"Rococo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... course southwards to Dresden, where he visited the Pinakothek. The Saxon town pleased him more than Berlin, both by its structural picturesqueness and surroundings. The palace, begun by Augustus, he esteemed the most curious masterpiece of rococo architecture. The Gallery he thought over-rated; but he none the less admired Correggio's Night, his Magdalene and two Virgins, as also Raphael's Virgins, and the Dutch pictures. His highest enthusiasm was aroused ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... smouldering on a couple of fire-dogs on the hearth. And on the chimney-piece above stood a foggy mirror and a modern clock with an inlaid wooden case; Fraisier had picked it up at an execution sale, together with the tawdry imitation rococo candlesticks, with the zinc beneath showing through the lacquer ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... contrast, in England and America, tools gained distinction through the directness of their design. Following English patterns, tools of American make were straightforward. Only later, in new tool types, did they imitate the rococo flourish of their European predecessors. In America, as in England, the baroque for things functional seemingly had little appeal. This is particularly true of woodworking planes on which, unlike their continental cousins, embellishment is rarely seen. Exemplifying this tradition are ...
— Woodworking Tools 1600-1900 • Peter C. Welsh
... metaphor) that she wasn't going to cook any dinner that evening. Not to be outdone, I affirmed in reply that even if she did cook it I wasn't going to clear it away. So we cleaned and adorned ourselves and groped our way to the Rococo. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... threads, miss 6 threads and make another 5 stitches. The groups of long stitches above and beneath the first row, encroach over two threads of the first group, so that a space of only four threads remains between two groups. The stitch between these groups is generally known as the rococo stitch. ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... aesthetic nature, as to deride and contemn the beauty of the art that we have just outgrown. To take a simple case. The Early Victorian upholsterers derided the stiffness and austerity of Queen Anne furniture, and the public genuinely admired the florid and rococo forms of Early Victorian art. A generation passed, and Early Victorian art was relentlessly derided, while the Queen Anne was reinstalled. Now there are signs of a growing tolerance among connoisseurs of the Early ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of the buzzer. Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle, the manager, desired to see him. He scampered along the corridor and slid decorously through the manager's doorway into the long sun-bright room, ornate with rugs and souvenirs. Seven Novelties glittered on the desk alone, including a large rococo Shakespeare-style glass ink-well containing cloves and a small iron Pittsburg-style one containing ink. Mr. Wrenn blinked like a noon-roused owlet in the brilliance. The manager dropped his fist on the ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... qualities of antiquity were blighted by the imitators, whose inventive powers were atrophied, while their skill and knowledge left nothing to be desired. Excluding the Cosmati, Rome was the mother of no period or movement of art excepting the Rococo. As for Donatello himself, he was but slightly influenced by classical motives. His sojourn in Rome was short, his time fully occupied; he was forty-seven years old and had long passed the most impressionable years of his life. He was a noted connoisseur, and on more than one occasion his opinion ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... exquisite art of Byzantium was wrongly considered as the debasement of Greco-Roman art. It was really the decorative expansion of it; the conventionalising of exaggerated realism. The same might have happened in Europe after the Baroque and Rococo fashions had their day; politics and commerce interfered. The intensely artificial painting of France, to which Diderot objected so much, had become perfect and sterile. Then (happily or unhappily, in whichever direction your tastes lie) the French Revolution, by a pathetic misunderstanding ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... for a few moments staring with a blank and helpless air, as if, for the first time in his life, he was beginning to question the finality of his own judgment. Then his eyes wandered off to the cornice of the wall, whose florid rococo upholstery won ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... saluting mutually at Geldern (11th June, 1763), there was laid the foundation of what they call the NEUE PALAIS; New Palace of Sans-Souci: [Rodenbeck, ii. 219.] a sumptuous Edifice, in the curious LOUIS-QUINZE or what is called "Rococo" style of the time; Palace never much inhabited by Friedrich or his successors, which still stands in those ornamental Potsdam regions. Why built, especially in the then down-pressed financial circumstances, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... with marble placques of various colors, garnished with medallions and consoles; then a great rose-colored wall in which is cut a large window with columnets; all styles are found there—the Byzantine, the Saracen, the Lombard, the Gothic, the Roman, the Greek, and even the Rococo; the column and the columnet; the lancet and the semicircle; the fanciful capital, full of birds and of flowers, brought from Acre or from Jaffa; the Greek capital found in Athenian ruins; the mosaic and the bas-relief; the classic severity ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... himself with pneumatic vestments in the rococo vein. From among the billowy developments of this style, and beneath a translucent and illuminated headdress, his eye watched jealously for the respect of the less fashionable world. At other times he ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... worthy, excellent man, in a picture out of which he smiled like a parvenu in all his glory. When at home, Madame Ragon completed her natural self with a little King Charles spaniel, which presented a surprisingly harmonious effect as it lay on the hard little sofa, rococo in shape, that assuredly never played the part assigned to ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... 1715.$ The greatest French style. An entirely French creation, marked by elegance and dignity. Toward the end of the period it softened into the early Rococo. ...
