Chinoiserie

By Richard Hayman

Chinoiserie, a decorative style inspired by the art of the Far East, gripped Britain from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Despite taking its name from the French word for 'Chinese', the style also incorporated influences from other Asian countries, helping to shape the period's popular fantasy of the 'exotic Orient'. Wealthy consumers jostled to obtain imported wallpaper, lacquered cabinets and hand-painted porcelain, while domestic manufacturers such as Royal Worcester and Chippendale met demand with mass-produced items of their own. Though interest in the style waned as the Gothic Revival took hold, many examples of Chinoiserie have been preserved.

In this beautifully illustrated book, Richard Hayman tells the story of this fascinating phenomenon, and explores the profound impact of Chinoiserie on the material culture of the West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jun 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781784424657

Richard Hayman

Richard Hayman is an archaeologist and architectural historian who writes on the history of the British landscape. His other books include Riddles in Stone: Myths, Archaeology and the Ancient Britons.

Book preview

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CONTENTS

CHINESE WHISPERS

ANGLO-CHINESE TRADE

THE CHINESE ROOM

OBJECTS

CHINESE BUILDINGS

REVIVAL

FURTHER READING

PLACES TO VISIT

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Clothing and upholstery were the most ephemeral forms of Chinoiserie and are the least well preserved. This hand-painted silk dress made c.1740 in Britain is decorated with ornamental flowers.

CHINESE WHISPERS

C

hinoiserie was a

craze of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period that overlapped with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and modern consumer society. Interior decoration, fabrics, table wares, ornaments and garden architecture were all produced in Chinoiserie styles at a time when more and more people were able to afford them. Asian culture impressed itself upon European culture to the extent that its signature products, porcelain and lacquer, are known in English as china and japan. As the celebrated ‘bluestocking’ Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800) remarked in 1749, ‘sick of Grecian elegance, or Gothic grandeur and magnificence, we must all seek the barbarous [taste] of the Chinese.’ In the domestic world Chinoiserie flourished in a period of multiple competing styles. As one wit put it in 1786, a well-educated British gentleman is of no country whatever: ‘he talks and dresses French, he sings Italian … his house is Grecian, his offices Gothic, his furniture Chinese.’

Chinoiserie was not an authentic version of China, something that consumers always knew in the back of their minds. Instead it was part of an exotic Orient conjured from the travel writings of missionaries, diplomats and traders over several centuries, about a part of the world that was experienced only through the imagination. Travel in China for Europeans was severely restricted, which only served to heighten its mystique. At the height of the craze for Chinese things in the eighteenth century the average European had a very hazy idea of the geography of Asia; few could have distinguished between work from China, Japan, India and Thailand (or Siam, as it was then known). In that sense Chinoiserie is a vague term and in practice encompasses material culture of the Far East, including lacquer and pottery from Japan and Indian chintz. When auction sales of Chinese goods were advertised in the London press, they were often referred to as Indian goods, largely because they were imported by the East India Company or its officials.

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A Chinese family is depicted in this piece of ornamental porcelain made by the St James Porcelain Factory in London in the 1750s.

By contrast, manufacturers in Canton had a much clearer idea of what version of China the Europeans wanted, and set about providing goods tailored to the European export market. But demand for oriental products far exceeded supply, a shortfall that was met by home production. Chinoiserie therefore covers two kinds of manufactured goods: those produced in China for the European market, and goods manufactured in Britain and other European countries under Chinese influence.

Eighteenth-century Britain was a nation of social mobility. Chinese goods, along with other exotic imports like sugar and chocolate, had originally been luxury items and a marker of elite status, but soon broadened to incorporate a wider section of society, including socially ambitious people whose wealth was derived from trade. Wealth derived from the plantations of the West Indies was invested in Chinese fantasies for the home. In the 1690s Queen Mary had been renowned for her magnificent collection of porcelain, but by the 1730s porcelain vases were a regular fixture on the mantelpieces of town and country houses. Aristocrats purchased porcelain because