Neoclassical Chinoiserie at Menars: the Marquis de Marigny’s Chinese kiosk

Abstract

Scholars tend to contrast Neoclassicism and Chinoiserie as opposing artistic movements bearing mutually exclusive trajectories of design and ideology. But these two aesthetic systems operated very much in tandem, as complementary facets of eighteenth-century royal and aristocratic visual and material culture across Europe. Chinese-style gardens and garden structures were almost always attached to classical or Neoclassical houses and palaces, while nearly every Chinoiserie room was set within a predominantly classical or Neoclassical interior. The same patrons patronized both modes of design, which were executed by the same designers and craftspeople. William Chambers was one of the most influential advocates for Chinese design in architecture and gardens alike, but was simultaneously a major architect and theorist of Neoclassicism. As David Porter has forcefully shown, the Chinese taste in England was widely considered an overly sensual, feminine threat to the rational, masculine authority of classicism. But this was no battle of opposing schools; Chinese and Neoclassical modes of taste, design, and ideology co-existed as symbiotic partners within the same unified cultural system, logically related as yin-yang complements rather than mutually exclusive antagonists. In garden design in particular, Chinese elements appeared as part of the ‘natural’ aesthetic that spread from England, an aesthetic that was inseparably conjoined to the classical aesthetic of the main house on which each garden depended. In England itself, the same patron, Lord Burlington, built one of Europe’s first consciously Neoclassical buildings, Chiswick House (1726–29), as well as one of Europe’s first consciously naturalistic gardens, at Stowe (1730 +), which also included Europe’s first modern Chinese folly, the Chinese House (1737–38). In France, the authoritative teacher and theorist JacquesFrançois Blondel (1705–1774) — whose students included Chambers and other budding Neoclassicists — wrote in 1752 that the outer gardens of a country house (maison de plaisance) should deploy irregularity and diversity in order to complement the house through complementary opposition: ‘one must find in nature enough to satisfy the view with contrasting objects which, in proportion to their diversity, provide just as many spaces for passing alternately from the regularity of shapes to this beautiful disorder generated by valleys, slopes, and mountains, the one raising the value of the other through its opposition’. Chinese bridges, boats, pavilions, and games became doubly favored, both as material enhancers of this picturesque diversity and as signs of the broader Anglo-Chinese aesthetic of studied disorder. If the use of Chinese elements thus became a modern way to complement modern Neoclassicism, the deeper question this raises for historians concerns the nature of that complementarity; in what ways, and to what degree, were Chinese forms and ideologies seen as alien to, or compatible with, the classical? The answer varies from one patron and context to another, because the general category Chinoiserie — much like the category Neoclassicism — included diverse styles to which people attached diverse meanings. In pushing forward our growing understanding of Chinoiserie’s interrelationship with Neoclassicism, then, it is important to particularize rather than generalize, to accentuate individual cases and their specific contexts, intentions, and forms. This article examines an especially sophisticated example of compatible complementarity at the Marquis de Marigny’s estate at Menars, situated along the