Washington Winter Show 2018

54 pastiche, and so chinoiserie came to be defined by the unexpected, the grotesque, and the bizarre—an outgrowth of the light-hearted theatricality of the rococo, itself a reaction to the decorous rigidity of art under Louis XIV. The first true chinoiserie folly on the Continent was the Trèfle , or Cloverleaf, built by the French architect Emmanuel Héré in the late 1730s at Lunéville, the provincial Lorraine court of the exiled Polish king Stanislas Leszczyenski. A masonry pavilion with a tri-lobed plan, the Trèfle was but one of several exotic pavilions erected in Lunéville’s park, which the king furnished as if it were an enormous, open-air Wunderkammer , and Frederick the Great would use it as the model for his own Chinese House at Sanssouci. A great variety of chinoiserie flourished in the German states in the 1750s, a period of relative political calm. Most courts employed highly capable architects and decorators, and even small principalities nurtured such talents as Paul Egell, who designed the folly at Oggersheim (fig. 4), one of the most beautiful and evocative examples of rococo chinoiserie. The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) abruptly halted such frivolous constructions. In the ensuing peace, Englishman Sir William Chambers captured the attention of Continental gardeners, bringing the colorful, bizarre reign of German chinoiserie to an abrupt close. The first English pagodas—diminutive, four-square summerhouses built of open fretwork—appeared in the late 1730s after an extensive China trade through the East India Company had established a strong English appetite for Chinese imports. The nobility assimilated eastern porcelain, lacquer-ware, and carpets so completely into their interiors that, like tea itself, they became thoroughly English commodities. Conditioned by the fashion for erecting Antique temples on their estates, the English nobility took to the new fad with relish, and by mid-century William Halfpenny (alias Michael Hoare) began Figure 4. The Chinoise at Oggersheim. Built ca. 1750, no longer extant. Watercolor on paper by the authors. ©Edward Andrew Zega and Bernd H. Dams, Architectural Watercolors. Figure 5. The Chinese House at Armanvilliers. Built ca. 1780, no longer extant. Watercolor on paper by the authors. ©Edward Andrew Zega and Bernd H. Dams, Architectural Watercolors. to publish a series of New Designs for Chinese Temples , his title confirming the English pagoda’s classical progenitors. In contrast to the masonry walls and solid volumetrics that characterized German pavilions, English pagodas were mostly insubstantial stick-and-lathe structures incrusted with rococo scrollwork. Their ornaments were a pastiche of Gothic elements, classically derived swags and grotesques, and naïve symbols of the Orient—Chinamen with Confucian moustaches, devil-tongued dragons, and a plethora of bells. The English style evolved from imported Chinese lacquer-work and furniture, whose decorative fretwork patterns were taken up by influential furniture makers such as Thomas Chippendale and blended with the Strawberry Hill Gothic then also in vogue. England’s rage for pagodas was an intense but brief efflorescence, spanning little over a decade’s time. Like every fad, novelty and outlandishness incited its rapid spread, and in due time surfeit and excess insured its abrupt demise. Fashion had turned, with aristocratic patrons freshly wary of indiscriminate ornament: Horace Walpole, acid-tongued barometer of taste, dismissed chinoiseries as “paltry” in 1753, after lauding their whimsy and originality but three years earlier. The English architect Sir William Chambers is a seminal figure in the history of the chinoiserie style, and the impact of his buildings and publications cannot be underestimated, though they are but a portion of his remarkable body of work. More than any other figure, he shaped both the intellectual content and the outward appearance of the Anglo-Chinese landscape garden and the innumerable pagodas animating them. In the late 1750s, Chambers secured his first royal commission, at Kew gardens for the Dowager Princess Augusta. Until then he had been known as a highly talented theorist, but his gardens and exotic follies at Kew