Chinese Pagoda
Category
Architecture / Exteriors
Date
1867
Materials
Wood & Concrete
Order this imageCollection
Cliveden Estate, Buckinghamshire
NT 766367
Summary
Pavilion, painted and gilded cast stone, wood, canvas, paint and metal, of hexagonal plan and open structure consisting of six columns connected at their bases by a balustrade and at their tops with an openwork frieze. Each column with four curved brackets at the top from which small bells are suspended. Surmounted by a concave roof with upswept corners, leading up to a smaller lantern structure, its sides with fretwork framing round central openings, topped with another concave roof with upswept corners, centring on a finial mounted with a figure of a dragon-like creature, painted in shades of green with gilded highlights, with a painting of a parrot-like bird in flight surrounded by a decorative border on the interior of the roof of the lantern.
Full description
This pavilion was traditionally called ‘the pagoda’, reflecting the hazy Western perceptions of East-Asian architecture. The fact that a ‘Chinese’ pavilion was made the centrepiece of a ‘Japanese’ garden was another sign of that generalised, orientalist perspective on East Asia. In fact, the visual origins of this particular pavilion also illustrate the mechanisms of repeated copying and the preference for Western models when representing ‘Asia’ characteristic of orientalist (or chinoiserie, or Chinese-style) design. The pavilion created for the 1867 Paris exhibition and appears to have been based on a ‘Pavillon Chinois’ that was constructed in the garden at the château de Romainville, near Ecquevilly west of Paris, in about 1780, and was illustrated in the garden design compendium entitled Jardins Anglo-Chinois by Georges Louis Le Rouge, which was published between 1776 and 1788. The Pavillon Chinois at Romainville, in turn, appears to have been inspired by an illustration (plate 4) in William Chamber’s book Designs of Chinese Buildings (1757). So the Cliveden pavilion is inspired by the illustrations in Le Rouge’s compendium, which represented a pavilion constructed at Romainville, which was inspired by the illustration in Chambers’s book, which was based on memories and sketches of what Chambers had observed in and around Guangzhou when he was an employee of the Swedish East India Company in the 1740s. The Romainville pavilion, which had been lost, was recreated in 1996 based on the Cliveden pavilion. Apart from the two-tier roof, other details of the Cliveden pavilion are also direct echoes of Chambers’s illustration, such as the balustrade, the frieze between the tops of the pillars and the relatively slender brackets – by way of Chambers’s sketches, or perhaps in the process of turning those sketches into book illustrations, the sturdy brackets commonly used in Chinese architecture as part of pillar and roof structures were ‘translated’ into relatively thin, tubelike ornamental features. As well as the painting of the bird in flight on the roof of the lantern, there were previously also paintings on the concave interior surfaces of the lower level of the roof, representing bird and flower vignettes within oval borders. They are currently in store due to their fragility. The pavilion was restored in 2014 when its colour scheme, which was then blue and red, was changed back to an earlier scheme of green and gold, which had been rediscovered through paint analysis. The small bells, which had mostly been lost over time, were recreated and reinstalled in c. 2015.
Provenance
Originally constructed for the grounds of the Exposition Universelle (Universal Exhibition) held in Paris in 1867; purchased by Richard Seymour-Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford (1800-1870), at the close of the 1867 Paris exhibition, and moved to the grounds of the château de Bagatelle, in the Bois de Boulogne on the outskirts of Paris; purchased by William Waldorf Astor, 1st Viscount Astor (1848–1919), in 1900 and installed in the garden at Cliveden, c. 1904; donated to the National Trust, together with the house and estate at Cliveden, by Waldorf Astor, 2nd Viscount Astor (1879–1952), 1942.