Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The happy family, called Young couple contemplating a sleeping child, or The return home, or The reconciliation. Oil on canvas, 70 x 89 cm. Estimate: €1,500,000-2,000,000. © Christie’s images limited

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.

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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........

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