"Rococo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... autocratic and abrupt than usual. Her shrewd eyes saw at once that she had no common adventuress to deal with. She was woman of the world enough, too, to know that 'birth' was not what it had been in her young days, that even money was rather rococo, and that good looks, manners, and a knowledge of literature, art, and music (and this woman looked like one of that sort), were often considered socially more valuable. She was therefore both ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... with cares, Though, no doubt, he can often trepan them; But one comes in a shape he can never escape - The implacable National Anthem! Though for quiet and rest he may yearn, It pursues him at every turn - No chance of forsaking Its ROCOCO numbers; They haunt him when waking - They poison his slumbers - Like the Banbury Lady, whom every one knows, He's cursed with its music wherever he goes! Though its words but imperfectly rhyme, And the devil himself couldn't scan them; ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... 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 Victorian taste again. The truth is that there is ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... honestly be said that the result is as incongruous as might have been expected. Some of his most elegant and attractive work is derived directly from the French, and we cannot doubt that the inspiration of his famous ribbon-backed chair came directly from some of the more artistic performances in rococo. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... rococo architects have introduced their ornaments (here is the fiddle out of tune again)—the cathedral is noble. A rich, tender sunshine is streaming in through the windows, and gilding the stately edifice with the purest light. The admirable stained-glass windows are not too ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lampshades was a sign of that—and she had not been able to mingle in society or to entertain it alone; so that the matter of her reminiscences struck one as an old world altogether. If she had not been so decent her references would have seemed to carry one back to the queer rococo Venice of Casanova. I found myself falling into the error of thinking of her too as one of Jeffrey Aspern's contemporaries; this came from her having so little in common with my own. It was possible, I said to myself, that she had not even heard of him; it might ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... not begin the year of 1869 in wishing to you and to yours "Happy New Year and many of them"? It is rococo, but it pleases me. Now, ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... Behn confessedly does not attain (nor was such her intention) the deep philosophy and exquisite melody of the great Spanish poet, she has produced a first-rate specimen of the romance drama, rococo perhaps, and with quaint ornaments, but none the less full of life, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... of his books, of his grandiose style, gorgeous as his early waistcoats and gold chains, the prose often made up of bad blank verse, leavings from his long coxcombical strain to be a poet; of his false-sublime and his false-romantic, of his rococo personages, monotonously magnificent; of his pseudo-Jewish stories, and his braggart assertions of blood, played off against the insulting pride of the proudest aristocracy in the world, and combined with a politic perseverance to be more English than the English; of his naive delight in fine ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... added bigotry, a well-assorted lining. She belonged to the society of the Virgin, wore a white veil on certain festivals, mumbled special orisons, revered "the holy blood," venerated "the sacred heart," remained for hours in contemplation before a rococo-jesuit altar in a chapel which was inaccessible to the rank and file of the faithful, and there allowed her soul to soar among little clouds of marble, and through ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... have confirmed the Stuart hold upon the English crown; but we can scarcely doubt that the hold would have been for the time established, that the Old Pretender would have been King James the Third, and that George the Elector would have been posting, bag and baggage, to the rococo shades of Herrenhausen. But, as we have said, failing that, if Charles had fallen in battle at the head of his defeated army, how much better that end would have been than the miserable career which was yet to lend no tragic dignity to the prolonged, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... site in the very middle of Broadway, of the lower, the real Broadway, where it could throb with the very pulse of the traffic in which we all innocently rejoiced—believing it, I surmise, the liveliest conceivable: a fact that is by itself, in the light of the present, an odd rococo note. The lower Broadway—I allude to the whole Fourth Street and Bond Street (where now is the Bond Street of that antiquity?)—was then a seat of education, since we had not done with it, as I shall presently ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... Pavilion in rococo style with high windows. In the middle of the room there is a large writing desk on which are various pieces of chemical and physical apparatus. Two copper wires are suspended from the ceiling to an electroscope that is standing on the middle of the ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... eleventh century were discovered beneath the rococo plaster-work in the semi-dome. In the centre is the Madonna and Child enthroned in a vesica above six saints, and surrounded by the symbols of the Evangelists. The saints to the spectator's right are SS. Hermagoras, Fortunatus, and Euphemia; to the left are SS. ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... and I cannot resist the pleasure of describing it. It was very large, circular, the floor covered with very fine matting. All round it was a little raised platform, covered with divans. The walls were entirely formed of great mirrors, in splendid rococo frames of carved wood, gilt. It was evidently the room in which the harem festivals were held. Between the mirrors were eight little doors, every one leading to a small apartment for one woman, fitted with mirrors and divans and each ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... Duke, indeed, at a council-board devoted hitherto to matters of state, would nod very early in certain long discussions on matters of art—magnificent schemes, from this or that eminent contractor, for spending his money tastefully, distinguishings of the rococo [126] and the baroque. On the other hand, having been all his life in close intercourse with select humanity, self-conscious and arrayed for presentation, he was a helpful judge of portraits and the various degrees of the attainment of truth therein—a phase of fine art which ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... classical 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
