At the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, to see the exhibition ‘Renoir Rococo Revival’. Rococo painting underwent a revival in the nineteenth century, despite once having been considered frivolous. Renoir was aquainted with the style of Rococo artists such as Antoine Watteau, Baptiste Siméon Chardin, François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard from his time as a porcelain painter in his home city of Limoges. His art later shared Rococo’s interest in certain subjects such as promenaders in the park and on the riverbank and the garden party. He also admired Rococo’s loose style of painting and its bright palette, both of which would influence him as well as other Impressionist artists.

The exhibition showed around 120 works by Renoir and his colleagues Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet and Berthe Morisot as well as examples of the Rococo art that inspired them.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir ‘In Summer’ (1868)

Jean-Baptiste Greuze ‘La Vertu Chancelante’ (c.1775)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir ‘The Promenade’ (1870)

Antoine Watteau ‘L’Embarquement pour Cythere’ (1717)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir ‘The Swing’ (1876)

Jean-Baptiste Pater ‘Pastoral Festivity’ (c.1725 – 35)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir ‘The Thinker’ (1876 – 77)

Antoine Watteau ‘Rosalba Carriera’ (1721)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir ‘After the Luncheon’ (1879)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir ‘Woman with a Fan’ (c.1879)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir ‘Bathers with Crab’ (c.1890 – 99)

François Boucher ‘Diana after her Bath’ (1742)