Rococo at the V. &A. LondonReview by: Alastair LaingThe Burlington Magazine, Vol. 126, No. 976 (Jul., 1984), pp. 450+452-453Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/881707 .

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Exhibition Reviews

London Rococo at the V. & A.

The English have never really felt at ease with the Rococo. Its manifestations have provoked reactions ranging from dismissiveness to outrage, compounded by the fact that, ever since the application of the word to the style, confusion has pre- vailed as to what it actually meant. Only one thing seemed sure, and that was that it was foreign, so that there was a good measure of John Bull-ish chauvinism in the hostility. There was also no doubt that rococo betokened ornament, which aroused a second set of antipathies rooted in puritanism. The current exhibition of Rococo: Art and Design in Hogarth's England at the Victoria & Albert Museum (until 30th September) may not win over those implacably opposed to the style -

though its visual appeal will surely be enough to make some converts - but it should banish for ever any confusion as to what that style essentially is.

English muddle over the application of the word 'rococo' is at first sight sur- prising, since they were among the earliest to take it up. First employed as a mocking reduplication of barocco by David's students, not merely (as Michael Snodin implies in his essay in the catalogue) to designate the taste of the age of Louis XV, but to condemn anything too florid for the purist barbus (cf. Guerin's letter to Gerard of 20 thermidor XII, dismissing the guglie and fountains of Naples as 'rococo'), it was soon narrowed down to that period, along with associated sobriquets such as Pompa- dour and perruque. The earliest use of the word that I have found in English - C. R. Cockerell's diary entry for 26th January 1822, saying that a plate that he had de- signed for Rundell & Bridge united 'the richness of rococo & the breadth & merit of Greek' - interestingly suggests that it had become part of the argot of the silver- smiths responsible for the first Rococo Re- vival (unless he had picked the term up on his Grand Tour).

Almost inevitably, however, the term then broadened its scope to mean ancien rigime, and it was with this sense that it really entered the English language, to the subsequent confusion of those trying to employ it in a stylistic sense. So it was explained by Mrs Trollope in Paris and the Parisians in 1835, and thus it was that in Vienna and the Austrians [1837-38] she could set down her - to us - incongruous reaction to enjoying a 'simple and classic little composition' by John Cramer, played entirely without frills: 'I felt at the very bottom of my heart that I was rococo, incorrigibly rococo, and that such I should live and die.'

The not entirely fortuitous homophony of the words rococo and rocaille would appear to have been responsible for the former coming to designate a specific style. J-F. Blondel had come near to applying the latter in this way, when he

declared in Vol.III of the Cours d'Architecture [1772] that: 'II y a plusieurs annees qu'il sembloit que notre siecle dtoit celui des Rocailles'. It was Quatremere de Quincy who actually did so, when in the Encyclopidie Mithodique in 1825 he noted the metaphorical extension of the word rocailleux: 'a un goat baro ue, (my under- lining) qui se pldit, en quelque genre que ce soit, a produire certaines aspiritis de langage ou de style dans le discours, certains contrastes cho- quans de ton, de couleur et de lignes dans la peinture, certainesformes heurties dans la sculp- ture, certaines combinaisons disparates et re- poussantes dans les contours ou les ditails de l'architecture.' The target may have been ambiguous, but the concept stuck; and it was no doubt above all Victor Hugo's reiterated use of the word rococo to describe things in Nancy, Mainz, and Lisbon, jux- taposed with - on one occasion - the phrase, 'le style rocaille et chinois', in Le Rhin [1838-39], that fixed the idea of the Rococo as a style in the popular mind.

