CHINOISERIE is a French word that means “in the Chinese taste”. It describes a European style of decorative ornament that was wildly popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and still looks great today. Scenes of the Orient abound on textiles, wallpapers, pottery, porcelain, and lacquered and painted furniture. Owning a piece of Chinoiserie (or, “japanned” furniture, as some pieces were called) was the height of fashion. The interesting thing about Chinoiserie is the tremendous range and variety of Oriental scenes and fantastical decorative details - Chinese people in elaborate robes with coolie hats, long pigtails and mustaches; intricately detailed pagodas with layer upon layer of fretwork, tassels, and bells; or monkeys, lions, and elephants in costume. Our endless fascination with exotic locales gives the designs relevance even today.
Why Chinoiserie at all? Europeans’ fascination with the Far East began in Marco Polo’s day, in the thirteenth century. At a time when few people traveled the world, exotic goods such as silk fabrics, carpets and porcelain reached Europe via a trading route known as the Silk Road, which carried goods by cart and camel across the entire continent of Asia. This ancient road was a bridge connecting the major cultures of the world. China and Japan were sophisticated and complex cultures at that time, with a long history of art. (In fact, in the 8th century, when Europe was in the Dark Ages, Chinese artists were inventing Impressionism!) For wealthy Europeans, owning artifacts from the Far East was a status symbol. With these artifacts came stories from the traders of the amazing temples and pagodas they had seen and the strange costumes and appearance of the Oriental people. Cultures from Persia all the way to China were called “Oriental” by the Europeans. They made little effort to distinguish one people from another, and the fanciful designs of Chinoiserie often blend Chinese, Japanese and Persian or Indian elements. Today we know that the “Orient” at the time was really the current-day Middle East, and “Asian” is the only correct term for the peoples of the Asian continent. But because of this long-ago misnomer, it is not uncommon to hear some people still refer to Chinoiserie as “Oriental” art.
Hundreds of years before photography, Marco Polo was the first well-known westerner to travel all the way to China, returning to Italy seventeen years later and describing architecture, art and costume that sounded like fantasy. When his accounts were published in 1295 they were known as “the million lies”. Europeans simply did not believe his stories, but because China closed itself off from most foreigners several years later, Marco Polo’s vision of Asia was, for nearly two hundred years, the only commonly known information, and it became deeply ingrained in the western mind. In the sixteenth century, when trade routes opened up again and sparked a craze for Oriental goods, it was Marco Polo’s China on the minds of Europeans.
What most people don’t realize about Chinoiserie is that the style doesn’t come from China at all. [click to continue…]
