Rococo

When Louis XIV died in 1715, the heavy grandeur of Versailles began to feel oppressive, and Parisian aristocratic society retreated — mentally and physically — into smaller, more intimate rooms painted in pale gold and cloud-white. The Rococo was the art of those rooms. Light, witty, shamelessly decorative and quietly erotic, it is the style of Watteau's *fêtes galantes* (elegantly dressed figures picnicking in dreamlike parkland), Fragonard's *The Swing* (1767) and Boucher's pink-fleshed goddesses reclining on clouds. It flourished from roughly 1720 to 1780 in France, then moved into the German courts and through Tiepolo into Venice. Its enemies called it frivolous; its admirers pointed to the breathtaking technical lightness of the brushwork and the genuine psychological delicacy of the best Watteau. Neoclassicism's moral severity eventually swept it away, but the Rococo remains one of the most purely pleasurable styles in the Western tradition.

How to recognise it

The palette is the quickest guide: pale, powdery, airy — rose pinks, sky blues, mint greens, warm creams, all slightly bleached as if seen in summer haze. Forms are rounded and softened; asymmetry and the S-curve (in ornament, in figures, in compositions) replace the Baroque's muscular diagonal. Subjects shift from history and religion toward pleasure and sociability: lovers in gardens, hunting parties, mythological scenes treated as excuses for undress. Figures are slender, refined, slightly porcelain-like. Skies are almost always present and almost always filled with cherubs or theatrical clouds. If the painting looks simultaneously aristocratic, sensual and utterly unconcerned with anything serious, it is probably Rococo.