Rococo and the Enlightenment
After Louis XIV, art became lighter, more intimate and more playful – and Paris became the capital of taste.
When Louis XIV died in 1715, the nobility were glad to leave Versailles and move into Paris. There they built town mansions, hôtels, with small, bright rooms full of mirrors, boiseries and gilded scrollwork. The new style was called rocaille, after the shells and stones used in garden grottoes. Later it acquired the name Rococo. Paintings became smaller and lighter, and their subjects were drawn more often from love, play and social life than from war and myths of the king's greatness.
Antoine Watteau created a new kind of picture, the fête galante, in which elegantly dressed couples gather in dreamlike parks. François Boucher became the favourite of Madame de Pompadour and painted goddesses and shepherds in pink and blue. Jean Siméon Chardin went in the opposite direction, painting still lifes and quiet scenes of middle-class everyday life. Jean-Honoré Fragonard brought the Rococo to its height with rapid brushwork and frivolous gaiety in pictures such as The Swing.
It was also the age of the Enlightenment. Philosophers such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot questioned the Church and royal power and wanted art to be morally instructive. The Salon in the Louvre became a public meeting place, and art criticism was born. Diderot praised Chardin and Greuze but grew tired of Boucher. Towards the end of the period architects and painters began to turn once more to the simplicity of antiquity. The Rococo gave way to Neoclassicism, which would soon take on a political meaning.