Rococo Art: Background

Rococo art is a very sensuous type of art. Rococo sculptures have been defined as the
Baroque style eroticized (Sayre, 479). The Rococo art movement began in the early 18th
century until the late 18th century and was said to be born of the Baroque movement
(huntfor.com). During this time, new ideas about human existence were coming into play
and brought optimism to many people. Rococo art objectified this optimistic feeling that
people felt (huntfor.com). The word Rococo comes from the French word rocaille which
refers to the small stones and shells that decorated the interiors of the grottoes. Grottoes
were artificial caves that were popular in landscape design at the time (Sayre, 479). The
Rococo style brought together erotic tones with the sensibility of the Baroque style.
“Rococo art portrayed a world of artificiality, make-believe, and game playing…it was
essentially an art of the aristocracy and emphasized what seems now to have been the
unreflective and indulgent lifestyles of the aristocracy rather than piety, morality, self-
discipline, reason, and heroism (all of which are found in the Baroque)” (huntfor.com).
Pastel colors are characteristic of the Rococo style as well as a light-hearted mood,
curving forms, and fanciful figures (huntfor.com).
This art was focused on the high-society, wealthy people of this period. It was not
focused on morality or any other serious issue that other types of art focused on. At the
end of the Rococo period, the French began to view it as “symptomatic of a wide-spread
cultural decadence, epitomized by the luxurious lifestyle of the aristocracy” (Sayre, 480).
Most of the paintings were people enjoying their leisure time. This would not happen as
shown among the working class people. This art was not created for them and
exemplified a lifestyle unknown to the common person at that time. This art was created
for enjoyment and to show others enjoying their lives.

Artist 1: Jean-Honoré Fragonard - 1732–1806

Fragonard first painted in a style suitable to his religious and historical subjects.
After 1765, however, he worked in the rococo style then fashionable in France. These
later paintings, the works for which he is best known, reflect the gaiety, frivolity, and
voluptuousness of the period. They are characterized by fluid lines, frothy flowers amid
loose foliage, and gracefully posed figures, usually of ladies and their lovers or peasant
mothers with children.

Fragonard was a prolific painter, but he rarely dated his works and it is not easy to chart
his stylistic development. As always with Fragonard, more important than the subject
matter are the soft tones and colors of the palate.

Fragonard's scenes of frivolity and gallantry are considered the embodiment of the
Rococo spirit. A pupil of Chardin and later Boucher, he won the Prix de Rome and from
1756 to 1761 was in Italy, where he developed a particular admiration for Tiepolo and the
late Baroque style. In this period he specialized in large historical paintings.

Returning to Paris, he soon changed this style, adopting instead the erotic subjects then in
vogue and for which he is chiefly known, of which The Swing is the most famous.
This picture became an immediate success, not merely for its technical excellence, but for
the scandal behind it. The young nobleman is not only getting an interesting view up the
lady's skirt, but she is being pushed into this position by her priest-lover, shown in the
rear.

In this same spirit are some other famous pictures, The See-Saw, Blindman's Bluff, The
Stolen Kiss, and the Meeting. After his marriage in 1769, he began painting children and
family scenes (usually called genre painting) and even returned to religious subjects. He
stopped exhibiting publicly in 1770 and all his later works are commissions from private
patrons.

developed an exuberant and fluid manner as a painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Prolific
and inventive, he abandoned early on the conventional career path dictated by the
hierarchical structure of the Royal Academy, working largely for private patrons. His
work constitutes a further elaboration of the Rococo idiom established by Antoine
Watteau and François Boucher, a manner perfectly suited to his subjects, which favored
the playful, the erotic, and the joys of domesticity

“The Swing” -1767

“The Swing” by Jean-Honore Fragonard is another typical Rococo art painting. This
painting is also outdoors and in the carefree spirit of the Rococo artists. The girl seems to
be thoroughly enjoying having the attention of two men and being pushed on the swing.
The colors, again, are typical pretty pastel colors used in Rococo art. The sky in the
background is cloudy, yet pastel blue. The statues in the yard and the woman lend the
painting an erotic sense. She laughs as her shoe flies off her foot and she continues to
enjoy herself. The sun shines through the clouds onto the girl and hits her dress just right
to make the color stand out. The sun shining on her puts her in a spotlight of sorts and
makes her the object of the painting.
These paintings totally epitomize the Rococo art style. They capture the light-heartedness
and the fun-loving attitude of that time.
“The Stolen Kiss”
Jean-Honore Fragonard's late period was marked by his careful study of the Dutch 17th-
century masters, whose influence is felt in this masterpiece from the 1790s, The Stolen
Kiss. The smooth, enamel-like surface of the painting, the blended brushstrokes used to
convey the details so precisely, unavoidably recall the work of the Dutch artists Metsu
and Terborch. Fragonard lovingly depicts surface texture and the material of which each
object is made. Yet the subject itself is a pretty, amusing scene taken from life, with that
grace and lightness in the movements of the two heroes which is so typical of French art
of the time. The painting lies firmly within the traditions of the rococo style - already
being affected by realistic tendencies in the second half of the 18th century. Resisting, but
not too strongly, a maiden pulls halfheartedly away from a furtive kiss in one of
Fragonard's many evocations of romantic love.

