CategoriesStyles and Movements
Rococo Art and Design
The light, curving and playful style of 18th-century European interiors, furniture, porcelain and painting, first developed in France.
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About
After Louis XIV died in 1715, French aristocrats spent more time in Paris town houses and wanted interiors for conversation, cards and intimacy rather than ceremony. Designers such as Nicolas Pineau and Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier answered with white and gilt panelling alive with C- and S-scrolls, shell forms, foliage and lopsided cartouches, and the ornament spread onto mirrors, candlesticks, silver and porcelain. Furniture swelled into curving commodes with gilt-bronze mounts, and chinoiserie added fanciful Asian motifs.
Painting shared the mood. Antoine Watteau created the fête galante, couples lingering in parkland, with Pilgrimage to Cythera (1717); François Boucher painted rosy mythologies for royal patrons; Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Swing (c. 1767) turned flirtation into airy spectacle. In central Europe the style reached its height in Bavarian pilgrimage churches such as the Wieskirche (1745–54) and in porcelain figures from Meissen and Nymphenburg. By the 1760s critics attacked its frivolity, and Neoclassicism took over.
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