Washington Winter Show 2018

49 Fig. 4: Henry Francis du Pont’s Chinese Parlor at Winterthur. Image by Gavin Ashworth, Courtesy of Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library.   Fig. 3: The Chinese Room at Gunston Hall. Photograph by Steven Brooke Studios, Inc., Courtesy of the Board of Regents, Gunston Hall. 18th-century Chinese wallpapers than previous attempts by European manufacturers. Use of chinoiserie wallpaper in a drawing room was certainly one manifestation of style, but another was an entire room decorated in the Chinese taste. The earliest and most significant example in America is the Chinese Room of George Mason’s Gunston Hall, completed in 1759 (fig. 3). The interior carving by William Buckland and William Sears combined elements of the rococo, Gothic, and chinoiserie styles and is a significant contrast to typical mid-18th-century interior decoration in Virginia. The room features a bold ornamental mantel with fretwork, pagoda- like moldings, and canopies surmounted by pinecone finials. Henry Francis du Pont’s Chinese Parlor at Winterthur (fig. 4) is a notable example of a 20th-century Chinese room. In Great Britain, the Chinese Dining Room of Buckingham Palace was furnished during the reign of King George V, incorporating many objects from storage that had previously been used in the Royal Pavilion at Brighton prior to its 1850 sale by Queen Victoria. 14 The garden pavilion, or folly, was another popular manifestation of chinoiserie. The earliest such structure recorded in Great Britain was the Chinese House built at Stowe in 1738. Arguably the best surviving example is the Great Pagoda (fig. 5) at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, designed by William Chambers and built between 1761 and 1762. Rising ten stories, the octagonal pagoda was a gift for Princess Augusta during a time when the royal family used Kew Palace as a summer residence. Commenting on the visibility of the Great Pagoda during its construction, Horace Walpole dryly remarked in a July 5, 1761, letter to the Earl of Strafford, “We begin to perceive the tower of Kew from Montpellier Row; in a fortnight you will see it in Yorkshire.” 15 Thomas Jefferson likely saw the Great Pagoda when he visited Kew during his tour of English gardens in the spring of 1786. 16 Jefferson was familiar with Chambers’s work and owned editions of his Designs of Chinese Buildings (1757) and Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings at Kew (1762). 17 These volumes likely influenced Jefferson’s use of Chinese railings at Monticello and later on the grounds of the University of Virginia’s Academical Village. Documentary evidence suggests that Jefferson planned Chinese-inspired railings for the terraces at Monticello, but it’s unknown if that design was actually carried out, although he did use the railings on the main roof of the house. The Chinese-Chippendale railings long associated with the Monticello terraces actually date to a restoration campaign in the 1940s. In the summer of 2017, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation made