William Chambers’s “Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils” in Context: An Authoritative Guide to Chinese Visual Culture

Abstract

Traditionally, William Chambers’s (1723–1796) Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils (1757) have been referred to as a pattern book designed for European architects and patrons interested in the so-called “Chinese style”. This study seeks to locate Chambers’s treatise in a broader context of both the European progress in the field of (proto-)sinology and the early modern strategies of coping with the abundance of knowledge about Chinese visual culture transferred to and disseminated in Europe. Its obvious role as a pattern book notwithstanding, Chambers’s book may be presented as a part of the phenomenon that gave rise to authoritative works of reference such as scholarly Jesuit publications, i.e., compendia aimed at structuring the chaotic influx of information and reformulating it in a universally accessible way. Drawing on the research of scholars such as Ann Blair and Georg Lehner, the first part of the article centres on the problem of structuring sinological knowledge in the early modern period and the need for scholarly syntheses. In section two, the same problem of information overload was identified with regard to Chinese artistic production and its reception in Europe. Finally, the last part offers an analysis of Chambers’s Designs as a normative work of reference conceived to simultaneously standardize knowledge about Chinese visual culture and to falsify the descriptions and illustrations included in other pattern books published at the time.