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18th-Century France — The Rococo and Watteau

Overview

In 1715 the French greeted a new king for the first time in seventy-two years. Louis XV, a boy only five years old, succeeded his great-grandfather Louis XIV, the Sun King, who had made France the preeminent power in Europe. For the next eight years the late king's nephew, the duc d'Orléans, governed as regent. His appetite for beauty and vivaciousness was well known, and he set aside the piety enforced by Louis XIV at Versailles. France turned away from imperial aspirations to focus on more personal—and pleasurable—pursuits. As political life and private morals relaxed, the change was mirrored by a new style in art, one that was intimate, decorative, and often erotic.

The Rococo Style

Louis XIV's desire to glorify his dignity and the magnificence of France had been well served by the monumental and formal qualities of most seventeenth-century French art. But members of the succeeding court began to decorate their elegant homes in a lighter, more delicate manner. This new style has been known since the last century as "rococo," from the French word, rocaille, for rock and shell garden ornamentation. First emerging in the decorative arts, the rococo emphasized pastel colors, sinuous curves, and patterns based on flowers, vines, and shells. Painters turned from grandiloquence to the sensual surface delights of color and light, and from weighty religious and historical subjects—though these were never ignored completely—to more intimate mythological scenes, views of daily life, and portraiture. Similarly, sculptors increasingly applied their skills to small works for the appreciation of private patrons.

After Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Louis XIV, c. 1700, bronze, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1943.4.87

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Antoine Watteau and the Fête Galante

Though several painters of the preceding generation had experimented with the ingredients of rococo—emphasizing color, a lighthearted approach, and close observation—Antoine Watteau merged them into something new.

Born near the Flemish border, Watteau was influenced by the carefully described scenes of everyday life popular in Holland and Flanders. Arriving in Paris in 1702, he first made his living by copying these genre paintings, which contained moralizing messages not always fully understood by French collectors. He worked for a painter of theatrical scenes and encountered the Italian commedia dell'arte and its French imitators. The stock characters of these broadly drawn, improvised comedies appear often in Watteau's paintings, and the world of the theater inspired him to mingle the real and imagined in enigmatic scenes. Through work with a fashionable rococo decorator, Watteau came eventually to the attention of patrons and established artists. He began studies at the official Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture—membership in which was necessary for important commissions—and gained access to new art collections being amassed by aristocrats and members of the expanding bourgeoisie. Influenced by his study of Rubens and Venetian Renaissance artists, Watteau developed a free, delicate painting technique and a taste for warm, shimmering colors.

In 1717 Watteau's "masterpiece" submitted for admission to the Academy was accepted as a "fête galante." With this new category, the Academy recognized the novelty of his work. The immediate popularity of these garden scenes, in which aristocratic young couples meet in amorous pursuits, suggests how well the fête galante matched the pleasure-seeking spirit of the early eighteenth century. Engravings made Watteau's subjects and manner widely known. Though the lyrical mystery of his own work remained unique, other painters who specialized in the fête galante, notably Pater and Lancret, also enjoyed international popularity.

Antoine Watteau, French, 1684 - 1721, A Fête Galante with Falconers, c. 1711-1712, red chalk over graphite on laid paper, Gift of Neil and Ivan Phillips, 1988.1.1

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A woman wearing a white and pale pink robe and holding a sickle sits on billowing clouds flanked by a lion and two young people in this vertical, oval painting. All three people have pale skin with rosy cheeks and blond hair. At the center of the composition, the woman, Ceres, sits facing us and she looks at us with lidded, gray eyes under faint brows. She has an oval face, small, pink, bow-shaped lips, and a dimple in her chin. Golden stalks of wheat along with pale blue cornflowers and red poppies create a crown in her upswept blond hair. Her white chemise falls off her shoulders and is loosely held in place with a rose-pink band that wraps around her right shoulder, to our left, and under the opposite arm. Shimmering, shell-pink drapery falls over her legs and covers one foot. Her other bare foot rests on a cloud like a footstool. A bundle of wheat is pinned between the fabric under her right elbow, to our left, and the lion there. With a long mane, his tawny face peers around Ceres’s hip from under the wheat. His mouth is pulled wide to expose one fang, and his pink tongue curls out of the other side. An iron-gray lobster crawls up the lower left side of the clouds beneath the lion. Ceres holds the curving blade of the sickle upright in her other hand by that hip. Near the sickle, a young woman and a child are seen from the chest up, each carrying a bundle of wheat. The young woman faces Ceres and looks off to our left, and the younger child, above her, looks down. Ceres and her companions are set against an arch of pale azure-blue sky filled with tan-colored and light pink clouds.

