings, and several thousand drawings, with many more hundreds thought to be lost. His style was quote, rapid, vigorous, and fluent, never tight or fussy like that of so many of his contemporaries, end quote. And that folks, is a very summarized version of the life of Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Just a dude that had a proficiency for painting and a love for art in general, that stuck to his guns, his stylistic guns, in the face of an artistic and national revolution. And now going into the actual painting, most of the information I got about the swing came from wallacecollection.org, which is where the painting currently resides, and also artsy.net. So again, those links will be in the description below. As for the actual painting of today, Les Hazards du Roi de l'Escarpolette, or commonly known as The Swing, is one of his most well-known paintings, made circa 1767 and 1768. The painting is 81 by 64.2 cm, it's an oil-on-canvas painting, and it depicts quote, a young woman wearing a lovely pink silk frock, who is tantalizingly positioned mid-air on a swing between her elderly husband on the right, and her young lover on the left. The force of the swing causes one of her slippers to fly off, resulting in a privileged view for her lover, whose delight is suggested by the symbolic offer of his hat, describes the Wallace Collection. So a very juicy narrative here in this painting, one that I really didn't know about until I actually started looking into this painting for this video. According to the journals of the writer Charles Collet, a history painter called Gabriel François Doyen was originally commissioned by the lover, subject in the bottom left corner of the painting, who we now know to be Baron Louis-Guillaume Belay de Saint-Julien, an incredibly catchy name. So yeah, this guy Gabriel was commissioned by this baron to make a painting of his mistress, and himself, admiring her legs from below. Doyen refused to take the commission as he was a religious history painter, and did not want to put his reputation on the line for this raunchy painting, and instead suggested that the baron commission Fragonard. And that is how Fragonard not only got this job, but finally took the swing, pardon the pun, from being a history painter to the romantic rococo painter we know as today. Not only did Fragonard not mind the commission's naughty and scandalous narrative, but he wouldn't have had fun with it. He sprinkled in some of his fantasy erotic rococo style to the max, Fragonard took some artistic freedoms with the painting, and as you can see, the older husband in the bottom right of the painting is no longer a priest, and added a dog barking next to his feet, which I am now realizing I missed and did not depict in my redraw. Yeah, I really really did not realize that that was a dog, I genuinely thought that those were flowers. Let's forget about the dog, let's just not think about that, okay? So yeah, sorry guys, I didn't realize there was a dog in the painting, whoops. Continuing, artsy.net describes the painting as follows, quote, while there's plenty of intrigue in the story of its making, the swing ultimately revels in fun, fantasy, and the idealized haute monde. Its hedonistic subject and obsessive detail make it an icon of rococo style and the continual source of creative inspiration and visual enjoyment, end quote, which one can only agree with. It is very very inspiring, and very visually enticing. Overall, I really love this painting, for the softness in the brush strokes and above all the colour palette used, it is just like so dreamy and fantastical, and it reminds me of many depictions of fairies in the woods for some reason, it's just a very cutesy and bright, colourful piece to look at, and I think in the simplest of assessments it is why most people enjoy it at first glance. So as for my redraw of this painting, it gave me many headaches. I initially was regretting putting this one up as an option, as it had just so many leaves and foliage, and I was getting cold sweats at the thought of how I was going to render it. I then thought that I could maybe shave off a few hundred hours by using a nature brush, so I'm not usually a fan of using brushes that mimic things like leaves and trees and etc, as I usually prefer the approach of drawing every element hand by hand, but I really had no choice but to try this avenue for this piece. I luckily found this gorgeous set of leaf and nature brushes for free on the procreate website, and yes I've linked the brush pack in the description, and after trying them out I think the style of the leaves matched the style of the painting very well, thank goodness. So I went ahead with a little bit less anxiety into this painting. I also went in and picked some of the more important colours from the original painting, but tried to add my little flare into the colour palette as well. I definitely wanted to make the painting a little more vibrant and bright, as the original is a little dark in nature, with very deep shadows and the bushes and stuff. I just really wanted to turn the fantasy notch up as much as possible, and I think I did successfully do that, looking at the final piece now. And as you can see, I did two rough sketches of this painting before I actually went into the proper lineart that you're seeing me do right now. And that's because, again, there was just so many elements in this that I really wanted to make sure that all the proportions were looking correct. I've never really done, I don't think, a painting this intricate, but again, it was just a really good challenge, and even though initially I was very anxious about it, I was like, you know what, this is good for me, I need to push myself. Yeah, in the end I was really happy with the final lineart for the piece. I lined it in red, as I usually do, and then took the first sort of layer that I did with all my leaf brushes, and used that as a base for the background, and then created another layer on top of the lineart to add the extra little details of leaves and stuff. Yeah, I kind of just alpha locked this layer of leaves, and went in with different colours of greens, and different, you know, darker greens, lighter greens, yellower greens, to kind of start adding depth to all of this shrubbery. Again, if you guys follow me, you know that I'm not really a background painter or an artist, and even though I have been trying to improve in that department, I don't feel like I'm that good at it yet, so this was definitely a big challenge, and a big opportunity