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Art Through Time · 1715 to 1780

Rococo art

Rococo is the light, playful style that followed the Baroque in France from about 1715, after the death of Louis XIV, and spread across Europe until the 1780s. It traded grandeur for charm: pastel color, curving lines, lovers in parks, and the pleasures of an aristocracy at ease.

Its painters were Antoine Watteau, François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard in France, and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who filled the ceilings of Venice and Würzburg with sunlit skies.

When
1715 to 1780
Where
Paris
Began
Watteau's Pilgrimage to Cythera, 1717
Grew out of
Baroque

When was the Rococo?

The Rococo begins with the Regency in France. When Louis XIV died in 1715, the nobility moved from Versailles into the town houses of Paris, and wanted pictures for smaller, lighter rooms. Watteau's The Embarkation for Cythera, accepted by the Royal Academy in 1717, set its tone, and the Academy named a new kind of picture for it: the fête galante, elegant people at leisure in a park.

By the 1760s critics such as Denis Diderot were calling the style frivolous, and by the 1780s Neoclassicism had replaced it. Its name, from rocaille, the shell and pebble work of garden grottoes, was coined later, as a joke at its expense.

How to recognize Rococo art

  • Pastel color. Rose, powder blue, pale gold and cream, in place of the Baroque's deep reds and shadow.
  • Curves everywhere. S-shapes and C-shapes in the composition, the frames and the rooms the pictures hung in.
  • Love and play. Flirtation, secrets and stolen glances, as in Fragonard's The Swing, where a young man in the bushes looks up as a slipper flies off.
  • Parks and gardens. Figures in silk lingering under feathery trees, in Watteau's fêtes galantes.
  • Open skies overhead. Tiepolo's ceilings, where gods and continents float on clouds in bright daylight.
  • Intimate size. Pictures made for salons and private rooms rather than churches.

The Rococo beyond Paris

Venice had its own Rococo. Tiepolo painted ceilings for Venetian palaces and for the prince-bishop's Residence at Würzburg, and Canaletto and Francesco Guardi painted the city's canals for English travelers on the Grand Tour, who carried views such as Canaletto's Piazza San Marco home as souvenirs.

In the German lands, the style filled pilgrimage churches and palaces with white and gold. In Paris, portraitists such as Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun carried its softness into the 1780s, painting Queen Marie Antoinette and her circle.

Famous Rococo paintings

What came after the Rococo?

In the 1780s, as France moved toward revolution, Jacques-Louis David answered the Rococo's pleasure with duty: Neoclassicism, with its sharp outlines and Roman heroes, and its manifesto painting, The Oath of the Horatii of 1784.

Rococo painters

More Rococo paintings

See Rococo on the timelineEvery art movement in order