What is chinoiserie? And what is grisaille?

Both terms get used loosely, and both describe techniques that are still doing real work in interiors. Worth being precise about what they actually are.

Chinoiserie

Chinoiserie is a European decorative style. That sentence is the whole point and it is the part most often missed.

It emerged from the seventeenth-century European trade in Chinese and Japanese goods — porcelain, lacquer, painted silk and wallpaper — and from the near-total absence of first-hand knowledge about the places those goods came from. European craftsmen copied what arrived, then improvised around it, then improvised around the improvisations. What resulted is a coherent decorative language: flowering branches, birds, pavilions, arched bridges, small figures in landscape, all arranged asymmetrically on an open ground, with a lightness and sense of air that European ornament of the same period otherwise lacks.

It reached its peak in the middle of the eighteenth century, alongside rococo, and it has never really gone away.

How it is painted

The ground is most of the decision.

• On tinted gesso or a soft distemper ground, chinoiserie is papery and delicate — closest to the painted wallpapers that inspired it.
• On silver or white gold leaf, the whole thing changes. Light passes through the thin colour, hits the metal and comes back, so branches appear to float in front of a luminous field. This is the version people remember from grand rooms, and it is why chinoiserie panels are so often gilded first.
• On lacquer-effect black or oxblood, it becomes dense and jewel-like, closer to the imported lacquerwork than to the wallpaper.

The painting itself is done panel by panel rather than as a repeat, which is what separates hand-painted chinoiserie from printed papers that imitate it. A repeat has to work anywhere; a painted scheme can be composed across a whole room, so a branch continues around a corner, birds are placed where the eye lands, and the density thins where the furniture will stand.

Using it now

Chinoiserie sits surprisingly well in contemporary rooms, on one condition: it should be the only decorative event. On a single feature wall, inside a set of panels, or in a dining room where everything else is plain, it reads as confident. Distributed over four walls plus curtains plus upholstery, it reads as a theme.

Grisaille

Grisaille is painting executed entirely in shades of a single colour — from the French gris, grey.

Its historic purpose was frankly economic: to give a flat surface the appearance of carved stone relief, sculpture and architectural enrichment at a fraction of the cost of actually carving it. Painted grisaille friezes, medallions, swags and figures did the work of stonework in houses that could not afford stonework, and in churches where a full polychrome scheme would have been inappropriate.

It had two other uses. Painters used grisaille as an underpainting layer, modelling form in monochrome before glazing colour over it — the value structure is easier to judge without hue in the way. And Northern Renaissance painters used it on the exteriors of altarpiece wings, so that closed panels appeared to be carved statuary until the wings opened onto full colour.

Why it still works

Three reasons.

It is the honest way to fake relief. Because it removes colour entirely, the illusion depends on nothing but value and light direction — which is exactly what real relief depends on. Painted relief in full colour almost always looks painted. In grisaille it very often does not.

It is quiet. A room can take a great deal of grisaille without feeling decorated, because there is no hue competing with anything else. It works in interiors where full ornament would be too much.

It is affordable enrichment. A grisaille frieze around a ceiling costs a fraction of plaster enrichment and can be sized precisely to the room rather than bought in a standard profile.

The variants

Strictly, grisaille is grey. The same monochrome method in browns is brunaille; in golds and yellows, cirage. In practice, most studios say grisaille and specify the colour separately.

They belong together more often than you would think

Both traditions do the same underlying job: they give a room structure and incident without adding objects to it.

And they pair unexpectedly well. Chinoiserie panels supply the event; grisaille supplies the architecture that frames it — a painted moulding run, a monochrome frieze, a false cornice. One is warm, open and asymmetrical; the other is cool, structured and symmetrical. Used together, each stops the other from becoming too much of itself.

---

Le Grande Studios paints chinoiserie, grisaille and hand-cut stencilled ornament across Los Angeles. See decorative painting or start a conversation.