The importance of the Chinese connection: The origin of the English garden

Eighteenth-Century Life

Volumn 27, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 70-98

  Liu, Yu ^a  

^a and Social Science

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EID: 60949747026     PISSN: 00982601     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00982601-27-3-70     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. Qtd. in Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathy (London: John Murray, 1961), 163.
2. Chinoiserie: The Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decoration (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1977), 129.
3. The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ., 1976), xi.
4. On Modern Gardening, ed. Rebecca More (Hackney: Stourton, 1987), 52. All quotations from Walpole will be from More's edn.
5. Alexander Pope, The Odyssey of Homer, ed. Maynard Mack (London: Methuen), VII, l. 144.
6. Miscellanies in Verse and Prose (London: James Knapton, 1693), 138-39.
7. Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England (New York: Oxford Univ., 1925), 13.
8. The English Garden: A Poem. 3rd edn. (London, 1778), ll. 65-66.
9. The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ., 1973), 122.
10. Timothy Mowl, Gentlemen and Players: Gardeners of the English Landscape (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), 150, 33.
11. Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge, 2nd edn. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), IV, ll. 241-43.
12. John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, in The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620-1820, ed. Hunt and Willis (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 79.
13. "Intro." to Horace Walpole's essay, The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening (New York: Ursus, 1995), 9.
14. Landscape into Art (London: John Murray, 1949), 66.
15. The best account of Chambers' interest in the Chinese garden is still R. C. Bald, "Sir William Chambers and the Chinese Garden," Journal of the History of Ideas 11 (1950): 287-320,
16. rep. in Discovering China: European Interpretations in the Enlightenment, ed. Julia Ching and Willard G. Oxtoby (Rochester: Univ. of Rochester, 1992), pp. 142-75. Though giving Chambers credit for basing much of his discussion about the Chinese style on his trip to Canton and on his readings of Jesuit publications on the subject, Bald overlooks the crucial fact that Chambers did not just believe that "Englishmen could learn from having the correct Chinese model before them" (145) but also regarded the English landscaping revolution as an imitation of the Chinese style. Since he really wished English gardeners to imitate the Chinese in the right way, and since he had what Bald judges to have been a good understanding of the Chinese idea about "the reconciliation of architecture and planting, cultivation and the wild, past and present, into one harmonious whole," his criticism of Capability Brown is not necessarily an example of what Bald calls "the well-established literary convention by which the Chinese . . . were endowed with all the skill and virtue Europeans did not possess: and exposed "the shortcomings of Europe . . . either by implication or specific comparison" (175, 149).
17. In The Works of Sir William Temple. 4 vols. (New York: Greenwood, 1968), 3:237.
18. In order to appreciate the revolutionary implication of sharawadgi or irregular beauty, it is important to remember that the word " asymmetry" was coined by John Evelyn in the second half of the 17th c. and that he used it in an unmistakably pejorative sense. "Distressed in particular by the barbarous irregularity of the city [London], 'its asymmetrie within the Walls,' as he phrased it, he deplored that in the case of the destruction of a street by fire the municipal authorities had no power to compel the owners to rebuild with uniformity." "What is significant," Allen goes on to point out, "is his concern for symmetry - evidence of his complete adoption of the Renaissance point of view" (B. Sprague Allen, Tides in English Taste (1619-1800) [Cambridge: Harvard Univ., 1937], 36).
19. The Moralists, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. John M. Robertson. Introduction by Stanley Grean. 2 vols, in 1 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 2:125.
20. Joseph Addison, Spectator #414 (25 June 1712), in The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, ed. Erin Mackie (Boston: Bedford, 1998), 394.
21. Guardian #173 (29 Sept. 1713), in The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Norman Ault (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1977), 148.
22. Thomas Twining, "Dissertation I," Aristotle's Treatise on Poetry (1789; rep., Westmead, U.K.: Gregg, 1972), 31.
23. Matthew Concanen, "A Miscellany on Taste," qtd. in Morris R. Brownell, Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 123.
24. "Spring," in Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams vol. 1, Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope (London: Methuen, 1961), ll. 1-2.
