Jardins Anglo-Chinois
Kew Gardens, near London, could be called the model Anglo-Chinese garden; it was originally laid out by William Kent in the 1730s. Beginning in 1760, William Chambers (1723-96), an architect who had visited China in 1744 and again in 1748, began to embellish it with buildings in exotic styles. Kew contained a higher concentration of follies than most English landscape gardens; the pagoda is the most famous of these buildings, but there were also a Chinese temple, a mosque, an Alhambra, a ruined Roman arch, and more than 20 classical temples.
William Chambers didn't like the spare simplicity of Capability Brown's landscape gardens, and he expressed his feelings in his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, which was published in 1772. This was his plea for gardens in which form, texture and color could be used to awaken curiosity and to evoke sensations of pleasure, surprise or alarm. He was not alone in this; a number of eighteenth century thinkers suggested that the human mind is passive, that the mind merely receives impulses and directions from the surrounding environment and that all emotions, including sublime feelings, could be evoked by the proper stimuli. These ideas led to the picturesque gardens of late eighteenth century England.
In 1771 Francois-de-Paul Latpie (1739 - 1823) published his translation of Thomas Whately's Observations on Modern Gardening under the title L' Art de former les jardins modernes, this was one of the first books to introduce English landscape gardens to the French. To Whately's text, Latpie added a description and plan of Stowe and a short history of gardens. In this history he stated that the English landscape style was derived from Chinese gardens, and to support his case he included lengthy quotes from Attiret and from William Chambers' 1757 book Designs of Chinese Buildings.
This attitude towards English gardens was supported by George-Louis Le Rouge's Details de nouveaux jardins a la mode, which was published in 21 parts (or cahiers) between 1776 and 1787 and contained many pictures of English landscape gardens. Cahier V was a French edition of William Chambers' Designs of Chinese Buildings; Cahier VII was about the Desert de Retz, one of the most eccentric of the Anglo-Chinese gardens; while Cahiers XIV and XVII show Imperial Chinese gardens and palaces, these were engraved reproductions of original Chinese paintings. In Cahier XV, La Rouge wrote "everyone knows that English gardens are only
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