Rococo Paintings

What is Rococo painting?

Rococo is a Western style of architecture, art and decoration that emerged in France in the 1730s as a reaction against the Louis XIV style. It is characterized by extensive ornamentation, fluid curves, asymmetry, and a smaller scale designed to foster intimacy. It employs rocaille, the shell and pebble motifs that gave the style its name, and often blends white and pastel colors with gilding and sculpted molding, using trompe l'oeil frescoes to create spatial illusion. In the visual arts the prevalent themes are aristocratic leisure and the pastoral, depicted in stage-like settings. Rococo art is often regarded as the final expression of the movement before it and is sometimes called Late Baroque.

For a painting that means a European style built for a room rather than for a church: smaller canvases, lighter colors, a park or an interior instead of a martyrdom, and a subject closer to love and leisure than to historical duty. Rococo art is decorative work in the most literal sense, made to be seen at home, on a wall a few steps away, at the same time as the furniture and the panelling it was designed with. The style was popular first in France and then across Europe and its colonies until about 1780, and it reached Italy, England, Sweden and Russia in its own local versions, each time inspired by the French design and each time a little plainer. What you see in the work here is that sense of a stage set: figures arranged in a garden as if a curtain had just gone up, and a view that keeps opening behind them.

Famous Rococo painting painters

Five painters of the Rococo period, each with a collection here. The French names come first because the style was designed in France, but the English school and the Venetian school did the most with it afterwards.

• Antoine Watteau: 64 works from the French painter whose pastoral scenes open the style
• Jean-Honore Fragonard: a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance and hedonism, and one of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Regime. 50 works here, including The Swing
• Francois Boucher: 56 works, the decorative side of the French 18th century
• Thomas Gainsborough: 156 works, including Mr and Mrs Andrews and The Blue Boy, the English portrait answer to the French style
• Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: 75 works from Venice, alongside 69 by William Hogarth and 66 by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin

Famous Rococo painting paintings

Famous Rococo art you can order as oil on canvas. These are the works with the strongest search demand and the highest number of views in this part of the catalogue, and between them they cover the whole range of the style: the swing, the double portrait outdoors, the satire of high society, the still life on a kitchen table. Every one is painted to order, so the time it takes is the time a painting takes.

• The Swing, Jean-Honore Fragonard, the single picture most people have in mind when they hear the word, a garden, a swing and two people in on the joke
• Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, Thomas Gainsborough, an oil on canvas portrait of about 1750, now in the National Gallery in London, which stayed in the family of the sitters until 1960
• The Blue Boy, Thomas Gainsborough, a full-length portrait in oil from about 1770, owned by The Huntington in San Marino, California
• The Morning Walk, Thomas Gainsborough
• William Poyntz and his Dog Amber, Thomas Gainsborough
• The Tete a Tete, William Hogarth, from the Marriage A-la-Mode series
• Prospero and Miranda, William Hogarth, the most viewed painting in this collection
• Satire on False Perspective, William Hogarth
• The Four Times of Day: Night, William Hogarth
• Miss Mary Edwards, William Hogarth
• The Silver Tureen, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, a still life in the same years, with none of the fantasy and all of the paint
• Portrait of Elena Naryshkina, Vladimir Borovikovsky, the Russian court
• Lady in a White Dress, Ulrika Pasch, from Sweden
• Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson, Lemuel Francis Abbott

Related styles

Baroque paintings for sale are the century before, whose final expression this style is often said to be, Peter Paul Rubens included. Neoclassicism art reproductions are the classical reaction that follows, drawing on ancient Rome instead of the pastoral. academic art oil paintings carry the same taste for finish into the 19th century.

Frequently asked questions

What is Rococo art?

A Western style of architecture, art and decoration that emerged in France in the 1730s against the Louis XIV style, with extensive ornamentation, fluid curves, asymmetry and a small intimate scale designed to foster intimacy. In painting the usual subjects are aristocratic leisure and the pastoral, set out in stage-like settings. The work in this collection is the painted part of a style that also covered rooms, mirrors, porcelain and gilded molding.

What years is the Rococo period?

About 1730 to 1780 in Europe and its colonies, between the Baroque and Neoclassicism. The early 18th century is where it starts, in France, and the 1780s are where the taste for classical antiquity displaces it. Many of the painters here worked on both sides of that line, and a few of them lived long enough to be called old-fashioned twice.

How is a Rococo reproduction made here?

An artist paints it in oil on canvas by hand, in the width you choose, and you approve a photograph before it ships. Frames are optional and returns stay open for 90 days.