Chinoiserie
Chinese porcelain and silk flooded
to the West after China eased its restrictions on foreign trade in
1684. Soon Europeans began to imitate them. This emulatory enthusiasm
spread to furniture and interior design. Such Western imitations of
Chinese art are known as Chinoiserie.
Already in 1670 Louis XIV had the rooms of his 'Trianon de porcelaine' decorated inside with blue and white ceramic tiles in imitation of the porcelain-faced pagoda at Nanjing (destroyed in the 19th century). In the 18th century no European palace was complete without its Chinese room. The fashion spread to English country houses, with some extraordinary results, such as the ornate Chinese Room created at Claydon House, Buckinghamshire in 1760. Hand-painted Chinese wallpapers became popular from the 1740s and influenced English manufacturers, who produced both printed and hand-painted imitations.
The Georgian exterior being clamped in the constraints of Classicism, full-bodied experiments with other styles were mainly forced out into the garden. There a fantasy landscape dotted with follies from a Greek temple to a Gothic ruin might happily accommodate a Chinese bridge, pagoda or summer house. These were not careful reproductions of Chinese originals, but a homage to features most striking to Western eyes. Broad, upcurving eaves piled one above the other were startlingly different from any Western architecture.
William Halfpenny produced
designs 'in the Chinese taste' without ever seeing a genuine Chinese
building, but Sir William Chambers had the advantage of visiting Canton
in his youth. His drawings of Cantonese buildings served him well when
he became an architect. The Pagoda
that Chambers designed for Kew Gardens was in its own day the most
accurate imitation of a Chinese building in Europe.
The fashion for 'Chinese' interiors carried on into the Regency period, encouraged by the Prince Regent himself. His Royal Pavilion at Brighton was an exotic mixture of Indian domes and arches on the outside and Chinoiserie within.
Sources
- William Chambers, Designs of Chinese Buildings (1757).
- Alan and Ann Gore, The History of English Interiors (1991).
- William Halfpenny, Rural Architecture in the Chinese Taste (c.1750).
- Wikipedia: Chinoiserie.