A slipper flies through the air
Paris, 1767. In an enchanted garden a young man lies in the bushes, looking up. Above him a young woman in a pink silk dress swings, pushed by an older gentleman in the background. As she swings, her slipper flies off and her skirt reveals a glimpse of her legs. A statue of Cupid raises a finger to its lips.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing is an epitome of the Rococo: airy, frivolous, full of light and movement. According to tradition, the subject goes back to an aristocratic patron who wanted to be painted with his mistress. Today the picture hangs in the Wallace Collection in London.
From palace to salon
After the death of Louis XIV in 1715, strict court life relaxed. The nobility built elegant town houses in Paris with smaller, more intimate rooms. Instead of huge history paintings, patrons wanted decorative pictures, portraits and scenes celebrating pleasure and love. Walls became light, ornament asymmetrical and playful.
The name of the style comes from “rocaille”, the shell and grotto work that became its most important ornament. As with the Gothic and the Baroque, the term arose only later and was at first meant disparagingly.
Watteau and the fête galante
In 1717 Antoine Watteau submitted a picture to the Paris Academy for which no category yet existed: elegant couples in silk gather on a shore. Whether they are leaving for Cythera, the island of love, or already returning from it is still debated. The Academy created a new genre for it, the “fête galante”. Watteau’s scenes are cheerful and at the same time touched by a quiet melancholy, as if the figures knew that every party must end.
François Boucher, the favourite painter of Madame de Pompadour, painted goddesses, shepherds and shepherdesses in rosy tones and portrayed the influential mistress of Louis XV several times. Jean-Siméon Chardin worked quite differently. He painted quiet kitchen still lifes and everyday scenes with children and maidservants, simple and of great dignity.
Women painters of the Rococo
The Venetian Rosalba Carriera made pastel a celebrated technique. In 1720 she was admitted to the Paris Academy, and her portraits were sought after at the courts of Europe. The Dresden Gemäldegalerie today holds a large collection of her pastels. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun became the favourite portraitist of Queen Marie-Antoinette. In 1783 the Academy admitted her on the same day as Adélaïde Labille-Guiard.
Rococo in Germany
The Rococo flourished especially richly in southern Germany. In the Amalienburg in Munich’s Nymphenburg Palace Park, François de Cuvilliés created a hunting lodge with a hall of mirrors in silver and blue. The Zimmermann brothers built and decorated the pilgrimage church of Wies near Steingaden, whose interior seems to float in white, gold and pastel. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In Potsdam, Frederick the Great had Sanssouci Palace built, and in Meissen Johann Joachim Kändler modelled porcelain figures of lovers, animals and comedians.
The end of lightness
Criticism grew even in Boucher’s lifetime. The philosopher Denis Diderot accused him of making an art without morality or truth. The Enlightenment called for serious, edifying pictures, and with Winckelmann and David, Neoclassicism prevailed. The Revolution of 1789 ended the world for which the Rococo had painted.
Why it still matters
The Rococo is often dismissed as merely decorative. Yet it freed painting from pathos, discovered private space and brought genres such as pastel painting and the intimate portrait to their highest flowering. Its lightness and colour inspired artists down to the Impressionists.
Further reading
- Mary D. Sheriff: Fragonard: Art and Eroticism (1990).
- Hermann Bauer: Rocaille: Zur Herkunft und zum Wesen eines Ornament-Motivs (1962, in German).