Could Rococo’s Relatability Make It the Next Big Thing?

If we look closely at the time we’re living in, several unsettling parallels emerge with the Rococo period, both artistically and socially. Long dismissed as frivolous, Rococo eventually revealed itself as an aesthetic forged in the crucible of instability—a language of resistance shaped by ongoing cultural and societal crisis. Its signature deflections, its elegance, charm, sensuality and apparent naïveté were never merely decorative but rather deliberate strategies. In an age marked by political fragility, economic imbalance and the slow unraveling of ancien régime certainties, Rococo soothed collective anxiety without pretending it didn’t exist.

That anxiety was often exorcised through depictions of comfort, richness, cuteness and the idealized—qualities that came to define the era’s visual culture just as insistently as the images liked and shared across digital platforms today. Fast forward to modern times, and intergenerational interest in Old Masters has propelled the category to some of its strongest results in recent years. In 2025, sales rose 68.7 percent to $282.5 million, and the number of lots sold increased by 7.9 percent, according to ArtTactic.

I drew these parallels after the Frick Collection introduced New York to the feathery, dreamlike brushstrokes of Flora Yukhnovich via a contemporary art commission for what was once known as the Boucher Room. After learning that Christie’s Paris, with the Chefs-d’oeuvre de la collection Veil-Picard sale, is bringing to auction a group of 30 masterpieces from the collection of Arthur Georges Veil-Picard—including some true Rococo highlights—I found myself wondering how the Rococo period is performing in the market.

A recent Artsy report confirmed that collectors in 2025 have gravitated toward idyllic contemporary bucolic landscapes, comforting and familiar table gatherings and still lifes—soothing tableaus that Rococo often combined with remarkable fluency. Rococo artists were also the first to create tailored imagery to meet a new demand for taste, depictions of intimacy and domestic-scale paintings—qualities many collectors still look for in artworks today. Their approach to the relationship between artistic production, audience and market was indeed so modern that we might question whether they should truly be considered Old Masters or rather painters standing at the threshold of modernity.

A collection for the art history books

It’s worth considering what the Veil-Picard collection actually represents, as it has long been known primarily through black-and-white reproductions of works that remain among the most mysterious and coveted from this golden age of French art. Formed over several decades by collectors working deliberately outside the realm of spectacle, the collection prioritized connoisseurship, condition, provenance and scholarly significance. Its core emphasis lies in works that reveal process, social life and visual intelligence—qualities closely aligned with Rococo’s original cultural function.

Arthur Georges Veil-Picard, a banker and brilliant entrepreneur at the helm of the renowned Pernod distillery, was behind it. He began building the collection in the early 20th Century, first as a free-spirited amateur—self-taught, instinctive and deeply passionate about works from the 18th Century—before evolving into a discerning collector who, over the years, assembled truly important museum-grade treasures in his private mansion in Paris’s Plaine Monceau district.

Highlights from the collection include prime paintings and drawings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Hubert Robert, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Marie-Suzanne Roslin. The top lot in the sale is a work by Fragonard, Veil-Picard’s favorite artist and a master of the Rococo style, titled Happy Family and estimated at €1,500,000-2,000,000. It is a quintessential example of the artist’s hand, with soft, virtuosic brushstrokes capturing a spontaneous and playful moment of familial affection and exchange—suspended between flirtation and pleasure with a typically Rococo erotic charge, subtly insinuated behind sliding silks, sprawled limbs and glowing flesh. These scenes are often tinged with melancholy rather than moral gravity. Of the various versions of the work, the one offered here is considered by scholars to be the first and most representative of Fragonard’s palette. Two other versions are held in private collections, and a preparatory study is housed at the André Malraux Museum in Le Havre.

