Abstract

greg m. thomas +), which also included Europe’s first modern Chinese folly, the Chinese House (1737–38). In France, the authoritative teacher and theorist Jacques- Neoclassicism + Chinoiserie François Blondel (1705–1774) — whose students included Chambers and other budding Neoclassicists — wrote in 1752 that the outer gardens of a Scholars tend to contrast Neoclassicism and Chinoiserie as opposing artistic move- country house (maison de plaisance) should deploy irregularity and diversity in ments bearing mutually exclusive trajectories of design and ideology. But these two order to complement the house through complementary opposition: ‘one aesthetic systems operated very much in tandem, as complementary facets of must find in nature enough to satisfy the view with contrasting objects which, eighteenth-century royal and aristocratic visual and material culture across Europe. in proportion to their diversity, provide just as many spaces for passing Chinese-style gardens and garden structures were almost always attached to classical alternately from the regularity of shapes to this beautiful disorder generated or Neoclassical houses and palaces, while nearly every Chinoiserie room was set by valleys, slopes, and mountains, the one raising the value of the other within a predominantly classical or Neoclassical interior. The same patrons patron- through its opposition’.