The Meeting by Jean-Honore Fragonard depicts an 18th century booty call.

This painting was commissioned by Madame Du Barry, the official mistress of King Louis XV, for her pleasure pavilion. She wanted paintings that depicted the four stages of love, The Pursuit, The Meeting, The Consummation/Marriage, and The Love Letters. This here is The Meeting, in which the girl sneaks out of her house to hook up with the guy who has just scaled her wall. They both look alert, because if they’re caught then she’ll be the 18th century version of grounded, which means that she’ll be sent to a convent. And in case there was any doubt about the fact that this is a lover’s tryst, then you can look at the giant statue of Venus, the Goddess of Love and her kid, Cupid  blessing this rendez-vous. Subtlety was not Fragonard’s strong suit.

A lot has been intuited from this painting that may or may not be true. For instance, some have claimed that the positioning of the girl in this work comes directly from 18th century theater. And because I don’t know what that means, I’ll choose to believe it. Another claim is that the trees behind Venus to the right are supposed to be phallic representations of the ~arousing~ young love that is happening before our eyes. This seems like a stretch (lol) but is funny so I choose to believe it as well.

But by the end of it all, Madame Du Barry rejected the paintings either because the people in the painting looked too much like her and King Louis XV (why this is bad, I’m not entirely certain) or because the style of the building was Classical and Rococo paintings like these would clash with the decor. This is a good thing though because they probably would have been destroyed around the time that Madame Du Barry was decapitated during the French Revolution. Instead the paintings were kept at one of Fragonard’s cousin’s villas in Southern France and young love lived to see another day.