Chinese manner

History

The term Chinese was used to describe both architecture and ornamental details found on garden façades or garden structures; it also described the layout of a garden. Features such as geometrically inspired trellises on a veranda, upward-turning curves on roofs, and small bulbous domes suggested East Asian influences rather than reproducing any authentic examples. In terms of garden layout, scenes of Chinese gardens drawn by missionaries and diplomatic staffs, as well as by Sir William Temple in his influential treatise, “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus” (1685), introduced the idea that variety, novelty, and surprise were characteristic of Chinese gardens, which meant that irregularity rather than symmetry prevailed.1 These impressions of the characteristics of Chinese garden design persisted; in the nineteenth century, writers such as J. C. Loudon and A. J. Downing debated whether the Chinese taste in gardening was the closest historic style to, if not the same as, the modern in landscape gardening.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the Chinese manner was used as the theme of public and private pleasure gardens, including the Pagoda and Labyrinth Garden [Fig. 1] and Gabriel Manigault’s China Retreat [Fig. 2], both in Philadelphia. The names for these pleasure gardens, the first of which was dominated by a giant pagoda, were chosen to evoke the fantasy and exoticism associated with China in this period.

Lucrative commerce in the colonies helped to stimulate an interest in the Far East. As decorative objects, ceramics, and lacquered cabinets poured into the West in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a taste for things Chinese grew. The increasing popularity of pattern books and design treatises during the same period helped spread Western ideas about China. Many of the Chinese-style details in American gardens derived from books such as William Halfpenny’s New Designs for Chinese Temples, triumphal arches, garden seats, palings, etc. (1750–52), Rural Architecture in the Chinese Taste (1755; written with his brother John), and Chinese and Gothic architecture properly ornamented (1752); William Chambers’s Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils (1757) and A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772); and Thomas Chippendale’s The Gentlemen and Cabinet-Maker’s Director . . . in the Gothic, Chinese and Modern Taste (1755). These were immensely popular in England and France and known in the colonies and early republic throughout the East Coast. Many drawings for designs in the Chinese manner can be traced to these publications. For example, Jefferson’s sketch for a “Chinese railing” [Fig. 3]—which was used extensively at Monticello and at the University of Virginia—is similar to plates in Halfpenny [Fig. 4] or Chippendale. Bridges [Fig. 5], verandas, gates, garden furniture [Fig. 6], and light frame summerhouses could easily be given a Chinese flair with criss-cross lattice work. Chambers’ Great Pagoda at Kew, reproduced in his widely known Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings at Kew in Surry (1763) [Fig. 7], served as the model for many pagodas such as the one by Haviland (see Fig. 1).

Charles Willson Peale built a summerhouse for himself in the Chinese taste, which he described as being built of thin posts with arched brackets holding up the roof. Because he considered the Chinese to be philosophers, Peale dedicated this structure to meditation, inscribing it with a long verse that ended with these words: “Then let me ask myself, why am I here? am I blessed with more profound reason than other Animals, if so, Lett me be thankful; let me meditate of the past, on the present and on the future.”2 This frequent association with meditative repose, poetry, and private delight made the Chinese manner appropriate for the garden, which was seen to be a place of peace and, as Peale noted, “rational Amusement.”

By the time Downing was writing about garden taste, a more archaeologically correct understanding of Chinese gardens, architecture, and decorative objects was available. Therefore his vehemence about the style and the notion of the English style originating in the Chinese can be understood as a more sophisticated understanding of what was actually Chinese. In Downing’s time, John Hare Otton made a series of drawings for proposed garden structures at Montgomery Place, one of which included an elaborate pagoda [Fig. 8]. In gardens the Chinese manner was continued in decorative details and ornament however, filtered through pattern and garden books.

-- Therese O'Malley