Sir William Chambers' Grand Tour: reconciling orientalism and classicism

This research project examined the influence of Chinese architecture and landscape on the work and ideas of William Chambers, British architect and garden designer in the mid-eighteenth century, in the context of his Grand Tour (1750–5). Noted for his elegant classical buildings, such as Somerset House in London, and his garden designs, most famously Kew Gardens, Chambers possessed an unusually international outlook, having been born in Sweden, educated in England, France and Italy, and having visited India and China during his employment with the Swedish East India Company. One of the aims of my research was to ascertain to what extent this international perspective influenced Chambers's work, in particular how his four-year residency in Rome helped shape his understanding of garden design and landscape. The research entailed detailed investigations of Chambers's so-called French-Italian Folio (Victoria and Albert Museum), which reveals how much the architect was interested in gardens and exotic forms found in Mannerist and Rococo design.

My investigations of Rome during Chambers's Grand Tour revealed how the city was in the grip of ‘oriental-mania’, highlighted in the construction of extravagant macchine for festivals (such as the Festa della Chinea and the annual Masquerade) that entailed temporary transformations of public spaces and streets into exotic landscapes. It is likely that these spectacles had a particular impact on Chambers's design sensibilities, not least the manner in which urban topography could be reinvented to accommodate ‘alien’ architectural bodies and settings such as Chinese pagodas, pavilions and gardens. My research considers these interventions in Rome in the light of his earlier encounters in Canton and his later designs of ‘oriental’ pavilions at Kew Gardens, such as the so-called House of Confucius and the famous pagoda. The research speculates that Chambers sought, in varying ways, to reconcile his interest in oriental gardens with his classical training under Jacques-François Blondel in Paris. Whilst we do not have any written accounts by Chambers of his four-year sojourn in Rome, his French-Italian Folio provides evidence that he saw both landscape and ornament as vehicles for this dialogue, in the manner in which buildings acquire a certain autonomy of identity, at both the macro and micro scales, and at the same time create possibilities for connected topographical itineraries, as demonstrated at Kew.

A key objective of the research was to situate Chambers's interest in things oriental within the more general context of the reception of China in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on the role of Rome in the dissemination of knowledge about Chinese art, architecture, religion and politics to the rest of Europe. My investigations highlighted a significant shift in the nature of this reception, from an essentially ethnographic approach to Chinese language and culture during the seventeenth century (implemented by Jesuit missionaries at the imperial court in Beijing and by Athanasius Kircher at the Collegio Romano in Rome), to a dominant aesthetic and representational interest in Chinese gardens in the eighteenth century and their potential appropriation to European landscapes, expressed in the paintings and etchings of Matteo Ripa, Jean Denis Attiret and Giuseppe Castiglione. Chambers's work should be considered in the light of this second phase in the European reception of China, as my research has sought to demonstrate.

Most of the initial research took place in the libraries of the Vatican, American Academy and the British School at Rome, where I undertook close readings of general studies of the Grand Tour, diaries/accounts of eighteenth-century travellers to Italy, and key texts on China and Asia from the seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries. In addition a series of special visits to other institutions, museums and monuments were organized that had a direct bearing on the research, including the former Collegio Romano in Rome and the Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘L'Orientale’.