Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art 9781501335488, 9781501335518, 9781501335501

Citation preview

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

i

ii

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds Global and Local Geographies of Art Edited by Stacey Sloboda and Michael Yonan

iii

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Stacey Sloboda, Michael Yonan, and Contributors, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xvii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: Utagawa Toyoharu,The Bell that Rings for 10,000 Leagues in the Dutch Port of Frankai, c. 1760. Color woodblock print on paper. Kobe City Museum, Kobe, Japan (Photo: TMN Image Archives) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

HB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-5013-3548-8 978-1-5013-3550-1 978-1-5013-3549-5

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

iv

In memory of Mary D. Sheriff

v

vi

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14

Introduction: Mapping Global Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds Stacey Sloboda and Michael Yonan Flowering Stone: The Aesthetics and Politics of Islamic Jades at the Qing Court Kristina Kleutghen The Market for “Western” Paintings in Eighteenth-Century East Asia: A View from the Liulichang Market in Beijing Michele Matteini Floating Pictures: The European Dimension to Japanese Art During the Eighteenth Century Timon Screech A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art Yeewan Koon Pedro Cambón’s Asian Objects: A Transpacific Approach to Eighteenth-Century California J. M. Mancini Making it Ours: Religious Art in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Spanish American Newspapers Kelly Donahue-Wallace Tortoiseshell and the Edge of Empire: Artistic Materials and Imperial Politics in Spain and France Mari-Tere Álvarez and Charlene Villaseñor Black Other Antiquities: Ancients, Moderns, and the Challenge of China in Eighteenth-Century France Kristel Smentek Drifting Through the Louvre: A Local Guide to the French Academy Hannah Williams The Art World of the European Grand Tour Carole Paul The African Geographies of Angelo Soliman Michael Yonan Toward an Itinerant Art History: The Swahili Coast of Eastern Africa Prita Meier St. Martin’s Lane in London, Philadelphia, and Vizagapatam Stacey Sloboda

Notes on Contributors Selected Bibliography Index

x xvii

1 19 35 53 71 95 115

133 153 171 191 209 227 245 267 271 281

vii

Tab’hane-yi hümayun (Ottoman Military Engineering School), after William Faden, Map of the World, viii

from Cedid atlas tercümesi. (Istanbul: 1803) Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress. ix

Illustrations Table of Contents map (pages viii-ix): Tab’hane-yi hümayun (Ottoman Military Engineering School), after William Faden, Map of the World, from Cedid atlas tercümesi. (Istanbul: 1803) Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/ 2004626120/, accessed 18 September 2018.

1.1 1.2 1.3

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

2.5 3.1 3.2 3.3

x

Bed hanging from Masulipatnam, India, c. 1770. Painted and dyed cotton. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London (18-1906). Early Modern Trade Routes. Image courtesy of Jean-Paul Rodrigue, Hofstra University. Saul Steinberg, View of the World from 9th Avenue, cover of The New Yorker, March 29, 1976. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Cover reprinted with permission of The New Yorker magazine. All rights reserved. Nephrite jade chrysanthemum-shaped bowl, inscribed in Chinese with a poem by the Qianlong emperor, dated 1770, Mughal, 18th century. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (02.18.762). Jade chime (qing), one of twelve, 1761. Khotanese jade and gold, inscribed in seal script, with text by the Qianlong emperor. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2016.179.2). Shah Jahan cup, Mughal, 1657. White nephrite jade. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London (IS.12-1962). Gourd-shaped cup with ram’s head, Xinjiang, late-18th–early-19th centuries. White nephrite jade, inlaid with ruby, onyx, and gold wire. After Exquisite Beauty—Islamic Jades (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 2008), p. 198. Elephant carrying a vase, symbolic homophone with phrase, “When there is peace, there are signs,” Qing, 18th–19th century. Nephrite jade inlaid with garnet. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (02.18.740). Giuseppe Castiglione (signed), Genre Scene with Westerners, undated. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio. Giuseppe Castiglione (signed), Western Figures and Architecture, undated. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk. Sen-oku Hakukokan Museum, Sumitomo Collection, Kyoto. Map of Beijing’s Inner and Outer City from Okada Gyokuzan, Morokoshi meishō zue, Osaka, 1805, juan 1, pp. 8a–b. Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

2 6

10

20

23 25

28

29

36

37

39

Illustrations

3.4 3.5 3.6 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

4.5 4.6 4.7 5.1 5.2

5.3 5.4

5.5

Unidentified artist, The Child Yanping Taking Care of His Mother, undated. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper. National Museum of Korea, Seoul. Seascape with Western Figures and Buildings, 18th century. Reverse-glass painting. Photo: Sotheby’s, London. Vase with European Figures and Two Handles in “Western” Enamel Painting, Qianlong Reign, 1736–95. National Palace Museum, Taipei. After Carlo Dolce, Virgin of the Thumb, c. 1700. Color on panel, 24.5 × 19.6 cm. Photo: Tokyo National Museum. Tani Bunchō, Still Life, after Willem van Royen, c. 1810. Color on paper, 232.8 × 106 cm. Photo: Kobe City Museum. Okumura Masanobu, First Kabuki Performance of the Year, 1740. Color woodblock print on paper, 42.4 × 63 cm. Photo: Kobe City Museum. Utagawa Toyoharu, The Bell that Rings for 10,000 Leagues in the Dutch Port of Frankai (properly, Grand Canal, Venice), c. 1760. Color woodblock print on paper, 26 × 38.7 cm. Kobe City Museum. Photo: TNM Image Archives. Maruyama Ōkyo, Hall of Thirty-Three Bays (Sanjūsangen-dō), Kyoto, c. 1770. Color on paper, 23.5 × 35.1 cm. Photo: Private Collection. Shiba Kōkan, Tweelandbruk (Ryōgoku Bridge), 1787. Hand-colored copperplate print on paper, 27.1 × 40.7 cm. Photo: British Museum, London (1949,1112,0.10). Odano Naotake, Shinobazu Pond, c. 1773. Color on silk, 98.5 × 132.5 cm. Photo: Akita Museum of Modern Art, Yokote. “A Merchant,” from Album of Costumes of China, c. 1740. Watercolor on paper. Peabody Essex Museum © 2009 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Photograph by Walter Silver. Putting Out the Lamp, late 18th century. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk. Gift of James Cahill and Hsingyuan Tsao. Photographed for the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive by Benjamin Blackwell. “A scholar,” from Album of Costumes of China, c. 1740. Watercolor on paper. Peabody Essex Museum. © 2009 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Photograph by Walter Silver. Portrait of Zhuge Liang (諸葛亮) from Illustrated Masterworks of the Han and Song: “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” and “Outlaws of the Marsh” (瀟湘漢宋奇書三國水滸合傳), 1722. Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University. “Wife of an Official,” from Album of Costumes of China, c. 1740. Watercolor on paper. Peabody Essex Museum. © 2009 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Photograph by Walter Silver.

xi

45 47

48 57 58

61

63

64

65 67

77

78

80

81

83

xii

Illustrations

5.6

Meiping vase with Jun-blue glaze, early Qing, 17th century. Shiwan ware ceramic. Gift of Bei Shan Tang, Collection of the Art Museum of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1981.0051). “Young Lady,” from Album of Costumes of China, c. 1740. Watercolor on paper. Peabody Essex Museum. © 2009 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Photograph by Walter Silver. “Qing Imperial Consort,” from Album of Costumes of China, c. 1740. Watercolor on paper. Peabody Essex Museum. © 2009 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Photograph by Walter Silver. Pedro Benito Cambón, sculpture at Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, San Gabriel, California. Photo: author. Wall niche with holy water font, Mission Dolores, San Francisco, California. Photo: author. Holy water font at Mission San Francisco de Asís (Mission Dolores), San Francisco, California. Chinese porcelain. Photo: author. Vestments at Mission San Gabriel Arcángel. Painted Chinese silk. Photo: author. Mission San Francisco de Asís (Mission Dolores), San Francisco, California. Photo: author. Gazeta de Lima, February 8–March 28, 1745. Ink and paper. John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Gazeta de México, January 1730. Ink and paper. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid. Jerónimo de Balbás, Altar of the Kings, 1737. Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral. Photo: Robert Harding/Alamy Stock Photo. Simón Pereyns, Our Lady of the Pardon, 1570. Oil on canvas. Formerly Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral, destroyed 1967. Photo: Archivo Fotográfice Manuel Toussaint, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Herman Moll, “A Map of the Middle Part of America.” Hand-colored engraving from William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (London: James Knapton, 1729). Image provided by Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc. at www.RareMaps.com. Bureau, Spain or Spanish Empire, 17th century. Wood, bronze, and tortoiseshell inlay, with forged iron handles and pulls. Museo Nacional de Cerámica y Artes Suntuarias “González Martí,” Valencia (Inv. No. CE3/01171). Detail of Figure 8.2. Sewing Box, Puebla, 17th century. Wood, tortoiseshell, mother of pearl. Museo de América, Madrid. Photograph by Joaquín Otero Ubeda.

5.7 5.8 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4

8.1

8.2

8.3 8.4

88

89

91 96 98 99 104 107

119 120

125

127

135

139 140 141

Illustrations

8.5 8.6 8.7

8.8 8.9 9.1 9.2

9.3 9.4 9.5

10.1 10.2

10.3 10.4

Francisco de Goya, Portrait of the Duchess of Alba, 1797. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America, New York. Detail of Figure 8.5. André Charles Boulle, Cabinet on Stand, 1675–80. Oak veneered with pewter, brass, tortoiseshell, horn, ebony, ivory, and wood marquetry; bronze mounts; figures of painted and gilded oak; drawers of snakewood. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (77.DA.1). André-Charles Boulle, Pedestal Clock, c. 1720. Carcass of oak with veneer of tortoiseshell; tortoiseshell and brass marquetry; and gilt bronze mounts. Detroit Institute of Art (1984.87). Henri Van Soest, Cabinet, c. 1701–13, detail. Oak, ebony, pine, tortoiseshell, bronze, copper, and pewter. Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid. Photo: Daderot. Pierre Roussel, Commode with two drawers, c. 1765. Musée Jacquemart-André, Institut de France, Paris (inv. M 568). Photo © Studio Sebert Photographes. Antoine Foullet, Wall Clock on Bracket, c. 1764. Oak veneered with panels of green, red, and cream painted horn, and brass, gilt bronze; enameled metal; glass. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (inv. 75.DB.7). Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, Vase Japon, 1774. Hard-paste porcelain with silver-gilt mount. The Frick Collection, New York (inv. 2011.9.01). Bronze in You form, Qinding Xiqing gujian, Beijing, 1755. Special and Area Studies Collection, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse and Honoré Gabriel Camion after René Theodore Berthon, Baron Vivant-Denon in His Cabinet, lithograph. Photo by Daniel Arnaudet, © Musée du Louvre, Paris, France RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York. Detail of the “Quartier du Louvre” from Louis Bretez, Plan de Paris dessiné et gravé sous les ordres de Michel-Étienne Turgot, 1739. Engraving. Image in the public domain. Detail of Plate VI, “Plan au premier étage de la distribution du Louvre dans son état actuel,” Jacques-François Blondel, Architecture Française, vol. 4, 1752–6. British Library, London. © The British Library Board (74/557*.g). Plan and elevation of the École du modèle in Nicolas Guérin, Description de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 1714. © The British Library Board (7807.e.3.B3-4-289). Rotonde d’Apollon (formerly the Salle ronde or Salle des portraits), Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: © Hannah Williams.

xiii

142 142

144

145

146

154

155

161

162

164

174

177

179 181

xiv

10.5

10.6 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5

12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4

12.5 13.1

13.2 13.3

Illustrations Jean-Baptiste Martin, A Meeting of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in the Louvre, c. 1712–1. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais/Musée du Louvre/ Adrien Didierjean. Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, View of the Salon at the Louvre in 1753, 1753. Etching. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2006.84). View of the Colonna Palace gallery showing early eighteenth-century decoration. Vault fresco by Giovanni Coli and Filippo Gherardi, 1675–8. Photo: Carole Paul. Johan Zoffany, The Tribuna of the Uffizi, 1772–7. Oil on canvas. Royal Collection Trust. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2017. Giovanni Antonio Canal, called Canaletto, Piazza San Marco, Venice, c. 1730–4. Oil on canvas. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum. © President and Fellows of Harvard College. Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of John Talbot, later 1st Earl Talbot, 1773. Oil on canvas. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Fan with Views of Vesuvius and the Environs of Naples, c. 1770. Black and gold lacquer fan, the sticks and guards of fine imitation lacquer, the head reinforced with ivory and tortoiseshell. The Fan Museum, Greenwich, London. Johann Gottfried Haid, after Johann Nepomuk Steiner, Angelo Soliman, c. 1760. Engraving. Bildarchiv, Ö NB, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York. Giambattista Tiepolo, Africa, detail from Apollo with the Four Continents. Ceiling fresco, Residenz, Würzburg, 1750–3. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, New York. Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Pyramides Aegyptiaca. Copperplate engraving from Entwurff einer historischen Architektur, 1721. Image in the public domain. Akan Peoples (modern Ghana and Ivory Coast). Linguist staff finial representing a leopard with a cow in its mouth, 1895–1905. Wood and gold. Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Gift of Alfred A. Glassell Jr. (97.1277). Giambattista Tiepolo, The Triumph of Marius, 1729. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (65.183.1). A nineteenth-century grand carved doorframe in Stone Town, Zanzibar. The photograph was labeled “Arab Door” in 1906. Photo: Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies Winterton Collection, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. A postcard showing Jaffer, Sheriff, and Company’s sale room in Old Town, Mombasa, n.d. Photo: National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi. The interior of a stone mansion in Lamu Town, Kenya, 1884. Photo: Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

183 185

196 198

201 202

203

210

214

217

218 220

228

230 231

Illustrations

13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7 13.8 14.1

14.2 14.3 14.4 14.5 14.6 14.7 14.8

14.9

View of a richly decorated room in a stone mansion in Lamu, Kenya, 1884. Photo: Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. A view of a zidaka niche system, likely photographed in a stone mansion in Lamu Town, Kenya, c. 1920s. Photo: National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi. A view of a zidaka wall and doorway covered with complex stuccowork, photographed in an unidentified stone mansion in Lamu Town, Kenya, c. 1970s. Photo: Mohamed Mchulla. The entrance room of a ruined stone mansion photographed in Lamu Town, Kenya, c. 1970s. Photo: Mohamed Mchulla. Imported glazed pottery dishes decorate the area around the mihrab of the Friday Mosque at Gedi, Kenya, built c. 15th century. Photo: Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. (1) St. Martin’s Lane Academy, Peter’s Court; (2) Mattias Lock, 9 Nottingham Court; (3) Celeste Regnier, Newport Street; (4) Louis-François Roubiliac, 63 St. Martin’s Lane; (5) François and Susan Vivares, 13 Newport Street; (6) James and Ann Pascall, Long Acre, over-against Hanover Street; (7) Gideon Saint, Prince’s Street; (8) Thomas Johnson, 9 Queen Street; (9) James Whittle, Great St. Andrew’s Street; (10) Thomas Chippendale, 61–62 St. Martin’s Lane. Map drawn by Paul Sloboda based on John Rocque’s 1746 map of London. Mattias Lock, Plate 8B from Six Tables, 1746. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London (27811:2). James Pascall, Girandole, 1745. Gilt pine and iron. Temple Newsam House, Leeds. Gideon Saint, Pages 180–1 from a Scrapbook of Working Designs, c. 1760. Pen and ink, engraving and etching. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (34.90.1). Photo: Art Resource, New York. James Smither, Trade Card of Benjamin Randolph, 1769. Engraving. The Library Company of Philadelphia. Philadelphia, High Chest of Drawers, 1762–5. Mahogany, tulip poplar, yellow pine, white cedar. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (18.110.4). Detail of Figure 14.6. Photo: Art Resource, New York. Thomas Johnson, “Design for a Tablet for a Chimney-Piece with Two Swans in Combat, Enclosed within a Scrolling Cartouche with a Water-Spouting Dragon’s Head,” from A New Book of Ornaments, 1762. Stipple engraving. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1985.1099). Vizagapatam, Side Chair, c. 1770. Cane, ivory, sandalwood, and black lac. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA (E84004). Photo: Jeffrey R. Dykes.

xv

231

232

233 234

235

246 249 251

252 255

256 257

257

259

xvi

Illustrations

14.10 Thomas Chippendale, Plate XVI “Backs of Chairs,” from The Gentleman and Cabinet-Makers Director, 3rd ed. (London, 1762). Houghton Library, Harvard University (Typ 705.62.277). 14.11 Vizagapatam, India. Cabinet on a Stand, c. 1765, Rosewood, inlaid and partly veneered with ivory, with silver mounts. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London (IS.289&A-1951). 14.12 James Green after Samuel Wale, “Entrance of the British Museum, from Russet [sic] Street/Garden Front,” from London and its Environs Describ’d (London, 1761). © Trustees of the British Museum.

260

261

262

Acknowledgments This book emerges out of an extended conversation between the co-editors, carried on for the better part of a decade, about how to tell the story of eighteenth-century art. The idea for a project on the subject began to take shape in 2011 and 2012. It assumed initial form in October 2012, when we convened a workshop at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), Los Angeles, on the subject of “The International Eighteenth Century.” We would like to thank the participants in that workshop for sharing their ideas so generously with us, and particularly to Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Alexa Sekyra, and the staff of the GRI and the Getty Museum for fostering an exciting and inspiring discussion about what the project could become. Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Craig Ashley Hanson, Meredith Martin, Kristel Smentek, Kristen Chiem, and Kristina Kleutghen were instrumental in those initial formulations and we would like to acknowledge their contributions to our shared thinking. At later points in its evolution, this book owes much to Margaret Michniewicz and to the anonymous readers for Bloomsbury Academic, who gave us vital perspectives on what we were trying to do. We would like to thank Jean-Paul Rodrigue for allowing us to reproduce the map of global trade routes in the Introduction. Paul Sloboda has supported this project in too many ways to count. He has our thanks for the maps, and Stacey’s particular thanks for everything else. The Art History Endowment Fund at Southern Illinois University Carbondale provided material support and considerable freedom at the earlier stages of the project, and funds from the Paul H. Tucker Fund at the University of Massachusetts Boston allowed for a splendid final product. Michael would like to thank the students in his seminar on “Global Art in the Early Modern World,” held at the University of Missouri in 2015, for a delightful exploration of this book’s themes with one of its intended audiences, and Stacey thanks the members of the Asian Art and Visual Cultures Working Group at University of California, Berkeley, for their astute comments. Finally, we would like to acknowledge a great debt to Mary D. Sheriff, to whom this book is dedicated, who stimulated art historians to think globally as far back as 1988 and who offered an example model for us in our inquiry.

xvii

xviii

1

Introduction: Mapping Global EighteenthCentury Art Worlds Stacey Sloboda and Michael Yonan

In 1775, Thomas Chippendale found himself, once again, in trouble with British Customs. In late spring of that year, government officials seized from the cabinetmaker’s London workshop a set of textiles belonging to the English actor David Garrick. These had been given to him, Garrick reported, by theater-loving English East India Company (EIC) merchants in appreciation for his assistance in establishing a playhouse in Calcutta.1 The fabric (Figure 1.1), called kalamkari in India and chintz in England, was painted cotton made in Masulipatnam on the Coromandel coast. It was acquired and stamped by the EIC sometime before being transported from Calcutta to be presented to Garrick along with two pipes of Madeira wine. Chippendale, like most elite London cabinetmakers of the period, also specialized in upholding, or upholstery, and the fabric was likely in his workshop to be fitted onto a japanned (painted in imitation of lacquer) green and white canopy bed that updated the “Chinese Chippendale” style for which the London cabinetmaker was famed with a carved Indo-Greek cornice. The fabric’s flowering-tree pattern is a hybrid design of the kind popular in eighteenth-century textiles in multiple countries. It incorporated design elements from Persian painting, French tapestries, English “branched hangings,” and Chinese embroideries and wallpaper. Yet there was a distinct danger behind its appeal. The brightly colored designs and light, durable cottons were so desirable and so threatened English textile production that the importation of Indian chintz was banned in 1721. That ban was repealed in 1774, but Garrick’s fabric was nonetheless seized the following year. Eventually it was returned after David Garrick’s death and fashioned into hangings for the bed now on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum.2 If material goods can be understood as having social lives, then this fabric’s early life was a vibrant and mobile one. Its origin in Masulipatnam and its reception in London typify an object in motion—a material trace of the commercial, artistic, social, and political networks that connected various points of the globe in the eighteenth century—but it is also an object whose production, circulation, and reception was dictated by the local conditions out of which it emerged.3 In Masulipatnam, kalamkari (which derives from the Persian for “pen work”) was an export item, one that Hindu 1

2

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 1.1 Bed hanging from Masulipatnam, India, c. 1770. Painted and dyed cotton. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London (18-1906).

craftsman developed to satisfy the tastes of Persian consumers connected to India through its Shia Muslim rulers. In London, the fabric was an import, a symbol of South Asia and of the increasingly militarized and colonializing British presence in the region and, by association, the entire world. In both locales, the fabric was exotic, produced by or for someone considered foreign. Chintz was part of both distinct and overlapping art worlds that were grounded in specific economic, social, artistic, and legal

Introduction

3

circumstances and connected and conditioned by transnational networks of people and their things. These types of transnational artistic and economic networks are a familiar part of the art world we occupy today; and as specialists in eighteenth-century art, we observe contemporary globalism with a sense of recognition. In our individual scholarly works, we each have addressed independently the problem of how the local and the distant intersect, considering how matters of geography, be they interactions across vast distances or across a single neighborhood, lent specific meanings to works of art. This book is the product of that thinking and it reflects our attempt to describe a series of eighteenth-century art worlds as sites deeply imbricated with notions of place. In exploring those sites, we seek to find a new way to describe what happened to art in the eighteenth century, one less reliant on linear narratives of stylistic progression and more oriented toward a conceptual interrelationship between place and space. Let us consider each of the terms in our title.

Eighteenth Century The eighteenth century has assumed vital importance in the project of globalizing art history, which is remarkable given its relative underdevelopment as a field of arthistorical inquiry for much of the twentieth century. Prior to the 1970s, the eighteenth century was the subject of infrequent attention, especially in Anglo-American spheres, where it was viewed alternatively as the dying gasps of the Baroque or the tentative beginnings of the modern. Particularly in Europe, the century’s importance has been understood in finite terms difficult to understand within the nationally oriented art histories that have proliferated there. It is a century uniquely ill-suited to straightforward categorizations by national style, as well as neatly ordered periodization or trajectories of influence. Its complexity resists easy summarization and chafes against the straightforward application of art-historical methodologies that privilege high art and stylistic coherence. But when art history began to prioritize approaches that revealed art as the product of complex international cultural interactions, the eighteenth century’s importance became increasingly apparent. The sheer number of scholarly studies devoted to it has increased exponentially. Scholars have found rich examples of transoceanic exchange and its artistic effects in the period, as they likewise identified plentiful instances of hybrid styles, new media, and cultural mimicry. Specialists have long recognized the century’s potential for unraveling or complicating art-historical hierarchies, as well as recognized the richness of content that it offers. Barbara Maria Stafford said as much in 1988 when she remarked that in the entire history of art, nearly everything that falls under its parameters however broadly defined, could be found somewhere in eighteenth-century visual and material culture, so panoramic was the period’s scope and so diverse the artistic products made within it.4 The eighteenth century provides a key moment in the development of a global culture. The century is far enough removed from those moments of initial cross-cultural

4

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

contacts in the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance worlds to offer something more systematic than initial impressions and novel exoticism. By the eighteenth century, significant parts of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe had been in political, economic, and cultural contact with each other for centuries, with the terms of their artistic interaction likewise significantly developed. The eighteenth century therefore possessed a global sensibility, defined by structures of deep international connection that came with repeated interaction. Yet the eighteenth century is also early enough in the process of globalization to reveal lingering pre-modern notions of the global: cultural beliefs as they were understood prior to mass industrialization, scientifically justified notions of race and colonialism, and modern modes of communication and travel. We contend that this combination of older structures of global knowledge with premonitions of the modern and postmodern interconnected globe typify the century, and it is in its global dimension that it mostly fully realizes Stafford’s characterization. At the same time, “the eighteenth century” is a term worth defining explicitly as a global formulation. Scholars of global history have observed that “human beings inhabit a unitary and finite space, move along the same temporal scale of worldhistorical time, and constitute one single collective entity.”5 To do the work of global history, one must be able to speak of that world-historical time, that shared time and space that all people occupy regardless of their individual cultural position. As scholars writing in English in the early twenty-first century, we opt for the Gregorian description of a period from roughly 1700 to 1800 ce as our volume’s scope, fully aware that that designation coexists with other terminologies such as Qing, Mughal, ancien régime, and Enlightenment. To discuss, for instance, the Edo period as part of the eighteenth century is to assert its interest to scholars of eighteenth-century art broadly, not just to scholars of Japan. We hope as well that the strict periodization we adopt can coexist with less purely chronological ones, with a series of undertakings engaged variously in different parts of the world within shared historical circumstances.

Art Worlds In identifying “art worlds” as an organizing theme for the book, we place value on an institutional approach that attends to the social entities that enable making, distributing, buying, and responding to art. An art world, according to the sociologist Howard Becker, is a social space in which artists and casts of supporting characters (apprentices, paint sellers, stonecutters, textile dyers, etc.) join with patrons, merchants, dealers, audiences, and critics to create, maintain, and modify the conventions that collectively define “art.”6 This book explores those conventions and the social practices that inform them in various geographic locales. To describe those social spaces in a global context, it is nevertheless essential to attend to the specifics of place and culture. The transnational networks that link these spaces are one part of their art world, but the local sites of production and consumption are equally important aspects of any historical understanding.

Introduction

5

Describing aspects of the art worlds of Beijing, the Swahili Coast, and Paris, for instance, reveals structural similarities and differences that complicate any singular notion of the types of objects that emerge from an art world. The pitfalls of a comparative approach are obvious with its potential for creating and re-inscribing Eurocentric hierarchies of value, quality, and civilization. However, as Mieke Bal has argued, “[c]omparison can be a tool of analysis as long as one of its terms is not established as normative.”7 In place of normativity and hierarchy, Bal, as well as Craig Clunas, have advocated for comparative methodology as a tool of differentiation. In examining art worlds comparatively, this book attempts to denaturalize the Western art historical understanding of a normative eighteenth-century art world centered around a royallysponsored institution of fine art, to offer instead a differentiated perspective on multiple possible art worlds. As a site of both social and ideological practice, an art world is a negotiated space and an imagined community, a space brought into being by people who understand themselves as engaged with something they understand as art.8 Objects and images communicate meaning about the places and spaces in which they were made and received. By focusing on specific materials, images, and texts, this book also shows that art shaped the concept of an interconnected global world. Images, objects, and new styles of art created a space for makers and audiences to confront, respond to, and accommodate contact with the world outside, and functioned as technologies of communication to which locally specific meaning was attached. As case studies, the essays in this volume offer specific examples of how transnational circulations and connections shaped art worlds and vice versa.

Global Contemporary connotations of globalization as an interlinked system of capital and communication have a pre-history in the early modern period.9 The connective and coercive forces of trade, religious missions, migration, and imperialism were present in the eighteenth century on six continents, and during that time both maritime and overland travel expanded dramatically (Figure 1.2). A sketch of a globalizing eighteenth-century world might be described as follows. Trade routes of the Mississippi River and Great Lakes region linking North American tribes to one another were well established, and Spanish, French, and English trade companies and colonization exploited those trade routes and developed others to create vibrant and violent points of contact between Native Americans and Europeans in this period. Enslavement of Africans and Native Americans and the forced migration of Europeans through religious persecution and indentured servitude caused an influx of people to North America and the Caribbean. Portuguese and Spanish colonization of Central America, the Caribbean, and South America was completed by the seventeenth century. Chinese Qing rulers moved west into Tibet and Central Asia, controlled governmental policy in Korea, and maintained active trading posts along its own eastern coast for maritime trade with other Asian nations and European trading

6

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 1.2 Early Modern Trade Routes. Image courtesy of Jean-Paul Rodrigue, Hofstra University. companies. The Persian Mughal Empire consolidated its rule of the majority of the India subcontinent as far north as Kabul, while Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British colonies in coastal Southeast Asia took hold. The Japanese capital of Edo joined Beijing, London, Guangzhou, and Constantinople as the most populous cities in the world. Inter-island trade of the South Pacific was brought into contact with the rest of the world by the third quarter of the century. The Safavid and Ottoman Empires were major trade hubs, with the Ottoman Empire spreading Islam along trade routes in Northern Africa. European and Islamic merchants enriched coastal African cities. European maritime commerce fueled high consumer demand for raw materials and finished goods from around the world that was engendered and supported by the imperial and colonial projects primarily of Britain, France, Holland, Spain, and Portugal. This partial political and economic sketch depicts the eighteenth century as an era of globalization. Recent interdisciplinary global history documenting that process has had a profound impact on the study of the history of art and culture of this period. Works such as Felicity Nussbaum’s The Global Eighteenth Century offer a framework and case studies for understanding the cultural history of global encounters from a European perspective in the eighteenth century, and numerous scholarly works have explored notions of cultural exchange and encounter in the early modern period.10 More recent, post-colonially informed work has usefully moved away from privileging the European experience and response to those exchanges and encounters. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s 2004 exhibition Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500–1800 broke ground in this direction and the more recent Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West, as well as Made in Americas: The New World Discovers Asia, The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, and a recent special issue of Art History on “Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World,” have attempted a more diverse account of cultural

Introduction

7

encounter and the various artistic responses to it.11 Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds continues in this vein, exploring significant sites of artistic production and consumption worldwide, without privileging European encounter with those sites. Those studies straddle two distinct but complementary trends in current global studies that David Washbrook describes as, on the one hand, “connections and networks, frequently spanning vast geographical spaces and epochs, which hint at the extraordinary interdependence of life on this planet. . .,” and on the other hand, “a rather different orientation of comparison, which particularly seeks not only points of difference between one culture or society and another—as in the older applications of the comparative method—but also, crucially, points of similarity.”12 We see both approaches as productive for a transnational understanding of art worlds that takes seriously their points of connection and disconnection. Yet neither of these approaches has been fully incorporated into art history as a discipline.13 Attempts to write the history of art with a broader cultural awareness are being published and are regular topics at major conferences, indicating a field in the process of structural change.14 Nevertheless, art historical training from the introductory survey to graduate specialization remains largely nationalist in character, it still being the norm in North American and Western European institutions to identify oneself, for instance, as a scholar of the Italian Renaissance or of Chinese art. This focus on a specific culture has merits that need not be rehearsed here, but also privileges national and regional boundaries as organizing categories that fail to account for the shared human experience of space and time that global historians have drawn to the fore of historical inquiry. As a result, it remains common for art historians of one place (particularly if that place is Europe) to be largely ignorant of the art of another place (particularly if that place is not Europe) in the same period. This volume attempts to address those challenges to bring a range of scholars writing in English on the relationship between geography and the art world to the attention of a wider community of scholars. Our aim is to consider what the global eighteenth century looks like from an art historical perspective. We attempt to move beyond art history’s conventional focus on nations, while also remaining aware that a global approach cannot include all possible points of view. Global art history does not equate with non-Western art history, which is based on the questionable distinction between Western and non-Western art worlds, as if their boundaries were clear and the interactions between them scant. We concur with Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel in their assertion that “Global art is not the reverse side of Western art history, but of national art history and cultural separations, and the limitations imposed by similar categorizations.”15 The eighteenth century presents particular advantages for understanding globalization as a process.16 The concept of the nation-state was not yet fully formed in the early modern period (roughly 1400–1800), which presents an opportunity for historians to move toward more locally specific points of reference. If comparative study reveals, for instance, that the London art world structurally had more in common with the market-based workshops of Beijing and Manila than to the French Royal Academy, then modern nationalist categories that keep European Art and Chinese Art

8

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

distinct begin to wane in their usefulness. In contrast, global history actually offers the opportunity to better understand local history. Said another way, we can better understand the eighteenth-century London art world if we stop comparing it to geographically proximate but structurally dissimilar spaces, such as the Parisian academy, and instead look at other art worlds structured around market-based workshops in metropolitan centers of trade. This allows us to study what is both typical and unique about an art world on its own terms while setting it into an appropriately broad cultural context in order to gain a richer historical understanding of its outcomes.

Local Art history has always operated with varied and at times conflicting senses of scale. Focused explications of single objects, the kind of art-historical writing that emerges from the practice of close looking, is a critical procedure long available to the discipline’s practitioners. This is art history as it comes closest to microhistory, that version of historical inquiry that concentrates on a relatively limited setting—a single town, a neighborhood, a family—in order to reveal aspects of history not otherwise visible in discussions of large-scale social change.17 Much art history operates as a kind of microhistory: concentrated explications of single works of art or closely related works of art examined in the immediate historical setting of their production. But art history has also long embraced the big picture. There are many examples of art-historical writing that cross historical and geographical areas, and one could add that the introductory art history survey illustrates exactly that practice. This is a kind of arthistorical macrohistory, an expansive view that takes in many different historical periods. Since the 1970s English-language art-historical writing has privileged the micro level, with the emergence of the social history of art especially committed to understanding art in terms of its immediate sociopolitical contexts. As a result, for much of the last three decades it has been easy to discredit macro art history, at least until the global turn. Global scholarship has promoted a broader view and part of its excitement is the sense it brings of crossing chronological and geographical boundaries boldly. The risk of such a critical move is that the local significance of art can be lost, or at minimum trivialized in order to emphasize a broader scheme of transregional connections. Art historian Éva Forgács has recently reasserted the importance of the local as an art-historical priority.18 Forgács characterizes global art history as like an eye positioned from above, similar to the view one has from the window of an airplane. From that great distance, the eye sees an enormous amount and can visualize connections that are impossible to understand on the ground. This, according to Forgács, is what a global art history provides, and we would agree that rich new knowledge emerges from such a panoramic viewpoint. But in that panoramic view, many things are also obscured, or are visible just enough to be apparent but not enough to be comprehended deeply. Upon closer inspection, they turn out to be profoundly situational. “The reality on the ground, no matter how informed of the global, is local:

Introduction

9

with specific details, history, inner dynamics, and personal relationships that often materialize in conceptual differences or conflicts of artistic, philosophical, and political views.”19 Forgács develops this idea further to show, somewhat paradoxically, how an emphasis on the global can work to reinstate established boundaries between East and West, North and South, Europe and Asia, and Eurasia versus the Americas. A global art history can confirm old distinctions between center and periphery as much as dissolve them. Emphasizing the local, including a western European local, can correct this, or at least offer sites where the totalizing narratives of global artistic exchange can be challenged. Forgács cautions against the standardization of art historical narratives that might emerge in the creation a global art history. Claudia Mattos seconded this concern in a recent piece for the series “Whither Art History?” published in The Art Bulletin. She expressed skepticism at recent attempts to totalize the history of art with a comprehensive art theory that applies to everything. Such a project runs a great risk of mimicking the project of transnational colonialism by applying an Anglo-American master narrative of art to the entire world.20 This standardization is something we have both encountered in our research and against which we have directed our art historical voices. Each of us has written on the eighteenth-century phenomenon of chinoiserie, that international artistic style that sought inspiration in the arts of China. Not long ago it was possible to characterize chinoiserie as a monolithic European fad, a fashion more or less consistent across the continent. Although transnational implications have occupied us both, we have argued that chinoiserie assumed unique meanings in the local contexts where we work. In England, chinoiserie was implicated in a series of debates about the effects of commerce in modern society as part of an increasingly internationalized marketplace for art that emerged out of a specifically British mercantilist economic system. The style there assumed significance quite directly related to uniquely British concerns. In eighteenthcentury Austria, chinoiserie operated very differently. It was promoted by local patrons with connections to France and gained popularity especially at the Habsburg court. The notion that Vienna was a bulwark at the border of Europe, the city that stood symbolically for the edge of western civilization and its mindset, resonated through artistic evocations of Asia there. It assumed no such significance in Britain. The distinction between English and Austrian chinoiserie is not simply one of different artisanal practices or pictorial references, but in the localized meanings that the style bore in each setting. It is a difference of geography not just between Europe and Asia, but also within Europe itself. A locally specific view of chinoiserie therefore reveals aspects of its historical significance that a panoramic one cannot. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds assumes this approach, examining art worlds that emerged in various local contexts. In this way, we aim for polycentrism, to put points on a map that mark geographic places and conceptual spaces that formulated art worlds within the eighteenth century. Polycentrism decenters any one region as the norm to which peripheries are compared, but also rejects the possibility of a single, globalized art world in any period. As Saul Steinberg’s famous and still humorous View of the World from 9th Avenue reminds us, one person’s center is another’s periphery (Figure 1.3). Bartolomé Yun Casalilla has

10

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 1.3 Saul Steinberg, View of the World from 9th Avenue, Cover of The New Yorker, March 29, 1976. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Cover reprinted with permission of The New Yorker magazine. All rights reserved.

called for a new global history that studies “the interaction between distant areas, situated in diverse cultural contexts all over the world, taking up the effects of these at a local level.”21 We view this book very much as a response to his call. Felicity Nussbaum has called this way of thinking “glocal,” the keeping of small and large-scale contexts legible while privileging neither.22 Meaningful connections of people and things make it possible to describe an early modern transnational art world, though as the plural in our title indicates, we do not propose to describe a single global eighteenth-century art world. In framing our inquiry in this way, we echo recent transnational histories of the early modern art world that promote an entangled history, Transfergeschichte, and

Introduction

11

histoire croisée, focusing on interrelationships within empires, regions, and places. Nicholas Thomas’s Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific describes such an entangled colonial art world in which Europeans and Pacific Islanders appropriated one another’s visual and material culture. More recently, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Michael North’s Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia describes a transnational art world in which the Dutch East India Company (VOC) provided the institutional structure for a transnational art world to emerge, demonstrating impressively how the VOC created an art world linked across three continents.23 We take inspiration from these scholars, seeking not only to find the multi-sited, transregional—for shorthand,“global”—dimensions of eighteenthcentury art, but also the layers of stratification that art bore at the local level. The familiar model of center and periphery in world systems analysis, in which raw materials flow from the periphery to the center where they are transformed into finished goods, is an insufficient account of the complex nature of artistic production and reception in a global context in the eighteenth century. Artistic exchange, appropriation, exoticisms, and hybridities make a mockery of the center/periphery model.24 Polycentricism embraces these complexities, creating a fluid map that keeps local context and global interconnectedness in productive tension.

Geographies of Art In this way, we offer a horizontal account of the history of eighteenth-century art that does not assign superiority to any particular place or media.25 This approach also necessarily decenters the primacy of Western “fine art,” a concept that emerged from early modern European academic art theory and practice that has exerted enormous influence on the boundaries and practice of art history until very recently. Indeed, from a global perspective it is clear that oil painting on canvas, a medium that occupies the central place in European art, was a profoundly local medium with relatively limited global resonance in our era. Decorative arts, books, and prints had a far wider circulation and much greater cultural currency. By placing the production and reception of specific types of objects within a glocal framework, we aim to create a picture of the eighteenth century that moves beyond canonical Western hierarchies. In doing so, we build upon significant work in art history and geography that has drawn renewed attention to the role of space and place in understanding works of art. The so-called “spatial turn” of intellectual inquiry has taken different forms in various disciplines. Again, in English-language art history it is Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann who has most fully delineated the importance of geography. Kaufmann’s Toward a Geography of Art reveals that legacy, as it also shows how art history’s current projects of expansion and global broadening are deeply related to, and challenged by, the discipline’s conception of space. He notes that art history’s traditional understanding of space was formed around the idea of representation, the ways in which works of twodimensional art evoke the illusion of three-dimensionality.26 Instead, Kaufmann has called for an awareness of the place of art, the location of works of art and how their

12

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

siting affects the ways in which we interpret them. This call for a geography of art resonates with long-standing art-historical methodologies that have emphasized the historical specificity of meaning, the ways in which a work of art meant discrete things to distinct audiences. It also harmonizes with the practice of reception history. In these and other recent frameworks, the work of art is viewed less as a moment in a historical continuum, although it remains part of it, but as a production of circulations of knowledge, materials, and visual forms. Kaufmann’s framework contrasts with the geography of art that has emerged in the discipline of geography. There the concern has been less with historical matters and more with the ways in which the place and site of art inflect the social relations that exist around it. Harriet Hawkins’s work can be seen as exemplary of these trends. Rooting her ideas in the writings of Rosalind Krauss, Hawkins imagines a geography of art that takes three distinct dimensions into account.27 The first concerns the sites of art’s production and consumption, a focus that has its parallel in established arthistorical investigations of artist, context, and audience. The second addresses art’s exploration of the body and of sensual experiences, the ways in which art related to various examples of human embodiment. This echoes a more cultural-studies based approach in disciplinary art history. The third, and the one with the greatest impact for this book, is an “ontological project around the practice and materiality of ‘art’.”28 Hawkins understands the latter mostly in terms of a destabilization and dematerialization of matter in contemporary art, something traceable in everything from digital art to modifications of the landscape in Earth Art. It is possible, however, to see geography in terms of a destabilization of art’s historical meanings as well, and in this respect Hawkins echoes Kaufmann closely.

Points on a Map Each of the chapters in this book functions as a point on a map from which a specific art world emerges. Some have a local focus, while others explicitly address transnational and trans-regional concerns, but each chapter attends to the intersection between the global and the local in the art world it describes. The book begins in Beijing. Kristina Kleutghen looks at jade objects produced in Islamic Eurasia and acquired by the imperial court. Emperor Qianlong praised these “Hindustan jades” and wrote poems about them that were incised onto their surfaces. The international power implicit in these objects significantly enhanced their aesthetic appeal. Michele Matteini’s essay considers the reception of xiyang, “Western” style paintings produced in Beijing’s Liulichang Market, considering the non-court engagement with objects and images made in China but adopting a set of signifiers recognized as “Western” to a broad East Asian audience, particularly as they were understood by Korean scholars. Both Kleutghen and Matteini’s essays describe Beijing art worlds that engaged with foreign objects and styles that became understood as local objects. Timon Screech directs our attention to a Japanese art world that was critically engaged with European art during a period typically described as closed to European

Introduction

13

contact. Though shoguns played an important role in the process, Screech’s account, like Matteini’s discussion of the Liulichang market, hinges on merchants, government intermediaries, and non-elite artists who engaged with Western pictorial aesthetics to create a new style of art. Chinese xiyang (Western pictures) and Japanese uki-e (floating pictures) and ranga (Dutch pictures) appear as styles that emerged from local artistic, cultural, and political conditions to engage a cosmopolitan interest in European subjects and pictorial techniques. Similar themes are explored in Yeewan Koon’s chapter, which broadens the geography of Chinese art by considering export art made in Guangzhou, typically understood as marginal to Chinese artistic practice, as articulating a distinctly Chinese regional identity that was deeply connected to Chinese literary and artistic culture. That art positioned Guangzhou at the center, not periphery, of where China met the rest of the world. Following one trade route from Guangzhou, through Manila to the Americas, J. M. Mancini’s essay explores of the presence of Chinese objects in Franciscan missions of eighteenth-century California to interrogate the boundaries of “American art” of the period, arguing that a transpacific view, linking East Asia to the Philippines and New Spain, specifically California, offers a significant contribution to the understanding of American art that complements the better-known art world of the Atlantic and the increasingly studied Indian Oceans. Kelly Donahue-Wallace’s essay further describes the process by which sacred objects became understood as commodities and commodities objects of veneration in a colonial context. Analyzing illustrations and discussions of art in Spanish American newspapers from Mexico City, Lima, and Havana, Donahue-Wallace reveals that those accounts “stripped European objects (or ones made locally by European artists) of their foreignness and localized viceregal and imported religious art.” As Donahue-Wallace’s essay shows, the affective properties of print culture relate clearly to the formation of a sense of geographical space. Mari-Tere Álvarez and Charlene Villaseñor Black’s essay examines tortoiseshell, one of the most coveted materials in eighteenth-century decorative arts. The authors trace the surprising story of how the scutes of a turtle living in the tropical Indo-Pacific and Americas became a material used for Spanish peinetas and French furniture. Álvarez and Villaseñor Black demonstrate how the same material functioned in different imperial and artistic contexts in Spain and France, once again showing the importance of local specificity within a global context. Kristel Smentek’s essay views the European art object, and indeed the idea of European art itself, as created in the eighteenth century specifically through comparisons with images and objects crafted from afar. She makes this point by showing how Chinese art objects enabled writers to form an alternative or complementary antiquity to the better-known Greek and Roman past. In eighteenth-century France, an increased awareness of geographical distance enhanced and complicated established understandings of historical distance. Considering a different aspect of the geography of art in France, Hannah Williams’s essay explores the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which provided the pre-eminent conceptual and institutional model for art academies in the eighteenth century throughout Europe, Russia, and

14

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Mexico. Indeed, it was a significant global institution. Yet, as Williams argues, the Academy was also an actual physical place, and the neighborhood it resided in, and the spaces within it, created a localized space for artistic interaction that then rippled across the globe. In this way, Williams demonstrates that local conditions are never separate from their global context. Turning toward the Mediterranean, a different kind of cosmopolitanism can be found in Rome, where the phenomenon of the Grand Tour brought large numbers of travelers to that city from all over Europe specifically to engage with art. Carole Paul’s essay describes how travel made Rome a uniquely complex art world, one in which local artistic developments greatly affected art’s appearance elsewhere on the continent, with influences in everything from architectural design to collecting practices. Both Williams and Paul’s essays explore well-known international cultural entities—the French Academy and the Grand Tour—and considers them as locally informed phenomena. Michael Yonan then offers a case study of how imaginative geographies, semi-fictional understandings of distant lands, were employed in the representation of an Africanborn Austrian, Angelo Soliman (c.1721–1796), to show how visual markers of foreignness contributed to an understanding of both a person and a place. Prita Meier’s essay shifts the volume’s focus to Africa, and particularly the eastern, largely Swahilispeaking areas along the Indian Ocean. The port cities of this region have long been centers of international convergence, with local art reflecting contact with the Kingdom of Kongo, the Islamic world, and Imperial China. Swahili aesthetics celebrated belonging to multiple geographical spheres at once, and this is reflected in its artistic cultures. Stacey Sloboda considers the art world on both micro- and macro-geographic levels through an exploration of St. Martin’s Lane, a single street in London, that was a center of design practice in mid-eighteenth-century London that spread globally through the dissemination of its printed designs and the colonial migration of artists and patrons. Focusing on the spatial and social networks of the street, she reveals how the cultural geography of mid-eighteenth-century London facilitated the development of a commercial, non-institutionally based art world. At the same time, exploring the global distribution of the products of St. Martin’s Lane – both objects and artists – demonstrates how a specific metropolitan style was adapted in American and Indian colonial locales. Across these this diverse terrain, common themes occur. The dominance of Chinese art and materials in cross-cultural networks of trade and collecting is a central theme in the essays by Koon, Mancini, Meier, and Smentek. These essays show that Chinese art and culture, as well as received notions about them, exerted enormous influence on notions of the global. To be global in the eighteenth century, it seems, was to be connected somehow to China. At the same time, these tendencies toward exoticism and cosmopolitanism were by no means unidirectional. Matteini’s and Kleutghen’s essays demonstrate different Chinese audiences’ enthusiasm for non-Chinese images and materials, while Screech similarly explores Japanese interest in European prints and paintings supplied by Dutch merchants. The transnational dissemination of aspects of a local art world is another consistent theme across several essays. Paul suggests how the institutional model of Italian

Introduction

15

museums was modified outside Italy to adapt to regional needs and preferences. Further adaptations are found in Sloboda’s essay: design publications, objects, and craftsmen themselves distributed London-based design into colonial contexts. This parallels the way in which Williams considers the spatial and social networks of the French Royal Academy as paradigmatic of later academic formations elsewhere, and the ways in which local reading practices created a sense of global geography in Donahue-Wallace’s discussion of New Spain. Considering the local and transnational networks that made up art worlds of the eighteenth century reveals the participation of more varied types of people than are typically understood as patrons of art. In particular, the individuals most likely to travel transnationally in the eighteenth century, that is, merchants and missionaries, take on a particularly prominent role in the story of a global eighteenth-century art world. Mancini’s essay vividly describes the role of the missionary as art buyer in a transpacific context, while Matteini, Koon, Donahue-Wallace, Paul, and Meier’s essays address the ways merchants created art worlds that responded both to transnational contact and local conditions in ways that were different from, but sometimes worked in tandem with, elite and aristocratic patronage. Adoptions and translations were part of a tendency toward mixing, hybridity, and assimilation that so frequently attend cross-cultural contact. Each chapter in this book shows that art history, so frequently focused on European exoticism, can be written from a polycentric point of view, a point that is especially central to the essays by Álvarez and Villaseñor Black, Koon, Screech, Yonan, and Sloboda. The material and social presence of foreignness, and a desire to engage, represent, refashion, or mediate that presence through art, is a defining feature of the history of the global eighteenthcentury art world. As Donahue-Wallace and Meier’s essays show explicitly, the distinction between the foreign and the domestic was actively elided in many examples of eighteenth-century visual and material culture. This demonstrates that the local is not the opposite of the global, but, in the examples and places discussed here, are mutually constitutive terms. Before ending our introductory journey, there is a final point to be made, one concerning geographical coverage. In an anthology such as this, one that attempts to examine cultural and artistic interactions from a global perspective, we are all too aware that many regions of the world are absent from its pages. Readers interested in French and British Canada, large parts of South America, Persia, the Mediterranean world, the South Pacific, Scandinavia, Iberia, and other areas will look in vain for discussions of their art worlds. The world does not fit inside a single book, and our intent has never been to give every eighteenth-century art world a chapter of its own. Instead, we have looked for situations where the glocal geographies we have imagined in this introduction can be formulated. Just like our subjects, we are embedded in local conditions that shape our scholarly view, however broadly knowledgeable we strive to be. We have sought to give attention to areas of the world that are currently less well studied and to juxtapose them with better-known regions. In doing so, we suggest what a future geography of eighteenth-century art might look like, and we invite this book’s readers to continue plotting points on the map we have created here. The result would be one in

16

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

which those points, some widely recognized, some less so, coexist in a complex interactive system. In so doing what we offer is less a new global narrative of eighteenthcentury art than a new methodology for characterizing what makes it so important. To visualize this, we launch this book with a map created toward the end of the period under consideration. It appeared in 1803 as part of the Cedid-Atlas, which itself was part of a program of institutional and governmental reforms overseen by the Ottoman Sultan Selim III and called the Nizam-I Djedid or “New Order.” The goal of these reforms was to restructure the Ottoman government and military to bring it more in line with international practices, and this involved mapping the world in a way that correlated with an increasingly internationally shared sense of global space. To achieve this, the publisher Mürderris Abdulrahman Effendi modified maps from William Faden’s General Atlas, published in London in 1788; indeed the atlas’s title in Turkish describes it as “a translation,” which directly acknowledges modification across cultures. To our twenty-first century eyes, the map appears remarkably familiar and true, but the prominence of Turkish-Arabic script across it and the centrality of the Pacific Ocean in its layout remind us that we are looking at a view of the world positioned from a distinct vantage point, and one likely unfamiliar to many readers of this book. Perhaps this map can stand in for the totalizing world view that might commence an inquiry such as ours, and remind us that the world is always visualized from a specific place within it. Stacey Sloboda Carbondale, IL and Boston, MA Michael Yonan Columbia, MO

Notes 1 David Garrick to Guy Cooper (2 June 1775). National Art Library 86.CC.44, reprinted in John Irwin and Katharine B. Brett, The Origins of Chintz (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1970), 82–3. Garrick’s involvement in Calcutta theater is described by Derek Forbes, “ ‘Our Theatrical Attempts in This Distant Quarter’: The British Stage in Eighteenth-Century Calcutta,” Theatre Notebook 61 no. 2 (2007): 62–76. Chippendale’s workshop seems to have been a frequent target for Customs’ raids, as discussed by Edward T. Joy, “Chippendale in Trouble at the Customs,” Country Life 110 (24 August 1951): 569. The entirety of the Garrick-Chippendale relationship is documented by Christopher Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 236–48. 2 Victoria and Albert Museum (W.70–1916). 3 On models and metaphors of the social life and mobility of material culture Arjun Appadurai, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), particularly Appadurai’s introductory chapter and Igor Kopytoff ’s essay, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization

Introduction

4 5

6 7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

17

as Process.” See also Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds., The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World (New York: Routledge, 2016); and Meredith Martin and Daniela Bleichmar, eds. “Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World,” special issue of Art History 38 no. 4 (September 2015). Barbara Maria Stafford, “The Eighteenth Century: Towards an Interdisciplinary Model,” The Art Bulletin 70, no. 1 (March 1988): 6–24. David Armitage, quoted by Jan de Vries in “Reflections on Doing Global History,” in Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the 21st Century, ed. Maxine Berg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 33. Howard Becker, Art Worlds, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Mieke Bal, “Grounds of Comparison,” in The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People, ed. M. Bal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 130; cited and discussed by Craig Clunas in “The Art of Global Comparisons,” in Writing the History of the Global, 175–6. The phrase is inspired by Benedict Anderson’s study of nationalism, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1998). David Armitage, “Is There a Prehistory of Globalization?” in Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective, eds. D. Cohen and M. O’Connor (New York: Routledge, 2004), 165–80. Felicity Nussbaum, ed. The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Michael North, ed. Artistic and Cultural Exchanges Between Europe and Asia, 1400–1900 (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2010); Mary D. Sheriff, ed., Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Ileana Baird and Christina Ionescu, eds. Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2013); Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall, eds. Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World (PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer, eds. Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500–1800 (London: V&A Publications, 2004); Petra ten-Doescchate Chu and Ning Ding, eds. Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015); Dennis Carr, ed. Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). David Washbrook, “Problems in Global History,” in Berg, Writing the History of the Global, 21–2. With respect to the eighteenth century, the subject is treated more recently in David T. Gies and Cynthia Wall, The Eighteenth Centuries: Global Networks of Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 1–13. The challenges of global art history are engagingly debated in James Elkins, ed. Is Art History Global? (New York: Routledge, 2007); select proceedings from the CIHA 2008 conference Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence, published as “How to Write Art History – National, Regional or Global? Conference of the CIHA,” in Acta Historiae Artium 49 (2008); Jill H. Casid and Aruna d’Souza, eds. Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2014); and in the “Wither Art History?” series that has appeared in The Art Bulletin and in essays published in Artl@s Bulletin. James Elkins, Stories of Art (New York: Routledge, 2002); David Summers, Real Spaces: Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2003); John Onians, ed. Atlas of World Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Julian Bell, A Mirror of

18

15

16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds the World: A New History of Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2007); Celina Jeffery and Gregory, eds. Global and Local Art Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007); David Carrier, A World Art History and Its Objects (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008). “Introduction: Reintroducing Circulations: Historiography and the Project of Global Art History,” in Circulations in the Global History of Art, eds. T. DaCosta Kaufmann, C. Dossin, and B. Joyeux-Prunel (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2015), 18. Bartolomé Yun Casalilla, “ ‘Localism,’ Global History, and Transnational History: A Reflection from the Historian of Early Modern Europe,” Historisk Tidskrift 127:4 (2007): 659–78. Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992): 93–113. Éva Forgács, “The Necessity of Writing Local Art History in the Global Context,” Acta Historiae Artium 49 (2008): 103–108. Forgács, 104–105. Claudia Mattos, “Geography, Art Theory, and New Perspectives for an Inclusive Art History,” The Art Bulletin 96, no. 3 (September 2014): 262. Casalilla, 663. Nussbaum, 10. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Michael North, eds. Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014). An issue discussed by Cheng-hua Wang in “A Global Perspective on EighteenthCentury Chinese Art and Visual Culture,” The Art Bulletin 96 no. 4 (December 2014); 379–94. Kaufmann, Dossin, and Joyeux-Prunel, 2–3. Kaufmann, 6. Harriet Hawkins, “Geography and Art. An Expanding Field: Site, the Body, and Practice,” Progress in Human Geography 37, no. 1 (2012), 55. Hawkins, 55.

