Sir William Chambers and Kew Gardens

Sir William Chambers played a positive role in promoting artistic exchanges between the East and the West and in the development of English landscape garden movement. By introducing his life and literary works on Chinese architectures and gardens, this paper sorts out the reasons, developments and viewpoints of Chambers’ cognition on Chinese garden art. Based on this, it sets forth the background, characteristics and changes in the construction of Kew Garden in Chamber’s era, and sums up the characteristics of picturesque gardens pioneered by Chambers. Different from Kent and Brown’s views on the relationship between nature and art, Chambers proposed that the garden art was originated from nature and higher than nature, and he made bold experiments in the integration of nature and art.