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Updated: June 23, 2025
In furniture, straight lines and simple curves may be plain and uninteresting, but they are by no means so objectionable as the over ornamentation of the debased rococo style, which obtained in this country about forty years ago; and if the scrolls and flowers, the shells and rockwork, which ornamented mirror frames, sideboard backs, sofas, and chairs, were debased in style, even when carefully carved in wood, the effect was infinitely worse when, for the sake of economy, as was the case with the houses of the middle classes, this elaborate and laboured enrichment was executed in the fashionable stucco of the day.
Chippendale, of course, must bear the chief part of the charge of over-elaboration, and he frankly says that he thinks "much enrichment is necessary." He copied Meissonier's designs and had a great love for gilding, but the display of rococo taste is not in all his work by any means, nor was it so excessive as that of the French.
I think of his books, of his grandiose style, gorgeous as his early waistcoats and gold chains, the prose often made up of bad blank verse, leavings from his long coxcombical strain to be a poet; of his false-sublime and his false-romantic, of his rococo personages, monotonously magnificent; of his pseudo-Jewish stories, and his braggart assertions of blood, played off against the insulting pride of the proudest aristocracy in the world, and combined with a politic perseverance to be more English than the English; of his naïve delight in fine clothes and fine dishes and fine company; of his nice conduct of a morning and evening cane; of his morbid self-consciousness of his gifts and his genius; of his unscrupulous chase of personal success and of Fame that shadow which great souls cast, and little souls pursue as substance; of his scrupulous personal rejection of Love Love, the one touch of true romance in his novels and his pecuniary marriage for his career's sake, after the manner of his tribe; of his romanesque conception of the British aristocracy, which he yet dominates, because he is not really rooted in the social conceptions which give it its prestige, and so is able to manœuvre it artistically from without, intellect detached from emotion: to play English politics like a game of chess, moving proud peers like pawns, with especial skill in handling his Queen; his very imperturbability under attack, only the mediæval Jew's self-mastery before the grosser-brained persecutor.
It is said that after the year eighteen hundred the quality of this decoration sensibly declined; it was soon replaced by more prosaic forms, and now the tools no longer exist that can make it. Sir Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones would have admired it. America, excepting in New York City, escaped the false rococo taste of the eighteenth century.
This phenomenon, however, leads to facts of much deeper significance for the history of culture. Let us first define the conceptions. The words "rococo" and "pigtail" at first applied only to the plastic arts; we are, however, gradually becoming accustomed to employ them to designate the whole period of culture.
Four or five tables, cases and stands, backed standoffishly against the tapestry on the walls, and the legs and bases of this furniture were great unbelievably great, rococo gilded legs legs that writhed and twisted themselves in a sheening agony of impossible forms, before they resigned themselves to dropping to the floor in distress.
The Marches escaped from the present, when they entered the cathedral, as wholly as if they had taken hold of the horns of the altar, though they were far from literally doing this in an interior so grandiose. There area few rococo churches in Italy, and perhaps more in Spain, which approach the perfection achieved by the Wurzburg cathedral in the baroque style.
Her eyelids droop: her breast heaves in a placid sigh. "Not the slightest, I am afraid." What to say next? I have had enough of asking after her child. I will not fall into that error again. Ask who all the men in the rococo frames are? which of them, or whether any, is Mr. Huntley?
Johannis end they seem to have felt the exotic spirit of the court, and are of a sort of Teutonized renaissance. The rococo margraves and margravines used of course to worship in St. Johannis Church.
The lady occupied a house in the great rococo square of San Carlo, opposite to the one which he rented; she could not go in or out of her door without being seen by Alfieri, and the sight of her was too much for him: he invariably broke all his resolves and went across the square to his Armida.
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