2

Flowering Stone The Aesthetics and Politics of Islamic Jades at the Qing Court Kristina Kleutghen

In 1770, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95) wrote a poem on the subject of a particular jade bowl in his collection (Figure 2.1). Qianlong often found inspiration for his prolific poetry among the myriad works of art in his possession, but, in this case, neither the work nor where the emperor chose to record the poem were typical collecting practices. Carved from green nephrite jade in seventeenth-century Mughal Indian style, although produced in India sometime in the eighteenth century, the bowl measures almost seven inches in diameter and approximately two-and-a-half inches in height. It is crafted in the form of a flower whose petals open outward to create the vessel, while closed buds on two sides extend out from the body of the bowl to meet leaves that create elegantly delicate handles. The organic form is carved to translucent thinness, allowing light to shine through the extremely hard stone walls of the bowl in a very desirable effect that Chinese jade carvers rarely achieved, but that was a hallmark of Mughal jade carving. Polished to a high gloss, the bowl would have felt cool and smooth to the touch, and likely remarkably light given its thin walls and relatively small size. To express his appreciation for this rare and luxurious object, Qianlong wrote a poem praising the item, and ordered it incised onto the exterior surface of the bowl. This decision, which risked destroying the fragile item, not only preserved the emperor’s thoughts in perpetuity, but also demonstrated how this ruler employed traditional and innovative collecting strategies in response to political changes in the empire. By the late eighteenth century, the monumental Chinese imperial art collection included antique, contemporary Chinese, and foreign fine and decorative arts in unsurpassed numbers. As a dedicated collector and connoisseur, Qianlong often wrote poems praising and engaging the works, thereby interacting with them in the longestablished way of the educated Chinese connoisseur. At the same time, both the imperial collection and the ruler’s poetic engagement with works in it were inherently political. As the ruler of the massive multiethnic empire created during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the Qianlong emperor’s every action and word regarding a work of art provided an opportunity to make a statement as much about the object as about 19

20

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 2.1 Nephrite jade chrysanthemum-shaped bowl, inscribed in Chinese with a poem by the Qianlong emperor, dated 1770, Mughal, 18th century. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (02.18.762).

himself and his empire. As was customary for Chinese paintings, his many poems written in appreciation or art-historical consideration of the thousands of paintings he collected were often inscribed directly on the surface of the silk or paper, or in the case of horizontal scrolls, could also be appended after the work using additional sheets. Much less traditional, and certainly exponentially riskier, was Qianlong’s highly unusual practice of ordering his poems incised directly on extremely fragile decorative objects, such as rare antique ceramics dating from the Northern Song (960–1127) and Southern Song (1127–1279) dynasties. His poetry written about and incised into these ceramics not only demonstrates his connoisseurial knowledge of these works as material objects, but also identifies their historical value to him as products of the Song dynasty imperial kilns, in addition to their political value as didactic reminders of the tragic fall of the Northern Song dynasty during the reign of the Huizong emperor (r. 1100–26), who served as a model for Qianlong’s own imperial collecting and as a cautionary tale to ward against the distractions of art.1 Qianlong’s decision to collect and incise his poetry on politically meaningful decorative works such as Song-dynasty ceramics extended also to the Islamic-style jades, such as the chrysanthemum bowl in Figure. 2.1, for which he developed a taste beginning around 1760. He uniformly praised these “Hindustan jades,” as he called the carved jade objects that he collected from across the Islamic world in the second half of the eighteenth century, and he waxed lyrical about them in numerous poems, often

Aesthetics and Politics of Islamic Jades at the Qing Court

21

incised directly onto the objects to make his appreciation of them and their foreignness a permanent part of their identities. Whether imported from afar or imitated at home, the incised poems demonstrate the emperor’s belief that the multivalent aesthetic and political value of these objects was significantly enhanced by the vast international power implicit in their material and carving style. The emperor’s decision to collect this particular style of jade bowl, to write a poem about it, and to have that poem made a permanent part of the object not only ensured that the item would be preserved in the imperial collection, but also that his intertwined political and aesthetic motivations for acquiring this item would likewise endure. The addition of Xinjiang province to the Qing empire after its Central Asian campaigns of 1755–9 resulted in dramatically increased access to raw jade from that region, which now also functioned as a gateway for new carved jade forms to enter China from across early modern Islamic Eurasia. Jade was historically the most precious stone in Chinese culture, yet following these campaigns, Qianlong began to collect a variety of Islamic-style jade forms that differed significantly from those in the history of Chinese jade carving. The political meaning of Qing access to Islamic jades in the second half of the eighteenth century reveals as much about the Qianlong emperor’s personal taste in exotic decorative arts as it does about larger Qing expansionist aspirations regarding its presence as a major imperial power in eighteenthcentury Eurasia. Qianlong’s inscribed Hindustan jades, objects from across the Islamic world carved in luxurious exotic forms from what the Chinese could now call their own domestic jade, enabled him to make the global local even as it demonstrated the incredible reach of the Qing empire and his own particular role in expanding it.

Jade and the Xinjiang Campaigns (1755–9) In China, jade items were treasured at least as early as the Neolithic era: they were often given pride of place as ritual items placed directly on the body of the deceased in the earliest extant tombs. Over time, jade gained additional metaphorical values, coming to connote the consistent integrity and profound morality of the true Confucian gentleman, as well as materially denoting wealth. The term “jade” is a generic name commonly used to refer indiscriminately to items made of either nephrite or jadeite. Nephrite is a calcium and magnesium silicate that appears in a wide variety of colors, but mostly pale green, grey, whites, browns, and yellows. This is the stone that the Chinese historically termed “jade” or yu 玉, the finest examples of which were imported from the area around Khotan (Hetian 和田) in what is now Xinjiang province, officially known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China. The Manasi River valley, in particular, has abundant nephrite deposits, and was historically prized as one of its most important sources.2 In contrast, jadeite is a sodium aluminum silicate of the pyroxene group, which include a range of bright and deep greens that have come to define what many think of today as the color “jade green.” However, this bright green jadeite only became widely known in China in the eighteenth century, when it was imported from Burma,

22

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

a Qing tributary.3 So, in using the term “jade” here, I refer not only to the mineral properly called nephrite, but also to a stone with profoundly Chinese cultural resonance, despite originating from around Khotan—an area that was not only inconsistently within the historical borders of China, but also ethnically, culturally, and linguistically distinct as well. At its early height, Khotan was the capital of a Buddhist kingdom located on the southern rim of the Taklamakan Desert and a major oasis stop on the ancient “Silk Road” around the Tarim Basin. In the early eleventh century, Turkic Muslims under the Kharakhanid Khanate invaded this region of Central Asia and converted it to Islam, establishing a firm Muslim faith that persisted even under the later control of Mongols (who were predominantly Tibetan Buddhists). During the late seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries, relations fluctuated between the Dzungar Mongols and Khoja Muslims who occupied the region, which was now on the far northwest border of the Qing empire. But from 1755 to 1759, the Qianlong emperor conducted a series of campaigns in this part of Central Asia that sought to pacify these two groups, bring them under Qing control, and thereby expand China to include this largely Muslim region.4 Many years after the campaigns concluded, Qianlong’s conquest of this territory was immortalized in a famous series of images drafted by the European missionary painters serving the Qing court and sent to France for engraving and printing.5 This well-studied album of engravings is often heralded as a key moment in eighteenth-century Sino-European artistic exchange. However, it also serves as a reminder that the addition of Xinjiang province to the Qing empire now meant that the jade-mining center of Khotan, a site of Turkic and Islamic culture historically famous for exporting nephrite across Asia and the Islamic world, was now unequivocally part of a massive, multicultural, and multiethnic Qing China. As a result, Khotanese jade from Xinjiang became imbued with new political and cultural references to Qing control over Islamic Central Asia alongside the traditional Confucian significance, and in many ways used to legitimize the conquest of Xinjiang. Beginning in 1740, at moments when the various groups occupying this area had been tributary to the Qing, they had sometimes sent tribute gifts to the emperors that included simple jade vessels such as small bowls or pots with little to no decoration.6 After 1759, however, the geography and the circumstances of these objects became inseparable from their materials.7 Nowhere is this clearer than in the set of twelve jade ritual chimes that in 1761 Qianlong commissioned to be made out of Khotanese jade (Figure 2.2). The large stone slab, measuring thirty-three inches at its widest point, is incised with a long piece of prose written in antique seal script calligraphy that begins with Qianlong invoking Confucius on the importance to imperial rule of ritual music played on chimes such as this. This classical reference continues directly into a statement about how Qianlong’s territory now included Khotan with its rich jade reserves, from which the Qing themselves mined the jade for objects that legitimized Qing control over the area, such as this very chime.8 In other words, Qianlong emphasizes the fact that the desirable Khotanese jade was no longer a tribute good offered by a foreign kingdom nor an object of trade as it had been previously, but instead a local product from one

Aesthetics and Politics of Islamic Jades at the Qing Court

23

Figure 2.2 Jade chime (qing), one of twelve, 1761. Khotanese jade and gold, inscribed in seal script, with text by the Qianlong emperor. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2016.179.2). corner of the vast, diverse, and powerful Qing empire that now extended well into Central Asia.9 Jade mining in the area subsequently increased dramatically, and more than one hundred tons of raw jade were sent east to Beijing and other cities between 1760 and 1820.10 Much of this jade, including this chime, was carved not in Xinjiang, but in the imperial workshops in Beijing and Suzhou, as well as by other hardstone artisans working in the Jiangnan region of central coastal China, thousands of miles away. But the Qianlong emperor also began specifically acquiring jades carved from Qing Khotanese jade in other parts of the Islamic world, and in new exotic Islamicstyle forms that further distinguished these objects from other jades in the imperial collection.

Praising the “Hindustan” Jades After the Qianlong emperor’s obsession with Khotanese jade became firmly established in the wake of the Xinjiang Campaigns, in 1768 an official in Yarkand, a site in Xinjiang not far from Khotan and also renowned for its jade, sent Qianlong a pair of large Mughal jade plates carved to resemble a stylized lotus.11 Qianlong already knew that these plates were made in a place called “Hindustan” (Hendusitan 很度斯坦), and

24

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

subsequently conducted research into its history and location. This resulted in his 1768 essay, “Examination into Falsehoods Concerning the Five Regions of India” (Tianzhu wuyindu kao’e 天 竺 五 印 度 考 訛), which correlated Hindustan specifically with the Muslim Mughal Empire, as opposed to the historical Chinese term Yindu 印 度 used for the greater area of India, where Buddhism originated.12 Resolving the religious and geographical details of these terms was essential given the historical dominance of Buddhism in China, and the term “Hindustan” therefore reconciled the far more recent Muslim empire with the historical geography of Indian Buddhism. Qianlong subsequently ordered a portion of this essay incised directly onto the Mughal plates, indelibly marking the jades with his imperial definition of their origins and recognition of that Islamic-inflected difference. This essay also marked the beginning of Qianlong’s writing on and about Hindustan jades: between 1768 and 1794, he wrote at least fifty-seven poems with the word “Hindustan” in their titles, and at least thirty-seven of these were also inscribed on more than forty imported Islamic jades and Qing-made imitations of jades carved in Mughal styles.13 With the 1768 gift of the plates and the beginning of Qianlong’s prolific writing on and upon Hindustan jades, the larger cities of far western Xinjiang (specifically Khotan, Yarkand, and Kashgar), thus became the sites into which carved jades from across the Islamic world flowed into China in ways that linked material, aesthetics, geography, and politics. As knowledge of Qianlong’s interest in acquiring Islamic-style jades spread across the Islamic world, examples subsequently began arriving from Ottoman Turkey, Central Asia, and especially Mughal India in response to the Qing emperor’s personal taste. Qianlong most prized Mughal-style nephrite jade carving, specifically styles used in the first half of the seventeenth century during the reigns of Jahangir (r. 1605–27) and Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58), whose patronage is considered the golden age of this art. The Mughal jade-carving tradition is exemplified by the Shah Jahan cup (Figure 2.3), dated 1657, that is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Beautifully carved by Mughal court artisans, the white nephrite jade cup is in the form of half a lobed gourd, with a lotus-flower foot carved in high relief and surrounded by acanthus leaves. The handle is shaped like the head of a horned goat, which curves inward toward the body of the cup to balance the curve of the gourd. At about nineteen centimeters long, the cup is just small enough to fit into the hand, and it is easy to imagine how cool and smooth the highly buffed stone would have felt to touch. Produced in the Mughal court workshops of Agra or Delhi, the cup is an eclectic blend of features from across Eurasia, reflecting the cosmopolitanism of Mughal style across its arts. The naturalism of the lotus and the goat head are characteristic of Hindu sculpture; the acanthus leaves are European; the gourd form is Chinese; and the tradition of jade carving is a Persian and Turkic practice that started in the fifteenth century, but was almost certainly borrowed from the Chinese tradition that began thousands of years before.14 Although not present in the Shah Jahan cup, another key aspect of Mughal jade carving is the use of inlaid gold and precious stones such as diamonds, emeralds, and rubies. All these elements, together with the translucent thinness of the Shah Jahan cup and the single color of the nephrite used in each piece,

Aesthetics and Politics of Islamic Jades at the Qing Court

25

Figure 2.3 Shah Jahan cup, Mughal, 1657. White nephrite jade. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London (IS.12-1962). define the height of Mughal jade carving—not just to us today, but also to the Qianlong emperor in late eighteenth-century China. Whether received as tribute gifts from diplomatic envoys, purchased by agents abroad for the imperial collection, or fabricated by Chinese jade carvers as exoticizing imitations in the imperial workshop in Beijing, Qianlong’s special fascination with Islamic-style jades lay as much in the material as in their novel forms carved to neartransparent thinness in exotic patterns. The imported Islamic-style jades in the former imperial collections include a wide variety of forms particular to the Islamic world that were not historically found in Chinese jade carving: decorative hilts for ornamental daggers and swords, cups and bowls shaped like plants and flowers, teapots and urns in distinctively foreign forms, and all manner of objects inlaid with gold and precious stones to emphasize geometric, organic, and zoomorphic decoration.15 The relatively few objects successfully fabricated in the Qing imperial workshops include imitations of all of these Islamic forms, as well as traditionally Chinese forms now decorated with imported vegetal and floral motifs, blending Qing and Mughal ideas into new design possibilities that brought a range of innovations into Chinese jades. Qianlong collected carved jades from across the Islamic world as far west as Turkey in the Ottoman Empire.16 But regardless of where these pieces originated, he uniformly referred to them as Hindustan jades, conflating multiple empires and kingdoms

26

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

scattered across the continent into a much smaller Islamic world west of the Qing empire. In many cases, he praised the thinness of their walls, carved to near transparency, which he sometimes compared positively with the transparency of paper or cicada’s wings. Despite this fragility, however, or perhaps even because of the comparison he saw with paper, Qianlong did not hesitate to have his poems about these objects incised directly onto them. Many of the items that received imperial poetry were carved in classic Mughal styles from the previous century, but the poems never mention any of the Mughal rulers by name. These poems instead suggest that whether imported from afar or imitated at home, the aesthetic value of the objects they graced was significantly enhanced by the vast international power implicit in them and their material, as well as the greater Qing political identity as a major imperial power in eighteenth-century Eurasia. One such example is the translucent bowl now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Figure. 2.1), incised with a poem that praises both its carving and its identity as a foreign item that is, nonetheless, entirely appropriate for a Chinese gentleman and poet: This chrysanthemum-patterned bowl from Hindustan Is fashioned in a style different from that of our ancient work. The handles hang down, suspended like two swelling buds And the foot below is carved with serried ranks of petals. Such offerings come to us not only as tribute from the Yulong River [in Khotan], But are also brought back by merchants from as far away as India.17 The chrysanthemum is still, as of old, the flower of the autumn holiday, And this is a fitting gift for Tao Yuanming in his five-willow retreat. Written by Qianlong in 177018

Praising the form of the bowl through careful description takes up fully half the poem, demonstrating Qianlong’s appreciation for this floral form that he specifically points out is not traditionally found in Chinese jade carving. Despite this noted difference, however, the flower pattern is one that a Mughal owner would likely have interpreted as a stylized lotus rather than a chrysanthemum, as Qianlong does. But the emperor’s decision to read it as a chrysanthemum transforms it into an intimately familiar, traditional Chinese symbol of the autumn season and particularly of longevity—even immortality—and therefore also associates it with the famous, reclusive fourth-century poet, Tao Yuanming. As the author of this poem and recipient of the bowl, Qianlong thereby implicitly equates himself with the earlier master, drawing parallels across the centuries to elevate both the bowl and his poem about it to a loftier status than might otherwise be granted to them. But by stating that such bowls are perfect gifts for unequivocally Chinese masters such as Tao Yuanming, directly after noting in practical political and economic terms that they arrived in China as both tribute from Xinjiang and as trade goods from Hindustani merchants, Qianlong underscores his personal connection to both the classical Han Chinese past and the multiethnic Qing imperial present. Identifying the pattern as a traditional Chinese symbol of longevity further

Aesthetics and Politics of Islamic Jades at the Qing Court

27

transforms the bowl into an auspicious wish for the long life of an emperor, a most appropriate gift in every way and whose “chrysanthemum” pattern was widely present across various media in the imperial collection. By collecting and poeticizing this bowl, Qianlong manipulated its story to claim a dual identity as both a reclusive poet and the engaged sovereign of a vast multicultural empire. Ordering his poem incised on the object not only ensured that it would endure in the imperial collection, but also that his own version of history would be preserved for posterity alongside the material evidence supporting his claim. This poem exemplifies a common approach to Qianlong’s poetry about Hindustan jades: he begins by describing the object ekphrastically, transitions into a statement of the object’s or the material’s distant geographic origins, and concludes with an allusion (often to some aspect of traditional Chinese culture or history) that, nonetheless, also reflects well on himself. Ekphrastic inscriptions are common on traditional Chinese paintings, and in the study of which have received the most scholarly consideration. The presence of ekphrastic inscriptions on paintings was bolstered not just by the elevated connoisseurial practice of writing poetry about painting, but also the fundamental aesthetic conviction, articulated by the influential Northern Song intellectual Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101), that “there is painting in poetry, and poetry in painting” (shi zhong you hua, hua zhong you shi 詩中有畫，畫中 有詩).19 Su Shi’s statement presages more abstract assessments by W. J. T. Mitchell that, “language can stand in for depiction and depiction can stand in for language because communication, expressive acts, narration, argument, description, exposition and other so-called ‘speech acts’ are not medium-specific, are not ‘proper’ to one medium or another.”20 In the case of Qianlong’s Hindustani bowl, both the object and the poem are inflected materially by the political and geographic origins of the jade, which Qianlong emphasizes without subtlety. Historically, incising ekphrastic poetic commentary directly on collected objects (other than paintings) or even on their storage boxes was not a common practice. However, Qianlong utilized this method to considerable effect, thereby preserving a large body of primary source material with his thoughts about certain objects, such as Song dynasty ceramics and Hindustan jades, which remain immutably correlated with those objects. Although any individual poem does function autonomously relative to the object on which it is incised, when considered alongside others as a corpus they would almost certainly offer a wider perspective on his connoisseurship as practiced on his imperial collection, and would significantly expand the related scholarship on his painting connoisseurship.21 However, given that approximately 43,000 poems overall are attributed to Qianlong, even considering the subset inspired by works of art is no small undertaking. Not all the pieces produced in Islamic styles were actual Hindustani imports: capitalizing on Qianlong’s fascination, Chinese jade carvers from Suzhou and Yangzhou established their own workshops in western Xinjiang to create Islamic-style jades, as did Uyghur Muslim carvers who already lived in the region. These works, exemplified by a gourd-shaped cup with a ram’s head (Figure 2.4), demonstrates the visibly lesser skills of the Qing carvers working in Mughal styles.

28

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 2.4 Gourd-shaped cup with ram’s head, Xinjiang, late-18th–early-19th centuries. White nephrite jade, inlaid with ruby, onyx, and gold wire. After Exquisite Beauty—Islamic Jades (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 2008), p. 198. In comparison with the Shah Jahan cup, the Xinjiang cup, although inlaid with precious stones and gold wire for greater panache and obvious exoticism, lacks the fluidity and naturalism of the Mughal masterpiece. The ram’s head is rigid and its expression dull and static, while its horns lie flat, with no space between them and the ram’s neck, and the additional gem set into the middle of its forehead distorts the face relative to the two gems set in its eyes. The cup itself has only the simplest flat foot carved in low relief and a clumsy base with no resemblance to the delicate flower and leaves of the Shan Jahan cup’s foot, while the scallop shape of the lobed gourd is stiff and rigid rather than fluid and mobile. Such features are common indicators of Chinese-made imitations of Mughal and Ottoman jades, and demonstrate that the Qing stonecarvers were typically only capable of imitating the general appearance of Hindustan jades, rather than capturing the details that truly distinguished them from the Chinese jade-carving tradition. Nevertheless, Qianlong’s fascination with Hindustan jades was so significant to jade carving across the Eurasian continent during the second half of the eighteenth century that today, many Eurasian jades from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries that are carved in Mughal styles cannot be conclusively identified as either Chinese or Mughal works.22 By the eighteenth century, as the Mughal Empire continued to shrink and weaken in the face of British colonial rule, Qianlong’s taste for jade presented stone carvers across the Islamic world with a new patron whose desire was well known across Eurasia. His collecting interests therefore contributed significantly to the perpetuation of the jade-carving industry across the continent, and in doing so preserved Mughal forms and styles long after the height of the art. Perhaps to better compete with foreign

Aesthetics and Politics of Islamic Jades at the Qing Court

29

jade carvers, or even to compensate for their lesser skills in carving to translucency, in the late eighteenth century, Chinese jade carvers began to incorporate the Hindustani element of inlay more into traditionally Chinese forms and subjects. One such example is the gold and garnet inlaid into a dark green nephrite statue of an elephant carrying a vase (Figure 2.5). This seemingly incongruous pairing was a traditional and popular Chinese homophonic symbol of auspiciousness: the words for “vase” (ping 瓶) and “elephant”

Figure 2.5 Elephant carrying a vase, symbolic homophone with phrase, “When there is peace, there are signs,” Qing, 18th–19th century. Nephrite jade inlaid with garnet. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (02.18.740).

30

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

(xiang 象) are homonyms for the words “peace” (ping 平) and “signs” (xiang 象) respectively. The words and images combine into a visual rebus that illustrates the Chinese proverb, “When there is peace, there are signs” (taiping you xiang 太平有象). Although this auspicious subject was a common motif for decorative arts, Mughal jades directly inspired the inlaid garnets and gold. Those tiny additions give this familiar Chinese emblem a fresh and exotic new decorative treatment without overwhelming the traditional wish.

Conclusion Jades like the inlaid elephant demonstrate that there was no need for either stylistic or formal purity when it came to the imperial Qing decorative interest in the foreign. This is not a criticism: these works are a vivid indication of the flexibility and expansiveness of Qing taste for the exotic, and the ways in the foreign could be juxtaposed with the familiar. Even when imported from India or Turkey, the Islamic-style jades come to acquire the distinctive facture of the Qing imperial court in the form of Qianlong’s Chinese poetry incised on them by the carvers in his imperial jade carving workshop in Beijing. This addition further mitigates their foreignness and reminds the viewer not only of the particular emperor who collected them, but whose military campaigns were responsible for adding the jade-rich Muslim region of Xinjiang to the Qing empire, thereby expanding it into Central Asia. Qianlong’s taste for the foreign in decorative arts was not limited to Islamic jades, but extended globally to include Japanese-style lacquers and copperwork, and most famously, a wide variety of European-inspired elements applied across a range of items, most notably porcelains and glass.23 Those Japanese- and European-style objects were produced domestically, in contrast to the Hindustan jades that were predominantly imported, even if the material originated within the Qing borders. Plumbing the depths of eighteenth-century Qing imperial taste for the exotic in its decorative arts must therefore consider both the collection of imported works as well as the domestic production of exoticizing objects. As Michele Matteini demonstrates in his essay in this volume, for example, the vast breadth of “Western” objects available in eighteenthcentury Beijing is inextricable from both the abstract political ideology of Qing cosmopolitanism and the practical experience of it in everyday life. But such an inquiry must also treat Europe and Japan as equal to Hindustan, because all of these objects—regardless of their foreign or domestic origins—share an important additional characteristic. In the eighteenth century, Europe, Japan, and India were not formal Qing tributaries in the traditional Chinese sense of its hierarchical dominance over surrounding countries and foreigners who came to the Chinese court to pay homage with gifts of local goods. Following precedents established during the Ming dynasty, the Qing received formal tribute offerings of local luxuries from Korea, Burma, Siam (Thailand), Vietnam, and the Ryukyu Islands, as well as occasionally other Southeast Asian kingdoms such as Sulawesi. But the Qing emperors displayed little interest in the styles of the decorative arts that arrived with these tribute offerings: we

Aesthetics and Politics of Islamic Jades at the Qing Court

31

do not find Thai or Korean styles affecting Qing court arts in any significant way, if even at all. Although a few European nations sent embassies to the High Qing court, most famously the British,24 they emphatically did not think of themselves as Qing tributaries, but rather as equals seeking trade concessions with little success. The Qing court considered these countries more in the traditional sense of China as a superior power recognizing inferior tributaries, but even that treatment varied widely. Most European nations did not send formal embassies: France, for example, used its Jesuits as conduits for contact and gift exchange with Qianlong, thereby preserving a façade of equality between the rulers without the troubles posed by diplomacy.25 Nor did Mughal India and Tokugawa Japan establish formal diplomatic contact with the Qing, although there was considerable mercantile exchange. Yet, Europe, Japan, and India were, nonetheless, the predominant sources of exoticizing inspiration for the High Qing court. Rather than tell a simple story about import substitution, these objects reveal how the Qianlong emperor used exoticizing decorative arts as a means of material mediation between the Qing dynasty and the major civilizations that he considered possible equals—and thus possible rivals—to China’s own cultural and political achievements. These objects therefore reflect a largely undiscussed interaction of eighteenth-century political and cultural peers: objects that indicate a deeper level of Qing engagement with other major powers in ways that materially complicate our previous understanding of late imperial Chinese interest in the world, and stand to offer new insights into its political interactions as well. But even as potential peers, Qianlong’s regular addition of poetry on the Islamic jades that he collected includes consistent references to his acquisition of Xinjiang as the origin of this famous jade that now lay within the Qing empire. The global reach of the Qing was therefore materially apparent in these objects, produced in distant lands that were not typically tributary to the Qing, but that, nonetheless, valued its resources in their decorative arts—even as the Qing themselves were less skilled in imitating those arts, and instead largely collected them from foreign producers. As striking illustrations of eighteenth-century Chinese interest in the wider world, and particularly areas with which it did not have a hierarchical tributary relationship, Qianlong’s collection of Islamic jades reveals the aesthetics and politics of his taste for the exotic, and suggests new methods for the materiality of eighteenth-century Chinese contact with the rest of the globe.

