Rococo was the light, ornamental style that grew out of the late Baroque in early 18th-century Paris and spread across Europe until Neoclassicism displaced it in the 1780s. Its paintings prefer pastel colors, flowing asymmetrical curves and intimate scenes of love, leisure and mythology in parks and private rooms. Contemporaries called it the rocaille style, after the shell and pebble work of garden grottoes. The word rococo began as a mocking twist on that term, coined by Pierre-Maurice Quays, a pupil of Jacques-Louis David. It first appeared in print as an insult in 1825, and art historians accepted it as a period name only around the mid-19th century.
After the death of Louis XIV in 1715, the court spent most of the Regency in Paris, and the nobility built town houses with smaller rooms for conversation. Painters decorated their mirrored salons with overdoors and wall panels set in gilded, curling frames. The Salon de la Princesse in the Hôtel de Soubise (1735-1740), with paintings by Charles-Joseph Natoire, survives intact. Instead of the dark contrasts and firm symmetry of the Baroque, such pictures use creams, pale blues and pearl grays, rosy flesh and soft, even light.
Antoine Watteau gave the style its first great paintings. In 1717 the Royal Academy accepted his Embarkation for Cythera (Louvre) and recorded it under a new heading, the fête galante. Couples in shimmering silks drift toward a gilded boat beneath feathery trees, in hazy golden light. Watteau also painted actors of the Italian comedy, as in Pierrot (about 1718-1719, Louvre), and a shop sign for his dealer Edme-François Gersaint (1720, Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin). He died in 1721. His only pupil, Jean-Baptiste Pater, and Nicolas Lancret carried the fête galante on.
François Boucher (1703-1770) led the next generation and was the favorite painter of Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV. His Diana Leaving Her Bath (1742, Louvre) sets pearly nudes against blue-green foliage and silk. He also designed tapestries, models for porcelain and sets for the Paris Opera, and in 1765 he became First Painter to the King. In his portrait of Madame de Pompadour (1756, Alte Pinakothek, Munich) she reclines with a book in a sea-green gown trimmed with roses. Pastel suited the same taste. The Venetian Rosalba Carriera was celebrated in Paris in 1720-1721, and Maurice Quentin de La Tour portrayed Madame de Pompadour full length (1748-1755, Louvre).
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), who trained briefly with Boucher, painted in quick, flickering strokes. In The Swing (1767, Wallace Collection, London) a young woman in pink silk kicks off a slipper above a hidden admirer, while an older man pushes her from the shadows. The dramatist Charles Collé noted in his journal that a courtier had first offered this subject to the painter Gabriel-François Doyen, who turned it down.
Outside France the style reached its grandest scale on palace and church ceilings. The Venetian Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770) worked with his son Giovanni Domenico at the Würzburg Residence in 1750-1753. Over the grand staircase he painted Apollo above personifications of the four continents. He later decorated the Royal Palace in Madrid, where he died. In Bavaria the vault of the Wieskirche (1745-1754), painted by Johann Baptist Zimmermann, opens onto a sky crossed by angels. In Britain, William Hogarth praised the S-shaped line of beauty in The Analysis of Beauty (1753), and Thomas Gainsborough painted The Blue Boy (about 1770, Huntington Library, San Marino) in feathery strokes of blue silk.
Excavations at Herculaneum from 1738 and Pompeii from 1748 revived interest in antiquity. Around 1750 Madame de Pompadour sent her brother, the future Marquis de Marigny, to Italy with the engraver Charles-Nicolas Cochin, who came back to attack Boucher’s small manner. Denis Diderot complained that Boucher had every gift except truth. Madame du Barry rejected Fragonard’s Progress of Love (1771-1773, Frick Collection, New York) and ordered classical scenes from Joseph-Marie Vien instead. By the Salon of 1785, where Jacques-Louis David showed The Oath of the Horatii, the Rococo had gone out of fashion in France.
