January 2009

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The setting for this exuberant show surveying four centuries of the English flirtation with the exotic East is Brighton Pavilion’s Indian stables, designed by William Porden in 1804 and now Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. Its biggest exhibit, on the far side of the garden, is the Pavilion itself. Spruced up and reinterpreted for this show, it is well worth a journey to Brighton on its own.

Immediately on entering the three galleries allocated to ‘Chinese Whispers’, there is an intense visual shock of colour and texture, as well as unfamiliar asymmetrical forms and playful ornament. Viewers discover the exhibits in a broadly chronological sequence by taking a winding path between plinths, with surprises at each turn. The objects, each intricate in form and complex in ornament, are set closely together against lacquer-red, silvery green or black walls, and the first room is further enriched with panels painted after John Stalker and George Parker’s 1688 Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing, a guide to imitation lacquer for late-Stuart decorators. These deep colours are the backdrop to a crowded display of gilded silver, ormolu-mounted porcelain, Vanderbank tapestry, painted silks and flowery chintzes.

In three galleries, this exhibition cannot claim to be comprehensive, nor the last word on the fluctuating English – not British – taste for ‘Indian’ novelties, from the potential for sexual encounters in the china shops of the New Exchange in London mocked by Ben Jonson in 1609, to the transgressive 1920s Chinese bed-room of Fleur Forsyte, as described by John Galsworthy and here recreated (although sadly without her white Pekinese).

As the first assessment of this subject for 70 years, the exhibition and its accompanying book benefit from recent research in both the decorative arts and the history of garden design. A recent discovery is a panel from Bolsover Castle, painted for William Cavendish around 1620 with restrained oriental motifs. The curators have brought together some delicious surprises, such as a beautifully restored japanned cabinet on a silvered stand of around 1700 (Fig. 2). Decorated in London with flowers and with delightful scenes of children playing, gowned ladies at low tables or wandering in gardens and over bridges, it evokes the escapist world that was associated with the pleasures of taking tea, collecting porcelain and the ornament of ladies’ closets.

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