Rococo: 1700s

In 18th century France, an affluent and prominent middle-class had become established, and whilst royalty and the nobility continued to be patrons of the arts, the death of Louis XIV in 1715 saw the court migrate from Versailles to Paris, whereupon the rather formal and contemplative style of previous artistic expression was replaced by Parisian high society’s taste for a lighter and more elegant movement.

The term Rococo was extracted from the French word "rocaille", which means pebbles and applies to the stones and shells that had been used to decorate the interiors of caves. It was first used in the early 19th century as a derogatory term to describe the trifling over-embellishment that critics of the time perceived to be a prevailing characteristic of the style.

However, it was a highly popular style developed to suit feminine tastes in the smaller, more intimate interiors of Paris town houses. Society women competed for the best and most flamboyant decorations for their houses, so that both interiors and furniture came to be randomly decorated with abstract ‘s’ and ‘c’ curves, usually combined with shell and plant motifs in a whimsical irregular pattern. The paintings of Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard, with their playfully provocative imagery, soft colours and elegant forms, provided the perfect companion to such interiors.

Indeed, Francois Boucher was the artist of choice for Mme de Pompadour, Louis XV’s mistress who was also widely regarded as the most powerful woman in France. He used delicate strokes and colours within a light-hearted subject matter, often illustrating mythological stories of goddesses and cupids in an Arcadian landscape. This was designed to reflect the frivolous and ornamented excesses of French aristocracy at the time, and with numerous commissions for both Mme de Pompadour and for the Queen of France, his style came to epitomise French taste in the Rococo period.

Outside of France, the Rococo art influence could be witnessed in Catholic parts of Southern Germany and Austria, where the churches of Neumann and Dominikus Zimmerman took Rococo decoration to dramatic extremes. Only Venice embraced the style in Italy, but in Tiepolo, it arguably produced the most talented decorative painter of the movement. His pursuit carried him to Spain and so influenced the early works of Goya. Whilst the style was never really adopted in England, Hogarth’s appreciation of the ‘s’ curve stems from the Rococo art movement, as to a certain extent does the elegance of Gainsborough’s paintings.

The Rococo is often viewed as the final phase of the Baroque art movement, after which it was replaced in the 1760s by the pivotal sobriety of Neoclassicism.

Our Art on Demand gallery contains the following rococo prints, posters and canvases: