Rococo

Anonymous French Designer
Rococo Revival
ca. 1915
block-printed wallpaper
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Cheney Brothers (Manchester, Connecticut)
Brocatelle
1925
printed silk and linen upholstery fabric
National Museum of American History, Washington DC

Anonymous French Designer
Cope Hood
ca. 1700
silk satin damask with metallic thread brocading
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
L'Ouïe
ca. 1935
block-printed wallpaper
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Loop-knotted Ribbons
ca. 1900
block-printed wallpaper border
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Rococo Revival
ca. 1910
block-printed wallpaper
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Nicolas Jean-Baptiste de Poilly
Rococo Ornament Design
ca. 1730-40
etching and engraving
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Nicolas Jean-Baptiste de Poilly
Rococo Cartouche Design
ca. 1730-40
etching and engraving
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous British Designer
Rococo Revival
ca. 1880-90
embossed and hand-painted wallpaper
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous American Designer
Rococo Revival
ca. 1875
machine-printed wallpaper
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Border with Griffin
18th century
Valenciennes bobbin-lace of linen
National Museum of American History, Washington DC

Anonymous French Designer
Embroidery Sample
ca. 1770
silk embroidery with sequins on silk velvet
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Embroidery Sample
ca. 1770
silk embroidery with sequins on silk velvet
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous American Designer
Rococo Revival
ca. 1930-40
machine-printed wallpaper
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Rococo Revival
ca. 1928-29
machine-printed wallpaper
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Fabric Panel
ca. 1740-60
silk satin brocade with metal-wrapped threads
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous American Designer
Paper Doll Costume
ca. 1876-80
die-cut and hand-colored lithograph
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

21 September 1946

    We went to Rochester.  Saw the gulls on the brown mud, heard the boys and men singing and droning beautifully in the cathedral.  Close up to me lump of the Norman pillar, so massive. it made me think for once of all the weight in the air above me – every moment pressing down, threatening century after century.  

    And the west front with the broken saints, thin in their Romanesque niches – black, crusted, cruelly restored in some places.  It gave me the feeling of a noble slum.  It had been there, I suppose, since the twelfth century, gathering all the defacements and scourings and mendings to it, until it seemed toughened to receive almost any outrage. 

                *

    We found the Guildhall door open so we went up the fine wide staircase, gazed up at the plaster angel's fully modelled stomach in the middle of the ceiling, admired the wide panels on the walls, then came into the fine room hung with full-length portraits nearly all in early eighteenth or late seventeenth-century clothes.  Only one man was in nineteenth-century tailcoat.  And he seemed disregarded by all the men of Anne's reign, and Anne herself.  Or perhaps it is truer to say that all the whigged people were so busy concentrating on their own consequence that his lesser sort of pomposity looked almost like the sad smiling anxiety of the snubbed.

– from The Journals of Denton Welch (who was born in 1915, gravely injured in 1935, then wrote the journals between 1942 and his early death in 1948), edited by Michael De-la-Noy (1984)