... rococo vestibule of the yellow-brick apartment house, while he pressed the bell below Miss Lily Dale's letter box, he began to feel a glow of comfort; and when Lily let him into her little parlor, all clean and vulgar and warm, and fragrant with blossoming bulbs, and ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... trait. The quaint old woman, indeed, with her smooth, well-bred voice, her elaborate complexion, her little, dignified incongruities, had always been the greatest solace to him. She had the charm of all rococo things; she represented so much that had passed away, exhaling a sort of elegant wickedness to find a parallel to which one had to seek back to the days of the Regency. Of course, in society, she passed ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... Mrs. Holdock had told her to keep an eye on me, in case I went away with coats from the hat-rack. McPhee liked that pamphlet enormously, for it was composed in the Bouverie-Byzantine style, with baroque and rococo embellishments; and afterwards he introduced me to Mrs. McPhee, who succeeded Dinah in my heart; for Dinah was half a world away, and it is wholesome and antiseptic to love such a woman as Janet McPhee. They lived ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... Last of the Leal Jeanne d'Arc Cricket Rhymes To Helen Ballade of Dead Cricketers Brahma Critical of Life, Art, and Literature Gainsborough Ghosts A Remonstrance with the Fair Rhyme of Rhymes Rhyme of Oxford Cockney Rhymes Rococo The Food of Fiction "A Highly Valuable Chain of Thoughts" Matrimony Piscatori Piscator The Contented Angler Off my Game The Property of a Gentleman who has Given up Collecting The Ballade of the Subconscious Self Ballade of the Optimist Zimbabwe Love's Cryptogram ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... present day, an ungrateful task for an intelligent reader or a conscientious reviewer, it is to be obliged to deal with a work whose whole compass is merely that of a second-rate romance inspired by rococo sentimentalism. We regret to speak thus of a book by so eminent a writer as Mrs. Stowe; but when any one at this time undertakes to build up a novel out of such material as cloisters, monks, and nuns, Beato Angelico and frankincense, cavaliers ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... "Nude at the Spring" is of wonderful surface quality. Wenk has an Italian marine and Benno Becker a landscape from the same country. Ghler's "Castle Terrace" has a particularly fine sky and a true rococo atmosphere. Hans von Volkmann's "Field of Ripe Grain" is typical of this Karlsruhe painter, whose stone lithographs have given German art a unique ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... in slumber, And its fountains also sleeping, Mildewed, lovely, and rococo, Lo ... Vienna, Canaletto's, Dated ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... the pair at every turn; in the picture gallery, standing before Durer's Evangelists; in the hall of sculpture examining Egina's marbles; in the rococo theater of the Residence, where Mozart was sung, an audience hall of a former century, with decorations of porcelain and garlands which seemed to require that the spectators wear the purple heel and the white wig. Accustomed to meeting each other, Jaime greeted her with a smile and ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a hill, and its parade looked into the waters of the Seine. In point of style it owed something to almost every age and nation—a great point with the architects of the day, who, equally rejecting all pedantic classicism, and all rococo prettiness, strove instead to make everything they put their hands to as complicated, bizarre, and incongruous as possible. It was not enough that the garden itself should stand on an island, but it was surrounded by an artificial stream meandering in the most masterly style in every ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... 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 ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... marvels. Mine is immense, with two suites of impossible rococo Louis XV. furniture in it; the richest curtains with heaps of arranged draperies and fringe, grand writing table things, a few embroidered cushions; but no new books, or comfy sofas, or look of cosy anywhere. The bathrooms to each room are superb; miles beyond one's ideas ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... sight from Riviere's quarters, and he soon learned that it belonged to a royalist widow and her daughters, who all three held themselves quite aloof from the rest of the world. "Ah," said the young citizen, "I see. If these rococo citizens play that game with me, I shall have to take them down." Thus a fresh peril menaced this family, on whose hearts and fortunes such heavy ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... belief 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 ballads, Homeric odes, epics, plays; he was, at all hazards, ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... began; but he went away into the hall, rang, and presently she heard the ascending clatter of a dumb-waiter. From it he took the luncheon card and returned to where she was sitting at a rococo table. She blushed as he laid the card before her, and would have nothing to do with it. The result was that he did the ordering, sent the dumb-waiter down with his scribbled memorandum, and came wandering back with long, cool glances at his canvas and the work he had ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... in