It was Hugo's restriction of the stylistic concept to architecture, furniture, and or- nament, rather than Quatremere de Quincy's extension of it to all the arts that generally prevailed: at least until the rise of departments of art history and the coffee-table book. Had this exhibition taken place when it was first mooted, in Denys Sutton's stimulating editorial for the 'English Rococo' number of Apollo in August 1969, it is very likely that we should have had (in addition to the rumoured reconstruction of the central saloon of the Menagerie) an attempted demonstration of the Rococo in all the visual arts - a maximalist view that would have included a substantial showing of Mercier, Hogarth, and Gainsborough; plans and photographs not only of interiors, but also of Taylor's polygonal villas, and a plethora of pattern-book il- lustrations of Gothick and Chinoiserie pavilions; and above all depictions of the rise and diffusion of the picturesque En- glish garden and le jardin anglo-chinois.

The restrictive impression of the ex- hibition was perhaps heightened by the refusal of several important loans, and by the lack of space in which to mount an audio-visual show devoted to architec- ture; but what we are presented with here is instead an authoritative view of le style rocaille in England. There are aberrations from this - most notably what one might have fallen into calling the rump of an aborted Roubiliac exhibition, were it not in fact a quite remarkable gathering of his portrait busts (amongst which I should still include that of Roubiliac himself, which does not seem credible as the work of Wilton). But there is no separate section on painting; architecture is largely re- stricted to the elements of interior deco- ration; Chinoiserie and Gothick are reduced to a handful of exhibits; and the 'rococo garden' is dismissed with a single painting by Thomas Robins.

The undoubted benefit of this masterly renunciation is the sharpness of the exhibition's focus: the emergence of the Rococo, and of successive phases of it, in the various fields of ornamental engraving, silver and wood-carving, is precisely plotted; and such often-cited things as Brunetti's Sixty Different Sorts of Ornaments (of which the catalogue very plausibly identifies an earlier state, even if it cannot demonstrate the dating of 1731 given by the 1939 Berlin catalogue) are put in their rightful place, as precursors rather than exemplars. The drawback is that this concentration upon the indisput- ably rococo - the minimalist position -

does make the English Rococo seem very derivative from the French (and this ex- hibition almost a herald of the Huguenot exhibition next year), by excluding the very things that represented an original English contribution to the art of the day, and that found an echo on the Continent: the informality of the English portrait and the English garden.

For me, the clarity of the picture thus presented outweighs the forfeited opportunity. Not only is the exhibition a pleasure in itself, its attractively presented (and indexed) catalogue, interweaving es- says and entries (edited by Michael Snodin for Trefoil Books/Victoria & Albert Museum, ?5.95), should make it impossible for anyone to maintain ever again, as did H. H. Statham's Short Critical History of Architecture [1912] that: 'The only difference between baroque and ro- coco is that the one word is French and the other bastard Italian, and their proper signification is a florid and tawdry manner of design'; or even, as more recent writers have, that the stucco of Artari and Bagutti is rococo or proto-rococo. Murmurings of methodological dissent at the Symposium that accompanied the opening of the exhibition (whose proceedings will also be published) indicated that there were many partisans of the maximalist position. Let us hope - since the days of mounting omnium-gatherum exhibitions are past -

that one of them will have been provoked to present his view in a book. For the moment, Michael Snodin's excellent ex- hibition - the 'view from the print-room' as it might be called - should mean that the minimalist position holds the field.

One or two observations about particular exhibits. It is not remarked upon in their catalogue entries (which no doubt had to be written from photo- graphs), but the two drawings for the dining-room at Kirtlington Park (M4 and M5, Fig.75) exhibit a significant differ- ence. This might both bear out Chris- topher Hussey's suggestion that Charles Stanley made designs for Kirtlington which his return to Denmark prevented him from executing, and shed some light on the nature of his attested responsibility for stucco-work. Whereas the design for the central relief in M4 is by the same

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76. Project for a monument to Francesco Gonzaga, attributed to Raphael. Pen and bistre wash, heightened with white, 51.1 by 27.3 cm. (Cabinet des Dessins, Mus6e du Louvre, Paris).