Ceres, Roman goddess of the harvest, is surrounded by signs of the summer zodiac: Gemini, Cancer, and Leo. This is one of four paintings of the seasons in mythological garb that Watteau painted for the home of Pierre Crozat. None of the others survive.

Watteau lived briefly in the Crozat household, studying the wealthy banker's impressive art collection, particularly works by Veronese. The shimmering brightness and lively pastel colors in Ceres reflect the influence of the Venetian painter and soften her large figure and formal pose.

Watteau was probably introduced to Crozat by Charles de La Fosse, a well-known painter and established member of the Academy, and it is likely that Watteau painted Ceres after sketches made by the older artist. Their collaboration stands at the transition between the monumental forms of the preceding century and the rococo.

Antoine Watteau, French, 1684 - 1721, Ceres (Summer), c. 1717/1718, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.50

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A man wearing loose, ivory-white clothing stands flanked by two groups of people in this horizontal painting. All the people have pale or peachy skin except for one person, who may have a brown mask. The man in the center, representing the character Pierrot, stands facing us with his hands by his sides. He has slightly bulging eyes, a bulbous nose, ruddy cheeks, and his full pink lips slightly smile. He wears a straw hat pushed back on his high forehead and a narrow ruffled collar around his neck. His shirt has long, voluminous sleeves and a row of small white buttons down the front. The pants are baggy and end abruptly above his white-stockinged ankles over white slippers. The fabric seems to have a sheen. In the shallow space behind him, a stone wall curves toward us to either side of a doorway that leads to a park-like setting. A crimson-red curtain is pulled to our right. Pierrot stands on the top of two steps, and the people to either side are arranged along the stage or the step that runs close to the bottom edge of the canvas. A spray of white flowers drapes down the front of the steps to our right of center. The group to our left has eight men, women, and children. Closest to us and in the lower left corner, a young man wearing a tomato-red jester’s costume trimmed with bells sits on the steps as he twists and looks back at the scene behind him. He holds a scepter or puppet in the shape of a doll-like jester. Two children gather at his feet. One weaves stems of white flowers together, and the other looks at us, smiling. Just above them another cleanshaven young man sits holding a lute in his lap. He wears a brick-red coat, brown breeches, and slate-blue stockings over crossed legs. He leans back and looks up and to our left, his round cheeks flushed. At the back of this group, two people wear tan-colored costumes covered in muted green and pink diamond shapes, and one might wear a brown mask. That person’s pink lips, black mustache and eyebrows, and black dots for eyes appear painted onto a hard, molded surface. The group of six people to our right stand on the same level as Pierrot. At the front of that group, a heavyset young man wears a gold-colored costume trimmed with black and a waist-length, Wedgewood-blue cape. He faces us but looks to our right as he leans back with one arm extended toward Pierrot. Beyond him are two woman and another person shown only from the neck up. The woman closest to Pierrot wears a pewter-gray gown with a scooped neckline. To the right of the man in gold is an old man with a long beard, wearing a black skullcap and cloak. He leans on a short staff and turns his head to look at the group. The last person on the far right is shown from the neck up and stands before the red curtain hanging from the upper right.

A troupe of the popular Italian comedy (commedia dell'arte) is gathered on stage, perhaps at curtain call. Standing awkwardly in the center is the vulnerable figure of Pierrot, the simple-minded valet and unlucky lover who was the most human of the commedia's stock characters. Scaramouche, the braggart, introduces him while the other characters interact around the strangely still Pierrot.

A brilliant draftsman, Watteau frequently sketched friends posed in theatrical costumes. Possibly their faces, not those of actors, are painted here. It has been suggested that the figures illustrate the passage from youth on the left to old age on the right, or that the melancholic Watteau saw himself in the sad Pierrot. Watteau's intention was to evoke a mood, not simply describe a scene, and his greatest paintings, like this one, remain puzzling and oddly poignant.

Italian Comedians was among Watteau's last works. Ill most of his life, he traveled to England in 1719 for treatment by the fashionable physician Robert Mead. This painting was probably the doctor's payment. Unfortunately, Watteau died of tuberculosis soon after, not yet thirty-seven years old.

