British Rococo as Social and Political Style

Abstract

AT A SYMPOSIUM ON BRITISH Rococo art in London in 1984, participants agreed on one thing: that there was no British Rococo high art. There were no examples of grandiose architecture, large scale official painting, monumental sculpture, nothing sanctioned by needs and imperatives of court, church, academy, or doctrines of a dominating esthetic theory. The exhibition which was occasion for symposium displayed hundreds of drawings, engravings, ornamented trade cards, silver, tables, chairs, brocades, carpets, comic prints, informal and family portraits, book illustrations, jewelry, models and architectural plans for places of popular amusement, for gardens and private rooms.' These diverse creations were linked by a common style, which art historians call Rococo, but which its practitioners and purchasers called modem style. The Rococo style, of course, was imported into England from France, where, too, it was called the taste, new taste, of present day. In this essay I want to consider what word modern meant when applied to this artistic style and to present evidence that in England Rococo was associated with some new social classes which were in a position, between 1715 and 1770, to exercise that liberty of taste which Horace Walpole in 1750 thought was a particularly English phenomenon. The same Walpole who was pleased with British artistic freedom had also asserted that arts had sunk to their lowest ebb in first thirty years of century? It was a constantly recur-