On an otherwise unremarkable day in the spring of 2017, Flora Yukhnovich, a 27-year-old master of fine art student with no distinct technique, no discernible profile, and no particular prospects, climbed the Wallace Collection’s grand marble staircase and came down again, an hour or so later, fixed on the aesthetic that would make her the pre-eminent British painter of her generation. There, in among the Gouthière clocks and Jean Ducrollay snuffboxes, she’d come face-to-face with Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing, the inescapable French fancy that distills the 18th-century rococo movement’s frivolity and flirtatiousness into a titillating trio of figures: a Marie Antoinette-esque coquette, suspended aloft in billowing blush-silk skirts; her bewigged, cuckolded husband, lurking in the shadows of an Arcadian forest; and her ancien régime paramour, reaching for her as she suggestively sends a ballet-pink slipper flying towards him in the velvet undergrowth.
“It felt like all these strands that I’d been looking at came together,” Yukhnovich tells me today of the 25-by-31-inch canvas, which has, in the centuries since a licentious French baron commissioned it, been reproduced everywhere from Disney’s Frozen to a fridge magnet on Etsy. She’s perching on a rickety folding stool in her southeast London studio, her head tilted in a way that brings out her own resemblance to one of Fragonard’s subjects: copper hair, heart-shaped face, ivory skin, Cupid’s-bow lips. Until that point, she says, she’d spent her MFA indulging her “light-hearted curiosity” about the froufrou via Spode’s Blue Italian porcelain and aughts Cath Kidston wallpapers, and feeling vaguely ashamed about it. (Tricky to imagine her teen idols, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, studying Sèvres’s elephant-head vases with any degree of seriousness.) But with The Swing in her mind’s eye, she suddenly “got the bit between my teeth”—and began to query how and why decorative had come to mean downmarket, the ladylike inherently lowbrow.
Four years later, Tu Vas me Faire Rougir (You’re Going to Make me Blush)—one of three Permanent Rose-daubed reinterpretations of Fragonard she painted for her graduate show—sold at Christie’s for £1,902,000, making her, in the space of a gavel stroke, a bonafide blue-chip artist. Gradually, she expanded her remit beyond Fragonard to encompass other rococo masterpieces—Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s celestial allegories, Nicolas Lancret’s rural idylls—exposing the ways in which they had shaped fashionable conceptions of the “coded feminine,” both then and now. See 2020’s Warm, Wet N’ Wild, which repositions Katy Perry’s maraschino-topped “California Gurls” video in the fruity, fecund context of Watteau’s fête galantes. It sold to a private collector, by way of Sotheby’s, for £2,697,000 in 2022.