Also coming to auction with an extraordinary provenance is another signature Fragonard, The Little Coquette, also known as The Peeping Girl (estimate: €400,000-600,000). The painting was previously owned by Hippolyte Walferdin, a great admirer of 18th-century art, and later by Count de Pourtalès. One of Fragonard’s seductive large wash drawings, Woman with a Dove, also came from Walferdin’s collection before being acquired by the Rothschild family (estimate: €200,000-300,000).

Standing among the most notable rediscoveries in the collection—and within the artist’s entire corpus—is a large sheet in red chalk and black stone by Antoine Watteau, described in his catalogue raisonné as coming “from an inaccessible private collection.” Reminiscent of the celebrated Pierrot in the Louvre, this image of a proud, delicately traced actor impersonating a hero or soldier of purely Rococo theatrical grace—Watteau loved to explore meditations disguised as leisure—is re-emerging for the first time not only at auction but also to the public, with an estimate of €600,000-800,000. Another playfully allusive and seductive drawing by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin offers a vivid glimpse into Parisian life, charged with subtle erotic tension; the artist depicts a painter and his model in the intimacy of the studio at a time when female nudes were forbidden at the Academy (The Private Academy, estimate: €150,000-200,000).

A market divided between important works and second-tier decorative material

The current auction record for a Rococo artist was set by Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Portrait of François-Henri, 5th duc d’Harcourt, which fetched £17,106,500 (about $27.9 million) at Bonhams in London in December 2013. More recently, a rediscovered Fragonard painting of a woman with a hat sold at Drouot on December 21, 2023, for $3.5 million after fees ($2,746,182 hammer), almost four times its modest estimate of $440,000-660,000. Earlier, in November 2023, a 72 x 91 cm. oil titled Un sacrifice antique, dit Le sacrifice au Minotaure sold at Artcurial in November 2024 for $6,216,804 after buyer’s premium. Since then, only smaller works—often with less reliable attribution—have appeared at auction, generally selling in the five-digit range or going unsold, mostly at smaller regional auction houses. Only one Fragonard oil is coming up during New York’s February Old Masters week: a perhaps less immediately pleasing—but no less expensive—Head of a Bearded Man, offered by Sotheby’s with an estimate of $600,000-800,000. By contrast, Christie’s will present a gem of a drawing from the collection of Irene Roosevelt Aitken in February that was previously shown in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2017 exhibition devoted to Fragonard’s drawings, with a more modest estimate of $200,000-300,000.

Meanwhile, when they do appear on the market, works by Jean-Antoine Watteau and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun continue to command significant prices. The auction record for a painting by Watteau remains the rediscovered La Surprise, which achieved £12,361,250 (about $24.3 million) at Christie’s London back in 2008. More recently, one of his oil-on-canvas works, Le Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère, sold for about €1.38 million at Christie’s in 2023, though substantial paintings by Watteau remain extremely rare at auction. In 2025, just a single—and not especially significant—oil on paper/panel by Watteau, depicting a small landscape devoid of human figures, appeared at Sotheby’s Paris, hammering at its high estimate of $206,866 (likely under guarantee) and reaching $262,720 with fees. Meanwhile, works on paper by Watteau continue to trade steadily in the mid-five-figure range, with all examples sold at Sotheby’s in 2024 exceeding their estimates. A very similar, though slightly smaller, drawing of a pompously standing man sold at Sotheby’s New York in January 2024 for $457,200 including premium, against an estimate of $120,000-180,000. Looking ahead, a drawing of a man playing the guitar by Watteau will be offered by Sotheby’s New York this February with a $700,000-1,000,000 estimate. The valuation is justified not only by its inclusion in the artist’s 1957 Catalogue complet, but also by its exceptional exhibition history, notably at The Morgan Library & Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The work is among the highlights of the Diane Nixon Collection, one of the most important drawing collections assembled in recent decades.

