Rococo

Though Rococo originated in the purely decorative arts, the style showed clearly in painting. These painters used delicate colors and curving forms, decorating their canvases with cherubs and myths of love. Portraiture was also popular among Rococo painters. Some works show a sort of naughtiness or impurity in the behavior of their subjects, showing the historical trend of departing away from the Baroque's church/state orientation. Landscapes were pastoral and often depicted the leisurely outings of aristocratic couples.

Jean-Antoine Watteau is generally considered the first great Rococo painter. He had a great influence on later painters, including François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, two masters of the late period. Even Thomas Gainsborough's delicate touch and sensitivity are reflective of the Rococo spirit. Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun's style also shows a great deal of Rococo influence, particularly in her portraits of Marie Antoinette. Other Rococo painters include: Jean François de Troy, Jean-Baptiste van Loo, his two sons Louis-Michel van Loo and Charles-Amédée-Philippe van Loo, his younger brother Charles-André van Loo, Nicolas Lancret, and both Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, who were important French painters of the Rococo era who are considered Anti-Rococo.

During the Rococo era Portraiture was an important component of painting in all countries, but especially in England, where the leaders were William Hogarth, in a blunt realist style, and Francis Hayman, Angelica Kauffman who was Swiss,Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, in more flattering styles influenced by Antony Van Dyck. While in France during the Rococo era Jean-Baptiste Greuze who was the favorite painter of Denis Diderot , Maurice Quentin de La Tour, and Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun were highly accomplished Portrait painters and History painters.
Sculpture was another area where the Rococo was widely adopted. Étienne-Maurice Falconet is widely considered one of the best representatives of French Rococo. In general, this style was best expressed through delicate porcelain sculpture rather than imposing marble statues. Falconet himself was director of a famous porcelain factory at Sèvres. The themes of love and gaiety were reflected in sculpture, as were elements of nature, curving lines and asymmetry.

The sculptor Bouchardon represented Cupid engaged in carving his darts of love from the club of Hercules; this serves as an excellent symbol of the Rococo style—the demigod is transformed into the soft child, the bone-shattering club becomes the heart-scathing arrows, just as marble is so freely replaced by stucco. In this connection, the French sculptors, Robert Le Lorrain, Michel Clodion, and Pigalle may be mentioned in passing.

Adam style

The Adam style (or Adamesque) is a style of neoclassical architecture and design as practiced by Scottish architect Robert Adam (1728- 1792) and his brothers. A book of engraved designs made the "Adam" repertory available throughout Europe. A parallel development of this early phase of neoclassical design is the French "Louis XVI style."

Robert Adam's main rivals were James Wyatt, whose many designs for furniture were less known outside the wide circle of his patrons, because he never published a book of engravings, and Sir William Chambers, who designed fewer furnishings for his interiors, preferring to work with such able cabinet-makers as John Linnell, Thomas Chippendale, and Ince and Mayhew. So many able designers were working in this style in London from ca. 1770 that the style is currently more usually termed Early Neoclassical.
it was typical of Adam style to combine decorative neo-Gothic details into the classical framework. So-called "Egyptian" and "Etruscan" design motifs were minor features.

The "Adam style" is identified with:

* Roman style decorative motifs such as framed medallions, vases, urns and tripods, arabesque vine scrolls, sphinxes and griffins;
* flat grotesque panels;
* pilasters;
* painted ornaments such as swags and ribbons;
* complex color schemes.

The Adam style found its niche from the late 1760s in upper-class residences in 18th-century England, Scotland, Russia (where it was introduced by Scottish architect Charles Cameron), and post-Revolutionary War United States (where it became known as Federal style and took on a variation of its own). The style was superseded from the end of the 1780s by a more massive and self-consciously archeological style, connected with the First French Empire.

A revived "Adams" style, initiated by a spectacular marquetry cabinet by Wright & Mansfield exhibited at the Paris Exposition of 1867, competed with revived Sheraton and Hepplewhite styles that lost momentum after World War I.
(wikipedia.org)