Antoine Watteau, French, 1684 - 1721, The Italian Comedians, probably 1720, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1946.7.9

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In this lush park elegant young aristocrats flirt, dance, and engage in intimate conversation, each couple an "episode" in the progress of courtship. Their anecdotal character makes Pater's paintings less ambiguous than Watteau's enigmatic works, which a contemporary criticized as having "no subject."

Pater studied under Watteau—who admitted to being an impatient master—and took over his commissions after he died. Haunted by fear of poverty, Pater worked incessantly but also rather mechanically, reusing figure groups and motifs from one painting to the next. He was received by the Academy as a painter of "modern subjects," and more than six hundred of his fêtes galantes survive today.

Several of the poses in this painting and Pater's unfinished On the Terrace can be traced to seventeenth-century Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, whose works could be seen in Paris during the 1700s. The dark dress of the woman on the right, fashionable in the preceding century, and the garden sculpture of Venus, which underscores the painting's focus on love, also reflect his influence. But Pater, in keeping with rococo tastes, has refined Rubens' robust figures. They are composed in graceful groups, their fine silks painted with cool, powdery colors, applied in feathery brushstrokes.

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Pater, French, 1695 - 1736, Fête Champêtre, c. 1730, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1946.7.19

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A young woman with light skin stands in a garden, wearing a voluminous, full-length, silvery, shimmering gown in this vertical portrait painting. Her body faces us, as she looks into the distance to our left. She has rosy cheeks, gray-green eyes under gently arched, light brown brows, and her coral-pink, thin, closed lips curve in a slight smile. Her ash-brown hair is pulled back and adorned with tiny shell-pink and azure-blue flowers along the left side top of head, to our right. A pleated lace ruffle encircles her smooth neck. Her gown is parchment white where the light glints off the stiff fabric and is silvery gray in the shadows, creating a silk-like sheen. The dress is cut low across the chest, fits tightly around her narrow waist, and has puffy sleeves tied at the elbows with topaz-blue bows. Another blue bow is tied at her chest, and the ends wrap around her back along her waist. A corsage at her left shoulder, to our right, is a profusion of white flowers around a pale pink rose. In her other hand, to our left, she holds a straw hat with a shallow crown and a wide brim, trimmed with sky-blue ribbon. The arm holding the hat is nearly engulfed in the deep folds of her full skirt. She holds a pink rose in her other hand, which rests on the lip of a shiny, copper-colored urn filled with pink flowers and delicate green leaves. On that wrist she wears a bracelet with four strands of white pearls holding a cameo. She stands on a pale, dirt ground. A teal-blue bench in the lower left corner of the painting is tucked into sage-green shrubbery. Sprigs of pink roses are strewn across the seat and on the ground. The woman is framed to either side with olive and celery-green trees and vegetation, which blend into the hazy distance beyond her head.

As a young artist, Boucher engraved the works of Watteau for publication. Engravings like his, often with verses added, spread the rococo style across Europe. Boucher himself became the most fashionable artist in France under the patronage of Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV's powerful mistress, whose refined tastes influenced French art for two decades. It may have been either the husband or the brother of the woman in this painting who introduced the young artist to his future patron.

Of the more than one thousand paintings Boucher produced, only about twenty are portraits. Contemporaries noted that the artist had difficulty capturing a likeness, a handicap thought in the 1700s to be less severe for women's portraits than men's, since flattery could substitute for veracity. The pale colors, rich fabrics, and rustic touch of the straw hat are typical of Boucher's style. It captured the grace of a pampered way of life, in which, as a contemporary noted, "we really have nothing else to do but to seek pleasant sensations and feelings."

François Boucher, French, 1703 - 1770, Madame Bergeret, possibly 1766, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1946.7.3

