Chinoiserie – Tea, Trade Routes and a Taste for the Exotic

This is an Avon Gardens Trust event – for full details go to the Book Tickets button. NB Avon Gardens Trust AGM at 2.30pm, followed by talk at 3pm.

Chinoiserie, an early European interest in the arts of the Far East, blossomed in Georgian Britain. It encompassed everything from furniture design and ceramics, to gardening and garden buildings. Soon, every landscape park in the country had a pagoda or tea-house; a Chinese bridge, barge or brightly painted ‘umbrella’ under which to take tea, that most fashionable of imported luxuries. This lecture examines the expanding trade routes of eighteenth-century Britain, as well as the craze for informal gardening ‘without line or level’, which had been gaining traction since William Temple’s 1685 appraisal of East Asian garden asymmetry.  It considers the full spectrum of structural accuracy to be found within British Chinoiserie, and ultimately questions just how English was the English landscape garden, after all?

Dr Laura Mayer