Singerie: the monkey business inside chinoiserie
The eighteenth-century fashion for painting monkeys aping human life gave a formal genre its comic streak. Christophe Huet's Chantilly rooms are the template.
Chinoiserie, Europe's decorative fantasy of an imagined China, was never entirely solemn, and its most delightful strain proves it. Singerie, from the French for monkey, is the fashion for decorative schemes in which monkeys dressed in human clothes act out human scenes, taking tea, painting portraits, going hunting, holding court. It is chinoiserie with its tongue in its cheek, and it was a serious eighteenth-century genre practiced by serious hands.
The reference point is Christophe Huet, who painted celebrated singerie rooms at the Château de Chantilly around 1735, the Grande Singerie and Petite Singerie, where elegantly dressed monkeys mingle with Chinese motifs across the panels. The joke was pointed: by putting the affairs of the aristocracy in the paws of monkeys, the decoration gently mocked the very fashions it decorated. That built-in irony is why singerie still feels contemporary. It is ornament that knows it is ornament.
For anyone drawn to traditional pattern but wary of taking it too seriously, the whimsical branch of chinoiserie is the natural home. Full hand-painted schemes in this manner exist at the top of the market, but the sensibility scales down to a papered powder room or a single panel: flowering branches and pagodas played straight, with a monkey in a waistcoat where you least expect one. The surrounding formality is what makes the gag land.
It pairs, historically and practically, with rooms that are otherwise composed. The Brighton Royal Pavilion, remodeled for the Prince Regent in the 1810s and 1820s, is chinoiserie at full theatrical volume and shows how the style thrives against architecture that plays it completely straight. The contrast is the point; whimsy needs a straight man.
The takeaway for a modern interior is that chinoiserie gives you two dials. One is the exotic-romantic register of branches and birds; the other is the comic register of singerie. Turn the second one up a little and a traditional room gains a sense of humor without losing an ounce of its manners.