This lavishly illustrated book offers a comprehensive and stimulating account of the forms and functions of interior decoration in Parisian domestic architecture during the first half of the eighteenth century—the period generally known as the rococo. It charts the rapid and sometimes dramatic changes in both the style and the imagery of the period and explores in detail the relations between social status and the consumption and display of decoration in Parisian houses.

The book is divided into three parts. In the first, Katie Scott examines the technologies developed for the manufacture of decorative materials, the guilds and academies that governed their production, and the organizational arrangements that coordinated their deployment on site. In the second part, she investigates the use of decoration both as embellishment and as acknowledgment of the prestige of the patron or client, and she traces the ways in which decoration came to represent and describe certain kinds of noble status. In the final part, Scott looks at how rococo decoration articulated the shifting ideological positions of its patrons. By focusing on the genres of the grotesque, the pastoral, and the mythological, she is able to shed light on the nobility's changing relationship with absolutism. She also considers how the nobility—and its enthusiasm for the rococo—was affected by pressures from "below," pressures such as competition from "new money" and the increasingly aggressive commercial culture it apparently entailed, the expanding scope of the printing press, and the rise of public exhibitions.