WEBSITES

General

Artcyclopedia: Rococo
Artcyclopedia offers a list of many rococo artists, with links to related sites.

ArtLex: Rococo
An overview of rococo art is provided by the ArtLex dictionary, with links to many examples.

Catholic Encyclopedia: Rococo Style
This entry from the Catholic Encyclopedia gives a brief overview of the rococo style.

Monographic

The following artist directories feature the leading academic websites, reviewed and cataloged by experts from Oxford, Stanford, and Yale Universities:

BOOK PICKS

General

Baroque and Rococo: Art and Culture
Vernon Hyde Minor manages to weave social and aesthetic considerations seamlessly in this elegant, thematically organized history of the baroque and rococo eras. A thorough and up-to-date bibliography accompanies this lavishly illustrated volume, with many good suggestions for further reading.

The 18th Century (Cambridge Introduction to Art)
This useful introduction to the rococo and neoclassical styles relates their emergence to the specific accomplishments of the age through such representative figures as Madame de Pompadour, Gainsborough, and Nash.

The Idea of Rococo
William Park's focused, readable volume looks at rococo less as a coherent style than as an idea, discussing the art and culture that contributed to its emergence.

Thematic

The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early 18th-Century Paris
Katie Scott focuses on interior decoration in this delightfully far-ranging exploration of the social and aesthetic make-up of Paris in the first half of the 18th century.

The Bavarian Rococo Church: Between Faith and Aestheticism
This fascinating study of the Bavarian Rococo Church examines the threshold of modern aesthetic culture.

Monographic

Jean Honoré Fragonard

Fragonard: Art and Eroticism
Fragonard has often been approached as a painter of mere surface—both social and artistic—but as Mary Sheriff asserts in this lovely and intelligent study, his art was actually alive with deep cultural and social meaning.

Fragonard
Thorough, scholarly, and beautiful to behold, this catalog from a major retrospective in 1987–88 offers a definitive survey of Fragonard's artistic achievements.

Antoine Watteau

Watteau's Painted Conversations: Art, Literature, and Talk in 17th- and 18th-Century France
Using a thematic study of the works of a single artist—Antoine Watteau—Mary Vidal explores the social and cultural developments that emerged from the interactions between art and society in 18th- century France.

Watteau and the Cultural Politics of 18th-Century France
Julie Anne Plax reassesses rococo art in light of wider cultural themes and political issues in this interdisciplinary study of Antoine Watteau's paintings.