China and the West

Hogarth, William. The analysis of beauty [ID D27291].
"How absolutely void of these turns are the pagodas of China, and what a mean taste runs thro' most of their attempts in painting and sculpture, notwithstanding they finish with such excessive neatness."
"There is at present such a thirst after variety, that even paltry imitations of Chinese buildings have a kind of vogue, chiefly on account of their novelty : but not only these, but any other new-invented characters of building might be regulated by proper principles."

David Porter : As an outspoken champion of the rococo style, Hogarth would presumably have found in Chinese and Chinese-styled wares more generally a set of decorative principles much in accord with his own. One might reasonably expect Hogarth to recognize and acknowledge the considerable aesthetic appeal of the Chinese goods his readers purchased and admired. Hogarth's criticism of Chinese art on the grounds that it did not adhere to conventions of naturalistic representation was a commonplace one at the time. Although Hogarth rejected a classicist conception of nature as idealized form, he believed strongly that nature, in its infinite variety, was the artist's most trustworthy guide. To the extent, then, that certain genres of Chinese and Chinese-inspired art seemed to flout familiar standards of verisimilitude, they were beyond the pale of even Hogarth's post-classicist sensibilities. Furthermore, the popularity of the Chinese style surely grated on Hogarth's keenly developed sense of aesthetic nationalism. Hogarth's repeated insistence on the worthlessness of the Chinese style, I suggest, is intimately bound up with his perplexing silence on the question of female aesthetic agency.