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Twenty-one men in long waistcoats and women in elegantly trimmed gowns gather and dance within a verdant landscape in this horizontal painting. The men wear jackets and breeches in ginger brown, pale pink, or spruce blue. The women’s gowns have full sleeves, tight-fitting bodices, and full skirts in shades of bronze, teal blue, butterscotch gold, or rich pink edged with ribbons and lace. Some of them wear floral wreaths or ribbons in their upswept hair. Groups gather around a woman and man who dance together to our left in the scene. Some in the group of onlookers to our left hold musical instruments, including a violin and a pipe. Another group is nestled among trees just beyond the dancers, at the center of the painting, and more sit and stand to our right. The dancing woman wears a gleaming, ice-blue gown with rows of flowers in muted pink, blue, and gold down the full skirt and around the bottom hem, which falls short of her thin ankles. More garlands cross her chest and shoulders, and flowers are tucked into her dark gray hair. She faces us with her head turned to our right as she looks off in that direction with dark eyes under curving brows. She has a delicate nose, rosy, round cheeks, and pink lips. She holds her arms spread wide with the thumb touching the index finger of each hand. The man with whom she dances wears a coral-red tunic and breeches with sleeves decorated with pale pink and blue ribbons. The brim of his brown hat is turned up. His body faces us but he turns his head to look at the woman, his lips parted. The man and woman each have one gracefully pointed foot raised. The dancers and groups are enclosed within a park-like setting with tall trees to either side, and a screen of trees across the back of the space. The trees have slender trunks and canopies in shades of pine, sage, and moss green. Near the back middle of the scene, a stone column topped by a human head wearing a wreath of laurel leaves rises above the central group. A fountain with a vertical jet of water is tucked into the shadows within a grove of trees along the right edge of the painting. The water falls into a pool in the lower right corner.

Of the artists who followed Watteau's lead, Lancret was the most talented and inventive. More a rival than an imitator, he was admitted to the Academy as a painter of fêtes galantes but also produced historical and religious paintings—and portraits, especially of actors and dancers.

In this inspired hybrid Lancret set such a portrait within the elegant garden of a fête galante. As if spotlit, the famous dancer La Camargo shares a pas de deux with her partner Laval. They are framed by lush foliage, which seems to echo their movements. Marie-Cuppi de Camargo (1710–1770) was widely praised for her sensitive ear for music, her airiness, and her strength. Voltaire likened her leaps to those of nymphs. Fashions and hairstyles were named after her, and her real contributions to dance were substantial. She was the first to shorten her skirts so that complicated steps could be fully appreciated, and some think she invented toe shoes.

Nicolas Lancret, French, 1690 - 1743, La Camargo Dancing, c. 1730, oil on canvas, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, 1937.1.89

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Two pale-skinned women sit together surrounded by five sheep and a dog in a lush forest in this vertical painting. The woman to our right sits slightly above the other, with her arm draped around the shoulders of her companion. The woman to our right wears a low-cut, rose-pink dress with a full skirt and voluminous, gossamer sleeves. Blond curls are pulled back behind a headband, which is adorned over one ear with three large, pink flowers and smaller yellow and blue flowers. She tips her head to our right as she gazes down to her left at her friend. She has blue eyes, flushed cheeks, a delicate nose, and her grapefruit-pink lips curl in a gentle smile. She crosses one knee over the other and leans toward the other woman. Tucked into her side, the second woman looks up at the first in profile facing our right. Her low-cut, lavender-purple dress has a gold shimmer that suggests silk. Her ash-brown curls are pulled back and decorated with small sea-blue flowers. One toe peeks out from her long skirt, and both women are barefoot. The woman in purple holds a white dove on her friend’s lap, and the woman in pink holds a small envelope closed with a shell-pink seal next to the bird. The dove’s wings are slightly outspread, and a blue ribbon is tied around its neck. Just behind the pair, a towering tree with a silvery-gray trunk grows up and off the top edge of the painting. It angles to our left, and green branches hang down into the picture. To our right of the tree, a rectangular sand-brown stone structure is topped with a male lion carved from the same stone, near the upper right corner. The ground beneath the women is covered with moss-green growth and the space around them filled with verdant bushes and plants. A single, cream-colored sheep stands to our right, facing the women, next to a basket of flowers near the lower right corner. Four more sheep stand and lie together beyond the women to our left, while a black-bodied hound with a white muzzle sits watching the women. A pile of broken branches, perhaps forming a fence, lies behind the sheep. Grassy hills and trees become hazy in the distance beyond, and the sky above is slate blue with a few white and pale pink clouds. The upper and lower right corners and the lower left corner are deep in shade. The artist signed and dated the painting as if he had inscribed the stone in the shadow just below the lion, “f. Boucher 1750.”

The Love Letter was commissioned by Madame de Pompadour herself. The king's mistress ordered it and a companion painting for her chateau at Bellevue, where they probably hung over doorways, built into curving oval frames. Pieces of canvas were later added at the corners to make this painting rectangular.

