After the excesses of the Louis XV style decors, the Louis XVI style, which began around 1775 and ended with the French Revolution around 1790, returned to simplicity, straight lines, and a simple and refined elegance, by combining the antique register with pastoral representations.
This enthusiasm for Antiquity and its aesthetic arouse with the discovery of the Antique ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, towards 1750. Artists traveled to Italy to practice their art, and some albums diffused the antique vestiges, their ornamentations, or even the objects that used to adorn it. Thus, all the antique repertoire was found into the Louis XVI style's decorative arts: trophies, sphinx, acanthus leaves, Greek friezes…
At the time of the first cottages or of the New Heloise, written by J-J. Rousseau, the other major source of inspiration was nature. The queen's hamlet in the Palace of Versailles, offered by the king in 1782, represents well that taste for a pastoral full of sentimentalism and knowingly neglected.