for me to practice working with values, depth, and how to create a narrative with a background, because not only did I get to learn from a literal icon, you know, Mr. Fragonard himself, I always say that recreating or redrawing art from the classical periods, or just even going to museums and drawing from life, you know, is always one of the best ways to learn how to draw or to improve your skills, so this is why the series is so lovely for me, because I get to just, you know, practice while I'm also doing something fun. So yeah, before I even got into, you know, drawing out the characters and everything, I wanted to get this background right, because I felt like that was the biggest hurdle for me in this painting, and I thought that the soonest I kind of got this part right, the more confident I would feel going into the rest. And it was starting to kind of take shape, I was very happy with this sort of first pass at the leaves. As you can see, I really like this brush sheet, because it's not like a flat color brush, it kind of has this sort of like, gouache-y like, feel to it, and it's got like a weird low opacity on them as well. Yeah, if you guys are interested in trying this brush set out yourselves on Procreate, the link will be down there in the description, as I said, but I highly recommend it, it's very, very good. And once I was happy with the placement of all the leaves, I went in and added the flat colors for everything else. So all the characters, all the little statues, the tree branches, everything. And yeah, as I said earlier, I did color pick some of the base colors from the original painting, but there were other bits that I kind of took my own artistic flair into account, and I knew that I wanted to highlight some areas that probably weren't highlighted in the original painting, so I wanted her dress to be like, a lot more sort of salmon-y colored and a lot brighter, because she is like, right in the center of the painting. I also wanted to add a little bit more saturation into the husband character over there in the bottom right, because bless him, he is really, really having a hard time in this painting, I assume. I'm not sure if he knows about this affair going on right in front of him, but yeah, I just wanted him to be more of a focal character in this piece, because I feel like in the original he's so far back in the background and he's so like, overshadowed, that yeah, I just wanted to bring him out a little bit more. And I had a lot of fun drawing those little cherubs in the back, and that little statue that I wanted to bring a little bit more light into that sort of clearing in the back. You can see here that I'm just adding a lot of lighting layers and creating a real sort of soft lighting source from that opening in the trees at the top, and sort of highlighting this middle stripe on the canvas, if that makes sense. Again, the lighting in this original painting is so beautiful and it creates such a closed sort of caved story that I just, I think it's so clever, and I wanted to do my own little take on it while still, you know, keeping in with the original painting. And unfortunately my screen recorder didn't film any of the really minute details that I did on the lady's face and on the lover's face, so unfortunately this is all I have. I'm so sorry about that. But we get back into it right around here, thankfully. Time for me to render all these little bits in the bottom right hand corner of the canvas, which, yeah, it was just this little man who's helping her on the swing. As you can see, I did, you know, make him a lot more brightly colored, because in the original painting he is just like, he looks like a statue, to the point where I actually thought he was a statue in the painting when I first looked at it properly. And I wanted to make him look a little bit happy too, joyful. And then I went in and added lighting and rim lighting to everything, because as I said, I really wanted to go ham with this like really fantasy lighting in this piece, to again just really go ham with the fantasy and this sort of like, just joyful feeling in the painting. So I did a lot of rim lighting, a lot of like really cute, just really like soft shadows and lighting, just to make it very, very nice and soft and calm to look at. At the end, I wanted to create this sort of vignette moment that the original painting sort of has as well, to match it a little bit better. So I added this sort of Gaussian blur effect onto a vignette and made it into a multiply layer just to kind of make it a real, a more seamless vignette. And finally, I just started adding in a bunch of stars. Yeah, I just obviously had to add the pipe of flare, which is sparkles, and I added sparkles in the color of the lighting, which I think looks so cute. Yeah, I just kind of, again, wanted to make that center area of the canvas look just so magically lit, and I think the stars really helped. And that was it for my redraw of the swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. As you can see side by side, the lighting is definitely one of the biggest changes I did, and I went really vibrant with the colors, and I'm really happy with the outcome of it. I think that I kind of smashed it, and I'm very, very, very proud of myself, apart from the bit where I forgot to draw a dog in the painting, but we're gonna let that one slide. I'm really proud of myself, I was so, so scared to start this painting, it took me weeks to even build up the courage to start it, but I'm so proud that I did, because it really pushed some limits. So yeah, I hope you guys enjoyed this speed painting. I hope you enjoyed voiceover as well, it was very interesting, I always learn something when doing these, and I hope that you guys learned something as well. So if you guys want to vote for the next one, I'm actually going to be doing the polls over on my Patreon now, so if you guys want to vote for the next painting in the series, make sure to sign up for my Patreon, and you can get voting rights for, you know, all kinds of things. So, for all my lovely patrons, watch out for a post on there for voting for the next painting in the series. And yeah, if you guys are interested in buying any of the prints of the paintings that I do in this series, I actually sell them on my shop. My shop is currently closed, but about to open up back again, so make sure to keep an eye out on my social media to know when my shop is back open again. So yeah, thank you so much for watching, and I will see you guys in my next video. Bye bye!