Notes 1 Peichin Yu, De jia qu: Qianlong huangdi de taoci pinwei (Obtaining Refined Enjoyment: The Qianlong Emperor’s Taste in Ceramics) (Taibei: Guoli gugong bowuyuan, 2012), 43–4; Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Accumulating Culture: The Collections of Emperor Huizong (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2008). 2 Guo Fuxiang, Qianlong gongting Manasi biyu yanjiu (Beijing: Gugong chubanshe, 2015).

32

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

3 James Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 180; Edward Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of Tang Exotics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1963), 223–7. 4 Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). 5 Laura Newby, “Copper Plates for the Qianlong Emperor: From Paris to Peking via Canton,” Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012): 161–99. 6 Teng Shuping, ed., Yueguo Kunlunshan de zhenbao: yuancang Yisilan yuqi tezhan (Taibei: National Palace Museum, 2015), 28. 7 Ming Wilson, “1760—An Important Year in the Production of Chinese Jade,” Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society 73 (2008): 51–9. 8 A complete translation of the inscription can be found at “Qing Jade Chime,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, available at: http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/ search/670539 (accessed December 30, 2016). 9 Li Dou, Yangzhou huafang lu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960), juan 17. 10 Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, 184. 11 Teng, Yueguo Kunlunshan, 32. 12 Matthew W. Mosca, “Hindustan as a Geographic and Political Concept in Qing Sources, 1700–1800,” China Report 47, no. 4 (2011): 263–77; Matthew W. Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), ch. 2. 13 Teng, Yueguo Kunlunshan, 39. 14 “V&A, The Wine Cup of Shah Jahan,” Victoria and Albert Museum, available at: https:// www.vam.ac.uk/articles/the-wine-cup-of-shah-jahan (accessed October 16, 2016); Ralph Pinder-Wilson, “Introduction: Rock-Crystal and Jade,” in The Arts of Islam: Hayward Gallery, 8 April–4 July 1976, edited by Arts Council of Great Britain (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976), 122–3. 15 Both the National Palace Museum (Taipei) and the Palace Museum (Beijing) have recently held exhibitions of the Islamic jades originating from the former Qing imperial collection. See Xu Xiaodong, ed., Xiangong qizhi: Gugong bowuyuan cang Hendusitan yuqi jingpin zhan (Hong Kong: Zhongwen daxue, Zhongguo wenhua yanjiusuo wenwuguan, 2015); Teng, Yueguo Kunlunshan; National Palace Museum, Guose tianxiang: Yisilan yuqi (Taibei: National Palace Museum, 2007); Teng Shuping, ed., Gugong suocang Hendusitan yuqi tezhan tulu (Taibei: National Palace Museum, 1983). 16 Teng, Yueguo Kunlunshan, 157–72. 17 Literally, Quxu, which is an ancient name for a country far to the west of early imperial China, but whose use here refers to India. 18 痕都斯坦菊花椀／径一圍三尺有餘／水磨工異考工書／耳垂翻出雙苞綴／足砥 紛承碎瓣舒／包貢却非来玉隴／通商恆是走渠胥／菊花依舊重陽節／合贈淵明 五柳居／乾隆庚 寅 御 题. Translation adapted from “Bowl in the Shape of a Chrysanthemum Flower,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, available at: http://www. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/56211 (accessed October 16, 2016). 19 Wai-kam Ho, “The Literary Concepts of ‘Picture-Like’ (Ru Hua) and ‘Picture-Idea’ (Hua Yi) in the Relationship Between Poetry and Painting,” in Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting, edited by Alfreda Murck and Wen Fong (New York

Aesthetics and Politics of Islamic Jades at the Qing Court

20 21 22

23

24 25

33

and Princeton, NJ: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Princeton University Press, 1991), 173–98. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, Il: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 160. Hironobu Kohara, “The Qianlong Emperor’s Skill in the Connoisseurship of Chinese Painting,” Phoebus 6, no. 1 (1988): 56–73 and 176–82. Robert Skelton, “The Relations Between the Chinese and Indian Jade Carving Traditions,” in The Westward Influence of the Chinese Arts from the 14th to the 18th Century, edited by William Watson (London: University of London, Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, 1972), 98–110. Kristina Kleutghen, “Imports and Imitations: The Taste for Japanese Lacquer in Eighteenth-Century China and Europe,” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2017): 175–206; Kristina Kleutghen, “Chinese Occidenterie: The Diversity of ‘Western’ Objects in Eighteenth-Century China,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 47, no. 2 (2014): 117–35. See also Matteini’s essay in this volume. James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Kristel Smentek, “Chinoiseries for the Qing: A French Gift of Tapestries to the Qianlong Emperor,” Journal of Early Modern History 20 (2016): 87–109; Kee Il Choi, “Father Amiot’s Cup: A Qing Imperial Porcelain Sent to the Cournt of Louis XV,” in Writing Material Culture History, edited by Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 33–41.

34

3

The Market for “Western” Paintings in Eighteenth-Century East Asia A View from the Liulichang Market in Beijing Michele Matteini

The proliferation of “Western” things in Qing China has in the last twenty years attracted the attention of historians investigating the Qing court’s role in the eighteenthcentury networks of global exchange.1 Part of this interest is certainly due to the idea that these curious objects—described in sources as “Western Oceans” (xiyang)—made for an intriguing counterpart to the fashion for Chinese things in Europe around the same time, thus corroborating a view of the China–West exchange as symmetrical and mutually self-defining. The Qing emperors amassed large quantities of clocks, glass, enamelware, textile, automata, and many more “Western” things as a measure of the global scale of their ambition. European Jesuits, employed at court for their technical expertise, were instrumental in forging the Qing imagination about the West. Today, scholars prefer not to disentangle the Qing–West exchange from the various nodes of cross-cultural negotiations taking place at court and to assess the Jesuits’ role as analogous to that of other techno-bureaucrats whose specialized skills transformed the Qing vision of emperorship into a tangible reality. The “prosperous age” (shengshi) of the Kangxi, Yongzheng, Qianlong reigns found its perfected image in a synthetic, imperial style that welded together Inner and Central Asian, Tibetan, Mongol, Chinese, as well as Western forms and technologies.2 A few notable exceptions aside, discussion of Western goods in Qing China has concentrated on the court or on the tangential milieus of the mercantile elite and the metropolitan bannermen aristocracy, whose elegant lifestyles were immortalized in the eighteenth-century novel The Dream of the Red Chamber.3 New research on trading centers like Suzhou or Canton shows that the range of things labeled Western was broader than previously thought and their circulation extended beyond the official channels monitored by the imperial administration. This essay introduces a body of xiyang pictures that for various reasons have not found space in standard narratives of exotica in Qing China. Broadly speaking, they can be divided into two groups: (1) depictions of large-sized figures, usually Westerners, in casual, sometimes risqué activities (Figure 3.1); and (2) conversation pieces immersed in lush natural settings, with tall trees and clusters of “Western” buildings in the distance (Figure 3.2).4 35

36

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 3.1 Giuseppe Castiglione (signed), Genre Scene with Westerners, undated. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio.

The Market for “Western” Paintings in Eighteenth-Century East Asia

37

Figure 3.2 Giuseppe Castiglione (signed), Western Figures and Architecture, undated. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk. Sen-oku Hakukokan Museum, Sumitomo Collection, Kyoto. In these pictures, basic principles of one-point perspective are applied to vertically elongated compositions, rendered in thick impastos of dark browns, greens, and ochre. Black is added to deepen tonalities in a somewhat crude rendition of chiaroscuro technique. Most of these pictures carry signatures of court painters of the time, like Jiao Bingzhen (1689–1726) or Giuseppe Castiglione/Lang Shining (1688–1766), but their rendition of standard Western repertoire shares little with these court artists’ work.5

38

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Because of the spurious signatures and quality, these pictures are rarely included in museum publications, and the study of their chronology and geographical dissemination is still somewhat tentative. They must have been popular items, available for small sums in the open art markets of China’s main cities. This essay locates these pictures specifically among the attractions of the art and antique market of Liulichang in central Beijing, where artists with some degree of exposure to imported Western pictorial techniques had set up independent workshops catering to a broad audience of local buyers and out-of-town visitors. In particular, Korean scholars, coming to Beijing as part of diplomatic missions, developed an interest in these pictures, many of which were brought back to Korea, where they are found today.6 By the mid-eighteenth century, the city of Beijing was the largest emporium of Western goods in continental East Asia, at the intersection of an articulated international and interregional market.7 What “Western” meant in this context and how Western objects in the open market related to those produced at court under the supervision of the Jesuits is the object of some speculation. In fact, just like the famous court productions of the time, these, too, were described as xiyang, a label used interchangeably for the (very few) things imported from the West and the (many) local products claiming some kind of affiliation to Western prototypes. Xiyang is a capacious and malleable category, especially when compared to the punctilious language of taste of the time that described differently even the slightest variation on the texture of a stone. By contrast, xiyang referred to all sorts of things: images, architecture, accessories, fashions made by either foreign or local hands, in a style or technique modeled in some way on recently available imports. The expansive nature of xiyang continued even when knowledge about the West increased, leaving the xiyang object open to constant reworking and appropriation. This malleability was key for the lasting popularity of “Western” things among different segments of Qing population, not all equally involved in the Qing court’s project of command. Inspired by James Clifford’s notion of “cosmopolitanism from below,” this essay follows the Western object as it moved through different locales and social strata, from Beijing to the provinces, and even abroad, losing its most familiar association with courtly etiquette and the rituals of diplomacy to take up new meanings.8 In this process, the Qing experience of cosmopolitanism emerges as one of incongruities, asymmetries, misunderstandings, in opposition to its more coherent and authoritative ideology promoted by the court.

The Court and the City One of the risks of concentrating exclusively on court activities is to overlook the dynamic interaction between court and city during the eighteenth century. Beijing was, indeed, a polycentric city, at the center of a vast, polycentric empire. Soon after the Manchu occupation of 1644, the Qing regime enforced a policy of ethnic separation that broke down the city into two halves (Figure 3.3).9

The Market for “Western” Paintings in Eighteenth-Century East Asia

39

Figure 3.3 Map of Beijing’s Inner and Outer City from Okada Gyokuzan, Morokoshi meishō zue, Osaka, 1805, juan 1, pp. 8a–b. Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

The central section, corresponding to the old Ming city, was reserved for the Manchus and their allies. Known as the Inner City or Tartar City in early accounts by Western travelers, it was encircled by high walls that protected the Imperial Palace. In contrast to the geometrical grid of the Inner City stood the loose plan of the Southern City, the vast area where the Chinese population of the capital had to relocate. By the mid-eighteenth century, this was the capital’s social and cultural heart: a thriving entertainment industry, the fashionable residences of local personalities, and the rich book and art market catered to a diverse audience of students, officials, and visitors. At the juncture between the court and the provinces, the Southern City prospered through interaction with both. The grandiose “European” pavilions and painting workshops that employed Jesuit artists and marked the cosmopolitan artistic achievements of Qing rulers stood securely within imperial residencies. Although emperors were known for gifting meritorious officials with Western objects, the circulation of these fashionable goods was restricted. On the occasion of imperial birthdays, ephemeral architecture flanked the streets of the capital.10 The design of these buildings combined ornamental motifs borrowed from Western models, sometimes with trompe l’oeil images in polychrome or grisaille. Even for these special events, the possession of a ticket granted access to the

40

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

imperial spectacle; most of the population could merely glimpse it from behind black curtains. Nevertheless, there were still ample opportunities for non-elite audiences to admire Western art in other parts of Beijing, especially in the Southern City. Of the four Catholic churches in Beijing, for example, one was located in the Southern City. The Church of the Immaculate Conception, best known as the South Church (Nan tang), was listed in local guidebooks as one of the main attractions in this area.11 The five-bay façade looked into a courtyard accessible via a Chinese-style gate. Built in 1605 and expanded in 1703, it consisted of one central nave with side chapels. An elaborate set of illusionistic frescoes spanned its vaulted ceiling in a style common to other Jesuit settlements around the world. Access to the church was relatively easy, and the murals became the object of intense scrutiny. Korean envoys were especially entranced by the architecture and decoration of Catholic churches. Their diaries carefully describe the crowded compositions (sometimes even identifying the iconography) and the dramatic modeling and colors of the figures, which changed appearance if “one looked at them with one eye open or two.”12 The immersive experience of walking into a church was, in the words of a commentator, just like “stepping into another world.”13 At the Jesuit headquarters in the city, Koreans purchased scientific texts as well as paintings and prints. In 1720, Yi Kiji (1690–1790) met the Austrian Jesuit Xavier Ehrenbert Fridelli (1673–1743), who presented Yi with “an album of animals, insects, and fish painted in Western style; an album of Western figures and cityscapes, and three views of the church.”14 Through Fridelli, Yi was also supposedly introduced to Castiglione, and the Italian artist gave the envoy a picture of a small dog leaping out “as if it were alive.” But what caught Yi’s attention most was a monochrome view of a village surrounded by mountains, waterfalls, and dense vegetation, executed in a technique unknown to him. When he inquired about it, he was told it was a copperplate print, a technique still rare in East Asia.15 Sources also report that Jesuits met regularly with other segments of Beijing’s scholarly world. One Chinese scholar remembered vividly the experience of visiting a Catholic church, where he recognized the painting of “a lady holding a child” as something he had seen in a woodblock print from his hometown, Suzhou.16 What this scholar had in mind was one of the many of Gusu prints, large-scale compositions with sometimes hand-painted details that popularized Western motifs and compositions across the empire.17 Some of the designers were court painters who had studied mineral pigment and oil under the Jesuits and had then left the palace to find alternative sources of income elsewhere.18 Luo Fumin (active in the eighteenth century), for example, underwent training at court in Western perspective, which he displayed in intricate compositions of fanciful buildings tucked among steep mountains. According to Hu Jing (1769–1845), an early historian of the Qing court painting academy, he had a double appointment at the academy and the Enamel Workshop (Falangchu), specializing in the decoration of copper and metal vessels.19 Luo eventually left the palace to set up a workshop that continued to produce “Western” landscapes and architectures for a broader audience of urbanites.

The Market for “Western” Paintings in Eighteenth-Century East Asia

41

Liulichang The workshops of independent masters like Luo Fumin were located in the area surrounding the antique and book market of Liulichang, at the center of the Southern City. The name Liulichang means “Factory [for the production] of Glazed Tiles” because the yellow-glazed tiles adorning the roof of imperial buildings were fired there.20 When the factory was relocated in the mid-sixteenth century, booksellers, mounting shops, and painting workshops began to move into this portion of unused land in the rapidly expanding Southern City. Liulichang, like the area around it, thrived with only the minimal intervention of court and city administration. Popular ballads captured the bustling atmosphere of the market, where one went to browse for anything new and fashionable, pictures, books, objects, while catching a glimpse of Beijing’s famous scholars. The author of the Dream of the Red Chamber must have had in mind the goods available at Liulichang Market when he described a foreign salesgirl wearing corals, Western damask, and a jeweled dagger. She was so beautiful and her hair so golden, “just like those beautiful women one sees in Western paintings (xiyang hua).”21 Around the 1760s, when the first complete descriptions of the site first appeared, the market extended for almost a kilometer, with shops lining up along parallel lanes, one for books and one for antiques.22 It continued to grow through the nineteenth century, becoming one of the symbols of Beijing’s urban modern culture. The present incarnation, inspired by a Post-Maoist revival of traditional Chinese architecture, occupies the eastern portion of the original site. Antique trading and connoisseurship-on-demand were profitable alternatives to a career in government, and several dealers were failed examination candidates who reverted to business in order to remain in the capital. Much of what was in the Southern City’s private libraries and collections had gone through Liulichang. Surviving letters reveal that Liulichang dealers received requests from clients living outside of Beijing and even from abroad. The “Lodge of the Five Willows” (Wuliu ju) and the “Mansion of the First Moon” (Xianyue lou) were among the shops most frequently visited by collectors.23 Nobody, however, could compete with Cheng Jiaxian (active mideighteenth century), the owner of the “Gathering Interests Pavilion” (Juhao ge). Cheng was a southerner who held a mid-level degree but had never occupied a position in the government. Instead, he specialized in trading antiques and precious textiles, in which he seems to have done quite well since his residence and lifestyle were considered second only to those of the emperor.24 Kim Chŏngjung (active late eighteenth century), visiting Beijing in 1791, described this larger-than-life personality trapped inside his tiny shop, filled floor-to-ceiling with art.25 Kim purchased several antiques from Cheng and presented him with rare Korean ink. Cheng maintained ties with several generations of Korean scholars and supplied them with all sorts of rare goods. He also sponsored the publication of translations of Korean poetry and hosted legendary private gatherings. Unfortunately, nothing like eighteenth-century Parisian dealers’ catalogs or Watteau’s Signboard of Gersaint survives for Liulichang. To gain a sense of what circulated through their shops or prices, one has to paste together the occasional notes

42

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

written down by visitors or clients. The diaries of Korean envoys are once again a rich resource and, in at least one instance, also include a sketch of the market.26 Yi Ŭi hyŏn (1669–1745) came to the Qing capital in 1732, met with Fridelli, and at the must-stop visit to Liulichang, was apparently fortunate enough to discover rare calligraphy by top artists like Mi Fu (1051–1107) and Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322).27 Yi then made the more unusual choice of purchasing “a batch of Western painting” (xiyang guo hua yi cu). Unfortunately, we do not know what these paintings were, and it is unclear what the measure word cu means exactly in this context: probably a cluster or a bundle holding different things together, most likely individual compositions that could be bought in stock, rather than compositions designed as sets, like sets of hanging scrolls. Other sources mention a variety of other Western goods available at Liulichang, including spectacles.28 Some of these things were perhaps originally designed for the court, but it is most likely that “Western” referred here to another class of objects, made specifically for the open market. Whether produced locally or brought from elsewhere, it is difficult to know, but they all became available here and from here were transported to other parts of the empire or abroad.

Scholars Looking at “Western” Painting In the eyes of eighteenth-century visitors, the Liulichang Market came to stand for the fast-paced, somewhat volatile experience of the cosmopolitan environment of the Qing capital, the large, multiethnic metropolis, where goods, people, and fashions convened from all over the world. The novel and curious forms of the “Western” object was singled out as a symbol of what visiting Beijing was about.29 The appreciation of this class of objects was widespread, interesting segments of the population that were previously thought of as being immune from the allure of the exotic. There has been a tendency in modern scholarship to discuss the circulation of Western objects as an exclusive concern of the court and to test its impact against the presumed lack of interest, if not outright scorn, of scholars. While there are certainly cases in which the debate surrounding Western representational techniques became heated, especially in the context of the court, contemporary scholars’ reactions were as diverse as the opportunities for encountering the Western object.30 In detailed accounts of Catholic churches by Korean scholars, for example, one finds less criticism of the dramatic interplay of light and shadow of late Baroque choreographies than attempts at understanding its working mechanisms. Yi Kiji, for example, the scholar mentioned earlier in conjunction to Castiglione, wrote an entry in his diary dedicated to the differences between Western and Chinese painting, the latter identified here with the monochromatic, gestural literati painting style. Yi was probably aware of the earlier essay by Kim Soon hyŏp (1693–1732), who had also suggested that Chinese and Western paintings were based on different, incompatible foundations. For Kim, that difference could be summarized in the fact that, where Chinese painting could render only light but no shadow, Western painting could render all transitions from light to shadow.31 Later in the century, the scholar Pak Chiwŏn

The Market for “Western” Paintings in Eighteenth-Century East Asia

43

(1737–1805), looking at the same murals, explained that the main difference was that Western painting could simultaneously present the “front and the back of things” against Chinese painting’s focus on “inside and outside.”32 Interestingly, in no case does one find mention of the kind of Western painting these scholars would have seen at court and which would have looked strikingly different from those in Jesuit churches. In other instances, scholars developed a critical vocabulary specific to the appreciation of Western pictures as a distinct category of painted images. In 1779, the artist Luo Ping purchased a Western painting (yang hua) to decorate his studio. Luo was a southerner who had relocated to Beijing, where he became famous for the startling imagery of his pictures, sometimes incorporating Western motifs as well.33 A frequent sighting at Liulichang, Luo was close to several Korean envoys and the leading scholar and antiquarian Weng Fanggang (1733–1818).34 As soon as the new picture was put on display, Luo invited Weng and Weng described the painting as a sundial scene (gui jing), an expression pointing to the sharp contrasts of light and shadow that characterize these Western images.35 The ancient practice of measuring space via shadows cast by a vertical sundial appears also in the opening line of a poem Weng wrote on the occasion: In ancient times, one inch [of cast shadow] stood for one mile, The Nine Chapters corrected the length and grade of lines/ The River Map Diagram incorporated the legacy of the Zhou [Dynasty 1046– 256 bce ]/ How many Confucians admittedly derive from this tradition?36

With his characteristic penchant for the obscure reference, Weng ponders the tenuous rapport between artistic make-believe and scientific certitude, drawing a long, uninterrupted arch of technical advancement from ancient times to the present. To Weng, the Western painting is simultaneously the repository of specialized, technical knowledge and an object of aesthetic contemplation. Such emphasis on the technical foundations of representation is at odds with the conventional language of literati painting, where the artist’s seemingly untutored hand and spontaneous expression were meant to be the object of praise. For Weng as well as for the Korean scholars, Western painting was not inferior to Chinese painting; it was different and as such it required its own, new aesthetic criteria.

“Western” Paintings Travel East In Beijing, Korean envoys admired examples of Western art, discussed its strengths and limitations, met with artists, and occasionally purchased examples of it. Once back in Korea, these pictures of this kind joined others, also labeled Western, coming from other centers of production like Nagasaki, in the Japanese Archipelago.37 Together, these pictures formed a visual corollary to the growing engagement with the west

44

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

across East Asia before the direct confrontation with Western powers the following century. At the forefront of the interregional scholarly exchange that characterizes the second half of the eighteenth century was Pak Chega (1750–1815), a historian, antiquarian, and political reformer whose contribution to Korean intellectual and political history can hardly be overstated. Pak was a leader of a generation of progressive officials whose ideas had thrived under the guidance of reformist Qing officials like Weng Fanggang, whom Pak had met during a visit to Beijing. At an unknown time, Pak took interest in an unusual picture that survives today in the collection of the National Museum of Korea (Figure 3.4).38 The slender vertical scroll presents two figures in an elaborate setting of architecture, surrounded by spiky mountains jutting into a body of water. A strange “Chinese” pavilion on the right side supports three slim columns with decorated capitals, evenly spaced around a squared terrace that encircles a domed cube. From this terrace, a boy leans away, pointing an arrow at a bird. The boy’s hair is long and loose, and he carries a green knife, perhaps made of jade. The painting includes two inscriptions, one on the upper left corner of the painting and one on the upper portion of the mounting. Pak Chega is the author of the inscription on the painting. Written in Chinese, it consists of seven large characters forming the title of the painting, a description, and a dedication. Pak says of having seen the painting in the studio of his mentor, Pak Chiwŏn, the scholar who had written on Western painting. Pak Chega then writes a lengthy dedication to the artist and close friend, Choe Buk (c. 1755–85), who had visited Japan as part of a diplomatic mission. The reference to Japan becomes more meaningful when looking closely at the unusual scene. The title reads: “The Child Yanping Taking Care of His Mother.” Yanping is the courtesy name of Zheng Chenggong (1624–62), best known in the West as Koxinga. Zheng was an official who remained loyal to the Ming throne after the fall of the dynasty and organized the anti-Manchu resistance by sea, eventually also chasing the Dutch from Taiwan.39 His father was a southern Chinese man who had escaped to Macau and converted to Catholicism. Taking the name of Nicholas Gaspard, he worked with foreign traders and moved to Hirado, near Nagasaki, where he married the daughter of a local warlord. Chenggong was the couple’s eldest son and, as such, was responsible for his mother’s wellbeing after his father resumed smuggling. The painting captures a moment in the daily life of this exemplary son while his mother sits on a bench in the foreground with a small animal, likely a rabbit, on her lap and a basketful of flowers. The conical shape of the distant mountain is meant to evoke Mount Fuji, reminding the viewer of the story’s overseas setting. The depiction of this interlude of virtuous devotion within an otherwise picaresque existence is unique in the visual culture of the time but what makes the painting even more striking is its style, the kind of Western style popularized by independent artists outside the court. The willowy silhouette of the woman, with a tall coiffeur à la Fontange, reappears in other depictions of Western beauties, with spurious Castiglione signatures, trapped in high wigs and tight gowns.40 The imaginary architecture, an

The Market for “Western” Paintings in Eighteenth-Century East Asia

45

Figure 3.4 Unidentified artist, The Child Yanping Taking Care of His Mother, undated. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper. National Museum of Korea, Seoul.

46

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

eclectic mixture of local and foreign elements, is reminiscent of the ephemeral architecture designed for imperial birthday celebrations and of architectural capricci, another popular subgenre of Western paintings in the open market.41 The palette is limited to earthy tones, applied according to both imported modeling technique and more standard East Asian line contouring. The final effect has something of the painting attributed to Castiglione (Figure  3.1), despite this artist’s preference for a flatter, more graphic rendering of the motifs. Figures, accessories, architecture, coloring, and the tenuous perspectival system are elements of an iconography of Westerness that is reassembled here to give form to an apocryphal episode set in Japan, from the life of the son of a Chinese Catholic pirate and a Japanese woman, dedicated by a Korean scholar to a fellow envoy back from Japan. To bring the painting’s transcultural biography to completion, the second inscription, not reproduced here, reports that the painting ended up in Beijing in the collection of Ruan Fu (b. 1802), whose father, Ruan Yuan (1764–1849) was a pupil of Weng Fanggang and an ally of Pak Chega. How the painting got there is not known, but the inscriber notes that Korean envoys asked Ruan to return it to Korea, with no success.42

Of Silk, Glass, and Metal If we were to approach a painting like The Child Yanping Taking Care of His Mother exclusively as a low-tier version of other, more accomplished examples of Western painting, we would assume that “Western” denoted a coherent class of things, with specific stylistic features. Instead, works like this demonstrate that “Western” could take on multiple, sometimes surprisingly different forms. It would be equally limiting to approach these pictures exclusively from the perspective of other pictures, without trying to reconstruct the dynamic, collaborative environment in which these objects were designed. The strong narrative dimensions of these paintings, in which action unfolds in compact spaces drawn in thick layers of viscous pigment and sharp tonal contrast, brings to mind the kind of lively vignettes painted on glass. The painted glass surface was either attached to a small wooden table screen or backed by a mirror and hung on a wall like a European framed picture. Known in Europe as verre eglomisé, or reverseglass painting (Figure  3.5), this technique was practiced in China by the early seventeenth century and, in the following century, imperial workshops joined privately run ones in producing highly sought-after luxury goods.43 The unpainted mirror or glass surface gives substance to an expansive sky over a fantastical landscape inhabited by figures in elegant Western attire promenading amid brick buildings, bell towers, and the like. Because the pigment had to stick on a smooth, impervious glass, the painter created a viscous concoction applied in thick layers, starting with the lightest tones applied closest to the viewer. This procedure is opposite to the standard procedure of applying oil painting, in which the painter starts with the darker tones on the background and progressively moves toward lighter ones. Reverseglass painting lent itself to all sorts of ingenious plays on presentation and representation

The Market for “Western” Paintings in Eighteenth-Century East Asia

47

Figure 3.5 Seascape with Western Figures and Buildings, 18th century. Reverse-glass painting. Photo: Sotheby’s, London.

through the combination of painted and reflective surfaces. Reverse-glass painting was among the tributes sent by Canton officials to the court but missionaries noted that private masters had also set up their workshops in the Southern City in order to serve a growing demand.44 Reverse-glass paintings display specific sets of skills and expertise that were not unlike those required for the creation of another coveted class of objects, enamelware (Figure 3.6). Qing emperors had been particularly drawn to the brightly painted, ornate decoration of enamelware, as documented by the high quality and immense number of items collected at court.45 These objects came in many shapes—some imported some developed locally—and were made of a metal or porcelain body covered by enamel pigments applied with a brush, sometimes in combination with other techniques like gilding or champlevé finishing. Enamel workshops were set up at court in the early eighteenth century and employed the leading court artists, under the supervision of the Jesuits. Many artists, like Luo Fumin mentioned earlier, had dual appointments at the painting academy and the enamel workshop. Lin Chaokai (active eighteenth century), another of Giuseppe Castiglione’s students, was sent to Canton to supervise the production of local enamel factories, introducing designs inspired by well-known court productions.46 Lin was also a painter of still-life and landscapes, in the brightly colored, high-contrasting mode of Western painting discussed here.

48

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 3.6 Vase with European Figures and Two Handles in “Western” Enamel Painting, Qianlong Reign, 1736–95. National Palace Museum, Taipei. The surface of enamelware incorporated a wide range of motifs, painted in vibrant yellows, pinks, blues, known collectively as falangcai, “European,” or “foreign,” pigments. Typical of the synthetic Qing court style, these objects merged arabesques of intertwining plants, geometrical freezes borrowed from archeological objects, combinations of plants and flowers, and narrative vignettes contained within

The Market for “Western” Paintings in Eighteenth-Century East Asia

49

cartouches, like cameos. A remarkably diverse cast of Western characters appear on these objects: farmers, shepherdesses, mothers with toddlers, and young men, all drawn from imported secular and religious illustrations, and rearranged in somewhat enigmatic ensembles. Most commonly found on the surface of containers, these scenes could also cover free-standing enameled landscapes, hung on walls like Western pictures.47 Enamelware production began to decline in the mid-eighteenth century, and it almost completely ceased at the turn of the next century. Court craftsmen were sometimes relocated or dismissed. Most likely, the collaborative procedures developed at court were refined or adjusted to the needs of private ateliers, where highly skilled craftsmen could propose similar motifs, painted in comparable styles, on metal as well as silk.

Conclusion In the eighteenth century, xiyang described a conspicuously broad array of things, peoples, and fashions that made up a considerable portion of the visual and material culture of the time. In the court context, “Western” objects were integral to a totalizing ideology of cosmopolitanism that turned the world into a sequence of decontextualized fragments to be endlessly combined together. The high finish and polished words inscribed on the Hindustani jades discussed by Kristina Kleutghen in her essay in this volume, exemplified what Michel de Certeau called the “lust to be a viewpoint,” the Qianlong emperor’s desire of placing himself at a central angle, from which the multiplicity of the world could be apprehended and transformed into a somewhat coherent, legible map.48 For de Certeau, this condition of “seeing the whole” is in tension to the“opaque malleability” of being inside the world. The experience of cosmopolitanism, unlike the ideology behind it, took on as many forms as the malleable xiyang allowed for, and for Korean scholars, as well as for other segments of the Qing population, that experience took form in the streets of Beijing. As the largest emporium of so many of those “fragments,” Beijing became the site where East Asian people encountered Western forms and, disconnected from the frame of reference of court politics, projected different associations on them. With its novel and peculiar features, the “Western” object captured, perhaps more effectively than any other local style, the fluctuation of things, ideas, and people that marked life in the eighteenth century.

Notes 1 For an overview of recent developments in the study of Qing visual culture, see Wang Cheng-hua, “A Global Perspective on Eighteenth-Century Chinese Art and Visual Culture,” The Art Bulletin 96, no. 4 (2014): 379–94. 2 See the essay by Kleutghen in this volume. 3 Kristina Kleutghen, “Chinese Occidenterie: The Diversity of ‘Western’ Objects in Eighteenth-Century China,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 47, no. 2 (2014): 117–35. On

50

4

5

6

7 8 9

10

11

12 13 14 15

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds Western objects in the material culture of The Dream of the Red Chamber, see Fang Hao, “Cong ‘Honglou meng’ suo ji xiyang wu pin kao gushi de peijing,” Hongloumeng yanjiu chuanke (1970): 1–92; and on the collecting patterns of merchants, Wu Yulian, Luxurious Networks: Salt Merchants, Status, and Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017). Pictures in the first category include the one signed by Zhang Rulin (active mid-18th century) of a foreigner lounging on a couch in the company of two children, in the collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (AK-MAK-1410). Thanks to Wang Ching-ling for directing me to this picture. Another example is in in the collection of the Smith College Museum (1968:594–1). These pictures constitute a different category from the so-called Di’an Gate forgeries. Known also as the “Back Door Production” (Houmen zao), these were pastiches, usually carrying Castiglione signatures, executed by workshop painters around the Di’an Gate, the backdoor of the Palace. They are characterized by heavy shading and extremely ornate mounting. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as the court’s finances dwindled, painters found alternative source of income by selling purported imperial treasures to foreigners or local collectors. As tributary to the Beijing throne, the Korean kings sent a yearly diplomatic mission of officials and scholars. The envoys could only travel to the Qing capitals and remained in Beijing for three months. There, their activities were closely monitored, but they nonetheless visited the city’s famous sites and became close to Southern City’s scholars. Their diaries, written in Classical Chinese, are a key resource for reconstructing daily life and institutions of the Qing Empire. For an overview of this material, see Gary Ledyard, “Korean Travelers in China over Four Hundred Years, 1488–1887,” Occasional Papers on Korea 2 (March 1974): 1–42. For this essay, I consulted this modern edition of Korean scholars’ papers, Shanghai Fudan daxue chubanshe, Hanguo Han wen Yan xing wen xian xuan bian, 30 vols (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2011). For other dimensions of this market, see the essays by Timon Screech and Yeewan Koon in this volume. See, for example, James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). On Beijing, see Susan Naquin, Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400–1900 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008); and the Southern City, Wu Jianyong, Xuannan shi xiang (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 2000). Ellen Uitzinger, “For the Man Who Has Everything: Western-Style Exotica in Birthday Celebrations at the Court of Ch’ien-Lung,” in Conflict and Accommodation in Early Modern East Asia, edited by Leonard Blussé and Harriet Zurndorfer (New York: Brill, 1993), 216–39. On the church, see Wang Lianming, “I disegni architettonici di una chiesa gesuita del diciottesimo secolo a Pechino (Nan tang/Chiesa del Sud): Analisi e Ricostruzione,” in Safeguard of Architectural, Visual, Environmental Heritage, edited by Carmine Gambardella (Naples: La Scuola di Pitagora, 2011), 1–9. Yi Ik (1681–1763), Xinghu xiansheng sai shuo, juan 4 (Kyŏnggi-do P’aju-si, Alma, 2011). Yi Kiji, Yi’an Yanxing riji, juan 4, Hanguo Han wen, vol. 13, 67. Ibid., 14–15. Ibid., 21–3.

The Market for “Western” Paintings in Eighteenth-Century East Asia

51

16 Chen Wenshu, Hualin xin yong bu gui, juan 2, in Zhongguo huihua quanshu, edited by Luo Fusheng, vol. 20 (Shanghai: Shanghai chubanshe, 2001), 496. 17 On Gusu prints, Hiromitsu Kobayashi, “Suzhou Prints and Western Perspective: The Painting Techniques of Jesuit Artists at the Qing Court, and Dissemination of the Contemporary Court Style of Painting to Mid-Eighteenth-Century Chinese Society through Woodblock Prints,” in The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, edited by John W. O’Malley et. al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 262–83. 18 On Giuseppe Castiglione’s collaborators and pupils, see Zeng Tiancheng, “Lang Shining yu tade Zhongguo hezuozhe,” Gugong bowuyuan yuankan 3, no. 161 (2012): 89–99. 19 Hu Jing, Guochao Yuanhua lu (Record of the Painting Academy of Our Dynasty), (Shanghai: Zhongguo shuhua bacunhui, 1924), juan shang, pp. 1a and 8a. 20 On the history of Liulichang, see Ma Jiannong, Liulichang (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 2006). 21 Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone: A Chinese Novel in Five Volumes, translated by David Hawkes, vol. 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 109–10. 22 To my knowledge, the earliest description of the site is in the diary of the Korean envoy Hong Taeyong (1731–83) and dates five years prior to the 1769 account of the official Li Wenzao, which is most frequently cited. 23 Yang Yulei “Beijing Liulichang Chaoxian Yan xinglu suo jide,” Wenhua guangjiao 4 (2004): 55–63. 24 On Cheng Jiaxian, see Wang Zhenzhong “Liulichang Hui shang Cheng Jiaxian yu Chaoxian Yan xing shizhe de jiaowang,” Zhongguo dianji yu wenhua 4 (2005): 96–103. 25 Ibid. 26 A view of the Liulichang Market is included in a series of illustrations of the embassy to Beijing, today in the Korean Christian Museum at Soongsil University, Seoul. Although illustrations of the embassy are common, they rarely include the market. See Park Hyun-kyu, “The Painting ‘Liulichang’ in Beijing and the Documents from Joseon,” Classical Studies in the East 42 (2010): 254–78. 27 Yi Ŭi hyŏn, Gengzi Yan xing zazhi, in Hanguo Han wen, vol. 11, 103. 28 See the diary of Yu Deukgong (1748–1807), quoted in Wang Zhenzhong, “Liulichang Yan xing shizhe yu shi ba shiji Beijing de Liulichang,” Anhui shixue 5 (2011): 25. 29 Yang Miren, “Dumen zhuzhici,” Zhonghua zhuzhici, edited by Lei Mengshui, vol. 1 (Beijing: Guji chubanshe, 1997), 103. 30 On the debate over newly imported painting techniques at court, see Liu Lihong, “Shadows in Chinese Art: An Intercultural Perspective,” in Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West, edited by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Ning Ding (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 2015), 190–215. For a different view, see Martin Powers, “The Cultural Politics of Brushwork,” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 2 (2013): 312–27. 31 Kim Soon hyŏp, Yanxing lu, juan 3, Hanguo Han wen, vol. 38, 367. 32 Pak Chiwŏn, Rehe riji, juan 56, Hanguo Han wen, vol. 22, 506–7. 33 Luo Ping incorporated skeletons from European anatomical studies and allegorical prints in the two surviving versions of his famous depictions of ghosts. See Jonathan Hay, “Culture, Ethnicity, and Empire in the Work of Two Eighteenth-Century ‘Eccentrics,’ ” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 35 (Spring 1999): 201–23. 34 Weng Fanggang, “Liangfeng yi suo de yanghua zhuang yu zhai bi zi ming qi zhai ‘gui’ jing,” in Fuchuzhai wai shi ji, juan 14 (Jiaye Tang congshu edition, 1917), 4b.

52

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

35 See Lihong, “Shadows in Chinese Art,” 202. Thanks to Liu Lihong for her help with this translation. 36 The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art (Jiuzhang suanshu) is a compendium of arithmetic and geometry completed in the 2nd century ce . The Zhoubi suanjing is an even earlier text dedicated to astronomy. Its content is incorporated in the River and Map Diagram, a visual demonstration of the specialized knowledge presented in the text. 37 On the Nagasaki production, see Shigeru Aoki, ed., “Chūgoku no yōfūga” ten: Minmatsu kara shin jidai no kaiga, hanga, sashiebon (Machida: Machida Shiritsu Kokusai Hanga Bijutsukan, 1995). 38 Additional information on the painting can be found in Yi Sŏng-mi, Chŏson shidae kŭrim sog-ŭi sŏyang hwabŏp (Seoul: Sowadang, 2008), 156–61. 39 Hang Xing, Conflict and Commerce in Maritime East Asia: The Zheng Family and the Shaping of the Modern World, ca. 1620–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 40. 40 Compare this painting with two matching hanging scrolls on silk reproduced in Chinese Export Porcelain and Works of Art, Sotheby’s London (June 17, 1998), lot no. 516, and those published in Cécile and Michel Beurdeley, Giuseppe Castiglione: A Jesuit Painter at the Court of the Chinese Emperors, translated by Michael Bullock (Rutland, VT, and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1971), 182–3, no. 193. 41 See, as an example, the anonymous composition of “Western” architecture published in “Chūgoku no yōfūga,” 18, illustration no. 8. 42 Yi Sŏng-mi, Chŏson shidae, 161 fn. 153. The painting eventually went back to Korea when it was donated as part of the collection of the leading modern scholar and historian of eighteenth-century inter-Asian scholarly networks, Fujitsuka Chikashi (1879–1948). 43 On reverse-glass painting, see Patrick Conner, “Mysteries of Deeper Consequences: Westerners in Chinese Reverse-Glass Painting of the 18th Century,” Arts of Asia 46, no. 5 (2015): 124–36. 44 See the reportage of Pierre-Martial Cibot (1727–80), who visited Beijing in 1760; quoted in Conner, “Mysteries,” 126. 45 On Qing enamelware, see Pei-chin Yu, “Dan qing yiwai: Lang Shining yinxiang Qianlong chao hua falang zhijie wen yang de shu mian,” in He Chuanxin, ed., Shen bi dan qing: Lang Shining lai Hua san bai nian te zhan (Taipei: Guoli Gugong bowuyuan, 2015), 374–87. 46 On Lin Chaokai’s activities, see the entry of his Peonies in Wooden Container in Kaikodo Journal 34 (Spring 2011): 92–3. 47 See, for example, the pair of enameled landscapes in Yang Boda, ed., Zhongguo jinyi boli falangqi quanji, vol. 6 (Shijiazhuang: Hebei meishu chubanshe, 2004), 149. 48 Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 92.

4

Floating Pictures The European Dimension to Japanese Art During the Eighteenth Century Timon Screech

Although it is commonly thought that prior to the Meiji era (1868–1912) Japan was isolated from the larger world, this was not the case. The country (or perhaps “countries”) had been fully integrated into the movement of people and goods that define the era of early European exploration. Japan was dismembered and in civil war, but that actually assisted trade in some ways. Japan was vigorously sought out on account of its vast capacity to mine and process silver. Some half of the world’s silver came from Japan, and economic historians identify that metal as the world’s first global commodity.1 One important though little-known example is a portrait of Elizabeth I, today lost or perhaps never actually produced, but intended to show the queen standing before a world map. China was to one side, America to the other; Japan was directly above the queen’s crown, in pride of place. This portrait was proposed by John Dee, best known as inventor of the expression “British empire.”2 However, as in the Americas, it was Iberian traders who were most persistent in their approaches to Japan. They brought with them their religion, and exchanged European wares not only for silver, but for conversion to the Roman Catholic faith. The missions were bloodily curtailed in 1614, largely due to the English.3 Within a generation, there were virtually no Japanese Catholics left, nor any international Japanese traders. What would be termed the Christian Century, beginning about 1550, ended before 1650. This absence would, indeed, continue until the eve of the Meiji Period. But to say this is to miss a large part of the story. The purpose of this essay is to investigate more thoroughly the period between the putative “closing” and the putative “opening” of Japan, roughly 1630–1860, and to put this into an art-historical context which demonstrates that global connections continued to be important to the development of Japanese art in the eighteenth century. Before considering the eighteenth century, however, we must look at what happened to the abundant material legacy of the preceding “Christian Century.” Overtly devotional items would have been destroyed quietly at the end of this period, but many secular European objects survived in the collections of the elite, and also quite commonly in the streets. A crucial date that tends to pass unnoticed is 1657. I propose 53

54

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

this as the beginning of Japan’s “long eighteenth century” in art-historical terms. This period came to a close not with the beginning of the Meiji era in 1868, but rather in the 1790s. During that time, although direct contact with Europe was less than it had been before, or would be later, there was plenty of interaction. The United (or Dutch) East India Company sent two large ships annually to Nagasaki. Company employees lived in Japan, sometimes for over a decade, engaged in business, and also interacted with locals socially, as we shall see. Early in that crucial year 1657, a group of Dutchmen were in Edo (modern Tokyo), capital of the shogunate that governed the reunited country. It is thanks to Zacharias Wagenaer that what unfolded next is known; there are Japanese accounts too, but none have such dramatic detail. Wagenaer was the most senior representative of the Company, and in town to offer presents to the shogun, the sixteen-year-old Tokugawa Ietsuna, and his entourage. He was happy that this time the gift was “substantially greater than in previous years.”4 Then a massive conflagration occurred. By the time it was over, Edo was gone. Though prone to fire, the destruction of 1657 was the worst that would ever occur in the shogun’s city. From this came—or had to come—a new start in political and also cultural terms. As the flames began to leap, Wagenaer and his fellows were visiting the home of Inoue Masashige, head of the shogunal intelligence office, in which context it was his role to take responsibility for foreigners. Masashige had used this position to acquire a vast array of imports, including European books and medical apparatus, a Westernstyle bed, paintings, mirrors, ceramics and tableware—although we will never know all that he possessed, as no inventory was made before his possessions were wiped out.5 A worried servant came in and whispered something, at which Masashige hurried out. Wagenaer looked outside and saw thick black smoke. Another servant instructed him to return at once to the Dutch compound in the city, known as the Nagasaki House, to place their goods and presents out of harm’s way. On his hurried path, Wagenaer saw “with horror and dread . . . this immense city ablaze, like once Troy.” The shogun’s castle then exploded, due to the gunpowder stored within. Mercifully, two storehouses were spared this onslaught, one containing the administration’s gold and treasure, the other its calambac, or agarwood, which was used for medicine and perfume.6 Whatever the effects of the fire on human life, in art-historical terms the result was the destruction of material from Japan’s “Christian century.” For almost one hundred years, vast amounts of European goods from European and Asian trade routes flooded into Japan. The proscription of Christianity limited the flow of imports, but had not stopped it, and previously brought goods remained part of the fabric of elite and commoner life. Now all was gone. In Edo the next year, 1658, a new head of Dutch operations, Johannes Boucheljon, met senior Japanese officials. He was given a special request. The Company was to bring a selection of European paintings and other rarities for the shogunal collection, since those that had been brought before had all been destroyed in the fire.7 It is not generally realized that Edo Castle was filled with European paintings—or, rather, had been. As well as the shogunal request, Boucheljon received a commission from Masashige, who asked for “a beautiful map of the world” and “some paintings of battles by land and sea.”8 Naturally, anything with a Christian subject was no longer wanted. Depiction of contemporary

The European Dimension to Japanese Art

55

battles could likely show the Dutch fighting the Roman Catholic nations. Masashige desired pictures to positioned Japan in the anti-Spanish camp, and as Japan has its own long tradition of war painting, the imports would also fit well with local expectations of display. Works produced around 1660 in Amsterdam would look very different from those produced around 1600 in Iberian lands. There is no further documentation concerning the works requested for the shogunal collection, but we know more of those commissioned for Masashige, thanks to documentation about their arrival. It took five years for the request to travel to Europe, the works to be made, and then brought back. Just two paintings arrived, in 1663, both very fine, referred to as “large” and set “in heavy frames.” They had cost 600 guilders the pair, which was a colossal price, and indicates that the Company was willing to make a very large outlay to satisfy this senior official. One work is described as the Battle of Flanders. This was a significant Hispano-Dutch military encounter in 1600, also known as the Battle of Nieuwpoort, at which the Dutch had been victorious. The Company had cleverly decided that the other work should pit their nation not against the old adversary, but against their newer one across that channel. This work was a naval encounter, referred to as a “sea battle between the Dutch and the English.”9 The title is vague, but it would surely have been a scene from the First Anglo-Dutch War of 1652 to 1654. No artists are named, and for the land battle it is hard to judge. It is exciting, though speculative, to suggest that the sea battle may have been by Willem van de Velde the Elder, the founder of that subcategory within Dutch maritime painting. This suggestion is more compelling by the price: according to the one record, van de Velde charged 325 guilders per picture.10 The arrival of the two paintings in Nagasaki, and their transmission to Edo should have prompted an interest in European art of an entirely new kind. But this was not to be. The Nagasaki governor (bugyō), Kurokawa Masanao, was delighted with the paintings, initially borrowing them to hang in his own mansion. Then Masanao had second thoughts. He noted the paintings showed “very sad scenes,” including such things as “dead people and the burning of ships.” The governor concluded that they could not be sent to Edo. Masashige, who had commissioned the paintings, it appears, had not intended to keep the works, but to present them to the shogun, Ietsuna. However, Masashige died during the five-year interim, which compounded the inauspiciousness of the works. They were rejected. The records state that they were shipped away in 1668, destination unspecified. By this time, there were few people left who recalled the period of flourishing international encounter. With this false démarche, no second period was provoked. The shogun did not seem to come into possession of a new stock of European paintings, meaning other members of the elite did not feel the need to acquire them either. We thus start our period in the mid-seventeenth century with erasure and absence. Although the Dutch were the sole official channel to Japan, European items might also come via other means. The year 1708 saw the arrival of a Neapolitan Jesuit, Giovanni Battista Sidotti. He smuggled himself into Japan on what was a blatant suicide mission (quite a suspect action, theologically speaking). Since he looked Italian and spoke no Japanese, Sidotti was quickly captured and taken to Edo. He was sequestered from the public, but housed comfortably in the so-called Christian Mansion (Kirishitan yashiki),

56

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

built to confine illegal priests, but not used before. Sidotti was interrogated by the great shogunal scholar, Arai Hakuseki, who found him a person of probity, and recommended his repatriation unharmed. However, return to Naples was not Sidotti’s objective, and he embarked on a course of action that, in the end, got him martyred as he wished in 1714. Importantly, since he came by stealth, Sidotti could not have brought much baggage, he nevertheless apparently had a painting: a depiction of the Virgin Mary. It showed only the upper body, wearing a blue robe held closed with an unusual hand gesture that exposed the thumb. It was a throwback to something unseen in Japan for decades though in a novel style. The Jesuit’s arrival gave rise to many questions, and Hakuseki produced a large and much circulated book of all that he had been told. Sidotti had asserted that the body of the “Apostle to the Indies,” Francis Xavier, who had founded the mission to Japan, had not rotted, but remained unblemished. When asked for their views, the Dutch merchants (who called Sidotti “Father Joan”) dismissed Sidotti’s claim as “Popish nonsense,” and a full outlining of the issues raised “took up three hours of my time,” as the Dutch leader remarked. Sidotti’s Eucharistic items, “his crucifix and other symbols” were taken, inventoried, and “locked away in a warehouse designated for Christian relics.”11 Later, the Dutch would be asked about their own religious imagery, and they clarified that the Protestant Church made no use of it, provoking a shogunal investigator to expostulate, “How do you know there is a God?”12 The messages coming from Europe were inconsistent, but what they did make clear was that the old Roman Catholic countries did not operate using the same visual systems of the more recently arrived northern Protestants. We can add that Sidotti’s painting of the Virgin Mary (Figure 4.1) is extant, and so it can be traced. Clearly, it is a copy of a work by Carlo Dolce (d. 1686), the original now in the Borghese Gallery in Rome. The image was a key articulation of Jesuit Mariology of the period. It looked very unlike Iberian mission paintings of c. 1600. Other versions of the work exist, one in the Archbishop’s Palace in Cusco, Peru; copies are also still displayed in most Christian churches in Iran.13 The shogun was now Ietsuna’s brother, Tsunayoshi. In 1709, the year after Sidotti’s arrival, he died heirless. After rapid succession by two nephews, direct succession came to an end. This was beneficial as it resulted in a concerted search by the authorities for a worthy replacement. The recent incumbents had not been impressive. Advisors settled on a cousin, Tokugawa Yoshimune, a person of intellect and experience. He was installed as new Shogun in 1716. The next year, the Dutch decided to try again and sent some more oil paintings that articulated their own cultural norms. Of course, these were not religious works, and were intended precisely to show the opposite, a Dutch national orientation. Details are lacking, but there is the record of two works arriving, “one depicting a sea battle and the other depicting a landscape.”14 Fights against the Spanish, or perhaps the English, were still part of how the Dutch wished to be seen in Japan. But they also wanted more peaceful views, celebrating their country’s verdant scenery. For some reason, the paintings were returned after eighteen months, in the summer of 1718, but the Shogun’s interest clearly was piqued.15 In 1722, Yoshimune placed the

The European Dimension to Japanese Art

57

Figure 4.1 After Carlo Dolce, Virgin of the Thumb, c. 1700. Color on panel, 24.5 × 19.6 cm. Photo: Tokyo National Museum. only direct shogunal commission for paintings ever placed with the United East India Company, blithely informing the Dutch that he wanted works by “the best painter in Europe.” Whether he made further specifications is not recorded. The Company took the demand seriously, although sending, commissioning and shipping back took four years. They spent 2,907 florins on five works, which is high, although not as high as it sounds, since the value of the guilder had dropped. These arrived at Nagasaki in 1726.

58

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

The name of the artist, or artists, is not recorded, but in about 1810 a careful copy of one of the works was made by the Edo artist Tani Bunchō; it is detailed enough to include at the base of the urn the signature and also the date: W. van Royen 1723 (Figure 4.2). Van Royen was then in his prime, working in Amsterdam, and if not quite the “best in Europe,” he was widely respected. A later Japanese viewer would also give the

Figure 4.2 Tani Bunchō, Still Life, after Willem van Royen, c. 1810. Color on paper, 232.8 × 106 cm. Photo: Kobe City Museum.

The European Dimension to Japanese Art

59

measurement of this same painting from among the five, as 4 shaku by 1 jō, that is 120 × 300 cm, so it was extremely large.16 Whether the other four paintings were also by van Royen is unclear, as are their dimensions, nor do we have any information about van Royen’s prices, or whether all five paintings were of the same cost. Some help comes from the Company’s own records, which lists one painting as “flowers, fruit and fowl”; this is clearly the work that Bunchō reproduced. Two others are “peacock, parrots, ostrich and tiger with a view of the Rhine” and an “elephant, tiger, with a house and a waterfall,” both of which sound quite typical of the strained life-form and landscape combinations that characterize Van Royen’s production. The two other titles do not match anything associated with Van Royen and were likely made by another hand. They were “two armies in battle and a castle being taken by storm” and “a deer, hare and rabbit hunt.”17 Having been approved in Nagasaki, the Dutch leader who took the paintings to Edo was Johannes de Hartog. He was questioned about the maker, and asked to confirm that they were by the “best painter in Holland”; he was also asked to name all the plants appearing in the works, during an interrogation that lasted from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., he said.18 Yoshimune was unperturbed by dead people (or animals) and he retained the paintings on battle, hunt, and the “elephant, tiger, with a house and a waterfall,” which could all be considered noble themes. But he wanted these fine European paintings to be more widely available, and to expose the populace to Western art. He therefore donated the two non-warrior themed works, the still life and view of the Rhine, to a much visited temple within the city, to be placed on open view. The site was one of Edo’s newest precincts, Gohyaku rakan-ji (Temple of the FiveHundred Arhats), which was run by a Chinese Buddhist school, meaning it was already a site of unfamiliar and exotic imagery and ritual.19 Regrettably, however, since the paintings were shogunal gifts, protocol precluded passing judgment on them, even in praise. Nor was it thought proper to copy them—Bunchō’s copy had been made on government request because the originals were starting to tarnish. There is only one other known copy, no more than a monochrome sketch, buried within the pages of a long book published in 1729 on the subject of “bird-and-flower” painting (kachō-ga).20 This is useful because it also depicts Yoshimune’s other gift, the “peacock, parrots, ostrich and tiger with a view of the Rhine.” In 1826, the regional ruler (daimyō) and polymath Matsura Seizan (who gave the dimensions quoted above) visited the temple. He had been there often as a child, but now had to note both pictures had been destroyed, some years before, when a storm had blown out the doors of the hall housing them.21

The Birth of “Western Studies” (Rangaku) Yoshimune was a vigorous administrator, and initiated many reforms to a system, by then, over a century old. Of significance is that he clarified the shogunate’s attitude toward foreign imports in general. Fear of being branded Christian had diminished, but people were still anxious that enthusiasm for imports might lead to accusations.22

60

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

The only real exceptions had been medicine, astronomy, or areas of obvious utility. Even here, there could be dangerous possibilities of overlap. Although it is earlier, before alarm about missionaries had died down, in 1668 the Dutch leader Daniel Six had a shock. He discovered an anatomical book that had been imported for presentation to the shogunate containing an illustration of the Crucifixion. Much intellectual endeavor in Europe, whether in Roman Catholic or Protestant nations, was rooted in Christian belief. Six was able to rip out the offending page, just in time, judging, “it might have led to the total ruin of the Company’s trade in Japan.”23 Yoshimune’s clarification was to declare that any domain of intellectual endeavor was acceptable for investigation, barring Christianity itself. The Dutch remained scrupulous not to risk their commerce, nor the lives of their partners, and pre-vetted imports, but much material now swarmed in. It is said that Yoshimune was motivated to issue this clarification by a specific prompt. The resident Dutch physician was rightly taken by the Japanese as the most educated person in the Company’s entourage. At this time the post was held by Willem Ketelaar, who spoke good Japanese. Records note that, in 1723, he was called in by the head shogunal doctor, Kurisaki Dōyū, to explain a lavishly illustrated zoological work, John (or Jan) Jonston’s Naeukeurige beschryving van der natuur der vier-voetige dieren (Natural History of Quadrupeds). It was rather old, having been published in 1660, and, in fact, it had been brought to Nagasaki just three years later and presented, only to languish in the shogunal library. The two doctors now bonded, and since dōyū sounds rather like dauw, the Dutch for “dew,” Dōyū adopted the sobriquet Tsuyu, which is the Japanese for dew. Ketelaar met “Tsuyu” again in Edo in 1725, and this time Yoshimune was also there. Someone of Ketelaar’s status could not be brought into the Shogun’s presence, as only the Dutch leaders were permitted this honor, so Yoshimune watched and listened from behind a lacquered screen that had been equipped with peeping-slits. His minions watched through another screen; one of these youths was later supplied with haemorrhoid cream by Ketelaar.24 It was the next year, 1726, that Jonston’s book was brought to Yoshimune’s own attention. Having perused it, he declared that if its pictures were as accurate as they seemed, the text must be worth reading, too. He accordingly commanded that the “horizontal script” should be learned.25 He went on to establish what the Dutch would approvingly, if optimistically, refer to as a College of Interpreters (tolken college), to engage with a new field of learning that became known as Dutch (or European) Studies, rangaku. “Ran” from Oranda, the Japanese word for “Holland” and gaku meaning study. Several families were given the hereditary task of residing in Nagasaki to promote Dutch materials and engage in translation and interpreting, as well as assisting the Company in mercantile matters and accompanying its officers in their regular trips to Edo. However, there was another dimension to their work, best termed outreach. Gifts to high-ranking officials were exceeded in quantity by more popular items that also needed interpretation. Paintings were expensive and hard to transport safely, while books, even if well-illustrated, had texts that were off-putting to most people. It is from about this time that European single-sheet prints began to have a significant impact. Japan had its

The European Dimension to Japanese Art

61

own developed print making and marketing systems to which imports could be integrated. As explored in Carole Paul’s essay in this volume, the mid-eighteenth century in Europe was the age of the Grand Tour and topographical views of the sights of Italy, called vedute, proliferated. Engraved and etched vedute prints arrived in Japan in considerable numbers in the eighteenth century. To Japanese viewers, they were striking and novel, and most surprising was the use of mathematical perspective, not seen for over a century. Since there was no word for this technique, the prints came to be known as “floating pictures” (uki-e); less often, they were “sunken pictures” (kubomi-e). The viewers felt the vista was surging off the page to encompass them, or conversely, that they were falling down into it. Imports were always expensive, so they were replicated by Japanese artists, who replaced the European city views with local ones. These made more sense to viewers. Only Edo had an advanced printing culture, so it was views of Edo that abounded in this hybrid artform. There was no prior history of printing Japanese topographical views, but suddenly they became a major genre. The emergence of “floating pictures” of Edo sites can be very precisely dated. They were first marketed in 1739 at some point between the 20th and 25th of the 5th lunar month (i.e., mid-August).26 The maker seems to have been a well-known Edo print master, Okumura Masanobu—at least he would proclaim himself “the originator of floating pictures.” Masanobu continued to produce such works, although not exclusively, until his death in 1764, by which time other artists had entered the field (Figure 4.3).

Figure 4.3 Okumura Masanobu, First Kabuki Performance of the Year, 1740. Color woodblock print on paper, 42.4 × 63 cm. Photo: Kobe City Museum.

62

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

One enthusiast for rangaku and for Western imagery was Shiba Kōkan. He wrote widely on the topic and printed and painted in the Western way. In 1799, Kokan explained: The Western pictorial manner operates on a highly theoretical level and no one should view works offhandedly. There is a correct way to look, and to this end pictures are framed and hung up. When viewing them, even if you only intend a quick glance, stand full-square in front. The Western picture will always show a division between sky and ground [the horizon line]; be sure to position this exactly at eye level, which, generally speaking, will entail viewing from a distance of about six shaku [approx. 180 cm]. If you observe this, things shown near at hand and things far off—the foreground and the rear-ground—will all be clearly distinguished and the picture will seem no different from reality itself.27

The “floating picture” was largely an ephemeral depiction of demotic spaces. Less than the city squares of palaces of European views, it was restaurants and theaters to which perspective was applied. Artists used the technique to capture places of fantasy, and enlarge them into something yet more extravagant. It has been debated whether perspective arrived in Japan also by more formal means. Andrea Pozzo, painter of the Jesuit headquarter church in Rome, published Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum in 1693, and this was partially translated into Chinese by Nian Xiyao in 1729. Any educated Japanese could read Chinese. There is no concrete evidence to support the hypothesis, although it may be noted that Pozzo did, indeed, propose a perspective system for creating false and illusory conceits, both in churches and in theaters.28 In the 1760s, the Edo artist, Utagawa Toyoharu, began to make a name for himself by reproducing European images more directly. Views of Edo did not lose their appeal, but buyers now also sought European cityscapes, available at the cheap price of a domestic print. One example is Toyoharu’s Grand Canal in Venice. Since he had little idea where the place really was, he entitled the work Floating Picture: The Bell that Rings for 10,000 Leagues in the Dutch Port of Frankai (Figure. 4.4). It is clearly derived from work by Antonio Canaletto, whose views of Venice were popular across Europe. No Canaletto could have come to Japan except in printed form, and it is known that the British Consul to Venice, Joseph Smith, had a very lavish printed set produced in 1735. This probably did not come either, but the collection was reissued and pirated many times. That crosses adorn many of the buildings must have escaped the notice of the Japanese censors—or perhaps not, since this print exists today in only a few copies, so the run may have been confiscated and destroyed for daring to expose viewers to Christian imagery. Edo was the center of rule, but not the capital. Today, that city is called Kyoto, although, in fact, that is not a proper name, and simply means “the capital.” The Japanese capital was much visited, but it lacked a picture-publishing tradition. Western works were therefore emulated in paint. Maruyama Okyo began painting perspectives

The European Dimension to Japanese Art

63

Figure 4.4 Utagawa Toyoharu, The Bell that Rings for 10,000 Leagues in the Dutch Port of Frankai (properly, Grand Canal, Venice), c. 1760. Color woodblock print on paper, 26 × 38.7 cm. Kobe City Museum. Photo: TNM Image Archives. showing the city’s sites of note in a manner closer to the European model, centering on temples and tourist sites (Figure 4.5). Okyo painted in the hatch marks of copperplate etching. Japanese prints were made with woodblocks, which allowed areas of black to be printed. But European works were copperplate etchings, where shadows could only be rendered by close-drawn lines. Okyo thus showed his vistas of the Japanese capital not just by using the foreign technique of perspective, but looking like imported etchings. As a copper-producing country, it was not long before Japanese makers sought to replicate etchings, too. The technique is not necessarily better than woodblock (in many ways it is worse), but they had a more authentic imported feel. Shiba Kōkan was the first to succeed in this, in 1783, and he would identify himself as “the first maker in Japan.”29 He kept close to the imported subject matter, not showing theaters, much less bordellos, as “floating picture” makers sometimes had, and centering on Edo’s river. Kōkan sometimes labeled his etchings in Dutch, suggesting he hoped for them to be exported: just as European scenes were being consumed in Japan, he hoped his Edo views would be consumed in the West. Kōkan made a trip to Nagasaki to seek further information from members of the Dutch Company. He was not a wealthy person, so he funded his trip by showing etchings of Edo to country people all along the way. It is not recorded whether on arrival he showed them to the Dutch, nor that the Dutch exported them, although had they arrived in Europe, these pictures would have caused a sensation (Figure 4.6).

64

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 4.5 Maruyama Ōkyo, Hall of Thirty-Three Bays (Sanjūsangen-dō), Kyoto, c. 1770. Color on paper, 23.5 × 35.1 cm. Photo: Private Collection.

European etchings were generally hand-colored, while Japanese woodblocks were printed in color using successive blocks. There was, however, no durable, printable blue. Only the highly fugitive indigo was used. Likely, Toyoharu’s Venetian scene originally had a bright Italian sky, now reduced to a yellow smear. Along with perspective and shadows, it was the colors that most struck Japanese viewers, meaning the blues. As one wag put it in verse: In our fair land Fancy seeing Such a picture. Talk about shadows! Talk about colors!30

It added up to a sense of visual realism—a notion that is not just a Eurocentric imposition, but was used by commenters at the time, as evinced in Kōkan’s remarks above. The purpose of topographical prints was to give a powerful impression of being in the depicted place, often for the benefit of those who had never gone. Since Kōkan’s works were also etchings, they were hand-painted, giving him access to a stable blue that his colleague could not use.

The European Dimension to Japanese Art

65

Figure 4.6 Shiba Kōkan, Tweelandbruk (Ryōgoku Bridge), 1787. Hand-colored copperplate print on paper, 27.1 × 40.7 cm. Photo: British Museum, London (1949,1112,0.10).

A further strategy was used to enhance the sense of place. This was to reverse-print images. In Europe, such works were known as vues d’optiques, or “optical views”; in Japan they became known as “lens-and-mirror pictures,” megane-e. The view was inverted because the print was made to be viewed in a mirror, which flipped right and left. As a further enhancing measure, the picture was also viewed through a lens, to remove unevenness in the paper. The lens inverted, so not only did the image have to be printed back-to-front, but also viewed upside down. The cityscape was at three removes from reality—seen in a picture, through a lens, reflected in a mirror—by which it appeared to be true. Both Kōkan and Okyo sometimes produced the very same vista both right-way around and reversed. As in Europe, however enjoyable and enlightening a print might be, it did not have the same status as a painting. Kōkan set himself to rectify this, and expand beyond Yoshimune’s two gift works. Kōkan was also fully aware that, as in Japan, too, Europe had a language of art, composed not only of theme and topic, but also of conventions, such as symbols and emblems. He wrote that: “most people believe Western pictures to be no more than ‘floating pictures,’ which is a risible opinion.”31 Kōkan stated that, while in Nagasaki, he had met the Dutch leader, Isaac Titsingh, who was one of the few university-educated traders to come to Japan. Kōkan says Titsingh gave him a copy of a key European painting manual of the period, Gérard de Lairesse’s Het Groot schilderboek (translated into English as The Art of Painting in All Its Branches), published

66

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

in 1707.32 Titsigh had intellectual exchange with many Japanese people, and he gave, and received books. But the pedigree Kōkan claimed is questionable, since Titsingh was not in Japan in 1788 and 1789, when Kōkan was in Nagasaki. Still, Kōkan certainly saw a copy of Lairesse, as did many other interested artists, and it was likely in Japan in more than one copy.33 The Schilderboek was part of an intent to challenge the dominance of Rembrandt, whom Lairesse deplored. Although they had once been friends (Rembrandt painted Lairesse’s portrait), Lairesse came to feel the old master had introduced unpardonable coarseness into Dutch art. Lairesse’s work was the opposite, full of airy spaces, mythical figures, and flying putti. Kōkan explained that “pictures from that country often contain winged people as well as other curious configurations, but these are pictorial devices; there are no winged people in fact.”34 Kōkan sometimes referred to devices as metaphors (tatoe), or, trying to retain the Dutch word for symbol, sinebeeru. The term he used for painting produced in this way, that is, Western in concept as well as technique, was called ranga (ga meaning picture). Another master, Kitayama Kangan, advertised his understanding by adopting the studio name Ban Deiki, refering to van Dyck, a painter who certainly used “pictorial devices.” It is not recorded how Kangan learned of van Dyck, who is not otherwise mentioned in Japanese sources of the period.35 Kōkan’s desire was for ranga to be more serious than “floating pictures.” It was axiomatic in formal Japanese art that paintings include a depiction of the season, which then indicated to owners when the work should be displayed. All decent people rotated works seasonally to match the actual season outside. A work devoid of temporal content, as most Western pictures were, was hard to display. Ranga included seasons to be coherent for Japanese viewers. However his paintings looked, there was one factor that Kōkan could not overcome. High-level painting, of the sort owned by the shogun, had to be produced by highstatus artists, that is, masters with military (samurai) rank. Masanobu, Toyoharu, and Okyo were townspeople; but as they restricted their themes to public spaces and entertainments this did not matter. If ranga was to become elite painting, then it mattered greatly that Kōkan (and Kangan) were townsmen. It was also important for the conceptualization and development of ranga that a group of military-class artists engaged with it. They hailed from the northern city of Kubota (modern Akita), where the young ruler (daimyo), Satake Yoshiatsu, was adventurous in his taste, and a fine amateur painter. Using his studio name of Shozan, Yoshiatsu produced the first Japanese treatise on Western art in 1778. Being a daimyo, and wishing to have ranga validated, he wrote in Chinese (kanbun); to use the vernacular demeaned both himself and the topic. However, since commoner Japanese could often not read Chinese, he rewrote his treatise in Japanese. This was a trick other elite writers used to ensure both honor and diffusion. Yoshitasu noted that: The utility of a picture is commensurate with its verisimilitude. . . . We make pictures of emperors tilling the soil to laud agriculture, and pictures of commanders in the thick of the fray to concentrate the mind on victory. If the image fails to look like the real thing, then how can it serve its purpose?36

The European Dimension to Japanese Art

67

Five years before, in 1773, Yoshitasu ordered a retainer, Odano Naotake, to go to Edo and devote himself to the ranga mode (Figure 4.7). On arrival, Naotake began to make the illustrations for an anatomical book, which would be the first fully translated Western book published in Japan since the time of the missions. Of course, the book was translated into Chinese, not Japanese. The original was by the German doctor Johann Kulmus, written in 1722 and imported in the Dutch translation of a decade later, Ontleedkundige tafelen. The title being hard to pronounce, it was known in Japanese as Tāheru anatomia (Anatomical Plates).37 Published in Edo by a team of shogunal doctors and with illustrations copied by a military-class artist, the resulting book of 1774, Kaitai shinsho (New Anatomical Atlas), won much acclaim. In 1785, the daimyo Yoshiatsu was able to gain access to the United East India Company’s lodgings in Edo. This was not easily done, as the shogunate was wary of regional rulers forging links to the Dutch, international trade being a government monopoly. Yoshiatsu met the long-standing and well-informed Dutch chief, Caspar Romberg, and the encounter might have had significant implications for the understanding and transmission of European art to Japan. Tragically, Yoshiatsu fell ill and died within the week of this meeting, at the age of 37.38 Foul play is possible. Akita ranga broke up, which may have allowed Kōkan to position himself as leader in the field. He turned ranga into something formal, but not necessarily elite, and wrote his many books entirely in Japanese.

Figure 4.7 Odano Naotake, Shinobazu Pond, c. 1773. Color on silk, 98.5 × 132.5 cm. Photo: Akita Museum of Modern Art, Yokote.

68

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

However, things had begun to change. A power grab in the shogunal council brought to the fore an anti-foreign element. In 1788, the Dutch arriving in Edo noted that the Japanese scholars who used to visit them (mostly shogunal physicians and astronomers) were absenting themselves. The next year, it was the same, and then in 1790 the Dutch received no visits of any kind. In Nagasaki, the chief interpreter at the College, Yoshio Kōsaku (who had written the preface to the translation of Kulmus) was arrested on charges of smuggling and was imprisoned; days later, his successor suffered the same fate.39 Dutch visits to Edo had taken place almost annually since 1640, nearly 150 times, but in 1791, the shogunate cancelled them. War in Europe was sending the Company into decline, so it was pleased enough to forgo this expensive ritual, although by doing so, the lines of communication across cultures were cut. In 1799, the United East India Company went bankrupt. It held onto its facilities in Japan, running a rump organization, and pretending to the Japanese authorities that all was well. Year after year no ships got through. Ran dwindled as a concept and foreign goods disappeared. We thus close the period of international encounter. The nineteenth century would see many transformations. The Russians came from the north. The Dutch state was taken over by France, and British ships came to Nagasaki, proposing themselves as interlocutors for the Japanese.40 The outside world began to take on a new and more fearsome aspect. Rangaku and ranga did not disappear, but no simple line can be traced from their eighteenth-century heyday to the emergence of Japan, in the 1850s, as a modern nation-state.

Notes 1 See, inter alia, Dennis K. Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571,” Journal of World History 6 (1995): 201–21. 2 William Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 198–200. 3 Timon Screech, “The English and the Control of Christianity in the Early Edo Period,” Japan Forum 24 (2012), 3–40. 4 Cynthia Viallé and Leonard Blussé, eds, The Deshima Dagregisters: Their Original Tables of Contents, 12 (Leiden: Intercontinenta, 1982–2010, hereafter, DDR), 287. 5 Timon Screech, “A 17th-Century Japanese Minister’s Acquisition of Western Pictures: Inoue Masashige (1585–1661) and his European Objects,” in Transforming Knowledge Orders: Museums, Collections and Exhibitions, edited by Larissa Förster (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2014), 72–106. 6 DDR, vol. 12, 297. 7 Ibid.,343. 8 Ibid., vol. 13, 93–8. 9 Ibid., vol. 8, 93–8. I am grateful to Cynthia Viallé for additional information relating to this episode. 10 Michael Robinson, The Paintings of the Willem van de Veldes: A Catalogue of the Paintings of the Elder and Younger van de Velde, 2 vols. (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum, 1990), 72–4.

The European Dimension to Japanese Art

69

11 DDR, vol. 4, 67. 12 Ibid., vol. 5, 146. 13 Sakamoto Manabu, Sugase Masa, and Naruse Fujio, Genshoku nihon no bijutsu, 25 (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1970), 74–5. Gholamhossayn Abab, Churches of Iran (Esfahan: Rasenah Kaj, 1998), 66; of course, such churches are Armenian. Arai Hakuseki’s book (referred to below), is Seiyō kibun (c. 1715), (Tokyo: Heibonsha, Tōyō Bunko, 1968). 14 DDR, vol. 4, 130. These were dispatched in January 1718, together with a ship model. 15 Ibid., 136. 16 Matsura Seizan, Kasshi yawa, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, Tōyō Bunko, 1978), 317. 17 Unpublished Dagregister entry for July 21, 1726. I am grateful to Reinier Hesselink for this reference. 18 DDR, vol. 5, 97. 19 For an assessment of the temple, see Timon Screech, “The Strangest Place in Edo: The Temple of the Five Hundred Arhats,” Monumenta Nipponica 48 (1993): 408–28. 20 Fujiwara Zaiga (ill.), in Yamamoto Sekichûshi, Gazu hyakkachō (Kyoto: Izumioji Izuminojô, 1729), n.p.; for an illustration, see Screech, “The Strangest Place in Edo,” 426. 21 See above, n. 16. Seizan’s family name is often mis-romanised as Matsuura. 22 Federico Marcon, The Knowledge of Nature and Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 2015), 115–39. 23 DDR, vol. 13, 281. The book is referred to as Spiegel der annatomie, which appears to be a description, not a title, since no such work is known to exist. 24 DDR, vol. 5, 20, 35–6, and 52–3. The Dutch refer to Kurisaki Dōyū as “Coeri Sakaidono.” Arai Hakuseki, Taion-ki (n.d.). Because I have not had access to the original, I have cited the reference in Shirahata. Taion-ki (undated) was published in Edo (Tokyo) no press named, in 1682. 25 See Yōzaburō Shirahata, “The Development of Japanese Botanical Interest and Dodonæus’s Role: From Pharamacopoeia to Botany and Horticulture,” in Dodonaeus in Japan: Translation and the Scientific Mind in the Tokugawa Period, edited by W. F. Vande Walle (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001), 263–80. Sugita Genpaku, Rantō kotohajime, in Nihon koten bungaku taikei, vol. 95 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1964), 478. Genpaku does not state the name of the book or author, merely noting that the shogun viewed an imported work. 26 The date has been established by Kishi Fumikazu, Edo no enkinhō (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1994), 4. 27 Shiba Kōkan, “Seiyō gadan,” reprinted in Yōgaku, Vol. 2: edited by Numata Jirō, Nihon shisō taikei, vol. 65 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1976), 489–97. 28 For speculation about this matter, see Julian Lee, “Development of Japanese Landscape Prints: A Study of the Synthesis of Eastern and Western Art,” PhD dissertation, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 1977, 224–6. 29 Kōkan inscribed this on a copperplate print in 1994. For a convenient reproduction, see Calvin French, Shiba Kōkan: Artist, Innovator and Pioneer in the Westernization of Japan (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1974), 133. 30 The verse is by Hōseidō Kisanji, quoted (without source) in Haruko Iwasaki, “The World of Gesaku: Playful Writers of Late Eighteenth Century Japan,” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1984), 124. 31 Kōkan, Seiyō gadan, 492.

70

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

32 Ibid., 493. 33 Isozaki Yasuhiko, Rairesse no dai-kaiga hon to kinsei nihon yōfū gaka (Tokyo: Yūzan-kaku, 1983). 34 Shiba Kōkan, Saiyū nikki (Tokyo: Tōyō Bunko, 1986), 117; Kōkan, Seiyō gadan, 116. 35 Ono Tadashige, Edo no yōgakka (Tokyo: Sansaisha, 1968), 73–5. 36 The two treatises are reproduced in, Sakazaki Tan (Shizuka), Nihon garon taikan, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Aruzu, 1913), 100–1. 37 The Japanese version was produced by a team under Sugita Genpaku see Numata (ed.), Nihon shisō taikei, vol. 65, 207–360. Kulmus was considered out of date in Europe; see A. M. Luyendijk-Elshout, “Ontleedkundige (anatomy) as Underlying Principle of Western Medicine in Japan,” in Red-Hair Medicine: Dutch–Japanese Medical Relations, edited by H. Beukers (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), 27–31. Kulmus compiled three anatomical works in 1722, 1732, and 1741. Only the first one was translated into Dutch by Gerard Dikten in 1734. 38 DDR, vol. 8, 130, where Yoshiatsu is referred to as “Setaeki Akita.” 39 Ibid., vol. 9, 124. Of course, as well as the possibility that they were removed from office for being too pro-Western, it is also possible that they were, indeed, involved in illegal activities, such as smuggling. 40 For the Russians, see George Lensen, The Russia Push Towards Japan: Russo-Japanese Relations, 1697–1875 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959). For the British, see Timon Screech, “Thomas (Sir Stamford) Raffles & Dr. Donald Ainslie,” in Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, edited by Hugh Cortazzi, vol. 10 (London: Global Oriental, 2016), 20–36.

