Collection: Rococo & Neoclassicism

Rococo and Neoclassicism are two consecutive European art movements that span the eighteenth century. Rococo emerged in France around 1730 as a reaction against the formal grandeur of the Louis XIV style, and flourished until approximately 1780. The term derives from the French word rocaille, originally describing decorative shell and pebble motifs used in Renaissance grottos and fountains.

Rococo painting and decorative art are characterised by extensive ornamentation, fluid asymmetric curves, intimate scale, and pastel colours such as soft yellows, creams, pearl greys, and pale blues. The principal painters were Antoine Watteau, whose fête galante compositions defined the early phase, François Boucher, favoured at the court of Louis XV, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. The style spread from Paris to Italy, Austria, southern Germany, Russia, and England, reaching its most elaborate expression in Bavarian church interiors.

By the 1760s, the discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum and the writings of the German archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann had shifted European taste toward classical antiquity. Neoclassicism emerged as a deliberate reform movement, replacing Rococo with austere line, idealised classical figures, and civic moral subjects. Jacques-Louis David made the new style a vehicle for Republican virtue and, later, for Napoleonic propaganda. The Empire style, codified under the architects Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, carried the Neoclassical idiom into furniture, ornament, and interior design across the Napoleonic territories.

The two movements together cover the trajectory of European court and academic art between the late Baroque and the Romantic reaction of the early nineteenth century. The principal sub-movements include Rococo proper, Neoclassicism, the Empire style, and the academic classicism that continued the Neoclassical project into the late nineteenth century.