— Mission Furniture - How to Make It, Part I • H. H. Windsor
... for him the same kind of charm as the early painters of Florence. Out of that "infancy," however, there had arisen no "titanically infantine" Michelangelo, but a race of accomplished petits maitres, whose characteristic achievement was the opera of the rococo age. A Goldsmith or a Sterne can make the light songs of their contemporaries eloquent even to us of gracious amenities and cultivated charm; but Browning, with the eternal April in his heart and brain, heard in the stately measures it danced to, only the ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... aristocratic Mesalina, and was tactful enough to let Cupid hold the mirror in which she tests her majestic allure with cold satisfaction. He looks as though his task were becoming burdensome enough. The picture is painted flattery. Later an 'expert' in the Rococo period baptized the lady with the name of Venus. The furs of the despot in which Titian's fair model wrapped herself, probably more for fear of a cold than out of modesty, have become a symbol ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... spoilt by flaws such as every Mrs. Moggridge can point out,—faces that begin in one style and end in another, half Greek perhaps and half Gothic; yet even such faces, if their individuality is strong enough, have their own rococo charm. For all but supremely great faces, of which perhaps the world has not seen half-a-dozen, absolute regularity, so-called correctness, of features is a calamity, and regular beauty on the ordinary human levels is only another ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... for decoration originate? The inhabitants of Florence and Athens did not consider it necessary. There must, I feel sure, be a reason for its use in this city; American land-lords rarely spend money without a purpose; perhaps they find that rococo detail draws business and ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... to policemen, chauffeurs, street-cleaners. Women with slim-shanked, whining, sticky-fingered children dragging after them. Women marching like grenadiers. Yellow women. Women with red hands. Women with asymmetrical eyes. Women with rococo ears. Stoop-shouldered women. Women with huge hips. Bow-legged women. ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... in the marketable value of Danish ballads, Welsh triads, Russian folk-songs, and the like in rococo English translations after the Bowring pattern led Borrow to exchange an attorney's office for a garret in Grub-street. His immediate ambition was something between Goldsmith's and Chatterton's ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... The Golden Ass, with, again, a sort of prologue and epilogue of modern love. It is undoubtedly a fine piece of work of its kind and beautifully written. But in itself it seems to me a little too much of a tour de force, and its kind a little rococo. Again, mea maxima culpa perhaps. On the other hand, Soeur Beatrix is a most charmingly told version of a very wide-spread story—that of Our Lady taking the place of an erring sister during her sojourn in the world, and restoring her to it without any scandal when she returns ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... The Loewenbraeu first—a rococo castle sprawling over a whole city block, and with accommodations in its "halls, galleries, loges, verandas, terraces, outlying garden promenades and beer rooms" (I quote the official guide) for eight thousand drinkers. A lordly and impressive ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... further in this field than I have room to describe. I even read the rococo-sweet poems of Joachim du Bellay. In this year my father gave me "The Doctor," by Robert Southey, a work which I read and re-read assiduously for many years, and was guided by it to a vast amount of odd reading, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... awaits your lordship in the salon," announced the groom, and conducted Herr Bernat into the adjoining chamber. Here, too, the furniture was white and gold. The oil-paintings in the rococo frames represented landscapes, fruit pieces, and game; there was not a ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... rose into a rococo tower, lit then with the curious kind of clearness produced by a half-moon's light. In the centre, before the hospital door, projected a pillared portico, under which our carriage drove, and at the other end lurked the shades of a massive gate-way with cobbled road leading ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... paleozoolical, paleozoic, preglacial^, antemundane^; archaic, classic, medieval, Pre-Raphaelite, ancestral, black-letter. immemorial, traditional, prescriptive, customary, whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary; inveterate, rooted. antiquated, of other times, rococo, of the old school, after-age, obsolete; out of date, out of fashion, out of it; stale, old-fashioned, behind the age; old-world; exploded; gone out, gone by; passe, run out; senile &c 128; time worn; crumbling &c (deteriorated) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of the German salon naturally was the salon of the rococo period. Strangely enough, Berlin Jews, disciples, friends, and descendants of Moses Mendelssohn, were the transplanters of the foreign product to German soil. Untrammelled as they were in this respect by traditions, they hearkened eagerly to