Rococo & the French Eighteenth Century

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Rococo was the light, graceful and intimate style that dominated French art in the eighteenth century, favouring pleasure, elegance and delicate colour over the grandeur of the previous age. Its world of fêtes galantes, tender portraits and mythological idylls defined the taste of the Enlightenment salon.

With the death of Louis XIV in 1715, the heavy grandeur of Versailles gave way to a lighter spirit. The Rococo, born in the Parisian townhouses of the Regency, turned from the state to private pleasure. Smaller rooms, softer colour, and subjects of love, music and leisure. It is the manner that the French Baroque of the Grand Siècle had made inevitable by exhausting its own.

Antoine Watteau invented the fête galante, the dreamlike gathering of elegant figures in a park. Boucher and Fragonard carried the style to its height with mythologies and love scenes of shimmering colour, while a great school of portraitists, Nattier, Tocqué, Drouais, painted the aristocracy with powder, silk and a knowing softness. Alongside them, the intimate still lifes and genre scenes of Chardin gave the century its quieter, more domestic voice.

The Rococo was eventually swept aside by the severe Neoclassicism of the Revolution, but its charm never fully died. Throughout the nineteenth century, painters returned to its fêtes galantes and its portrait manner, and these later works in the eighteenth-century taste remain among the most decorative paintings a collector can acquire.

Where a portrait stands in relation to the master whose name it carries is set out in our guide to reading attribution on an antique painting.