Words by Chris Yeo, valuer at Clevedon Salerooms and regular expert on BBC Antiques Roadshow.
Have you ever come across something that’s so good it literally stops you in your tracks, makes your heart jump for joy and your fingertips tingle?
Recently I came discovered an interior that did all of that and more: a riotous assembly of fiery dragons, bamboo stalks, pagodas and mythical beasts presided over by near life size figures in Chinese imperial robes. Although worthy of the Forbidden City, this fantastical vision was less than half an hour’s drive from the centre of Bristol. Welcome to the extraordinary world of chinoiserie.
Anyone who spends time with antiques quickly realises that decorative styles are rather like people. There are the brash, in your face sorts (Art Deco), the ever so serious, couldn’t smile for fear of their face cracking sorts (Georgian), and then there are the exuberant, life and soul of the party sorts. Chinoiserie is most definitely in this last category. Taking its name from chinois the French for Chinese, chinoiserie was a fantasy vision of China and the East that boomed in the 18th and early 19th centuries. As a decorative style, it influenced just about everything – from tea pots to garden pavilions.
For Europeans, the 4,000-year-old civilisation of China had for centuries been shrouded in mystery. As trade routes gradually opened up, Chinese porcelain, silk and lacquerware began to trickle into the West and instantly became the height of fashion. Everything that found its way out of China from blue-and-white vases to tea leaves was highly prized and the demand for Chinese goods reached fever pitch. Savvy home grown artisans looked to cash-in on the demand but because no clear vision of the country was available, designers came up with their own, highly fanciful, interpretations of Chinese art and chinoiserie was born.
The most important thing to remember about chinoiserie is that it’s about as authentically Asian as a packet of supermarket prawn crackers. Think of it as a Disneyland version of how the West liked to imagine China – light on academic rigour and heavy on stereotypes. Its practitioners never visited China – they just let their imagination flow. In the right hands the results are joyous and dazzling, but the complexity and sophistication of true Chinese art are noticeably absent. A few critical eyebrows were raised at the time and some still are.
Chinoiserie’s popularity hit its stride in the middle decades of the 18th century – offering an escape from chilly Georgian formality – and then went into decline as the smart money turned to our own native Gothic (or Gothick) for light relief. It boomeranged back into fashion at the start of the following century, largely as a result of George IV choosing it as the fancy dress for his seaside retreat in Brighton – the Royal Pavilion. This spectacular – some might say monstrous – palace, just a pebble’s throw from the seafront, is the most spectacular example of chinoiserie style anywhere in the world.
As Kings go, Georgy Porgey has an extremely bad rep (according to a recent survey to find Britain’s least popular sovereign even history’s favourite bogey man, Richard III, is thought of more highly) but no monarch has had a sharper eye for works of art. Brighton was chinoiserie’s last great hurrah. Shortly after the political relationship between East and West worsened and the spell was broken. But while styles fall out of fashion, rarely do they completely die. Today chinoiserie is again finding renewed life amongst the Instagram generation and this most intriguing of styles continues to inspire designers and decorators. The spirit of chinoiserie not only survives in the 21st century, but thrives.
clevedonsalerooms.com; @chrisyeo_antiques
Images courtesy of the Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove Asset Bank
