Word: rococo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1980
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Before Bath, there is an innocence to Gainsborough's portraits that occasionally looks almost spectral: the early figures of Heneage Lloyd and His Sister, round-eyed adolescents in a rococo garden, look like large pale dolls haunting an artificial landscape. Confidence came with his absorption of the grand manner. With access to the big houses, the young painter could see the work of Rubens, Van Dyck and Claude. He rapidly learned to deal with the social mask. Those pink, smooth, patrician egg faces, the men a little knobbly of jaw and hooded of eyelid, with their "cold pleasant stares...