The Full Story On Chinoiserie… Part One

“As Seen At Your Local Decorative Antiques & Textiles Fair”

Key Periods in the Development of Chinoiserie Style in the West – How Taste Travelled

In the first decades of the 17th century, English and Italian and, later, other craftsmen began to draw freely from forms found on cabinets, porcelain vessels, and embroideries imported from China. Small quantities of Chinese artefacts had entered Europe by the Silk Route through central Asia since Antiquity, but it was not until after the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the sea route to the west coast of India via the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 that maritime contact between Europe and Asia was established. Henceforth, Chinese products, notably silk and porcelain, found their way to Europe in some quantity.

Decal Jars

The first four voyages of the English East India Company between 1601 and 1607 were to Bantam in Java where quantities of porcelain were acquired as ‘private trade’ by the ship’s crew. Chinese porcelain was so unlike anything produced in Europe that it was regarded as almost magical. William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520-1598) mounted his Chinese porcelain in silver as did Lettice, Countess of Leicester, whose possessions in 1634 included a ‘pursland boule’ (porcelain bowl) with ‘guilt foote and guilt cover’. Silver settings and ormolu mounts adapted exotic objects to European taste whilst also masking cracks and blemishes and drawing attention to the importance and rarity of the object.

Early ceramic wares at Meissen and other porcelain centres naturally imitated Chinese shapes for dishes, vases and tea wares. The fashion peaked with the wave of rococo Chinoiserie from 1740-1770. Initially images of China were also conveyed to designers and craftsmen by means of works such as the Dutch traveller, Johan Nieuhof’s 1665 illlustrated study of China.

Holland and England were active with the East India Companies in the early 17th century and it was in these two nations that the earliest hints of Chinoiserie are first to be seen. Tin glazed pottery from Delft and other Dutch towns adopted genuine blue-and-white Ming decoration from the early 17th century.

With the easing of Chinese restrictions on foreign trade in 1684, porcelain and silk began to flood the West and the Chinese influence became all pervasive.

The fashion spread rapidly to all areas of design and no court residence, especially in Germany, was complete without its Chinese room, which was often reserved for the prince’s mistress (e.g., Lackkabinett, Schloss Ludwigsburg, Württemberg, 1714–22).

Chinoiserie on the continent , in conjunction with Baroque and Rococco styles featured extensive gilding and lacquering; much use of blue-and-white (e.g., Delftware); asymmetrical forms; disruptions of orthodox perspective; and Oriental figures and motifs. The style’s lightness, asymmetry and the vivacity of many of its motifs was popular in the fine arts too as in the work of Antoine Watteau and Francois Boucher.

The English embraced the new fashion which was particularly suited to light, feminine spaces: wealthy women’s bedrooms, dressing rooms and drawing rooms in stately homes. One of the earliest complete Chinoiserie interiors in Britain was commissioned by Charles, 4th Duke of Beaufort (d.1756) for the Chinese Bedroom at Badminton House and supplied by John and William Linnell in 1753-55. An escapist fantasy, the room was an European rococo interpretation of ‘Chinese’ design and motifs. The Chinese style Badminton Bed is now in the Victoria & Albert Museum.

An extraordinary Chinese Room was created at Claydon House, Buckinghamshire in 1760, with an extravagance of woodcarvings by Luke Lightfoot. Wallpaper was key to many of these interiors; both hand painted and of English design and manufacture. Saltram in Devon has four Chinese papers which are probably the earliest still to be seen in Britain, dating from the reign of K’ang Hsi (1662-1722). Houses such as Nostell Priory, Erdigg, near Wrexham and Belton House Lincolnshire also retain papers.

In furniture the major exponent of the time was the much admired Thomas Chippendale, who believed his delicate Chinese, fret-back chairs to be ‘very proper for a lady’s Dressing Room’. His tea tables and china cabinets were embellished with fretwork glazing and railings, ca 1753 – 70, but sober homages to early Qing scholars’ furnishings were also assimilated. The tang evolved into a mid-Georgian side table and squared slat-back armchairs suited English gentlemen as well as Chinese scholars. Chippendale’s work of this period can be seen at Dumfries House in Ayreshire, Scotland.