Washington Winter Show 2018

55 would bring him major commissions and lasting fame. Publication of Chambers’s Designs of Chinese Buildings in 1757 opened the final, frenetic chapter in the chinoiserie craze, and the work’s seemingly authoritative tone and revelatory plates reverberated across Europe. With its seeming authenticity, the treatise proffered a new, more academic approach to the subject: suddenly a normative pattern book became available, carefully edited for the European market, from which to assemble different parts and ideas, apparently guaranteeing authentic Chinese buildings in western gardens. Though the book’s impact was relatively minor in England, where chinoiserie was already in irrevocable decline, Chambers’s vision fell on particularly fertile ground in France. His plates became the visual sourcebook for the majority of chinoiserie buildings erected in the twilight of the ancien r égime , and a good number were faithful reproductions, such as the Chinese House at Armainvilliers (figs. 5 and 6), erected for the Duc de Penthièvre. The vast, pastoral English landscape conceived by Capability Brown never found favor in France, where properties were relatively small and enclosed by walls, but Chambers’s vision of the studied disarray of the jardin anglo-chinois became the intellectual and aesthetic engine driving France’s unfolding garden mania. As ephemeral as chinoiserie structures appeared, expense was rarely an object. The France of Louis XVI was littered with ministers, financiers, and aristocrats ruined by their gardens: the Duc de Choiseul at Chanteloup and the Baron de Sainte-James at his Folie in Neuilly (fig. 7) are but two prominent examples, and her architectural extravagances at Trianon would be among the most damning accusations raised against Marie-Antoinette. Even Catherine the Great, reminded of the exorbitant cost of her Chinese village at Tsarskoje Selo, shrugged and replied, “So be it, it is my caprice.” In large part due to their very ubiquity, chinoiserie follies fell precipitously from fashion in the 1780s, but ironically Chanbers’s Designs of Chinese Buildings also played a major role, having snuffed out the essential life-blood of chinoiserie, the realm of imagination. As revolution approached, fickle tastemakers began plundering all the world and all its cultures in search of hitherto untapped ornamental possibilities. By 1781, the Prince de Ligne, confidant of Marie-Antoinette, would remark, “Chinese buildings reek of the boulevards and sideshow fairs” and observed that “Gothic houses, too, are becoming too common.” He proposed instead Moldavian huts and allowed that Arab and Turkish styles had not yet been exhausted. ■ The well-known watercolorists and architectural historians, Andrew Zega and Bernd H. Dams, are partners of Architectural Watercolors and authors of numerous books on European and American architecture and gardens. While associated with Robert A.M. Stern Architects, Zega began producing renderings and book illustrations, while also designing interior furnishings and fabrics. After Dams received his Master of Architecture at Munich Technical University, he worked for several museums and auction houses in New York and Munich before joining Robert A.M. Stern Architects as an architectural designer. Zega and Dams established their partnership, Architectural Watercolors, in 1994. Figure 6. One of the plates illustrating William Chambers’s seminal work, “Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils,” London, 1757. The Chinese House at Armainvilliers was modeled on the partial elevation at right. Figure 7. The Lake Pagoda at la Folie Sainte-James, Neuilly. Built ca. 1685, no longer extant. Watercolor on paper by the authors. ©Edward Andrew Zega and Bernd H. Dams, Architectural Watercolors.