French Landscape Garden - The Chinese Influence On The French Landscape Garden

The Chinese Influence On The French Landscape Garden

In 1743, Father Attiret, a French Jesuit priest and painter in service to the Emperor of China, wrote a series of letters describing the Chinese gardens he had seen. In particular he described the Emperor's summer residence, Yuanming Yuan near Beijing:

A beautiful disorder reigns almost everywhere. An anti-symmetry. Everything works on this principle: it is a pastoral and natural countryside that one wants to represent: a solitude and not a well-ordered palace following all the rules of symmetry and proportions."

Attiret's letters were a success in both France and in England, where they were translated and published in 1752. They had an important influence on what became known as the Anglo-Chinese garden.

In 1757 Sir William Chambers, an English writer and traveler who made three trips to China, published a book called The Drawings, buildings, furniture, habits, machines and utensils of the Chinese, with a chapter about gardens. The book was quickly translated into French. Chambers brought to Europe the Chinese idea that gardens should be composed of a series of scenes which evoke different emotions, ranging from enchantment to horror to laughter. Chambers wrote, "The enchanted or romanesque scenes abound in the marvelous. They provoke a series of violent or opposing sensations; footpaths leading down to underground passages where mysterious lights reveal strange groupings; winding roads which pass through beautiful forests leading to precipices or melancholy rivers lined with funerary monuments shaded by laurels and willows. The horrible scenes present hanging rocks, cataracts, caverns, dead tree broken by the storm, burnt or shattered by lightning, and buildings in ruins... The scenes of horror are only one act in a theatrical production that usually ends in a soothing extended perspective, simple forms and beautiful colors. The laughing scenes make one forget the enchantment and the horror of the landscapes that one has passed through."

Chambers became the creator of the first Chinese garden in Europe, complete with a Chinese pagoda, at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, in the southwest of London. Chambers' book and the Chinese garden he created at Kew Gardens brought Chinese gardens into fashion in both England and France. Landscape gardens in France began to include artificial hills, pagodas, and promenades designed to provoke emotions ranging from melancholy to sadness to joy.