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Abstract
Sir William Chambers was one of the most important English architects in the eighteenth-century, but both in his day and later his international recognition was closely connected with his admiration for and promotion of Chinese art, particularly Chinese landscaping. Between 1757 and 1773, Chambers published three treatises praising the ingenious mixture of nature and art in a Chinese pleasure ground, criticizing the then influential English gardener Lancelot (Capability) Brown, and trying to goad English garden design into the direction of China. He did not achieve his purposes mainly because he mixed what he knew as genuine about the Chinese gardening art with what he fantasized about it. While recent scholarship has focused on his fantasy, this article examines what Chambers knew or imagined about Chinese landscaping, what he and his detractors were for and against, and how the fiasco of his 1772 and 1773 treatises, which he brought upon himself, nevertheless helped to usher in a new phase in the English reception of Chinese landscaping ideas.
Acknowledgment and Funding
Work on this essay was supported by a short-term research fellowship at The Yale Center for British Art in 2016, and a short-term research fellowship at the Lewis Walpole Library of Yale University in 2017. For the crucial support of both institutions, the author would like to express appreciation and gratitude.
Notes
1. Chambers, Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, 11 and 11.
2. Porter, “Beyond the Bounds of Truth,” 47.
3. See, for instance, Shouyi, “The Chinese Garden,” 339–55; Chase, Horace Walpole: Gardenist, esp. chap. 5, “Walpole and the Chinese Vogue”; Bald, “Sir William Chambers,” 287–320; and Eileen Harris, “Designs of Chinese Buildings,” in Harris, Knight of the Polar Star, 144–62.
4. Chambers, Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, viii.
5. Chambers, Designs of Chinese Buildings, ii and i.
6. Ibid., 14.
7. For a detailed study of Chitqua and his time in London, see Clarke, Chinese, 15–84.
8. Chambers, Designs of Chinese Buildings, 15 and 16.
9. Ibid., 17–18.
10. Chambers, Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, 37, 40.
11. Eileen Harris, “Designs of Chinese Buildings,” 150.
12. Addison, “No. 412, Monday, June 23, 1712,” in The Spectator, vol. 3, 540.
13. Even though Addison’s distinction about the great, the uncommon, and the beautiful was made in No. 412 of The Spectator, while his echo of Temple about the irregular layout of the Chinese garden was made in No. 414, both were parts of the same essay about the pleasures of the imagination.
14. Strassberg, “An Intercultural Artist,” 41–71, 60.
15. Mason, An Heroic Postscript to the Public, 100.
16. Cited in Eileen Harris, “Designs of Chinese Buildings,” 158, note 95.
17. For the intricate involvement of Chambers in the design of the House of Confucius, see Harris, “Kew Gardens,” in Knight of the Polar Star, 33–35.
18. Chambers, Plans, Elevations, Sections, 2.
19. Attiret, Particular Account, 10.
20. Grosley, Tour to London, II, 117; cited in Desmond, Kew, 61.
21. Harris, Knight of the Polar Star, 38.
22. Harris, “Chambers and Kew Gardens,” in Sir William Chambers, vol. 3, 67.
23. Walpole, “To Mason, Wednesday 25 May 1772,” in Correspondence, no. 38, 34.
24. Dallaway, “Supplementary Anecdotes,” in Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, 305.
25. See Eileen Harris, “Designs of Chinese Buildings,” 158, note 98.
26. Dallaway, “Supplementary Anecdotes,” 304.
27. Chambers, Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, v–vi.
28. Chambers, Explanatory Discourse, in Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (2d ed.), 150.
29. Chambers, Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, vi–vii.
30. Turner, Capability Brown, 37.
31. Chambers, Designs of Chinese Buildings, iii–iv.
32. Chambers, “Letter to a Gentleman,” in Harris, Knight of the Polar Star, 192–93.
33. Walpole, On Modern Gardening, 48.
34. Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening, 1.
35. Mason, The English Garden, vol. 1, 533–35.
36. Mason, An Heroic Epistle, 55 and 11–12.
37. Walpole, “To Mason, Saturday 27 March 1773,” in Correspondence, no. 28, 77.
38. Dallaway, “Supplementary Anecdotes,” 297–98.
39. Walpole, On Modern Gardening, 51.
40. For discussions about the similarity of Walpole and Mason in extravagance to Chambers, see Chase, “William Mason and Sir William,” 517–29; and Porter, “From Chinese to Goth,” 46–58.
41. Hinde, Capability Brown, 154.
42. Mason, The English Garden, I. 68–69.
43. Walpole, “Notes,” in Mason, Satirical Poems, 41, 42.
44. Harris, Knight of the Polar Star, 35.
45. For a recent study of Chambers’s drawings including those done at English Palladian houses, see Snodin, ed., Sir William Chambers.
46. Spence, “Note,” in Attiret, Particular Account, 38.
47. For a recent discussion of the changes of the drawings in the direction of chinoiserie or the English fantasy of China, see Strassberg, “An Intercultural Artist,” 63–65.
48. Honour, Chinoiserie, 143.
49. For a recent discussion of Ripa, see Strassberg, “An Intercultural Artist,” 63.
50. For the set of engravings given to Burlington, see Gray, “Lord Burlington and Father Ripa’s,” 40–43.
51. On the question of when the Ripa engravings went into Burlington’s collection, see Jacques, “On the Supposed Chineseness,” 180–91.
52. Castell, Villas of the Ancients, 116 and 117.
53. Clark, “Lord Burlington’s Bijou,” 126.
54. Wittkower, “English Neo-Palladianism,” 27.
55. Castell, Villas of the Ancients, 116.
56. For a recent study of the crucial connection between Castell’s creative interpretation of Pliny with the verbal and visual information of Ripa about Chinese imperial garden complexes, see Liu, “Castell’s Pliny,” 243–57. For a recent study of the decisive impact of Castell on Kent’s experiment with landscaping irregularity at Chiswick, see Mowl, William Kent, 142–46.
57. For a recent study of the role played by imported ideas of Chinese gardening at the beginning of the English landscaping reform in the early eighteenth century, see Liu, Seeds of a Different Eden.
58. Temple, “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus,” in Works, vol. 3, 237. For the possible meaning and origin of the word “sharawadgi,” see Chang, “A Note on Sharawadgi,” 221–24; Ch’ien Chung-shu, “China in the English Literature,” 351–84; and Murray, Sharawadgi. For a recent discussion of the topic, see Kuitert, “Japanese Art,” 77–101.
59. Snodin, “Going to Strawberry Hill,” 22.
60. Iddon, Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, 31.
61. Chalcraft and Viscardi, Strawberry Hill, 115.