5

A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art Yeewan Koon

They embarked and disembarked using a ladder made of rattan. When the guests went on board, the barbarians stuck their heads out of the cabins. Their eyes were bluish green, their hair light brown, and their faces tanned. They took hold of their hands. They were a frightening spectacle, like devils. The guests had not even got halfway up the ladder when they fired cannonballs. The people were enveloped in a yellow vapor and you could not even see your own hands. It sounded like a series of thunderbolts. You felt the rumbling in the soles of your feet. The interpreter said, “This is how we honor guests in our country. Don’t be afraid.”1 So observed Qu Dajun (屈大均, 1630–96) in his New Comments on Guangdong (廣東 新語), offering a rare account of foreigners in Guangzhou City. Published posthumously in 1700, Qu’s colorful description of yellow vapors and thundering cannons would become a regular sight in the following 150 years as European and American companies began to deal directly with Chinese merchants. Ships from the West were anchored alongside those from other parts of Asia that were also picking up cargoes of tea, cotton, silk, and ceramics to markets across the seas. As European imperialist ambitions in Asia expanded in conjunction with maritime trade, the Qing government began to fear the increasing number of Western traders along the coastline of South China. In 1757, Emperor Qianlong designated Guangzhou the sole trading port, with further stipulations that foreign merchants were only allowed to stay within a strip of land measuring no longer than a quarter mile outside the city walls.2 At certain times of the year, access was given to other parts of the city, although never inside the walls, and all communications and exchanges were to be made through a limited number of hang merchants approved by the court.3 Despite the restrictions, the number of foreign merchants continued to grow, along with sailors, doctors, and missionaries, but equally strong was the traffic from within China as officials, traders, and artisans traveled to Guangdong seeking fortunes and adventure. Since the seventeenth century, the restricted area of this entrepôt was known as Canton, a name that continues to be used, particularly in studies on Sino-Western 71

72

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

maritime trade. The name was coined by the British and based on an earlier Portuguese appellation for Guangdong Province (Cantão). From the very beginning of its construction, Canton extended beyond its geographic limits to define the goods and the people from this region, acting as a synecdoche for China. Shaped by a large body of writings by Euro-American visitors for an audience curious about this faraway country, Canton became a universalizing focal point whose goal was to demonstrate differences between China and the West with Canton as the place of contact. In contrast, there were substantially less eighteenth-century Chinese writings dedicated to the intercultural world of Canton. To some extent, this was because “Canton” was part of a long history of Guangzhou as a port city that dates back to the Later Han period (25–220 ce ). This long history of commercial success went hand in hand with a narrative of Guangdong, often written by outsiders, as a frontier that was too far away from the capital and therefore a place of little consequence. Although this narrative was a way of defending a center that was becoming more reliant on a maritime economy, it was a compelling one. For example, one common truism was how Guangdong was only capable of producing merchants interested in profits and not scholarly gentlemen, who were learned in the arts and the moral paragons of Chinese civilization.4 Qu Yuan’s text signals the beginnings of Guangdong scholarly writings on local history that challenge this traditional narrative, but the stereotype of a marginal Guangzhou as essentially different from a Continental China continues today. The center/periphery narrative has also been supported by Guangzhou’s physical geography. Guangdong is approximately 2,000 km away from Beijing, with the Nanlingshan, a long range of mountains over 600 km long that stretches north of Guangzhou, between them. This range of mountains provides a ready boundary between the Pearl River Basin area of the south, and the Yangtze Valley that leads to the political and cultural hubs in central and north China. It also separates different climatic zones and has often been used to account for the shift in landscape terrains and ecosystems. The mountains also act as a linguistic border, differentiating the Sinitic languages of Mandarin in the north and Cantonese in the south. If there was an imposing mountain range in Guangdong’s north, then the vastness of an open sea greeted it from the south. Here, the city was connected to other towns in the province by waterways, including the Zhujiang, the third largest river in China, which flowed into the South China Sea.5 The southeast location of the port provided easy access to other port cities in Asia, creating a network that would eventually connect with the European world. But this region also has had a long history of piracy and bandits, and the sea itself was another source of peril. Ultimately, it was the sea and its multitude of possibilities that both enticed and underscored the dangerous porousness of borders. As a frontier city, Guangzhou has had numerous identities as a site—as a marginal space, as an exotic hub, and as a place of commercial success. These were identities constructed by outsiders who came either from across the mountains or from the sea, and these different encounters have shaped a Guangzhou and a Canton that appear to

A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art

73

have coexisted as separate entities. Therefore, any serious art-historical study seeking to place China trade production within a larger Chinese world faces many obstacles. The conventional Chinese art history approach, which follows the parochialism of a center/peripheral narrative, maintains a canon that favors the Confucian trained scholar-artist and certain types of ink painting. Especially in today’s global field of art, painting in ink is seen as “authentically” more Chinese, while works in foreign mediums, by implication, cannot belong to a history of Chinese art. It was collectors and connoisseurs, largely based in Europe and America, who first shaped the study of export art, which has now expanded beyond its niche area of research. At one end of the spectrum are studies that treat the pictorial image of export art as historical evidence of the landscape, geography, and community in Canton. At the other is the study of the reception of these works, which focuses on the hybridity of styles and the hodgepodge approach to imagery and iconography as part of the construction of an imagined and often exotic China. Both approaches, whether of an imagined China or a historical portrait of Canton, are anchored by the perception of export art as a trading commodity driven by the demands of a foreign audience. With the exception of a few oil painters, most makers of China trade art are seen as anonymous artisans, without the training needed to hone an aesthetic sensibility or cultivate a knowledge of Chinese art. If marginality has shaped both the identities of Guangzhou and Canton, whose cultural production is seen as a token representative of a ghettoized aesthetic, this essay proposes a different geographical reorientation by asking if there was a Chinese Canton—a place where maritime trade was informed by Chinese culture. It will consider the question from the position of production rather than reception, and consider what sort of strategies of aesthetic and cultural values were used for the new Euro-American market. From this perspective, the focus is an examination of Canton vis-à-vis regional production. Did the rise in export painting production actively frame a regional Guangzhou identity that differentiated it from the other parts of China and spoke to its position as a global center?

A Canton Album of Figures The focus of my discussion is a manuscript album of thirty-three images of costumed figures in the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM).6 The album, elegantly bound in red leather with gold embossed decoration, has a bookplate identifying it as part of the collection of Thomas Philip, Earl de Grey of Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, England. As Thomas Philip Robinson (1781–1859) assumed the title of Earl de Grey in 1833, the book was in his collection from at least that date. On the flyleaf, a handwritten note identifies an earlier owner: “I bought these Chinese drawings for 16 guineas at the auction for Mr. Martyn the supercargo effects in March 1747, P. Yorke.” It has not been possible to trace the supercargo Mr. Martin, but the date of 1747 makes this the earliest dated Canton trade album of watercolors. A strong argument can be made that “P. Yorke” was Philip Yorke, 2nd Earl of Hardwicke (1720–90), a fellow of the Royal

74

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Society and an active politician. Philip Yorke was married to Lady Jemima Campbell, who would later become Marchioness Grey. They had two daughters; the eldest, Amabel Hume-Campbell, inherited her mother’s title and had no children, while the youngest, Lady Mary Yorke (1757–1830), married Thomas Robinson and had three sons. It was their eldest, Thomas Philip, who succeeded his aunt to take on the title of Earl de Grey. It is possible that after Philip Yorke’s death, this album was passed to Lady Amabel, and with the passing of her title, the book came to her nephew at Wrest House. If this is, indeed, a work that formerly belonged to Philip Yorke, it can be seen as part of the Yorke family’s long-standing interest in China. Philip Yorke’s sister Elizabeth was married to George Anson, the naval officer who published his Voyage Round the World in 1748, seen by some scholars as marking the turning point in imperialist narratives of China.7 Jemima Yorke commissioned a Chinese pagoda at Wrest Park, and the Ansons also built a pagoda at Shugborough with the same garden designer, Thomas Wright.8 The album, unusually, has four small handwritten papers bound between the cover and the first page that include a list of contents and notes by Yorke, recounting his attempt to learn about the figures in the album. He finds some unlikely help as he writes: Che Qua, a Chinese modeler, who was in England in 1769, read and explained the characters in this book, which he said more in the mandarine [sic] language exactly like the missionaries . . . Khieou jen kong, Le Vieillard a la barbe bouclèe, he said meant the great Khieou jen but he did not know his history. Neither did he know anything more of Nue yuen choui, la femme generale, no, 21, but that she was a woman who fought and commanded soldiers.

Yorke continues to recount what he has learned from Che Qua, including stories about China’s famous beauties, the name of gods worshipped, and the important examination system which all educated men would take in order to gain the prestigious titles of government officials. But it is his conversational partner who is of interest. The Chinese modeler is Tan Che Qua (c. 1728–96),9 also known in England as Chitqua or Chetqua, who unlawfully, by switching ships without permission, landed in England in 1769.10 Che Qua made clay portrait figures, a type of art that flourished in Canton in the early eighteenth century but had ceased by the end of the century when its popularity was replaced by oil paintings. He stayed in England for three years and continued his clay portrait-making in London, where he charged ten guineas for a bust and fifteen for a whole-length sculpture. In 1770, he showed his work at the Royal Academy, and he was even included in a group portrait of Royal Academicians by Johan Zoffany. Given Che Qua’s relative fame and his openness to engage with potential clients, it is not surprising that Yorke sought his help. If Yorke’s records can be used as an indicator of Che Qua’s knowledge, it is clear that the Chinese sculptor was neither familiar with Chinese classical histories, nor equipped with the type of education expected of literary men. He was, however, literate and had a generalized knowledge of histories gleaned from folk tales and popular novels. In many ways, he represents the typical social class of art

A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art

75

makers in Canton, basically educated and adaptable to different demands, in this case to a different environment. The PEM album’s content list was written in French, most likely with the help of French missionaries, and follows the order of the book closely. Each item is first listed, where possible, by a transliteration of the Chinese characters written on a small red label pasted above the right corner of the image identifying the figures. Unfortunately, some of the title slips are now missing, leaving a few figures anonymous. In these cases, the content list provides a generic description of the figure. According to the list, there were originally thirty-four images, but three were missing when the book was bound together, and two additional pictures were added at the end. These last two works are more rigid in composition and lack the finesse of execution of the other images, suggesting that they are poorer quality additions made after Yorke’s death. It is possible that this book was bound, along with these two last images, under the orders of his grandson, Philip Thomas. All told, the album has passed through the hands of at least six people: the artist, who may have also written the red title slips, Mr. Martyn, P. Yorke, the French missionaries, Che Qua, and Philip Thomas, the Earl de Grey. The history of this album in England prompts the question of whether it was intended for a European audience. The strongest argument that it was made for a Western viewer comes from examining the work as a complete album, one in which the organization of the figures is in an order that would have been alien to a Chinese audience. For example, the album begins with a nun, a figure who if included in any traditional Chinese text, would have appeared at the end. There are also many other images of women, almost equal in number to men, which, again, would have been an unusual feature in Chinese illustrated books.11 At the very least, we can conclude that in album form, this was not intended for a Chinese viewer, although we cannot rule out the possibility that individual images may have had domestic appeal. Ultimately, this question of a Western audience rests on the assumption that there is a direct China–West relation inherent in the object that can be used to assess the relationship between the European viewer and the Chinese maker. Is this album intended for a viewer who is familiar (or not) with the layers of these cultural codes? Such an approach involves a reading of the ideological effects of the subject of the album, and asks what work they perform, which, while useful, leads us back to methods that erase the agency of the artist in relation with the artwork. It may be more useful to shift the question away from the audience to the object’s function as an “export,” and to consider how the necessity and ambition to travel and to be seen was an integral part of its making. This opens up a different set of questions that must take into account the materiality of the object, and the performance of the subject as part of the object. The following close reading of the PEM album tackles these questions through two lines of investigation. The first examines how the subjects are formed by a pictorial bricolage that speaks to networks as misaligned connections rather than direct translations; the second considers the album as a collection of objects by examining issues of materiality in eighteenth-century China.

76

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

A Guangdong World of Figures The PEM album of figures, or Book of Habits as titled by Yorke, is currently catalogued as an Album of Costumes of China. This later designation places this book within the genre of costume books that were popular in the late eighteenth century that introduced far-flung places to Euro-American audiences. Costume albums distilled the image of China to an unchanged place, fixed in time, where people could be organized into social types that reflected a nation that would never modernize. Such albums often used a standard pictorial template of a figure on an empty background, all of similar scale and colors. The repetition and consistency of this pictorialization created a standardized visual language that connected the figures to the same space and used similarity to convey an objectivity that fitted a pseudo-documentary ambition. As aptly described by Eric Hayot, such costume albums were a “form of collective documents that organize for their readers an entire typology of China,”12 and operated not as narrative illustrations, but as “a collection of anecdotal comments that satisfied the curious armchair traveler.”13 The PEM album, however, predates this popular genre of China trade art, and is pictorially at odds with costume album conventions. The individual leaves of the PEM album vary in the treatment of the figures’ scale, colors, and spatial compositions, and they are also situated in different scenes. The figures are drawn from novels, history, and current times, with some being specific characters and others more generic. Although these differences have been seen as part of a stylistic evolution, it is possible to examine the broader pictorial context of this album to reconsider its production. The following examples are selected to highlight the unusual and the familiar in the images when seen within the context of Chinese art. Many of the images incorporate elements of both, and all are presented as bright and colorful. They also include motifs that are specific to the region and suggest that, at the very least, they showcased the cosmopolitan world of Guangdong. An example of this is the portrait of a merchant in official dress of blue gown and hat with a red tassel (Figure 5.1). Behind our merchant are bolts of silks and cases wrapped in embroidered cloths with patterns of mythical beasts. If these are items that were made for export, there are also imported items, including a piece of red coral branch, a European fork and spoon and two glass goblets. These objects speak of the two-way traffic of exotic goods that contributed to the cosmopolitan world of maritime trade. Although this image appears to be a straightforward descriptive image of a merchant, the maker has flouted Chinese pictorial conventions, which must have added an element of strangeness that fit in with the narrative of a marginal Guangdong. First, the merchant is surrounded by items of trade, including an abacus, scales, and the stacked piles of rattan trays used for drying tealeaves or mulberry leaves, which as a display of the professional side of commerce transgresses Chinese portraiture practices. Another unusual characteristic is how the merchant is depicted within walled interiors. This is a type of composition more commonly seen in images of women (Figure 5.2), who, when seen within their private quarters, added a dimension of voyeuristic titillation. Can the same be seen here?

A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art

77

Figure 5.1 “A Merchant,” from Album of Costumes of China, c. 1740. Watercolor on paper. Peabody Essex Museum © 2009 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Photography by Walter Silver. On the whole, however, it is the inclusion of the many figures derived from the then contemporary novels and dramas that differentiates this album from the later costume album types. These figures would have been unfamiliar to Western viewers, suggesting that, at least in the early eighteenth century, the production of standalone pictures and albums of figures were not made to perform to European imperialist narratives about China. One such character, and mentioned by Yorke in his conversation with Che Qua, is “Khieou jen kong,” or rather Qiuran Gong (球髯公), of Image 16. The first character,

78

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 5.2 Putting Out the Lamp, late 18th century. Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk. Gift of James Cahill and Hsingyuan Tsao. Photographed for the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive by Benjamin Blackwell.

A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art

79

written as “球,” should be “虯,” a less common character, but similar enough in sound to account for the error. This is the popular hero Qiu Ranke (虯 髯 客) from the short story The Biography of the Dragon Beard Guest (虯髯客傳) by Du Guangting (杜光庭, 850–933), which was later adapted in the Ming dynasty by the seventeenth-century dramatist, Ling Mengchu (凌 濛 初, 1580–1644), into an opera called Dragon Beard Elder (虯髯翁). By the Qing dynasty, this tale was celebrated as the first wuxia (knighterrant) story of three unusual heroes: Dragon Beard Man, his protégé Li Jing (李 璟, 916–61), and Li Jing’s wife, also known as Hong Funü (紅拂女), the Lady with Red Sleeves. A well-known character in her own right, she later appeared in the eighteenthcentury tour-de-force novel Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢). Hong Funü may also have made an appearance in the PEM album; there is an image of a female warrior with red sleeves that intrigued Yorke, but was only identified as a female Admiral. It is possible that these images of fictional characters were made with the Chinese viewer in mind, but what is striking is that some spoke directly to a local identity. Another famous Chinese cultural figure in the album is Gentleman Fan (Fan Li, 范蠡, 507–?), a political advisor to the ancient State of Yue during the Spring and Autumn Period (770–476 bce ). Fan had famously devised a successful plot by sending the great beauty Xi Shi, (西施, 506 bce ?), to seduce their enemy, the King of Wu. Fan’s story was incorporated into a historical novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三 國 演 義), a fourteenth-century work written by Luo Guanzhong and considered one of the four great novels in Chinese history. This novel, which continues to be one of the most widely read works in China, combined history with myths and largely focused on military battles and intrigues. Fan Li may have appealed to the artist because of his regional connections with Guangdong. Fan Li was from Yue, which is a geographical term that broadly refers to people from South China. Moreover, according to the novel, Fan Li and Xi Shi eventually left politics to become merchants, an unusual choice that is likely to have appealed to audiences living in a port city. If the maker of the PEM album was drawing on Chinese novels and operas for his figures, his debt extended to pictorial precedents. Since the seventeenth century, illustrations and printed images expanded the visual world of books and opened up literary texts to those outside the exclusive world of the educated scholar. The image that shows the clearest debt to printed pictures is Image 5, with a label identifying its central figure as a scholar (Figure 5.3). Here, the gentleman holding onto a feathered fan with his back toward the audience and his head partially turned, is a close copy of a portrait of the historical figure, Zhu Geliang (諸葛亮, 184–234), in Illustrated Masterworks of the Han and Song: “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” and “Outlaws of the Marsh” (瀟湘漢宋奇書三國水滸合傳), printed in 1722 (Figure 5.4). The image of Zhu Geliang is almost identical to the scholar in the PEM album and undoubtedly the artist used this image for his painting. It is outside the scope of this essay to list all the various other album images and their possible pictorial sources, but a quick survey includes Image 10, Young Gentleman Liu (Liu Mengmei, 柳 夢 梅), who is a character from the popular play Peony Pavilion (牡 丹 亭). Image 15 of a Manchu official with his bow and arrows bears remarkable similarity to many court portraits of Manchu warriors, and Image 8 of a Daoist priest

80

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 5.3 “A scholar,” from Album of Costumes of China, c. 1740. Watercolor on paper. Peabody Essex Museum. © 2009 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Photography by Walter Silver.

praying at an image of Zhong Kui with a Tiger draws on popular vernacular images of Fuhu, the tiger-taming Arhat. The comparison of the PEM album with other forms of imagery speaks to an active circulation of pictures, and, in particular, the importance of the printed book as a carrier of pictorial information. It is perhaps not surprising that eighteenth-century Guangdong was a major center for commercial publication and had the third highest number of bookshops in China. Of importance were the market towns of Foshan and

A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art

81

Figure 5.4 Portrait of Zhuge Liang (諸葛亮) from Illustrated Masterworks of the Han and Song: “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” and “Outlaws of the Marsh” (瀟湘漢宋奇 書三國水滸合傳), 1722. Harvard-Yenching Library.

82

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Shunde, where there were many publishers and bookshops. Foshan, an iron-producing town, was known for its high-quality craft production, including woodcarving, and thus there was a body of skilled workers there who could carve the blocks needed for book production.14 Shunde, better known for its silk, stands out for the use of women carvers who supplemented family income with their work.15 A female workforce, most of whom were illiterate, lowered production costs and thus contributed to Guangdong’s reputation as a place of inexpensive book publishing. The appropriation of popular Chinese iconographic motifs for export objects is not unusual. Stacey Sloboda’s work on chinoiserie has shown how eighteenth-century trade objects including ceramics, wallpaper, and mirror paintings drew on a similar network of Chinese vernacular imagery.16 Her study also shows how such imagery was not valued for symbolic meaning, but rather for its connective potential to make sense of Europe’s encounter with China. One strand of her argument is that it is precisely the image’s pictorial incoherence and symbolic opacity as decoration that “negates the possibility of deep cultural recognition, and its bright colors, popular motifs and creative assemblage associate it with the world of fashion and global commerce.”17 One can extend this insight to the PEM album as another version of this creative assemblage associated with a maritime economy. But it is also important to recognize that the PEM album is of a series of singular images (rather than decorative patterning) and, as such, each leaf has a pictorial coherence, even if there is no deep cultural recognition of the subject. Moreover, as works on paper, the album prompts viewers to view the work as a form that belongs to the world of illustrated books and fine arts. In other words, it operated differently from many export art that were used to decorate interiors, and which were valued as much for their novelty of function. The PEM album therefore straddles the world of objects and the pictorial world of paintings. From the perspective of production, it is not surprising that the maker of this album expanded the pictorial range by turning to images from other paintings. One pictorial source that deserves more attention is vernacular paintings of beautiful women, or meirenhua (美人畫). As defined by the late art historian, James Cahill, meirenhua were works made by city-based workshop artists for domestic use (Figure  5.2). Stylistically, they use gongbi (工筆), or fine line, brushwork, painted in color and with a variable degree of mimetic skill.18 The aim of these paintings was to be decorative and exact an immediate sense of optic pleasure. During the eighteenth century, this type of painting, often in hanging-scroll format, was associated with urban centers in the Jiangnan region known for their pleasure quarters. However, the genre was appropriated by the Qing painting academy artists, who made such paintings for the emperor and his immediate family. This is one example of how the court turned to the aesthetic tastes of urban spaces, especially those in Jiangnan, and it highlights the porous nature of “influences” of art-making in eighteenth-century Qing China. While the court versions of meirenhua were of significantly higher quality in both skill and material, they, nonetheless, followed a basic compositional arrangement, where the woman waits for her scholar/lover in an inner space surrounded by layers of different rooms and gardens. As already noted, in the PEM album, this compositional formula was appropriated for the images of men, but when used for the images of women, the

A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art

83

composition enhances ideals of desire and intimacy. In Image 27, the viewer is led through the bamboo garden to the meiren, or beautiful woman, who is the wife of an official (Figure 5.5). Behind her hangs an ink landscape scroll showing a pavilion next to a cluster of trees in the foreground. This pavilion is a motif associated with the Yuan artist, Ni Zan (倪瓚, 1301–74), who by the late Ming was recognized as a master painter and an example of a learned gentleman artist. The inclusion of this painting suggests that the

Figure 5.5 “Wife of an Official,” from Album of Costumes of China, c. 1740. Watercolor on paper. Peabody Essex Museum. © 2009 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Photography by Walter Silver.

84

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

PEM album artist had a degree of art-historical knowledge, and that the painting adds a male presence that acts as a foil for our elegant beauty waiting her husband. She sits displayed on a wooden bench, somewhat coyly propping her chin on her hand draped in flowing sleeves, gazing at two potted plants. Our beauty, so typical of other meirenhua circulating in Jiangnan and the court, suggests that we must add eighteenth-century Guangzhou, and, by extension, the West, to a growing network of city–court–port transfers. This brief examination of the pictorial sources of the PEM album has shown the interconnectedness of images across different Chinese art worlds and the crosspollination of domestic styles that informed early export paintings before it developed its own distinctive templates of motif. The PEM album is also an example of the beginnings of an expansion of art production for foreign trade. Returning to Sloboda’s argument that decorative art, because of its pictorial incoherence and the disruptive treatment of space, created an ambivalent connective relation in which China could remain unknown, it follows that painting, because of its pictorial coherence, opened a space where it was possible to seek or impose certain types of knowledge about China. The PEM album can be seen as an example of an opening of such a space, and we can see this in operation with Yorke’s quizzing of Che Qua. It is possible to argue that it is through the growing market for items that belong to the traditional genre of “art” that we see the development of a cultural space that generated certain types of knowledge about China. We can follow this idea through by positioning late eighteenth-century costume albums and paintings of Canton as examples of this opened space. Therefore, while this album may not be a traditional costume album, it did preempt a viewing experience that reinforced certain types of knowledge that was increasingly used to justify Europe’s imperialist expansion in the East.19

A Guangdong World of Objects The comparison of figurative works may demonstrate how Chinese trade artists drew upon local practices and visual knowledge to make works for a global audience, and this analysis goes some distance in investigating how such an album was made. It does not, on its own, explain why it matters. Looking beyond pictorial citations to turn to the painterly treatment of the work, this album is unusual in the attention given to object surfaces that differentiate the nature of their materials and effectively creates a sense of “optic touch.”20 Moreover, each leaf presents a medley of unique things, and very few items or even decorative patterns are repeated in other leaves. The detailed attention to surfaces means that we must also see this work as an album of objects. Jonathan Hay has argued that from the sixteenth century onwards, the economic rise of city centers valorized a social hierarchy that not only prompted an urban spectacle of conspicuous consumption, but also shifted how people engaged with luxurious goods.21 Workshops grew and, for the first time, artisans signed their works and left behind records identifying where and how things were made. The intensification of the craft trade was also extended through the Qing expansion of imperial workshops,

A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art

85

which added to the demand for skilled craftsmen. This historical grounding provides the context for Hay’s pioneering study on how Chinese objects from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century were active agents that prompted their beholders to “think” along with them through a conceptual space that existed between the structure of the object and its surface, and which could elicit a variety of responses that were difficult to articulate, but could nonetheless be experienced.22 The significance of the experiential encounter also generated hierarchies of material importance. For example, certain materials carried with them symbolic value linked to their place of origin, such as stone from Duanzhou or jade from Burma, and these symbolic values added to the pleasure of beholding. At times, this symbolic power of origin transcended an object’s actual “thingness,” thus allowing a layperson to exact as much pleasure from knowing where an item originated as a connoisseur might derive from an erudite encounter with it. Following this line of argument, I would propose that the PEM album shows an urban workshop artist’s approach to creating an aesthetic response to elite objects. Moreover, as paintings of things, they underscore how part of the pleasure was achieved through tantalizing suggestion of the objects’ actual or imagined origins as part of the appreciation of material culture. It is perhaps no accident that Guangzhou (and not just Canton) was a center for luxury handicrafts for export, domestic, and court markets. It was known for its Duanzhou inkstones, Shiwan ceramics, zitan furniture, and works that were made from exotic materials or used new technologies such as ivory carving, enamel painting, and glasswork. These items were not only made for an interregional and international market, but were also presented as gifts to the Qing court as part of annual provincial tributes. This was an opportunity for provincial officials to show off the type of craftsmanship that could lead to imperial favor. For example, the Superintendent of Maritime Customs in 1729 sent five Guangdong carpenters to the Imperial Household Workshops, as the Yongzheng Emperor (r.  1723–35) admired the way Guangdong artisans used high-quality imported wood and these were carved with intricate designs.23 Guangdong artisans also dominated the court’s ivory carving and enamel painting workshops. The transplantation of expertise and transfer of knowledge of new technology did not mean that local aesthetics and imagery were transmitted as well, but rather that the artisans worked according to the demands of the court, and that their final works were regarded as expressions of court taste. However, it is important to note that the court was only one consumer in a market of many, and that the emperor was as reliant on what the private markets and artisans produced as any other wealthy customer. By the eighteenth century, the significance of the market trickled into the literary arena that usually scorned mercantile interests. Qu Dajun, our acute observer of foreign sailors, in his New Comments on Guangdong included a chapter titled “Comments on Trade Goods” (貨語).24 Not only was this unusual in literary texts, but it was also daringly placed ahead of (and therefore considered more significant than) Qu’s chapter on ancient ritual bronzes, traditionally prized as embodiments of learning. Within his chapter on trade goods, he lists twenty-five groups of products, classified largely by materials such as gold, precious stones, shells, tribute goods, and other

86

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

objects. Among these, he includes five different groups of fabric: cotton, hemp, common silk-mix, feathered cloth, and silk.25 Throughout the book, Qu focuses on the wealth of raw, regional materials. His section on textiles is no exception, except that he also speaks of the high quality of local production. Qu rates the cotton from Eastern Yue (Southern China) to be of the highest quality and imbues this common fabric with poetic descriptions, extolling the beauty of its tight weave, how it was white as snow, and light as silken paper. He maps the many forms of fabric made from natural fibers from hemp to textiles made up of plantain leaves, and lists all the different varieties made in different areas in Guangdong, including those made by smaller communities who live on boats, or those in the remote hilly regions.26For silk, he examines the different types from other regions, but mentions Guangdong’s own varieties in his poem: State Merchants fight to board the foreign ships The Shizimen (Macau) is opened to the two oceans Five-thread silks, eight-thread silks, and Guangdong common silk are good Silver money piled up in the shisanhang (十三行, Thirteen Companies).27

This poem is one of the earliest records we have identifying the foreign companies in Canton, the shisanhang. Traditionally, the term is usually applied to the hang merchants and their exclusive monopoly on western trade after 1757. However, as we see, the term shishanhang was used before the Emperor’s intervention in the Canton trade, and referred to the buildings rather than the merchants who held the posts of hang merchants. More importantly, it was the access point for two oceans, or rather two main trade routes. One was the West Ocean route, which led to direct trade with Europe; the other was the East Ocean that carried Guangzhou–Macau–Nagasaki and also Guangzhou–Manila–Acapulco. In other words, Canton dealt with more than Western trade. Qu, however, not only maps out the geographies of a silk market, but he also places emphasis on local production. In doing so, he locates “Canton” between China and the rest of the world—a node in a larger market network that crafted as well as moved, myriad things across the multiple seas. There are other poems that also talk about the shisanhang, including a poem by Luo Tianchi (羅 天 尺, fl. 1736). An Everlasting Song of Sorrow Written on a Winter’s Night on a Skiff in the Pearl Delta River Watching the Fire Destroy the Foreign Goods at the Thirteen Companies describes the large fire in 1743, in which Luo writes: Guangzhou city is a hero under Heavens, Island Barbarians live within packed together like fish scales: Heaps of fragrant pearls and silver coins fill the market, With fire-cloths, feathered embroidery and all sorts of velvets. The foreign officials with their blue-green eyes live in the towers These red-hair barbarians have lived here for many years. From the streets of Haopan connected to the Xijian Tower, This is where goods from across the oceans, like hills of miscellaneous things, live . . .

