The Bolt
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) · c. 1777-1778
In a shuttered bedroom a young man stretches his whole body upward to shoot the bolt on the door while the woman in his arms pushes at his face, her other arm flung towards the lock. Whether she is resisting or colluding is left exactly ambiguous, and eighteenth-century viewers would have enjoyed the ambiguity. Two thirds of the canvas is taken up by a great rumpled bed with crimson curtains that surge like a storm cloud, the sheets still holding the shape of bodies. On the table at the left, catching a point of light, sits an apple, the oldest available emblem of a fall.
Fragonard organises the drama along a single diagonal running from the lower left corner up through the couple to the bolt, and he floods the right-hand side with light while leaving the bed in warm shadow. The handling has changed from his earlier feathery manner: the strokes are firmer, the forms more sculpted, the palette reduced to golds, reds and whites, a response to the more severe taste that would soon produce Neoclassicism. Look at the drapery, where fabric is painted with real weight and becomes an actor in the scene.
The painting was commissioned by the marquis de Véri as a pendant to a very different picture by the same artist, an Adoration of the Shepherds, the two intended to hang together as profane and sacred love. Prints after it circulated widely and made the image famous long before the Louvre acquired the canvas in 1974. It is often taken as the last great statement of French libertine painting, made on the eve of a revolution that would sweep away the world it depicts.
Did You Know? Its original partner on the wall was a nativity scene, so the marquis de Véri could look from earthly seduction straight across to the Adoration of the Shepherds.
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