Rococo is the light, decorative, and intimate style that swept european art and decoration in the early 18th century, particularly under louis xv in france.
Rococo emerged in early-18th-century France as a reaction against the heavy formality of late Baroque court art under Louis XIV. The name derives from 'rocaille' (rockwork) and 'coquille' (shell), referencing the curling, asymmetrical motifs that defined its decorative vocabulary. In painting, Antoine Watteau's 'Pilgrimage to Cythera' (1717) inaugurated the genre of the 'fête galante' — elegant figures in idealised garden settings — and François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard developed it into mythological and erotic confections under royal mistress patronage. Boucher's portraits of Madame de Pompadour and Fragonard's 'The Swing' (1767) became the icons of the style. In England, Thomas Gainsborough adapted the Rococo touch to portraits of country aristocrats. Rococo extended into interior design (the Hôtel de Soubise in Paris), porcelain (Meissen, Sèvres), and church architecture (the Wieskirche in Bavaria). The style was sharply criticised by Diderot and the philosophes as morally frivolous, and it was swept away after 1760 by the more austere Neoclassicism and the political turbulence of the French Revolution.