Collection: Rococo & Neoclassicism

Rococo and Neoclassicism are two consecutive answers to the gravity of Baroque art, the first lighter and more intimate, the second deliberately severe. Together they cover roughly a century, from the salons of early eighteenth century Paris to the Empire interiors of Napoleonic Europe.

Rococo emerged in France around 1715, after the death of Louis XIV, when court patronage gave way to private aristocratic taste. Pastel palettes, asymmetrical ornament, and pastoral or mythological subjects displaced the heroic religious scenes of the previous century. The style spread through engraved reproductions of paintings, fashion plates, and decorative pattern books that made the Parisian sensibility legible from Saint Petersburg to Naples.

Neoclassicism arrived as deliberate counter-reform. Beginning in the 1760s, prompted by archaeological excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii and by the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, painters and sculptors returned to the line, restraint, and civic seriousness of Greco Roman models. Jacques-Louis David made the style a vehicle for Republican virtue and, later, for Napoleonic propaganda, distilling complex history paintings into compositions of disciplined clarity. The Empire decorative idiom, with its laurels, palmettes, and cool symmetries, was the domestic counterpart of his great public canvases.

The prints here trace both tendencies. Rococo plates record the world of fêtes galantes, idealised pastoral scenes, and ornament; Neoclassical engravings preserve the lean profile drawings, antique reliefs, and history pieces that shaped European academic teaching for the next hundred years. They lead naturally into the gallery's Romanticism & Classical Landscapes holdings, where the next generation pushed against Davidian discipline, and they extend backward through the Baroque & Chiaroscuro selection, the world Rococo set out to soften.