An Insular Rococco

Between the years 1710-1770, the inventive, ornate Rococo style should, in the natural course of events, have been Britain's prevailing decorative style. This text describes and explains its oddly frustrated course in England and its brilliant flourishes in Ireland. The authors controversially claim that Ireland, more sophisticated in the technical education of its craftsmen and artists, not only devised its own subtle "insular" Rococo, but exported this mode successfully in a gesture of cultural colonialism to the West of England. This text challenges the sacred cows of the English Georgians with reverence for correct forms, and it will oblige Ireland to rethink the faked historic priorities by which it has tried to live since 1922. Ireland was, far more effectively than England, a part of the European consensus of Rococo living. This fact should encourage debate, not only in Dublin and Belfast, but in Boston, New York and the Irish American communities caught up in the Celtic myth.