The Real vs the Imaginary
Sir William Chambers on the Chinese Garden
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3971985 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Yu-Sung Su (0000-0001-5021-8209, Niagara County Community College), Yu Liu (0000-0002-0016-2902, Niagara County Community College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 674-691 |
| Publication date | 2018-08-18 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The European Legacy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1084-8770 • E-ISSN: 1470-1316 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10848770.2018.1470382 |
| OpenAlex | W2804304087 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
Sir William Chambers was one of the most important English architects in the eighteenth-century, but both in his day and later his international recognition was closely connected with his admiration for and promotion of Chinese art, particularly Chinese landscaping. Between 1757 and 1773, Chambers published three treatises praising the ingenious mixture of nature and art in a Chinese pleasure ground, criticizing the then influential English gardener Lancelot (Capability) Brown, and trying to goad English garden design into the direction of China. He did not achieve his purposes mainly because he mixed what he knew as genuine about the Chinese gardening art with what he fantasized about it. While recent scholarship has focused on his fantasy, this article examines what Chambers knew or imagined about Chinese landscaping, what he and his detractors were for and against, and how the fiasco of his 1772 and 1773 treatises, which he brought upon himself, nevertheless helped to usher in a new phase in the English reception of Chinese landscaping ideas
Admiration · Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · China · Landscaping · Literature · Pleasure · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Scholarship · The Imaginary · Historical Architecture and Urbanism · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History · Law · Psychology · Scottish History and National Identity
A dissertation on oriental gardening /
Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
An Explanatory Discourse by Tan Chet-Qua, of Quang-Chew-Fu, Gent
On the Supposed Chineseness of the English Landscape Garden
William Kent
Capability Brown and the Eighteenth-Century English Landscape
Sir William Chambers and the Chinese Garden
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |