Overlooked Britain: Chinese Dairy, Woburn Abbey
Designed by Henry Holland for the 5th Duke of Bedford, the dairy at Woburn Abbey Gardens is steeped in Oriental flavour
Woburn’s Chinese Dairy was a most exquisite last huzzah of the Chinoiserie style that once raged across Britain and Europe.
It was designed by Henry Holland, between 1787 and 1802, when he was working for the 5th Duke of Bedford on architectural and decorative improvements to Woburn Abbey.
The interior, thanks to arched alcoves in the corners, is octagonal and as delicate as Wedgwood’s bamboodecorated ducal porcelain that once filled it. Painted in the Chinese manner, with faux-bamboo trellis work and filigree of gentlest hues, it dimly glows from the light through the oriental glass windows, painted and dated ‘Theodore Perrache fecit 1794’.
A long, covered walkway from the dairy once swept a full quarter of a mile to the house, revealing picturesque surprises at every turn. A ‘lofty palm house’ was a delightful diversion, as was ‘a statue gallery with very beautiful pillars from Italy’ that led on into ‘an interminable plantation’.
All this was relished and recorded by a particular hero of mine, Prince Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler Muskau, a German grandee exponent of landscape gardening. In the 1820s, he recorded charmful and particularly thorough observations of human and architectural idiosyncrasies he found when travelling through England.
His letters to his ex-wife – they were both in penury and had separated, he coming to England at her behest so as to find himself a rich new spouse – were to be published in his Tour in England, Ireland and France in the Years 1826, 1827, 1828 and 1829.
The prince particularly praised the arrangements at Woburn’s dairy, with ‘its unbroken arcade clothed with roses and climbing plants … over the arcade are partly chambers, partly the prettiest little greenhouses. One of them contains nothing but heaths, hundreds of which, in full blow, present the loveliest picture, endlessly multiplied by walls of mirror.’
The prince gave poetic life to the arrangements: the Chinese temple look, decorated with a profusion of marble and coloured glass. In the centre, he wrote, is a fountain and around the walls hundreds of large dishes and bowls, of Chinese and Japanese porcelain of every form and colour, filled with new milk and cream.
The windows are of ground glass, with Chinese painting, which shows fantastically, even by the dim light. Their shelf and the dado above them, as well as the floor beneath them, are all of grey marble.
The little pagoda roof sits atop a fretworked, octagonal lantern, while tasselled lanterns have recently been reinstated to hang from every arch along the façade.
For all the architectural details, Holland drew heavily on Sir William Chambers’s Designs for Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines and Utensils of 1757.
Chambers was an architect who knew what he was talking about. Five years later, in 1762, he designed the Great Pagoda at Kew. This, incidentally, has recently been superbly restored, with Historic Royal Palaces having remade and reinstated 80 of the original dragons – missing for over 200 years – to leap forth once again from the roofs of all ten
storeys of the building. Hand-scanned and printed in 3D in brilliant, metallic hues, these creatures are a triumph indeed.
I fear that the prince also revelled in Billy the rat-killing dog, who was wagered to kill 100 rats in five minutes. The prince also described a fête given by the Marquess of Hertford, in rooms carpeted in ‘flesh red’, as ‘magnificently boring’.
He wrote delightedly of ‘a famous clerical foxhunter, who always carried a tame fox in his pocket, that if they did not happen to find one they might be sure of a run.
‘The animal was so well trained that he amused the hounds for a time; and when he was tired of running, took refuge in his inviolable retreat – which was no other than the altar of the parish church. There was a hole broken for him in the church wall, and a comfortable bed made under the steps. This is right English tradition.’
The Chinoiserie style, exotic, curious and consistently charming, was the European interpretation and imitation of Chinese and East Asian artistic traditions, especially in the decorative arts, garden design, architecture, literature, theatre, and music.
First appearing in the 17th century, it was popularised in the 18th century. The rise in trade with the Orient resulted in a host of architecturally fantastical buildings – all of them winners.
What about the Chinese Palace – La Casina alla Cinese – in Palermo, built for the Bourbon of Naples, between 1799 and 1806? With its pagoda roof, along with columns and pillars galore, and an interior with dozens of delicately painted frescoes, this is eclecticism at its exhilarating best.
So too is the rare beauty of the Chinese House in Sanssouci Park at Potsdam in Germany, built for Frederick the Great between 1755 and 1764. Here, almost life-size gilded figures abound, with a golden woman under a parasol atop the cupola crowning the roof.
In England, too, Chinoiserie was to enchant. Take the 1760 Chinese room at Claydon in Buckinghamshire, with its carvings by Luke Lightfoot. A feast of woodwork, all painted white, it is like whipped cream or icing sugar, making you lick your lips at its sheer delectability.
With its fantastical elaborations, Chinoiserie was related to the Rococo movement. Both movements were characterised by exuberant decoration, asymmetry, a delight in materials and stylised nature, with a subject matter that relished leisure and pleasure.
Chinoiserie was especially linked with subjects that were thought by colonialera Europeans to be typical of Chinese culture. At Claydon, tea-drinking is most elegantly in evidence.
Chinoiserie became part of European art and decoration in the mid-to-late17th century. Its popularity peaked around the middle of the 18th century when it was associated with the Rococo style. It was particularly popularised by the influx of Chinese and Indian goods brought annually to Europe by Dutch, French and Swedish East India Companies. Though the style never fully went out of fashion, by the 1760s it was declining in Europe, as the neoclassical style forged to the fore.
Good fortune is ours that the English chose to embrace the Chinese style to the extent that they did. Such fancies seldom took flight in Scotland and, as far as I know, never in Northern Ireland or Wales.
The European version of the Chinese style, mocked by many for its unruly flights of fancy, was, by its very nature, invigoratingly original.
The lake was filled with carp, and Woburn’s records reveal the most pleasing detail that it was a regular occurrence for the 6th Duke of Bedford to rise each morning at 6am to feed the fish.