AN INSULAR ROCOCO: architecture, politics and society in Ireland and Britain, 1710-1770.

AN INSULAR ROCOCO: architecture, politics and society in Ireland and Britain, 1710-1770

By Timothy Mowl and Brian Earnshaw. London: Reaktion Books. 1999. [pounds]45

Mowl is unusual for writing many books which are not offered as the last word on their subjects but as irreverent, amusing squibs, serving an intellectually stimulating role because they take nothing for granted. Arguing that Rococo should have been the prevailing decorative style between 1710 and 1770, he and Earnshaw condemn eighteenth-century Palladianism as a cultural disaster imposed on a chauvinistic ruling class. Burlington and his followers crippled the development of Rococo with a 'retrograde' style whose 'internal decor was based on memories of ruined Roman baths or the improvisations of itinerant Italo-Swiss stucco workers'.

This is a harsh way to write off Robert Adam, but this is a 'what if' book, full of challenging rebukes, threats, and warnings. At Saltram House, Devon, 'the walls are thick with lost opportunities', while William Paty's Christ Church, Bristol, is the Rococo church 'which Sir Robert Taylor should have built'. Of Bristol they write that 'as a pineapple can be persuaded to bear fruit in a hot-bed of manure, so the Rococo flourished unexpectedly in that unlikely city'. It also flourished in Ireland where, they claim, craftsmen and artists were better trained than in England.

Like Betjeman, they ruthlessly describe places as they are: thus the setting of Claydon House, Buckinghamshire, the finest Rococo fantasy in England, is a 'cultural sink in which successive governments have been able to drop prisons, borstals, army camps and sinister experimental institutions'. At Claydon the book abruptly ends, without the comfort of a conclusion.