Le rocaille, le goût pittoresque, le petit goût, le goût moderne. During the eighteenth century these terms were used in equal measure to describe artistic production now categorized as rococo, a locution perhaps most famously coined in the “Van Loo, Pompadour, rococo” rallying cry of the students of Jacques-Louis David. Indeed just as the designation rococo was imposed upon the visual culture of an earlier era by those who later rejected its charms, so too was its theorization completed by its detractors, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alike. In titling her book Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher and His Critics, Melissa Hyde asks us to consider the constructed nature of the rococo, demanding that we engage equally with the playful aspects of paint and language alike. What Hyde in fact offers may be characterized as a discourse analysis. While she provides us with many interesting and insightful discussions of individual paintings, her focus is on “how facets of the eighteenth-century critical debates surrounding the art of François Boucher (1703–70) intersected with contemporaneous social debates” (1), and consequently on how these might provide insight into aspects of Boucher’s œuvre. This is not, as one rather caustic review points out,...