A George III Sino-“Gothick” door surround. Ca. 1760

George III Sino-“Gothick” door surround. Ca. 1760. Installed on the west wall of the dining room. Surround: 10’ 9” x 6’ 2”; door (later): 6’ 5” x 3’ 5 ½”. The arc of Georgian architecture is largely modes of neoclassicism. The vocabulary of Roman (and, increasingly, Greek) architecture was filtered through various vernaculars until it settled in its own particularly British forms. There was, however, a series of counter-movements that ultimately found their flowering in the XIXc. The early forms, of which the present door surround is a rare and beguiling example, reflect a wide range of influences. In 1749 — the heart of the Georgian era — Walpole’s Strawberry Hill House set off a new phase of Gothic architecture in the UK Georgian Gothic (spelled “Gothick” rather pejoratively by the Victorians, a sticky moniker) went through various phases; the present item fits well into Kenneth Clark’s “Rococo Gothic” — a term banished for a while but now resurgent thanks to Lindfield’s 2016 monogra