Artist 2: Francois Boucher

(1703-1770), French painter, noted for his pastoral and mythological scenes, whose work
embodies the frivolity and sensuousness of the rococo style. Boucher's delicate,
lighthearted depictions of classical divinities and well-dressed French shepherdesses
delighted the public, who considered him the most fashionable painter of his day. In 1723
Boucher won the Prix de Rome; he studied in Rome from 1727 to 1731. After his return
to France, he created hundreds of paintings, decorative boudoir panels, tapestry designs,
theater designs, and book illustrations. He became a faculty member of the Royal
Academy in 1734. He designed for the Beauvais tapestry works and in 1755 became
director of the Gobelins tapestries. In 1765 he was made first painter to the king, director
of the Royal Academy, and designer for the Royal Porcelain Works. His success was
encouraged by his patron, Marquise de Pompadour, mistress to Louis XV. He painted her
portrait several times.
Madame de Pompadour

François Boucher - Portrait of Mademoiselle Bergeret

Architecture
style in architecture, especially in interiors and the decorative arts, which originated in
France and was widely used in Europe in the 18th cent. The term may be derived from
the French words rocaille and coquille (rock and shell), natural forms prominent in the
Italian baroque decorations of interiors and gardens. The first expression of the rococo
was the transitional régence style. In contrast with the heavy baroque plasticity and
grandiloquence, the rococo was an art of exquisite refinement and linearity. Through their
engravings, Juste Aurèle Meissonier and Nicholas Pineau helped spread the style
throughout Europe. The Parisian tapestry weavers, cabinetmakers, and bronze workers
followed the trend and arranged motifs such as arabesque elements, shells, scrolls,
branches of leaves, flowers, and bamboo stems into ingenious and engaging
compositions. The fashionable enthusiasm for Chinese art added to the style the whole
bizarre vocabulary of chinoiserie motifs. In France, major exponents of the rococo were
the painters Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard and the architects Robert de Cotte, Gilles
Marie Oppenord, and later Jacques Ange Gabriel. The rococo vogue spread to Germany
and Austria, where François de Cuvilliès was the pioneer. Italian rococo, particularly that
of Venice, was brilliantly decorative, exemplified in the paintings of Tiepolo. The
furniture of Thomas Chippendale manifested its influence in England. During the 1660s
and 1670s, the rococo competed with a more severely classical form of architecture,
which triumphed with the accession of Louis XVI.

Rococo Architecture • 1725-1775

Rococo artists reigned in the weighty drama of Baroque but retained its curves and
elaborate ornament, resulting in a gentler, lighter style typified by whimsical, often
asymmetrical decoration and pastel colours. Rococo painting and interior design
flourished best in France, the birthplace of the style, but the foremost Rococo architecture
was built in the Holy Roman Empire (Germany and Austria)10, which had in fact been
the second-greatest centre of the Late Baroque11. Rococo architecture was led by
François de Cuvilliès, whose masterpiece is the Amalienburg: a hunting lodge that,
inside and out, positively bursts with the exuberant frivolity of Rococo.

Rococo (less commonly roccoco) is a style of 18th century French art and interior design.
Rococo rooms were designed as total works of art with elegant and ornate furniture,
small sculptures, ornamental mirrors, and tapestry complementing architecture, reliefs,
and wall paintings. It was largely supplanted by the Neoclassic style.

Architect 1: Manuel Caetano de Sousa

Place : Mafra National Palace library,

situated at the back of the second floor, is truly the highlight of this palace, rivalling the
grandeur of the library of the Melk Abbey

in Austria. Built by Manuel Caetano de Sousa

, this library is 88 m long, 9.5 m wide and 13 m high. The magnificent floor is covered
with tiles of rose, grey and white marble. The wooden bookshelves in Rococo style are
situated on the sidewalls in two rows, separated by a balcony with a wooden railing. They
contain over 35,000 leather-bound volumes, attesting of the extent of western knowledge
from the 14th to the 19th century. Among them, are many valuable bibliographical
jewels, such as incunabula
The palace

, which also served as a Franciscan

monastery

, was built during the reign of King John V

Architect 2: Francois Cuvillies

Place: Hall of Mirrors at Amalienburg

- The pale delphinium blue walls and ceiling are set off by elaborate carved silver
decoration that rises from the floor and flows into the dome. The Amalienburg is the
most famous of three pleasure pavilions in the park of NYMPHENBURG PALACE, the
summer residence of the Bavarian kings on the outskirts of Munich. The pavilion, a
sumptuous version of a hunting lodge, was built between 1734 and 1740 by the great
ROCOCO architect Francois CUVILLIES (1695-1768) for Princess Amalie, wife of
Elector Charles Albert of Bavaria (later Holy Roman Emperor CHARLES VII).