Word: rococo
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...usually the first words one hears in conjunction with Oscar Wilde's plays, as if anything beyond that strains his talents. Naturally Wilde's frivolity is not devoid of substance, even though his lazy work habits allegedly kept his best work from ever being recorded. Victorian England's Rococo fop was not loathe to entertain a single meaningful thought--only, perhaps, to express it as such...
...closest he came to the rococo sparkle of English portraiture was in his 1767 portrait of Nicholas Boylston, Boston's biggest luxury-goods importer: blue-chinned, sharp-eyed and relaxed in his morning panoply of damask dressing gown, unbuttoned waistcoat (showing the careless ease of the gentleman) and velvet turban. His ships ply the sea behind him, and his arm rests on an account ledger. As art historian Paul Staiti observes in an excellent catalog essay, Copley's clients liked his style because it was so embedded in the world of substance and inventories that had made them what they...
...that's exactly the way it turns out. Zencey, a professor of history at Goddard College in Vermont, presents an Adams pastiche that might have been recognizable to the original: a small, acute, conflicted man who emits pedantry when made nervous. He cannot praise except in negatives: on the rococo facade of the Paris Opera House "the winged figures and rearing horses ... seemed to him, if not beautiful, then at least not totally disharmonious." Asked by the aged U.S. Senator Donald Cameron whether he is in love with Cameron's pretty young wife Lizzie, with whom he has conducted...
...auction, however, seemed excited only about bidding up the prices. From the opening gavel of what amounted to a nine-hour garage sale, buyers in the museum's main hall sought to outbid one another on 630 lots that ranged from ivory figurines and a Flemish tapestry to a rococo revival cabinet and an 1873 Steinway. "I always wanted the thrill of owning a museum piece," said Denver Realtor Midge Wallace after acquiring an 18th century grandfather clock...
...came up with these wildly ambitious, grandiose scenarios," says the officer. "Nobody bought them." Every year the reservists gathered for two weeks of concerted drill, and the G-2s were allowed to train briefly with active-duty troops. Koernke returned with stories of espionage derring-do that were so rococo they became the talk of his contemporaries. Says one today: "He was in this dream world. You would sit and have a drink and say, 'Guess what that jerk said today...