What is Rococo? Characteristics, artists and works

Rococo is a style in art, interior decoration and architecture that flourished in Europe from about 1720 to 1770. It was born in France after the death of Louis XIV and swapped the gravity of the Baroque for pastel colours, asymmetrical shell ornament and scenes of love, play and pleasure gardens.

Facts

How Rococo began

When Louis XIV died in 1715, much of the French nobility left the stiff ceremonial of Versailles for town houses in Paris. In the salons, conversation, music and romantic intrigue were what counted, and the rooms were decorated accordingly: pale panelling, mirrors, gilded frames and ornament that curled freely across walls and ceilings. Out of that world grew Rococo, first as a style of interior decoration and then as a way of painting.

The word comes from rocaille, the shell and rock forms used in grottoes and fountains. The term Rococo only came into use towards the end of the 18th century, and it was then disparaging: to supporters of Neoclassicism it stood for frivolity and poor judgement. It became a neutral stylistic term only in the 19th century.

The painters and the works

Antoine Watteau is regarded as the first master of Rococo. When in 1717 he submitted The Embarkation for Cythera as his reception piece to the Academy, there was no category for that kind of picture, and the Academy created the genre of the fête galante for him: elegant couples in a dreamlike park, painted with light, shimmering brushstrokes. François Boucher became Madame de Pompadour's favourite painter with goddesses, shepherdesses and rosy clouds, and in 1767 Jean-Honoré Fragonard painted The Swing, perhaps the picture most often used to illustrate the whole period.

Rococo also had a quieter side. Jean Siméon Chardin painted kitchen tables and children at play with a stillness far removed from Boucher's boudoirs. In Venice and southern Germany the style reached its grandest scale: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo painted skies full of figures on the ceilings of the Residence in Würzburg in the early 1750s.

Rococo in Sweden

In Sweden, Rococo coincided with the Age of Liberty and the court around Queen Lovisa Ulrika. Alexander Roslin made his career in Paris as one of Europe's most sought-after portrait painters and in 1768 painted The Lady with the Veil, a portrait of his wife Marie-Suzanne Giroust. Gustaf Lundberg brought pastel painting home from Paris, and Carl Gustaf Pilo worked for many years at the Danish court.

The style is just as clear in buildings and objects. The Chinese Pavilion at Drottningholm is a Swedish example of the period's fascination with China, and southern Germany has the great Rococo interiors, such as the hunting lodge Amalienburg in Munich and the pilgrimage church Wieskirche. Furniture with curved legs and swelling fronts, such as the Rococo commode, belongs to the same style in design.

Why Rococo came to an end

Criticism was already growing by the middle of the 18th century. Enlightenment philosophers and critics such as Denis Diderot wanted an art that educated and taught virtue, not one that merely amused. The excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii awakened interest in antiquity, and Johann Joachim Winckelmann praised the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” of Greek art.

By the end of the 1760s taste had changed. Straight lines, classical motifs and serious subjects took over in what became Neoclassicism. But Rococo's light colours and feeling for intimacy lived on, not least in portraiture and interior decoration.

Rococo also had a late revival in the 19th century, when the style returned in interiors and porcelain as Rococo Revival. That is why a piece of furniture in Rococo style is not always from the 18th century; read more in the guide to furniture styles in chronological order.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which of these paintings is a typical Rococo work?