Vigée Le Brun’s record was set at Sotheby’s Old Masters sale in New York in 2019, when a 1788 portrait sold for $7.18 million—making it the most expensive painting by a pre-modern woman artist ever sold at auction. Still, the slightly more classical painter has continued to exceed expectations in recent auctions, particularly when the attribution is strong. Her oil Allégorie de la Poésie (1774) sold last September at Artcurial Paris for $387,226, surpassing its $94,445-141,668 estimate. Other works have landed within estimate, though a female portrait fetched $91,636 at a regional auction house (J.P. Osenat Fontainebleau S.A.S.). A double portrait in pastel on paper is coming up at Christie’s New York in February with an estimate of $500,000-700,000. It will be followed by an aluminous, idyllic pastoral landscape by François Boucher, offered with an estimate of $200,000-300,000. Boucher’s record remains $2,405,000 for The Sleep of Venus, sold at Sotheby’s New York on January 30, 2014.

These and other sales at auction suggest that what’s lacking is not demand for Rococo art among contemporary audiences but rather the supply of prime-quality works. The Rococo painting market is thin but highly sensitive to quality: when a truly museum-grade painting by a top-name artist surfaces with strong attribution and a compelling narrative, it can still command multi-million-dollar prices. By contrast, the broader field—less important compositions, workshop or circle works, “after” pictures and decorative genre scenes—is far less reliable.

Today, the market for Rococo—perhaps even more so than for other Old Masters—remains divided between important, iconic works and decorative second-tier material. “There is a real disconnect between important works and decorative ones,” Étienne Bréton, one of Paris’s leading Old Masters advisers, told Le Monde. “A large painting by Fragonard remains highly sought after, while 18th-century genre scenes are not worth much.” The issue is that attribution for these works is rarely binary (authentic vs. fake); rather, it is graded—autograph, studio, workshop, circle, follower, after—and most of the works resurfacing today fall in the lower tiers.

As Rococo artists operated within one of the earliest fully articulated art markets in Europe, they were often in such high demand that they actively produced versions of their compositions and encouraged replication. Studios and assistants played a major role in this process. Collectors frequently sought “a Fragonard” or “a Watteau-type” image, not necessarily the autograph work. The result is a market saturated with legitimate historical copies—many dating from the 18th or early 19th Century—not later fakes, but traded today through lower-tier auction houses as decorative objects rather than as true masterpieces. In many ways, this dynamic is embedded in the movement itself. Rococo artists were already navigating an early market economy shaped not only by royal courts but also by an emerging class of financiers, merchants, administrators and professionals who purchased art for their private interiors.

It’s a pattern that inevitably recalls any market cycle ending in saturation—when the proliferation of too many types of work dilutes originality, excitement and value. And the pattern feels unmistakably familiar today. Yet we’ve seen how Rococo-inspired artists such as Flora Yukhnovich have achieved strong secondary-market traction. Her auction record stands just above £3 million, set in 2022, with six-figure and high-six-figure results now routine for sought-after works.

The prime material, coming to auction at Christie’s Paris on March 25, speaks to a nostalgic desire for, and belief in, the illusory promise of charm and beauty—pleasing images capable of lifting the spirit amid today’s global tumult. Much as collectors are also turning toward more spiritually charged artworks, both now and in the past, Rococo offers access to alternate realms of intuition, sensuality and reverie. It stands in quiet resistance to a rational, technologically driven Western model of progress that has struggled to deliver the happiness and well-being it once promised. It will also be worth watching how the more esoteric charm of symbolist painter Jean-Michel Moreau performs, with two paintings illustrating festivities in honor of the Dauphin’s birth by the royal couple—respectively at the Hôtel de Ville (€300,000-500,000) and at the Palais Royal (€70,000-100,000).

More in Auctions

• Lalannes Fever and the Global Demand for Design

• In New York, Sotheby’s Repositions Itself as a Cultural Destination

• The $10 Million Hermès Problem: Estate Planning When Luxury Collectibles Outpace the Art Market

• The “Grosse Pièce” Sets a New Auction Record for Audemars Piguet at Sotheby’s

• The Most Watched Auctioneer in the World Isn’t Who the Industry Expected