which she had taken refuge, perpetually outraged by the violence of her husband and the insolence of his mistress; it was an ill-omened sort of place for a bride. Around extended the sombre and squalid Rome of the second half of the eighteenth century, with its huge ostentatious rococo palaces and churches, its straggled, black and filthy streets, its ruins still embedded in nettles and filth, its population seemingly composed only of monks and priests (for all men of the middle-classes wore the black dress and short hair of the clergy), or of half-savage ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... because they offered an escape from the heavy grandeur of the Baroque style, they were subsequently imitated by assembly-line methods. They fitted naturally into the developing rocaille style (corrupted into Rococo outside of France), and it is not surprising that they were also produced extensively in Paris. In England these imitations, which formed a substitute for expensive velvet and damask hangings, completely ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... plot shall be more disengaged from their framework—that they should be brought into higher relief, should stand out more than is the case. Yet further, the pure character-interest is small—is almost nonexistent: and the rococo-mosaic of manners and sentiment which was to prove the curse of the heroic romance generally prevents much interest being felt in that direction.[1] It would also be impossible to devise a style less suited to prose narrative, except of a very ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... through the romantic narrative of the Cremona Violin, where the instrument is a symbol of the human heart. Those who, in the old days before the Germans began their career of wholesale robbery and murder, used to hear Mozart's operas in the little rococo Residenz-Theater in Munich, ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... 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 ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... quotational the critics were, the better. For himself the speaker said that he liked that old custom of printing the very finest things in italics when it came to citing corroborative passages. It had not only the charm of the rococo, the pathos of a bygone fashion, but it was of the greatest use. No one is the worse for having a great beauty pointed out in the author one is reading or reading from. Sometimes one does not see the given beauty at first, and then he has the pleasure of puzzling ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... influence which the Renaissance exercised on both.[142] Sidney, however full of it elsewhere, put less of it in his actual novel; while, on the other hand, nothing did so much to create and spread the rather rococo notion of pseudo-platonic love in France, and from France throughout Europe, as the Astree itself. The further union of the philosophic mind with an eminently cavalier temperament—the united ethos of scholar, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... spout curved upward at the top, being furnished with a small, hinged flap and a scroll-shaped thumb-piece attached to the rim of the cover. The body and cover were originally quite plain, the embossing and chasing with symmetrical rococo decoration being added later, probably about 1740. Jackson says the wooden handle is not the original one, which was probably C-shaped. The pot bears the usual London hall-marks for the year 1692 and the maker's mark is "G G" upon a shaped shield, a mark recorded upon the copper plate belonging ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... of a useless leisure class. Four or five tables, cases and stands, backed standoffishly against the tapestry on the walls, and the legs and bases of this furniture were great—unbelievably great, rococo gilded legs—legs that writhed and twisted themselves in a sheening agony of impossible forms, before they resigned themselves to dropping to the ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... much a culture as a temperament, and Bladery—if the thing may have the name—a code of sentiments rather than a ritual. It is the rococo school of behaviour, the flamboyant gentleman, the gargoyle life. The Blade is the tribute innocence pays to vice. He may look like a devil and belong to a church. And the clothing of the Blade, being symbolical, is ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... looked nobly born, so proud became his step and steadfast his gaze. The long market (surrounded with its fantastic gables, strange, rickety, and picturesque, which looked us though they retained the expression of the angular, quaint, rococo faces of those by whom the houses were formerly tenanted) was crowded with all that was gay and animated in Dantzic; around the fountains, somewhat rude in their execution but admirable in their models, the peasants from the neighborhood ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... of trades-folk, it seems in every sense a church of the people. Here the native Nicois, gay, industrious, mercurial, and dispossessed of his town, may feel truly at home. Finished in the most exuberant rococo style, it is an edifice from which all architectural or religious inspiration is conspicuously absent. It is a revel of luxurious bad taste; a Cathedral in Provence, a Cathedral by the Sea, but neither Provencal nor Maritime,—rather a product of that ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... 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
