The artist who perhaps had the greatest influence in producing the Louis XV. _rocaille_ style was J. A. Meissonier (b. 1695), who by his contemporaries was abused for having broken up the straight line outrageously and pushed the curve to extreme limits. He was the abomination of all who held the angular and dry in reverence. A very able designer, Cochin, in 1754, issues an appeal to goldsmiths, chisellers, interior woodwork carvers, engravers, etc. He begs them “when carving an artichoke or celery head in natural size to be kind enough not to set beside it a hare as big as a man’s finger, a lark of natural size, and a pheasant one-fourth or one-fifth size; children of the same size as a vine-leaf; or figures of a supposed natural size supported by a decorative flower that could scarcely support a little bird without bending; trees with trunks slimmer than one of their own leaves, and many other sensible things of the same order. We should also be infinitely obliged to them if they would be kind enough not to change the uses of things, but to remember, for instance, that a chandelier should be straight and perpendicular, in order to carry the light, and not twisted as if it had been wrenched; and that a socket-rim should be concave to receive the running wax and not convex to shed it back upon the chandelier; and a multitude of equally unreasonable details that would take too long to particularize. Similarly, carvers of interior decorations of rooms are begged to be obliging enough, when executing their trophies, not to make a scythe smaller than an hour-glass, a hat or Basque drum larger than a bass-viol, a man’s head smaller than a rose, nor a sickle as big as a rake.”