The Importance of the Chinese Connection: The Origin of the English Garden

Abstract

In the first half of the eighteenth century landscaping fashions in England changed drastically from the formal to the informal or from an obedient conformity with classical art to an enthusiastic association with nature. Even before the process was completed in the 1750s, however, the idea of its origin began to bother those English writers who were most passionate about the subject. They were annoyed not only to hear that their prized English ingenuity had an alien origin, but to find that the perpetrators of the idea were French. “Whatever may have been reported, whether truly or falsely, of the Chinese Gardens,” a vexed Richard Cambridge wrote in 1756, “it is certain that we are the first Europeans to have founded their taste.”1 Cambridge, who is often quoted to show that the English denied any debt to Chinese design from the very beginning, here casts doubt on the Chinese connection by characterizing the supposed Chinese origin of the new English garden as nothing more than a rumor. It was “a little difficult for the English observer to see,” Olver Impey later recalls of the typical response, “just why the English landscape garden or park should have been called, in France, the jardin anglo-chinois.”2 “Indeed,” as John Dixon Hunt likewise points out, “many in the eighteenth century would have claimed that, like Liberty, with which it was often compared, the landscape garden was an English invention.”3 In retrospect, Cambridge and others were not