Rococo art for beginners: pastel and play

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

After the death of Louis XIV in 1715, French aristocratic taste turned away from the heavy grandeur of Versailles toward intimate Paris townhouses. The new style, later called Rococo, loves pastel colors, curving lines, shells, asymmetry, and themes of love, music and leisure. It is easy to dismiss as frivolous. I think it is also the world in which tarot first became an occult object, which makes it worth a closer look.

Three layers

Historical What the works and the salons show. Later tradition What later critics and occultists made of the period. Modern How people use Rococo style today.

Shells and curves

Historical The name comes from rocaille, decoration of shells and rocks used in garden grottoes. Rococo rooms in Paris, Munich and Würzburg melt walls into ceilings with gilded scrolls, mirrors and painted skies. Porcelain from Meissen and Sèvres filled the cabinets. In Würzburg, the Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo covered the vast staircase ceiling of the prince-bishop’s Residence in 1752 and 1753 with Apollo and allegories of the four known continents, a sky so bright and airy that the stone vault seems to vanish.

Watteau and the fête galante

Antoine Watteau, Mezzetin, about 1718 to 1720. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (34.138). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical Antoine Watteau (1684 to 1721) invented a new kind of picture, the fête galante, with elegant couples in parkland. The Academy accepted his Pilgrimage to Cythera in 1717; whether the lovers are leaving for the island of Venus or departing from it is still debated. Watteau also loved the Italian comedy. Mezzetin, about 1718 to 1720, shows the stock character of the lovesick servant singing in a garden, while behind him a statue of a woman turns her back. It is funny and sad at once, which is very Watteau.

Boucher, Fragonard and Carriera

Historical François Boucher painted mythological scenes and pastoral fantasies for Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV. Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing (1767), in the Wallace Collection in London, shows a young woman flying high on a swing and kicking her slipper toward a hidden admirer. In Venice, Rosalba Carriera made pastel portraits so admired that she was elected to academies in Rome, Bologna and Paris.

Chinoiserie

Historical Rococo designers loved chinoiserie, decoration in an imagined Chinese style. It was a European fantasy of Asia built on imported porcelain, lacquer and wallpaper, and it tells us more about European desire than about China.

Reason pushes back

Historical The Enlightenment valued reason and virtue. By the 1760s the critic Denis Diderot was calling for art that would teach morality instead of flirting. That demand opened the way for Neoclassicism.

The esoteric angle

Historical The same salons that hung Boucher and Fragonard were full of Freemasons, mesmerists and seekers. In 1781 the scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published, in volume 8 of Le Monde primitif, the claim that tarot cards preserved an ancient Egyptian book of wisdom. There was no evidence for it; tarot began as a card game in fifteenth-century Italy. Soon after, a Paris card reader who called himself Etteilla published a method for reading tarot and designed decks for divination.

Later tradition The Egyptian theory shaped occult tarot for a century, through Éliphas Lévi to the Golden Dawn. I trace it in the history of tarot and tarot in art history.

Modern Rococo pastels and shell motifs are everywhere in modern witchy decor. Few people know how close that taste is to tarot’s occult birth.

Try it yourself

Find Fragonard’s The Swing on the Wallace Collection website. Follow the curve of the swing rope, the branches and the flying slipper with your finger. How many S and C curves can you find? Then compare them with the straight lines of a Neoclassical painting.

Before and after

Before this: Dutch Golden Age.

After this: Neoclassicism.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.