75. Design for the dining room at Kirtlington Park, Oxfordshire, ascribed to John Sanderson. c. 1742. Pen, brown and grey ink and washes, 45.4 by 52.1 cm. (The Elish Whittelsey Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; exh. Victoria and Albert Museum, Cat. No. M5).

77. The 'Rembrandt House', by Cornelis Springer. 1857. Panel, 49 by 41 cm. Private collection; exh. Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede).

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EXHIBITION REVIEWS

hand and wash as the rest of the drawing, those in M5 are by a clearly superior hand and in ink - exactly the kind of thing that the sculptor Stanley might have been ex- pected to contribute here, as at Honington Hall and Langley Park: is it then loose usage or carelessness that the inscription refers to 'Pictures in ye sides & Ceiling'? It is, incidentally, misleading that several of the entries in this section suggest a dichotomy between the Rococo and Palladianism. Palladio prescribed no forms of interior decoration, and Vitruvius's strictures on the kinds of fantastic decoration exemplified by Pompeian murals were countered by the authority of excavated buildings, and Raphael's practice, for grotesques. It was thus explicitly understood that in interiors licence, fantasy, and the whims of the pro- prietor or his craftsmen might be allowed some rein. The question, as Isaac Ware's Book of Architecture reveals, was essentially one of degree; and that is why the vast majority of English rococo stucco, which respected the basic compartmentation of walls and ceilings, was acceptable, in a way that the rare instances of French-style all-over treatment of ceilings and boiseries (as at Chesterfield House) were not.

M20 is one of a group of drawings attributed to Thomas Paty that have never been satisfactorily connected with any work designed by him; nor does the attribution sit well with the obvious grandeur of the client for whom the designs were made, or the idiosyncratic nature of the ornamental vocabulary - a kind of rococo deformation of Kentian motifs. In both handling and character they appear to me to be very like C18, John Vardy's design for a pier-table and glass at Hackwood Park, and I should accordingly like to propose that they were made by him for a similar commission.

Silver is the star of the show. It is thus perhaps opportune to point out that Thomas Heming's death can probably be pin-pointed more precisely than in the catalogue, to 1801, and his birth to 1722/23, by the tablet, with its inscription on an exquisite tripod urn, in the parish church of Hillingdon. George Wickes's superb ewer and basin of 1735/36 (C4) raise in an acute form the problem judi- ciously propounded by Philippa Granville in her essay, a propos Paul de Lamerie, that: 'The extraordinary concentration of high-relief chasing and asymmetrical forms in [his] output between about 1735 and 1742 is explicable only if we assume that he was employing both a modeller and highly skilled foreign-trained chaser at that time.'

In the case of Wickes, the contrast between this ewer and basin on the one hand, and the old-fashioned Fitzwilliam candlesticks of 1733 and the uninspiring Leinster service of 1745-47 on the other, suggests something of exactly the same kind. There can be little doubt that this anonymous foreign-trained chaser, whose services were presumably available to several silversmiths, was French, and thus in touch with the latest developments in rococo ornament, as the employment of

the cartouches adapted from Lajoue's Second livre [1734] indicates. The cata- logue rightly notices that one of these cartouches was also copied in reverse in Hoppus's The Gentleman's and Builder's Repository [1737], but it gives the credit for this to Hoppus rather than - as it should - to Jean Rocque. The half-effaced name of Rocque at the foot of pl.LXVIII in the British Library copy makes it clear that he was responsible, not just for the one signed cartouche within pl.LXXIII, as the cata- logiie implies, (p.323, n.14), which was evidently thrown in at the last minute to make up the page, but for all but one of the plates of cartouches that appear as such surprising interlopers in this other- wise Kentian publication.