the new dispensation issuing from ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... and very picturesque. They should look well, for they cover a vast and wasted fortune. There is, for instance, a grotto which cost forty thousand pounds. It is one of those wretched and tasteless masses of silly rock-rococo work which were so much admired at the beginning of the present century, when sham ruins and sham caverns were preferred to real. There is, also, close by the grotto, a dogs' burial-ground, in which more than ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... spirit—a note of Belgian art which is quite unfamiliar to us—the walls of the colonnade are decorated with memorials of famous 'Stock Exchange' worthies and merchants, and nothing could be more skilful than the enrichment of these conventional records, which are made to harmonize by florid rococo decorations with the Spanish genre and encrusted with bronzes and marbles. This admirable and original monument is in itself worth a journey ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... Reigning sovereigns, princes and distinguished persons are received in the grand throne-room, where the throne is covered with red velvet, with coats of arms at the angles of the canopy. Upon a large pier-table, in the rococo style, between the windows and opposite the throne, stands a great crucifix of ivory and ebony, between two candlesticks. The carpet used at such times was presented by Spain. Before the Emperor of Germany's visit the Pope himself ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... attempt at all at decoration as one understands it in Spanish cathedrals. The tone of the walls and floor is a pinkish brown, and the whole church has a warm glowing effect from its richly-coloured stone. I could have spared most, if not all, of the overladen rococo monuments to the Electors of Mainz, with their monstrous records of impossible perfections; but my companion (a German lady) thought them beautiful. The whole church struck one as rather ill-kept; perhaps the red stone floor had ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... the lower floor an expensive little shop with monsieur sitting complacently at the door and madame, fat and voluble, at the money-drawer, and on the floor above, a still more expensive suite of rooms to let—rooms panelled in white and gold, resplendent with rococo mouldings, and crowded with abominable furniture, intended to be coquettish—gilt chairs, scalloped tables, embroidered lambrequins, ottomans smothered in plush and fringe, beds draped with curtains until they were all but air-tight—in effect more ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... room; I want to speak to you!" Isabelle said, suddenly. Harriet followed her upstairs, and they entered the beautiful boudoir together. Here Isabelle dropped into a chair, sitting sidewise, with one bare arm locked across its rococo back, and stared dully ahead of her, a queen of tragedy. Her silver scarf fluttered free, and the toe of a spangled slipper beat with an angry, steady throb ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... smooth stop before a large, richly decorated building that glowed brightly under the electric lights of a large sign. The sign said something incomprehensible in Cyrillic script. Under it, the building entrance was gilded and carved into fantastic rococo shapes. Malone stared at the sign, and was about to ask a question about it ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Brazilian, Roman, Rococo, Dresden, Festoon, College Stripe, Marie Antoinette, Indian, ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... later he was deposited under the bronze shelter of the porte-cochere belonging to an extremely expensive mansion overlooking the park; and presently, admitted, he prowled ponderously and softly about an over-gilded rococo reception-room. But all anxiety had now fled from his face; he coyly nipped the atmosphere at intervals as various portions of the furniture attracted his approval; he stood before a splendid canvas of Goya and pushed his thumb at it; he moused and prowled and peeped and snooped, and his ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... printed accordingly in French in 1722, this time adorned with engravings.[140] They show "Doraste" dressed as a marquis of Louis XV.'s time; while "Pandolphe" wears a flowing wig under his cocked hat, and sits on a throne in rococo style. A copy of the book was purchased for the royal library, and is still to be seen at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, with the crown and cipher of his Most ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... and lost and polished civilizations; there was about her even a breath of immemorial China. It mingled with a suggestion of Venice, the eighteenth century Venice of the princes of Naxos—how curiously she brought back tags of discarded reading!—and of the rococo Viennese court. This much he grasped; but the secret of her fascination, of what, at heart, she represented, what in her had happened to ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... (esp.) software designs, this has many of the connotations of {elephantine} or {monstrosity} but is less extreme and not pejorative in itself. "Metafont even has features to introduce random variations to its letterform output. Now *that* is baroque!" See also {rococo}. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0 |