... he must have meant this for a surprise to the spectator, who easily misses it under the trees overleaning the moss-grown walks which hardly kept themselves from running wild. There is a sense of crumbling decorations of statues, broken in their rococo caverns; of cypresses carelessly grouped and fallen out of their proper straightness and slimness; of unkempt bushes crowding the space beneath; of fragmentary gods or giants half hid in the tangling grasses. It all has the air of something impatiently done for eager luxury, and ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... the badly anatomized ladies on the ceiling, riding impossible blue clouds; the gorgeousness of many gilded columns, and even the bright red plush of the seats. Arethusa's tastes were ever slightly rococo. ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... 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 the ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... a comparison of dress with architecture, bringing out the insistent tendency in both to the rococo, to the burying of structural lines in ornamentation. The cuff, for instance, originally intended to protect the skin from contact with unwashable fabrics, degenerated into a mere bit of "trimming," which has lost all its meaning, which may be set anywhere on the sleeve. ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... 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, Philemon Holland's translation ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... sudden wonder of gardens and fountains; the bright-earringed negresses peering down from painted balconies, the pilgrims and clients dozing in the sun against hot walls, the deserted halls with plaster lace-work and gold pendentives in tiled niches; the Venetian chandeliers and tawdry rococo beds, the terraces from which pigeons whirled up in a white cloud while we walked on a carpet of their feathers—were all these the ghosts of vanished state, or the actual setting of the life of some rich merchant with "business connections" in ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... harmlessly; but it may easily become as the bed of Procrustes. To turn ideals to idols, and to command your whole world to bow down to them, savours of the folly of Nebuchadnezzar the king. Let your ideal world be far away from reality, fit it with rococo furniture, angels and birds-of-paradise, Minnesinger flowers and views of the Delectable Mountains: and go there occasionally and rest—to return without illusions, without encumbrance, but with renewed zest, to the sordid world of the actual, the world ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... blackest at its base, an arrangement of exterior lights at the top made a sort of floating fairyland—and as John gazed up in warm enchantment the faint acciaccare sound of violins drifted down in a rococo harmony that was like nothing he had ever beard before. Then in a moment the car stepped before wide, high marble steps around which the night air was fragrant with a host of flowers. At the top of the steps two great doors swung silently open and amber light ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... fascination, and facing on the Prospekt, stands the Anitchkoff Palace, on the site of a former lumber-yard, which was purchased by the Empress Elizabeth, when she commissioned her favorite architect, Rastrelli, to erect for Count Razumovsky a palace in that rococo style which he used in so many palaces and churches during her reign and that of Katherine II.,—the rococo style being, by the way, quite the most unsuited discoverable for ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... round Gabriel found an opportunity of getting a few days' work. They were going to put up in the Cathedral the famous "Monument" between the choir and the Puerta del Perdon. It was a heavy and complicated erection, of a sumptuous and rococo style, which had cost the second Cardinal de Bourbon a fortune at the beginning of last century. A real forest of woodwork formed the basis of the monument; the riches of the cardinal had created a prodigality of solidity and sumptuousness, and several days were required to fit together ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Oonahgemessuk weegeet, the Home of the Water Fairies. [Footnote: Also called from a legend, Oonahgemessuk k'tubbee, the Water Fairies' Spring. This appropriate and beautiful name has been rejected in favor of the ridiculously rococo term "Diana's Bath." As there is a "Diana's Bath" at almost every summer watering place in America, North Conway must of course have one. The absolute antipathy which the majority of Americans manifest for the aboriginal names, even in a translation, is really remarkable.] Now the old man, ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... the oldest houses in Petersburg, built in the time of Catherine, about 1768, and although in a highly florid rococo style of decoration, as though something gorgeous and barbaric had amalgamated with the Louis XV., still it had escaped the terrible wave of 1850 vandalism, and stood, except for a few Empire rooms, a monument of ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... Russian, Venetian, Brazilian, Roman, Rococo, Dresden, Festoon, College Stripe, Marie Antoinette, Indian, Calcutta, Bombay, ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... Pleiad too [167] with the rest; and in that new middle age which their genius has evoked, the poetry of the Pleiad has found its place. At first, with Malherbe, you may think it, like the architecture, the whole mode of life, the very dresses of that time, fantastic, faded, rococo. But if you look long enough to understand it, to conceive its sentiment, you will find that those wanton lines have a spirit guiding their caprices. For there is style there; one temper has shaped the whole; ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... their usual sober fashion; he, deep in vintage matters, still studying his friend De Serres, and arguing various points with Angelot whose day had been passed with Joubard in the vineyards; she, working at her frame, where a very rococo shepherd and shepherdess under a tree had almost ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... bound the girders of the vault in a dense mat of leaves and woven twigs, while underfoot the carpet was soft inches deep with fern and moss. As for the flowers—Jacqueline wanted to pluck them all, to wreathe the wondering fawns, as ladies with picture hats do in the old frivolous rococo fantasies. And as to that, she might have been one of those Watteau ladies herself, so rich was the coloring there, and she in the foreground so white, so soft of skin, so ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... "I can send Roscoe Rococo after that Courtyard," he mused, "he'll know. The last man I sent to Spain for a casemented facade, brought home a temple! But Roscie knows, and he'll do it proper. I don't want to ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells |
