Rococo

Rococo. 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 century. The word is said to have been coined in 1796–7 by one of J.-L. David's students, wittily combining rocaille and barocco (Baroque), to refer disparagingly to the taste fashionable in the mid-18th century. 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’. However, the word is now used without any pejorative connotations.

The Rococo was both a development from and a reaction against the weightier Baroque style, and initially it was expressed mainly in interior decoration. It shared with the Baroque a love of complexity of form, but instead of a concern for solidity and mass, there was a delicate play on the surface, with sombre colours and heavy gilding giving way to lighter tones and delicate ornament, and much use of asymmetrical curves and pretty decorative motifs. The style was in general less suited to exteriors, but something of the Rococo spirit—of its refinement and charm—can be seen even in such a regular and relatively unadorned building as Ange-Jacques Gabriel's Petit Trianon (1763–9) at Versailles. In painting, the first great master of the Rococo style was Watteau, and the painters who most completely represent the light-hearted (often gently erotic) spirit of the mature Rococo style are Boucher and Fragonard. Falconet is perhaps the best representative of the style in French sculpture, but generally the Rococo spirit is seen more clearly in small porcelain figures than in large-scale statues (Falconet himself was director of the sculpture studios at the famous porcelain factory at Sèvres).

From Paris the Rococo was disseminated by French artists working abroad and by engraved publications of French designs (see Berain, for example). 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. Gainsborough's delicacy of characterization and sensitivity of touch (although completely personal) are also thoroughly in the Rococo spirit. 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 vigorous 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 (as in the work of Maulbertsch), but in France and elsewhere the tide of taste had begun to turn from frivolity towards the sternness of Neoclassicism by the 1760s.