The scene is a pastoral idyll. The young "shepherdesses" wear fine silks, and a contemporary audience would understand an erotic promise in the display of pink toes. Idealized visions of country life were common on the stage and in real-life masquerades. Denis Diderot, disdainful of the frivolity of Boucher's scenes, complained, "Shall I never be rid of these damned pastorals?" Yet the encyclopedist, who was an influential critic, also appreciated the brilliance of Boucher's painting, which captures the luminous colors of shells, butterflies, and polished stones—objects the artist collected so he could copy their fragile iridescence.

François Boucher, French, 1703 - 1770, The Love Letter, 1750, oil on canvas, Timken Collection, 1960.6.3

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Close to us, a woman and a winged, child-like putto float on clouds above a clean-shaven young man in a forest setting in this horizontal painting. All three people have smooth, pale skin, rosy cheeks, and ash-blond hair. The man reclines with his torso propped so his feet extend along the rocky ground to our left. He rests his head in his right hand, farther from us, with that elbow resting on a rock. We look up onto the underside of his chin and delicate features. A scarlet-red robe falls from his shoulders and across his hips. One knee is propped up, and that foot is tucked behind his other ankle. His muscular torso, arms, and legs are bare. His left hand, closer to us, rests by his side and loosely holds a staff. Three tan-colored sheep with long faces lie or stand behind the man, in the lower right corner of the painting. A light gray hound dog with floppy ears sleeps with its drooping muzzle resting on its paws in the shadows at the man’s feet. The woman floats just above the man, reclining on a fog-gray cloud with her feet angled toward the man’s torso. Her curls are held back by a topaz-blue ribbon, and she looks down at the man, a faint smile on her lips. A loose white garment partially covered by a blue robe falls from her shoulders, leaving one breast and one leg bare. She reaches outward with her left hand, palm out, and the other hand rests down on the cloud alongside her. A sharply pointed, luminous crescent moon curves up to each side behind the cloud. The chubby, nude, baby-like putto nestles on his belly in a cloud between the man and woman. He has short, tousled hair, stubby wings, and his skin is flushed pink. An arrow held in one hand points toward the man, and the putto rests his other hand in a bunch of pink roses. Plants and flowers grow in patches on the ground around the man. The sky above is framed with steel-gray clouds against pale blue.

In this scene Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt, steals forth through the moonlight to kiss the sleeping shepherd Endymion, whom the gods granted eternal sleep to preserve his beauty and youth. Diana and Endymion was painted when Fragonard was still a student at the Academy and heavily influenced by Boucher, who was his teacher. It was one of several mythological vignettes set at different times of the day; another depicts Aurora (Dawn) rising. Both compositions, painted as over-door decorations, were based on designs Boucher had done for the Beauvais tapestry works. Despite similarities to the older artist's work, Diana and Endymion already displays important elements of what would become Fragonard's own style: rich colors and a fluid handling of paint.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, French, 1732 - 1806, Diana and Endymion, c. 1753/1756, oil on canvas, Timken Collection, 1960.6.2

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The costumes and setting here suggest a masquerade, perhaps in Venice. Like the elegant and enigmatic trio depicted, however, the painting remains mysterious. It has been attributed to many different artists, most recently Le Lorrain, a little-known artist who spent nine years in Italy and was recognized primarily as a "painter of ruins." Le Lorrain also designed interiors, furniture (including a neoclassical suite in a portrait by Greuze in the Gallery's collection), and sets for public spectacles (like Louis XV's coronation). The frosty colors and cold, hard light in this painting appear similar to those in another work by Le Lorrain, but few of his works exist for comparison. Eventually he accepted an invitation from Catherine the Great to head the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, dying there only a few months after he arrived.

Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain, French, 1715 - 1759, Three Figures Dressed for a Masquerade, c. 1740s, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.92

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Sweeping drapery and a taut twist of the head create movement and energy in this portrait bust. The slightly parted lips, drilled pupils, and carefully detailed features—the lines etched around eyes and mouth—animate the personality of the subject, who was a counselor to Louis XV and whose son fought in the American War of Independence. Both painted and sculpted portraits of the period sought to capture more than a sitter's likeness, and Lemoyne has conveyed a sense of Cromot's strong character and lively intelligence. His voluminous robes are a convention from ancient sculpture and partly cover his informal modern dress.

Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne II, French, 1704 - 1778, Jules-David Cromot, Baron du Bourg, c. 1757, marble, Gift of Camille de Nucheze, direct descendant, and her husband, John Hadley Cox, 1985.39.1

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