Themes > Arts > Painting > Art in 18th-Century Europe > The Age of Rococo > Rococo Style

Style of art and architecture, characterized by lightness, grace, playfulness, and intimacy, that emerged in France c. 1700 and spread throughout Europe in the 18th cent. By extension the term is often used simply as a period label-the age of Rococo’. The word was apparently coined in 1796-7 by one of David’s students, wittily combining rocaille and barocco (Baroque), to refer disparagingly to the taste fashionable under Louis XV. Thus, like so many stylistic labels, it began life as a term of abuse, and it long retained its original connotations, implying an art that was, in the words of one of the definitions given to it in the Oxford English Dictionary, excessively or tastelessly florid or ornate’. The word was used as a formal term of art history from the middle of the 19th cent. in Germany, where those followers of Burckhardt who tried to establish a rhythmic periodicity for the phases of artistic development applied it to the closing and therefore decadent period of any phase. With more recent changes in aesthetic taste the term has become respectable, and is now used by art historians generally in an objective sense, without implied belittlement, to designate an artistic and decorative style which has a certain coherence and consistency. The concern for colourfully fragile decoration, for trivial instead of significant subjects, for pastoral poetry in art gave it a readily identifiable character. Fiske Kimball, its chief historian (The Creation of the Rococo, 1943), has called it an art essentially French in its grace, its gaiety and its gentleness’. It was both a development from and a reaction against the weightier Baroque style, and was initially expressed mainly in decoration. It shared with the Baroque a love of complexity of form, but instead of a concern for mass, there was a delicate play on the surface, and sombre colours and heavy gilding were replaced with light pinks, blues, and greens, with white also often being prominent. Elegance and convenience rather than grandeur were the qualities demanded by a society tired of the excesses of Versailles. The early masters of the style were engravers such as Audran and Bérain, and Watteau is generally regarded as the first great Rococo painter. Boucher and Fragonard are the painters who most completely represent the spirit of the mature Rococo, and Falconet is perhaps the quintessential sculptor in the style. It is appropriate that many of his works were reproduced in porcelain, for this art form is much more representative of the age than the heroic statue. From Paris the Rococo was disseminated by French artists working abroad and by engraved publications of French designs. It spread to Germany, Austria, Russia, Spain, and northern Italy (Tiepolo, Longhi, Guardi). In England it had somewhat less of a vogue, although a substantial exhibition of English Rococo art was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1984 and there are clear reflections of the style even in the work of so xenophobic an artist as Hogarth. In each country the style took on a national character and in addition many local variants may be distinguished. Outside France, it had its finest flowering in Germany and Austria, where it merged with a still vital Baroque tradition. In churches such as Vierzehnheiligen (1743-72) by Balthasar Neumann, the Baroque qualities of spatial variety and of architecture, sculpture, and painting working together are taken up in a breathtakingly light and exuberant manner. The Rococo flourished in central Europe until the end of the century, but in France and elsewhere the tide of taste had begun to turn from frivolity and lightheartedness towards the sternness of Neoclassicism by the 1760s. The fate of Fragonard is instructive. His four canvases on The Pursuit of Love (Frick Coll., New York), now regarded as his masterpieces, were returned to him in 1773 by Madame du Barry (1743-93), one of Louis XV’s mistresses, his style evidently already considered out of date in court circles, and by the end of his career he was virtually forgotten.

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