Scholars tend to contrast Neoclassicism and Chinoiserie as opposing artistic movements bearing mutually exclusive trajectories of design and ideology. But these two aesthetic systems operated very much in tandem, as complementary facets of eighteenth-century royal and aristocratic visual and material culture across Europe. Chinese-style gardens and garden structures were almost always attached to classical or Neoclassical houses and palaces, while nearly every Chinoiserie room was set within a predominantly classical or Neoclassical interior. The same patrons patronized both modes of design, which were executed by the same designers and craftspeople. William Chambers was one of the most influential advocates for Chinese design in architecture and gardens alike, but was simultaneously a major architect and theorist of Neoclassicism. As David Porter has forcefully shown, the Chinese taste in England was widely considered an overly sensual, feminine threat to the rational, masculine authority of classicism.1 But this was no battle of opposing schools; Chinese and Neoclassical modes of taste, design, and ideology co-existed as symbiotic partners within the same unified cultural system, logically related as yin-yang complements rather than mutually exclusive antagonists.
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