Washington Winter Show 2018

53 Figure 2. The famed Porcelain Tower at Nanking by Nieuhof, which fixed the image of the pagoda in the western eye. Johanes Nieuhof, “An Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces to the… Emperour of China,” London, 1673. Collection of the authors. Figure. 3. The Porcelain Trianon at Versailles. Built 1671–1674, no longer extant. Watercolor on paper by the authors. ©Edward Andrew Zega and Bernd H. Dams, Architectural Watercolors. If Cyril Connoly defined garden pavilions as “exercises in simplicity,” chinoiserie pagodas can be described as exercises in eccentricity. The embodiment of the picturesque, these small buildings were symbols of a better world, the architectural antithesis of absolutism, and it is little wonder they sprang up so vigorously in the waning decades of the ancien r é gime . The ostensible frivolity of chinoiserie follies, frankly designed and more often resembling over-sized toys than actual buildings, nonetheless revealed a deep, unspoken sentiment: their authenticity was validated by the longings of those who had built them. These new gardens were conceived as a highly decorative stage upon which to pursue political and philosophical questions as well as childish pastimes. Usually built of wood, painted board, and sheet metal, pagodas embodied the transience of their nomadic ancestors, and it was exactly their fugitive nature that elicited enchantment and led them almost invariably to be set beside, or even in, the mercurial element of water. As if to ground their floating image, pagodas were often built on rockwork bases—torturously worked grottos and diminutive mountains gushing miniature cascades that evoked Chinese landscapes. In execution, chinoiserie rarely if ever rose above decoration: its underlying attraction—the call of another, richer world— was subsumed in frivolity, and the style was often employed indiscriminately to add pictorial charm to a landscape. While foreign forms were often employed, architects and builders, ignorant of the rules that underpinned them, could happily indulge in picturesque and first inspired the mythic land of Cathay. Though his account would be validated by historians centuries later, his contemporaries, befuddled by descriptions of an empire more vast, better governed, and wealthier than even ancient Rome’s—a prosperous, highly civilized world beyond the hostile barrier of Arab lands—seemed to have read his book as work of fiction. Concurrently, Chinese porcelain and decorative arts began to reach Europe, imported via the ancient trading routes of the Silk Road. Coveted by collectors, these extraordinary objects held pride of place in curiosity cabinets long before they became near-commodities in the 18th century. Despite their rarity, Chinese objects were merely considered remarkable curios, and from its inception to its decline chinoiserie’s most defining characteristic would remain the confluence of fantasy and opulence. By the mid-17th century, fueled by growing demand for all things Chinese, authentic or not, sinomania began to influence European decorative arts. Concomitantly, the reports of Jesuit missionaries were profoundly shaping the European vision of China and influencing thought. Two highly influential illustrated books from the 1660s, the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher’s China Monumentalis Illustrata and the trader Johan Nieuhof’s report of the Dutch embassy to the Manchu Court, together became the era’s encyclopedia of China, and their impact overwhelmingly resided in hundreds of engravings—the first apparently authoritative illustrations of the fabled Cathay. Nieuhof’s iconic view of the Nanking Tower (fig. 2) would serve as the blueprint for chinoiserie garden follies in generations to come, just as his description of the tower’s red, green, and yellow palette became their color template. European travelers became so familiar with these illustrations that upon arrival in China they would invariably ask directions to Cathay, unable to believe that what they saw was indeed their destination. The simple scarcity of reliable information, induced by China’s enduring and self-willed isolation, acted to untether China from reality. Europeans projected the winsome fantasy of Cathay into this void, inspired by the tall tales of eastern adventurers and their own imitation trinkets. Quite simply, China in all spheres stood in diametrical opposition to the European baroque mindset, rendering it a virtual cipher. “I come straight from Congo,” the character of a Chinese doctor announced upon entering a Parisian stage in 1692. Though export porcelain and roll paintings offered numerous authentic depictions of Chinese architecture—pagodas and tiny huts scattered about the countryside—Europeans, when they came to build their own chinoiserie follies, simply ignored them. Chinoiserie first established itself as a style in interior decoration in baroque France, and paradoxically much credit must be given to Louis XIV. The highly influential Porcelain Trianon at Versailles (fig. 3), though it was the earliest example of chinoiserie architecture erected in Europe, predating the first examples built in Germany by well over forty years, was essentially a compound of sober classical pavilions garbed in a baroque fantasy of Chinese décor—the interior brought outside. With the r égence, Watteau, Gillot, and Boucher imagined a universe of cavorting monkeys and parasol-toting mandarins floating on scraps of earth, sheltered by festive tents and Seussian pagodas, tethered by garlands and ribbons to gilded rocaille boiseries . In time chinoiserie’s gestation in interior décor would transmute into the rococo, all the while gathering and absorbing the most diverse influences until the predilection with Cathay finally spread out-of- doors and developed into an architectural style.