25. "Preface," in The Iliad of Homer, Books I - IX, ed. Maynard Mack (London: Methuen, 1967), l. 3.
26. "The Chinese Origin of a Romanticism," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 32 (1933): 3.
27. The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated (1728; rep. New York: Garland, 1982), 116.
28. New Principles of Gardening (London, 1728), iv.
29. Christopher Hussey, English Gardens and Landscapes 1700-1750 (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1967), 21.
30. David Leatherbarrow, "Character, Geometry and Perspective: The Third Earl of Shaftesbury's Principles of Garden Design," Journal of Garden History 4 (1974): 332-58.
31. The difference between Chinese and European garden designs was so well-known at the end of the 17th c. that even the stage direction for an operatic performance of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream would have it set in "a transparent prospect of a Chinese garden, the Architecture, the Trees, the Plants, the Fruit, the Birds, the Beasts, quite different from what we have in this part of the world" (quoted in Jonathan D. Spence's The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds [New York: Norton, 1998], 65). Was Spence referring to Henry Purcell's Fairy-Queen, first produced in 1692? He doesn't mention the name and date of the piece.
32. John Nieuhoff, An Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces to the Grand Tartar Cham, Empereur of China (London, 1669), 129.
33. China and France, Or Two Treaties (London, 1676), 75.
34. Louis le Comte, Memoirs and Observations, 2nd edn. (London, 1698), 159.
35. Basil Gray, "Lord Burlington and Father Ripa's Chinese Engravings," British Museum Quarterly 22 (1960): 40-43.
36. In "English Neo-Palladianism, the Landscape Garden, China, and the Enlightenment" (L'Arte 6 (1969): 18-35), Rudolf Wittkower makes the forceful claim that "Ripa's views of Chinese gardens arrived at a decisive moment, namely when William Kent, Burlington's closest collaborator, was beginning to plan what was perhaps the first partly natural garden for the Earl's Chiswick villa" (28).
37. "China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth Century" Quarterly Bulletin of Chinese Bibliography (1940): 376;
38. "A Note on Sharawadgi," Modern Language Notes 45 (1930): 223.
39. The Craft of Gardens, trans. Alison Hardie (New Haven: Yale Univ., 1988), 39-40.
40. "Those who understand classical Chinese gardens," Wang Yi points out, "are aware that the soul of this art is not to be found in the specific scene wrought from hills, ponds, flowers, and trees or from the architectural creations set within the garden's confines, but rather resides in the philosophical spirit and ideals of human character invested in these scenic objects" ("Interior Display and its Relation to External Spaces in Traditional Chinese Gardens," Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 18 [1998], 241).
41. "Epistle to Burlington," in Epistle to Several Persons (Moral Essays), ed. F. W. Bateson (London: Methuen), ll. 47-50.
42. Gardens of China (New York: Ronald, 1949), 3.
43. Qtd. in John Dixon Hunt, William Kent: Landscape Garden Designer (London: A. Zwemmer, 1987), 46.
44. "Letter of 22 June [1722]" in Correspondence, ed. William Courthope, vol. 4 of The Works of Alexander Pope (London, 1886), 301.
45. Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. van Kley Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 3, bk 1. Trade, Missions, Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1993), 591.
46. Arnold H. Rowbotham, "The Impact of Confucianism on Seventeenth-Century Europe," Far Eastern Quarterly 4 (1944-45): 225.
47. John E. Wills, Jr. 1688: A Global History (New York: Norton, 2001), 141.
48. "The Temple of Fame," in The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson (London: Methuen, 1940), ll. 107, 108.
49. "Windsor-Forest," in Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams (London: Methuen, 1961), ll. 7-16.
50. Science and Civilization in China. 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1956), 2:302.
51. Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1986), 14.
52. Capability Brown and the Eighteenth-Century English Landscape (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 37.
53. Qtd. in Letters of Hannah More, ed. Annette M. B. Meakin (London, 1911), 172.
54. The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1750-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1972), 37.
55. James Thomson, "Autumn," in The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 1060.
56. Honour, Chinoiserie, 152,
57. Jacobson, Chinoiserie (London: Phaidon, 1993), 160.
58. Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford Univ., 2001), 171.
59. See also David Porter, "From Chinese to Goth: Walpole and the Gothic Repudiation of Chinoiserie," Eighteenth-Century Life 23 (1999): 46-58,
60. "Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Chinese Taste," Eighteenth-Century Studies 35 (2002): 395-411.