Sir William Chambers and the Chinese Garden

Abstract

On the south side of the Strand, just where it widens to encompass the church of St. Mary-le-Strand, is the rather sombre entrance to Somerset House, whose much more extensive south front looks out imposingly on to the Thames. Originally intended to house the Royal Society, the Royal Academy, and various government offices, the vast building is now partly occupied by King's College, while the rest of it is the repository of all the records which fall within the department of the Registrar-General. The building was erected between 1776 and 1788; it is the chief work of its architect, Sir William Chambers, then Surveyor-General of His Majesty's Works. But eight miles to the west of the solid magnificence of Somerset House, along the trees and lawns of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, rises the exotic shape of a ten-storeyed Chinese pagoda. It stands there as a memorial to an alien streak in the mind of Chambers. This friend of Dr. Johnson, this exponent of mid-eighteenth century classicism,' had in him a strain of romantic fancy that had been nurtured in far-distant lands. William Chambers was born in 1726, and, since his family had Swedish connections, at the age of sixteen he sailed for the Far East as a supercargo on one of the ships of the Swedish East India Company. After his second voyage, at about the age of twenty, he abandoned a mercantile career to spend several years studying architecture in Italy and France, though his brother John, who had started life similarly, remained in the East India trade and amassed a large fortune. Before devoting himself permanently to architecture Chambers had spent some months in Canton, the city through which all trade between China and the outside world had to pass. The young man had been fascinated by this glimpse of a civilization so completely different from his own, and had spent a considerable part of his time ashore with his sketch-