Cole & Son | Japanese Chinoiserie - Grasscloth

Chinoiserie has always been a European idea of the East, and Japanese Chinoiserie is candid about that. It is a composed landscape, assembled from several Japanese gardens rather than copied from one. The panel runs 140 cm wide and 3.5 m high, and the composition is read vertically: hills at the base, a stream that cascades through the middle, blossom and branch carried up into the top third.

The drawing has a calligrapher's economy. A single stroke gives a branch its whole taper; the water is described in a handful of lines and left. Sakura appears where a real garden would place it, at the turn of a path or over water, and the eye is led rather than shown. On natural grasscloth all of this gains a further texture, the woven fibre catching light unevenly across the panel so the scene shifts a little through the day.

Panels hang to a straight match. Because the design is a scene rather than a repeat, it rewards planning: measure the wall first, then decide where the horizon and the blossom should fall in relation to a dado, a bed head or a chimney breast. In a bedroom, a dining room or a small entrance hall, one run of it is usually enough.