Jean-Honoré Fragonard: Le Verrou (1777) [1]
Eugène Delacroix: La Liberté guidant le peuple (1830 / restored 2024) [2]
I.
Having recently viewed the extended remix of Peter Pahor's documentary about the life and work of Nick Egan - Creative Vandal (2024) [3] - I was left thinking about the design decision taken with regard to the cover of Bow Wow Wow's debut studio album.
As everybody knows, See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy! (1981) features a brilliant photographic recreation of Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) [4].
But what a lot of people - including me - didn't realise before hearing Nick discuss this work was that Manet's painting was not the first or only choice: that at least two other famous French masterpieces were also considered, including Fragonard's Le Verrou (1777) and Delacroix's La Liberté guidant le peuple (1830) ...
II.
Le Verrou is one of Fragonard's most famous works. It depicts what is known as a galant scene [5].
Whether the male libertine is locking the door with consent so that he and his elegantly dressed mistress are not disturbed, or whether he is bolting the door so as to prevent her escape and what we are witnessing is an attempted rape is open to interpretation [6].
Either way, it's slightly risqué and one can see why it would appeal to Malcolm McLaren and Nick Egan, although, in my view, it would have made a much better cover for the Bow Wow Wow single 'Louis Quatorze' - which famously contains the lines: Louis, Louis's locking my door / Louis's serious, I'm delirious [7] - than for the album, so they were right to reject it.
III.
La Liberté guidant le peuple is a very well-known Romantic painting by Delacroix that many people - including Egan - mistakenly believe to be a depiction of the 1789 Revolution, when, actually, it commemorates the uprising of July 1830 that toppled the short reign of King Charles X [8].
Everyone loves a bare-footed, bare-breasted woman wearing a Phrygian cap while waving the tricolour and brandishing a bayonetted musket. Malcolm McLaren and his cohorts certainly did - one might recall, for example, that Jamie Reid later incorporated this Marianne image for the cover of his 1987 book Up They Rise [9].
But, again, I think McLaren and Egan wisely decided not to use this image for the cover of See Jungle! It's a bit too punk and political and doesn't quite fit with the aesthetics and ideology behind Bow Wow Wow - which was more about going wild in the country and teenage kicks than it was anarchy and bloody revolution.
Delacroix's picture would have been fine for the Sex Pistols - the young boy storming the barricades is even holding two pistols - but, in relation to Bow Wow Wow, it's probably not even as strong an option as Fragonard's work.
And neither match up to Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, which is the perfect choice: très moderne and still capable of causing scandal and outrage - particularly when the nude female figure is replaced by a fourteen-year-old girl.
Notes
[1] Known in English either as The Bolt or The Lock, this painting by Fragonard is an oil on canvas measuring 73.5 x 93.5 cm. It can be viewed at the Louvre.
[2] Known in English as Liberty Leading the People, this painting by Delacroix is an oil on canvas measuring 260 x 325 cm. It too - of course - can be viewed at the Louvre.
[3] I was fortunate enough to be invited to an evening with Nick Egan, hosted by Catalina Guirado at Karma Sanctum Hotel, in Soho, earlier this week, and there was a screening of Peter Pahor's film - as well as an exhibition of Nick's latest paintings. See the TTA post 'Live Forever / Fuck Forever' (11 October, 2026) which anticipates this event.
[4] Whilst as art director Egan was responsible for the overall sleeve design and staging the photo shoot, the actual photograph was by Andy Earl. It is now part of the National Portrait Gallery collection. See the TTA post: 'Why I Love Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe' (27 April 2017).
[5] A galant scene [fête galante] is a genre of art that was particularly popular in 18th-century France, blending reality with Rococo fantasy.
Such scenes depicted aristocratic figures engaged in lighthearted conversation, music-making, or gentle courtship activities. While most often set in outdoor locations, such as idyllic gardens, some artists ventured into the bedroom or boudoir and works like Fragonard's Le Verrou were rather more suggestive of amorous games and illicit affairs.
[6] Of course, it could be that the man is attempting to leave (perhaps post-coitally) and the woman is holding him back and trying to prevent him unbolting the door.
[7] Lyrics (written by McLaren) from the Bow Wow Wow track 'Louis Quatorze' which featured on the cassette-only mini-album Your Cassette Pet (EMI, 1980), and told the story of a young girl being sexually assaulted at gunpoint (or perhaps of a teenage girl's fantasy of such). It was released in Europe as a 7" single by EMI in 1981 and then re-recorded and released in the same format for the UK market by RCA in 1982.
[8] Speaking to camera in Creative Vandal, Egan twice says that Delacroix's 1830 picture depicts the French Revolution. It's a common error - one that I often made until fairly recently, probably like most people with only a vague knowledge of French history.
See Egan discussing his work with Bow Wow Wow at 8:28 - 11:22. His claim that nobody saw the reworking of Manet as having anything to do with sexuality whatsoever is either naive or disingenuous - either way, I could only smile when I heard this. McLaren's projects have always been stylish and subversive - always been attempts to capture the look of music and the sound of fashion - but, above all, they have always been about confronting the English public with sex.
[9] See Jamie Reid and Jon Savage, Up They Rise: The Incomplete Works of Jamie Reid (Faber and Faber, 1987). A signed and numbered six-coloured silkscreen print of this work produced by Reid in 2007 can be viewed at (and purchased from) fairart.com
This post is for Nick Egan and Catalina Guirado.