Rocque may indeed have been one of the key mysterious agents in the trans- mission to England of rocaille - or, as contemporaries sometimes called it, the goat baroque (cf. the reference in the Gloucester Journal in 1739, to the 'border of Barroque work' on the waiter by Lewis Pantin of 1733, bought from Wickes for presentation to Bath Corporation in 1739). He was also the first to use a rocaille cartouche, and asymmetry combined with rocaille, in engravings, in the titles to his maps of Wrest Park and Wanstead (1735). He was one of the engravers of Brunetti's - admittedly more barochetto -

Sixty Different Sorts of Ornaments (1736-37); he published (as Michael Snodin reveals in the entry for C17) a reversed set of engravings by Frangois Vivares (another significant go-between) after Meis- sonnier's Livre d'Ornemens, first published by the widow Chereau; and his reciprocal links with this important accoucheuse of rococo ornament are indicated by her advertisement for his celebrated Map of London in the Mercure de France for December 1748.

It would not be just to end this review without mentioning the fact that the ex- hibition itself - which the Director of the V. & A. has been quoted as saying will be the last of its kind in his museum - would not have been possible without the sponsorship of Trusthouse Forte. In acknowledgment of this, the last exhibit, demonstrating the continuing vitality of rococo ornament is (an actually rather Louis Seize) icing-sugar cake made by the Cafe Royal: apt fulfilment of Isaac Ware's assertion that the wilder extremes of rococo extravagance 'are left to cake- houses for sunday apprentices'!

ALASTAIR LAING

Paris Boilly at the Mus6e Marmottan

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of its foundation, the Mus6e Marmaottan recently mounted an exhibition of the works of Louis-L6opold Boilly. It was an appropriate choice; for Boilly was one of the favourite artists of Paul Marmottan, a collector particularly taken with the art of the Napoleonic Empire, and who

accumulated a notable number of works -

above all portraits - by Boilly, on whom he also published a substantial monograph.

The exhibition was largish, but not as extensive as one might have hoped. Con- sidering that this was the first show of his work for fifty years, it was disappointing that the opportunity was not taken to attempt a rigorous re-examination and reconsideration of our knowledge of the artist and his euvre, which would also have taken into account the reassessment of the period that is now in progress. A further limitation of the exhibition was that the organisers were forced through lack of funds to limit their selection to works drawn almost exclusively from French collections.

Of those aspects of his euvre that re- ceived emphasis in the show, one was struck by the room filled with some thirty examples of his small portraits, whose intensity of character is accentuated by their close focus and the absence of props or setting, and whose consistency of format and pose never stifle a sense of individuality and acuteness of perception (although it should be said that No.57 stood out as anomalous in its much broader handling and the averted gaze of the sitter). His large set-pieces were well represented - the Rdunion d'artistes dans l'atelier d'Isabey, the Distribution de vin et de comestibles aux Champs Elystes, and Les conscrits de 1807 defilant devant la Porte de Saint-Denis - all displaying Boilly's facility in depicting crowd scenes by means of subsidiary, anecdotal groups and studies of costume, facial expression and gesture. There were also a number of extremely pretty genre scenes, oscillating between humble domestic interiors redolent of seventeenth-century Dutch art seen through Greuzian spectacles, and fash- ionably dressed young contemporaries.

Boilly's technical virtuosity was also well-illustrated in three grisailles - the Galeries du Palais Royal - Boilly at his most 16che and lascivious (see the May issue of this Magazine), Deux Savoyards, and the Portrait of Madame Chenard. However, there were no examples of trompe l'oeil, a genre at which Boilly excelled.

Yet several aspects of his euvre would have provided highly illuminating foci for more detailed study, and could have been pursued in the catalogue if not in the exhibition itself. Above all, one would like to know more about the career of Boilly -

an apparently successful genre and portrait painter and print-maker - through the years of the Revolution; this would have constituted a salutary counter-balance to the tendency of history painting to monopolise our attention. The exhibition in fact contained what could have been the starting-point for such a study.

As John Goodman kindly pointed out to me, the drawing exhibited under the title Le feu aux poudres (No.71; Fig.70), closely resembles a drawing of the same subject attributed by William Olander to Vincent in his very important article on the concours of year II organised by the

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