A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art

87

. . . While searching through the quiet night for a poetic phrase, long strands of light covering 10,000 feet suddenly cast across [the waters] [The flames were like] A gathering of red birds in flight, and the city was one of feathered wings, a distant mirage hidden by the light.28

The poem describes the drama of the scene, but Luo also captures the sense of loss. Like Qu, Luo was an eminent local and this poem is another example of the type of literary works that place shisanhang within the fabric of Guangzhou City. He was familiar with the geography of the area, including Haopan Street, which was the market area next to the thirteen companies, and the Xijiao Tower, a teahouse with singing girls, and, of course, the factories filled with fabric. It is evident that if imperial decree prevented foreigners from entering the city, it did not prevent Chinese visitors from gaining knowledge, perhaps even first-hand, of the foreign quarters outside the gates. Regional production also meant regional competition with other urban centers that produced silk, wood, glass, and ceramics, and contributed to the emergence of a general style associated with Guangdong. In general, regardless of material, there was a greater interest in creating intricate and rich effects enhanced by the use of precious stones and other materials. This type of treatment was not only an indicator of opulence, but it also visualized technology as a cultural force. There is evidence of an interest in new technology in the PEM album. In Image 27 (Figure 5.5), the two potted plants include a blue jun glaze vase, a type of Qing reproduction of earlier and more classical styles of glazed surfaces made at the Shiwan kiln sites in Guangdong, which employed two layers of glazes that helped intensify the color (Figure  5.6). In the PEM image, the bright blue speckled vessel may well be these jun-glaze shiwan vases. If the album draws attention to technology, it also takes into account the metaphorical power of materials and the ways in which the decorative surface acts as a social connector. For example, in Image 3, the artist depicts a woman dressed in a delicately patterned red silk with a blue collar (Figure 5.7). She holds a fan made of mottled bamboo (xiangfei zhu 湘妃竹), referring to the legend of the Xiang River Goddesses, known for their extraordinary beauty. The spots on the bamboo are the traces of their tears shed after hearing of the death of their husband, the legendary Emperor Shun. Here we see how metaphorical agency of materials adds to the pleasure of viewing a lovely woman. Her fan is opened to reveal a delicate branch of flowers, a fitting subject matter for a meiren. Its opened form echoes the unfolded, feathered tail of the peacock at her feet, whose exotic beauty is used to enhance our appreciation for the young lady, but which is also meant to draw attention to the extraordinary details of her clothing, including her embroidered collar. Qu Dajun also talks about this in his section on feathered textiles found in Guangdong. He writes, “There are also peacock feathers that are spun into threads, and they are applied in embroidery manuals, cloud collars and sleeve openings. Our eyes are won over by its gold and jade-blue colors and it is possible to take delight in it.”29 Qu, being a literary iconoclast, ends with a comment of commercial rather than aesthetic value regarding how the cost of one set of peacock tail was equal to one piece of gold.

88

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 5.6 Meiping vase with Jun-blue glaze, early Qing, 17th century. Shiwan ware ceramic. Gift of Bei Shan Tang, Collection of the Art Museum of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1981.0051).

A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art

89

Figure 5.7 “Young Lady,” from Album of Costumes of China, c. 1740. Watercolor on paper. Peabody Essex Museum. © 2009 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Photography by Walter Silver. Almost every figure in the PEM album, regardless of its apparent social class, is decked in fine patterned fabrics. Again, Qu provides some local insight. In his section on hemp, he cites how the classic History of the Former Han (漢書) described the region as “a pool of fruit and cloth.”30 And he continues to extol the region’s abundance with more historical anecdotes, including how bamboo and plantain hemp were presented as tribute to the Tang court. Guangdong was known for its cloth production, not least because of some of its unusual practices in sericulture, which included a

90

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

method of planting mulberry trees on embankments next to fishponds, which produced a closed ecosystem where the waste from the ponds fertilized the trees and the trees provided food for the fish. With the growing demand for silk, many enterprising farmers converted rice paddies into embankments and ponds, and by the end of the eighteenth century, many suburbs in Guangdong had dedicated the majority of their land to this profitable cash crop.31 Textile production was therefore not only an important part of Guangdong’s history, but in the eighteenth century it also became an essential economic engine. If the attention to textiles was one of the significant aspects of this album, at times it was excessive. This is evident in Image 21, “Qing Imperial Consort,” where the entire surface is covered in various patterns and materials, from the woven carpet to the silk gowns, the stone dragon screen, and the ornate red beams with gold decoration (Figure 5.8). The patterns, composed of naturalistic forms and abstract shapes, have a similar rhythmic energy that is shared across objects. In traditional portraits of imperial consorts, conventions dictate that her identity is informed by the various iconographies of her dress that can identify her rank. In informal portraits, a high-ranking consort or empress is usually depicted with maids and servants who would be smaller, or placed at the edge. However, in the image before us, this lady’s sociopolitical role is not emphasized by her physical presence, but rather through the overwhelming portrayal of the court as a bedazzling place. The woman in the picture acts more as a device to showcase the many different textile surfaces on display, and as such destabilizes the conventions of picturing of an imperial consort. Ultimately, this is an album that is as much about things as it is about figures. It displays an approach that makes sense for an artist working before there was an established market for export watercolors, but when there was a substantial one for high-quality crafts. Moreover, the artist drew upon materials and things that were specifically locally produced items, highlighting the importance of the region’s reputation as a maker of things, and not just as a place through which goods moved. Taking this idea further, there is a sense that the artist was also responding to a decorative aesthetic and not just a painterly tradition. The close attention to different surfaces creates a painterly explosion of colors and patterns that heightens the sensory experience of the beholder, not unlike the surfaces of the items that it is portraying. On one level, this album conveyed the eighteenth-century interest in an aesthetic of things through representation. On another level, it was an object whose painterly effect as a form of decorative surface prompted viewers to hold, view, and “think” with it, or to take Hay’s argument, “in that the beholder’s involuntary affectedness by the object brings about an awareness of the producer’s work of making it.”32 Certainly, this album shows off a painter’s work, particularly with the careful details, such as a gown’s textile pattern, which attracts the viewer’s eye. Whether later viewers would have understood the aesthetic ideals of Chinese objects is less important than how this aspect was part of its production process, and it further demonstrates the agency of the maker in making artistic decisions for the new emerging market of watercolor images. After this market developed, the approach changed in response to client demands, but in the early eighteenth century, such a book showed off the rich world of Chinese material culture.

A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art

91

Figure 5.8 “Qing Imperial Consort,” from Album of Costumes of China, c. 1740. Watercolor on paper. Peabody Essex Museum © 2009 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Photography by Walter Silver.

Conclusion The close analysis of the PEM album opens up an alternative approach to studying export art that has been dominated by discussions of China vis-à-vis the West or marginalized in a Chinese art history that saw little artistic value in such works. What has been revealed is a larger Chinese cultural network of material, knowledge, skill, and aesthetic sensibility that extended beyond the markets of a so-called West. One

92

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

important part of this second network was how it fitted into the making of a regional identity that challenged the idea of Guangdong as a place on the margins by situating it at the center, where China meets the seas. Returning to my starting point about whether there was a Chinese Canton, predictably there are no clear answers to that question. The shisanhang was the Chinese equivalent to the idea of “Canton,” where it came to designate the heart of maritime trade, but it was a set of buildings rather than a geographical location. As such, being storehouses, they were sites that were understood through what they contained: goods. This included the rich variety of different types of goods and their material qualities, how they circulated, new technologies and their impact on production, and the interaction of goods with one another. The shisanhang was also a symbol of the city’s history as a port, one in which the comings and goings of the exotic were the norm. It was here where different trading routes met, where things made were exchanged, and where, for at least the Guangdong community, the local intervened in the global flow. The research for this paper was made possible with the generous support of the Research Grant Council, Hong Kong.

Notes 1 梯以藤結而上下。客登。則番人從雀室探其首。眼皆碧綠。髮黃而面黧。以手 相援。見之驚猶魑魅。登未及半。則施放火器。黃霧蔽人。咫尺渺不相見。聲 如叢雷。轟闐足底。譯人云。此吾國所以敬客。願毋恐。 Qu Dajun, Guangdong xinyu 廣東 新語, vol. 2 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985), 481–2. 2 The decision to create a single point of entry may have been a way of curbing British influence on the seas as they began to expand their power east of the Straits of Malacca and because of their aggressive stance in the Battle of Plassey. Guangdong was most likely chosen because it had a more organized network of business guilds that made tax collections easier there than in neighboring Fujian. 3 Hang (行, also known as hong or cohong) merchants are men who are part of a guild of merchants who dealt exclusively with yanghuo 洋 貨 (goods from across the oceans). The hang system was formalized in 1760 and restricted to a small number of merchants, forming the Canton system. Although the number varied, this group came to be known as the Thirteen Hangs or shisanhang—a term used in Chinese to refer to the storehouses (or factories) along the edge. 4 For more on the construction of an exotic Guangzhou, see David Faure, Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 17–26. 5 During the Tang dynasty, the maritime Silk Road brought in Arabic merchants trading silk, precious stones, and spices. In 714, the first Bureau for the Superintendent of Maritime Trade (shiboshi 市舶使) was set up. 6 The PEM album’s accession number is AE85315. 7 Robert Markley, “China and the English Enlightenment: Literature, Aesthetics, and Commerce,” Literature Compass, 11, no. 8 (2014): 517–27.

A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art

93

8 I want to thank Stacey Sloboda for bringing these connections to my attention. For more on Anson, see Stacey Sloboda, Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in EighteenthCentury Britain (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2014), 174–81. 9 The word “qua” is a pidgin-English honorific meaning “esquire” or “mister.” We are not sure what his actual Chinese name is. 10 The Gentleman’s Magazine provides a lively description of Che Qua’s (Chitqua) arrival in England: This gentleman came over to England on the Horsendon East Indiaman, Capt. Jameson, the beginning of August, 1769 . . . He is a middle-aged man of a proper stature, his face and hands of a copperish color; is elegantly [clothed] in silk robes, after the fashion of his country; speaks the Lingua Franca, mixed with broken English; is very sensible, and a great observer. He is remarkably ingenious in forming small sorts with a sort of China earth, many of which carry a striking likeness of the person they are designed to represent. He steals a likeness, and forms the busts from his memory.

11

12 13 14

15 16 17

18 19

20 21 22 23

In John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century Consisting of Authentic Memories and Original Letters of Eminent Persons, vol. 5 (London: J. B. Nichols and Son, 1828), 319. Thirteen of the thirty-three images are of women in the current PEM album, but three are now lost, so the original album would have been sixteen out of thirty-four images, according to Yorke’s list. Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity and Chinese Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 65. Ibid. Wen Gehong, “Qing dai Guangzhou diqu tongsu xiaoshuo kanke kao lue,” 清代廣州地 區通俗刊刻考略, Journal of Jinan University: Philosophy and Social Sciences 暨南學 報: 哲學社會科學版 32, no. 2 (2010): 3–11. Huang Guosheng, “Guangdong Magang nuzi keshu kaosuo,” 廣東馬崗女子刻書考索, Wenxian 文獻 2 (1998): 266–70. For more on this argument, see Sloboda, Chinoiserie, 3–10. Stacey Sloboda, “Surface Contact: Decoration in the Chinese Taste,” in Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West,” edited by Petra ten Doesschate–Chu and Ning Ding (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 2015), 254. James Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Vernacular Painting in High Qing China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 6–17. It should be pointed out that, while there had been earlier negative writings about China, in terms of visual works, it was in the late eighteenth century when we begin to see a more systematic presentation of a weak China fueled by a public interest in the Macartney Mission in 1793. I borrow this term from Jonathan Hay, Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China (London: Reaktion Books, 2010). Ibid., 21–42. Ibid., 77–89. Yang Boda, Tributes from Guangdong to the Qing Court: Exhibition Jointly Presented by the Palace Museum, Beijing & The Art Gallery, Chinese University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Don Bosco Painting Co., 1987), 65.

94

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

24 Qu Dajun was a Ming loyalist who was involved in a number of rebellions against the new Qing Empire. He surrendered only after many failed attempts in the 1670s. However, his anti-Qing stance meant that his writings were banned during Emperor Qianlong’s literary inquisition in 1774. Given his reputation, it is possible to see Guangdong xinyu and its determined effort to place the local ahead of national concerns as an iconoclastic act. This may explain why Qu, a recognized scholar and poet, would tackle unusual subject matters such as foreign trade, a subject that would become only commonplace in the late eighteenth century. 25 Qu, juan 15. 26 Ibid., 422–6. 27 廣之線紗與牛郎綢、五絲、八絲、雲緞、光緞。皆為嶺外京華東西二洋所貴。 予廣州竹枝詞云。洋船爭出是官商。十字門開向二洋。五絲八絲廣緞好。銀錢 堆滿十三行。 Ibid., 427. 28 广州城郭天下雄，岛夷鳞次居其中。香珠银钱堆满市，火布羽缎哆哪绒。碧 眼 蕃官占楼住，红毛鬼子经年寓。濠畔街连西角楼，洋货如山纷杂处。 ... 探 幽觅句一竿冷，万丈虹光忽横亘。赤乌飞集雁翅城，蜃楼遥从电光隐。 Chen Yongzheng, Zhongguo gudai hai shang sidiaozhilu shixuan (中國古代海上絲綢 之 路 詩 選 Selection of Poetry on China’s Ancient Maritime Silk Road), (Guangdong: Guangdong nuyou chubanshe, 2001), x. 29 Qu, juan 15, 427. 30 Ibid., 425. 31 For more information on the production process, see Kenneth Ruddle and Gongfu Zhong, Integrated Agriculture–Aquaculture in South China: The Dike Pond System of the Zhujiang Delta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 32 Hay, Sensuous Surfaces, 78.

6

Pedro Cambón’s Asian Objects A Transpacific Approach to Eighteenth-Century California J. M. Mancini

On December 9, 1781, a Franciscan missionary named Pedro Benito Cambón (Figure 6.1) returned to the Californias after a two-year absence.1 His arrival in the harbor of San Diego was noted by Francisco Palóu, Cambón’s “father companion” in the mission of San Francisco de Asís, who waited with keen anticipation for the Galician to complete the final leg of his voyage. Palóu would have had good reasons to dwell on his colleague’s return. There was the worrying matter of Cambón’s ill health. Palóu remarked frequently on it in his writings, offering it as the reason his companion had left the mission with the “commander and maritime officers” who had hurriedly shipped down the Pacific coast to San Blas in October 1779 upon hearing that Spain was once again at war with Great Britain. Since the missions were shorthanded, the temporary and perhaps permanent loss of any colleague was sure to present difficulties. Moreover, Cambón (1738–92 or later) was not just any colleague but an especially versatile one, who, over the course of his career, took an interest in the architecture and engineering of the missions and the logistics of furnishing them with images and objects as well as the tasks formally associated with his missionary vocation.2 Palóu’s anticipation must also have been piqued by two other aspects of Cambón’s voyage: the fact that his companion had not merely left the Californias for San Blas but ultimately had traveled across the Pacific to the Philippine Islands and back; and the arrival of a letter from Cambón saying that he had purchased “a great consignment of vestments, wax, and other special things for the church and sacristy of this mission.” Coming from Cambón, this must have been a tantalizing prospect. For, as Palóu knew, his colleague was not the sort to “come with empty hands.” Indeed, Cambón had demonstrated a capacity for procuring “special things.” Even in 1771, when the missions’ founding president, Junípero Serra, insisted on their aesthetic poverty, Cambón and his associate, Ángel Somera, had managed to give him paintings of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Our Lady of Mount Carmel from a supply “they had procured elsewhere.” And even earlier, the pair had been in possession of “a linen cloth with the Image of Our Lady of Sorrows,” the display of which reputedly defused a potentially violent conflict with a group of armed Gabrielino. Palóu might have experienced anxiety along with 95

96

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 6.1 Pedro Benito Cambón, sculpture at Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, San Gabriel, California. Photo: author. his anticipation, however, when he read Cambón’s qualification that, “as everything came under the register of San Blas, nothing could be unloaded, but he hoped the commissary of San Blas would send it on the first bark that came.” As is evident from his long and vehement account of Cambón’s earlier effort to transport “vestments and ornaments” and other items to the new California missions from some earlier

Pedro Cambón’s Asian Objects: A Transpacific Approach

97

missions—an episode during which Cambón and his shipment had been stranded below the Franciscan-Dominican border at Mission San Fernando Velicatá for nearly two years—Palóu knew that the logistics of such “consignments” could go terribly awry.3 Palóu need not have worried: the resourceful Cambón returned and was, in fact, preceded by his cargo. Moreover, as is clear from an inventory made during that brief detour to San Blas, Cambón shipped much more than the “vestments and wax” and “ordinary stuffs” in Palóu’s account: twenty-two cases of finished objects from the Philippine Islands and China in wood, fiber, metal, ceramics, and other media were listed as well as materials that could be used in the creation of additional images, objects, and structures and a variety of items for consumption or medicinal use such as tea and other plant products.4 Of the finished objects Cambón sent across the Pacific, many were clearly for liturgical use, including new and used vestments made of silk and satin brocade and damask; consecrated and unconsecrated altar stones; “one wrought silver chalice, made in Canton in South China, with its paten and spoon”; carved, gilt, and painted tabernacles; decorated fiber mats for altar covers; painted and lacquered lecterns; candles and tapers; and gilt and painted processional candleholders. In a single instance of a figurative work, these objects also included another image of Our Lady of Sorrows (Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, after whom Mission San Francisco de Asís takes its unofficial name, Mission Dolores)—this time a statue. Other objects were designed for use by both indigenous people and Franciscans as they went about their daily work, such as “7 rattan hats, of the kind worn by the Reverend Fathers of the Philippines,” and “50 blue kerchiefs from China,” and a hand mill—a labor-saving device that historians claim Franciscans deliberately avoided introducing into New California in order to keep Indian women in drudgery. Beyond these two categories, Cambón also shipped a quantity of objects that were purpose-made for neither liturgical use nor the daily work routine, including a parlor clock, 154 red and 82 blue cups for drinking chocolate, 14 large platters, 12 small plates, and 12 dozen “ordinary” plates.5 In addition to finished works, Cambón shipped paper and ink, unfinished textiles such as “150 rolls fine denim from Ylocos dyed blue,” “leaves used for dying material,” a case of 350 shells “for church windows labelled for the Mission of our Father St. Francis,” and paint in four colors: blue, red, yellow, and eight pounds of Paris green. As this suggests, it was Cambón’s intention not only that Asian objects be introduced to complement an existing visual and material culture but also that Asian materials be built into new forms created through the interaction of Amerindians and Europeans in California.6 Although time has dispersed Cambón’s consignment, it is still possible to identify a number of objects that appear to correlate with the inventory in locations associated with him, including textiles in San Gabriel Archangel and in San Buenaventura. In the mission to which Cambón had the longest attachment, Mission Dolores, the array of such objects is more diverse: for example, one of six “painted and gilt bouquet-like holders to serve as candlesticks” and an elaborate gilt and painted tabernacle that

98

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

employs the lush vegetal reliefs, decorative pilasters, and ornate framing devices typical of Philippine sacred art. Although now in the mission’s museum, this tabernacle stood in the large niche in the north wall of the church as late as 1936. It is also possible that a chalice, stolen from the mission in the 1970s, was the Chinese silver chalice obtained by Cambón. And Mission Dolores also still possesses two shallow, rimless porcelain plates, decorated in underglaze blue. Now disused and usually covered by cloths, the plates are built into two irregularly shaped round-arched niches, themselves built directly into the north and south walls of the mission for use as fonts for holy water (Figures 6.2 and 6.3). The plate in the niche in the south wall is badly broken, and it is difficult to make out the decorative scheme, yet the edges of what appear to be two lotuses and two peonies can be discerned. The dish in the right (north) font is in better condition and also employs decorative motifs common to Chinese ceramics: two birds nestled among peonies and branches with spring blossoms. In both cases, the plates’ broad brushwork and guileless style suggest they are from the coastal province of Fujian, the home province of many Chinese emigrants and a common source of Chinese ceramics in the Spanish colonial Philippines.7 Remaining evidence of the artistic materials Cambón shipped is more elusive than that of the finished objects. Shells that Cambón acquired for use in the windows of

Figure 6.2 Wall niche with holy water font, Mission Dolores, San Francisco, California. Photo: author.

Pedro Cambón’s Asian Objects: A Transpacific Approach

99

Figure 6.3 Holy water font at Mission San Francisco de Asís (Mission Dolores), San Francisco, California. Chinese porcelain. Photo: author.

Mission Dolores, which were sent separately, seem never to have reached their destination. Tracing the whereabouts of cloth, ink, paper, or paint used in the eighteenth century presents obvious difficulties. Nonetheless, one intriguing possibility is raised by the presence of a mural in the sanctuary of Mission Dolores, painted before the installation of a monumental baroque reredos in 1796. Covering the entire west wall of the church, the mural includes two statuary niches that are similar in form to the niches for the holy water fonts that hold the porcelain plates—one with a shell design, “richly ornamented with scroll motifs and flanked on either side with more scrolling decorative patterns,” and another that “is less decorative and painted in red.” It is assumed that the paints used to create the mural and other interior works were made with local materials. Pigment analysis has never been conducted on the mural, however, and so it is at least possible that the paints Cambón brought across the Pacific to California were also used in its creation.8

Global Contexts From the global vantage point of this book, it is easy to see Pedro Benito Cambón, his voyage and his objects as typical of an eighteenth century in which people and art

100

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

traveled across vast geographies along routes of empire, mission, war, and trade. Yet, within mainstream scholarship on American art or history, the specifics of Cambón’s case, and the general observation they lead to—that Asian moveable arts, and potentially Asian art materials, were part of eighteenth-century California’s visual and built culture—are barely recognized. Thus, even before questions of interpretation may be posed about the meanings of his journey and the choices he made as an art-world actor, it is necessary to pose a more fundamental historiographical question. Why is this presence (and the global interaction it presupposes) all but unrecognized? In my view, this absence is not necessarily attributable to the objects’ lack of visibility in themselves, but rather to the ways in which the art and history of eighteenth-century “early America”—and, to put it another way, its “art worlds”—are ordinarily contextualised. Like many other national art histories, the art history of the United States and “early America” has, until recently, been conceptualized within a relatively narrow geographical framework: that of the present-day boundaries of the United States, or the thirteen colonies, projected backwards. To be sure, this has changed in recent years, with an upsurge in interest in the Atlantic world (or, at least, the AngloAtlantic world) on the part of eighteenth-century specialists. This Atlanticist turn has even brought art historians of “early America” face to face with the arts of Asia, notably in Caroline Frank’s Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America. However, it has not necessarily led to the abandonment of nationalist geographies. Frank’s study, for example, does not consider California, New Mexico, or other Spanish colonies influenced by Chinese commodities. Rather, it defines “early America” as the thirteen Atlantic colonies of Great Britain—and, more specifically, as a thirteen-colony proto-nation distinct from and antagonistic to the British Empire. As such, it refers to the Spanish Empire and the Catholic religious orders as entities whose trans-regional activities fostered the large-scale Pacific and global migration of silver and objects—but it does not treat the “art worlds” created by them as part of “early America.”9 But scholarship on eighteenth-century California has also tended to rely on continental, rather than on oceanic or global perspectives. Thus, while transpacific perspectives are common within colonial Latin American and Spanish Empire scholarship, such perspectives have yet to be fully assimilated by “early Americanists.” Instead, scholars of eighteenth-century California—mostly historians, as American art scholarship on the region is not well developed—tend to be more concerned with “taking us into the missions and reimagining them from Indian angles of vision”; or reflecting on the “unresolved moral question[s]” raised by European colonialism, for example by raking over the already obsessively documented career of Serra to determine if he was a “Pioneer, Saint, [or] Villain.” Similarly, such scholarship tends to cast the Franciscans as an entity geographically limited to the California missions (or, most extensively, to the locations in Spain and New Spain specifically associated with Serra).10 Beyond the lingering continentalism embedded within this perspective, there is another, equally important, conceptual limitation to “Americanist” views of Franciscans. It is standard practice within academic history to ascribe agency to all persons,

Pedro Cambón’s Asian Objects: A Transpacific Approach

101

regardless of their condition. Thus, a central concern of recent California historiography has been to overturn prior views of indigenous people as without history or agency: in the words of the ground-breaking historian, David Weber, to give “Indians their due as rational historical actors who made choices that circumscribed the scope of Spaniards’ actions.” This is an important goal. However, in practice, it sometimes has come at the expense of seeing Franciscans as fully human: for, when writing about “the padres,” early American historians routinely describe them as passive, homogeneous, and interchangeable, rather than as individuals who possessed the full range of motivations and the full capacity for human agency of other historical actors. Indeed, one prominent historian of the California missions, James Sandos, is so concerned to differentiate Franciscans from other historical actors that he explicitly employs different conceptual frames to Indians and Franciscans: ethnohistory and “theohistory.” Similarly, California historians frequently cast Franciscans as a corporate entity in atemporal, rather than historical terms, as an anachronistic “medieval” institution teleported directly to the “Enlightenment.”11 My point here is not to argue against making normative judgments about colonialism. Rather, it is to suggest that the geographical and conceptual limitations of much existing “early Americanist” scholarship obscure a figure like Pedro Benito Cambón. There is little to suggest that he was either a “saint” or a “villain.” Indeed, during his time in California, he seems to have spent a significant amount of time in roles that sidestepped the task of converting Indians, for example as chaplain to and fellow adventurer among seamen and soldiers, not only on the San Blas and Manila trips but also during an expedition to find the source of San Francisco Bay—or, more importantly from the perspective of this volume, within the constellation of art-world roles that kept Cambón away from missionary work for years at a time. Rather, it seems more likely that Cambón was typical of many Galicians of humble origins, for whom joining a religious order, gaining an education, traveling the world, and living a life of structured and socially condoned poverty may have represented the best option among limited choices. As important, the prevailing geographies of American art also obscure a more basic point: that Cambón was, in its true sense, not even a “pioneer.” It is certainly the case that, in the eighteenth century, New California would have been unfamiliar and forbidding terrain for Spaniards. But the transpacific was different. The corridor between Acapulco and Manila was a familiar place that by the 1770s had been part of the Spanish Empire for more than two centuries—and which, as colonial Latin American and Asian art scholarship has amply demonstrated, fostered exchange on a vast scale as well as changes to local production on both sides of the Pacific. Viewed from this perspective, Cambón’s voyage was nearly as “ordinary” as his twelve dozen porcelain plates. As this suggests, a first step in making Cambón’s voyage recognizable—and in recognizing how eighteenth-century California might fit into a global account of eighteenth-century art—is to introduce additional contexts with which to frame it. The “Pacific world” linked by the Spanish Empire is the most obvious of such contexts. But the Franciscan Order—viewed as a global political community with its own history,

102

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

culture, and political exigencies—also ought to be considered. After all, Franciscan voyaging to, diplomatic negotiation in, and cultural exchange with East Asia preceded that of Spain by centuries, although it had been cut short by the Black Death. Moreover, upon the founding of Manila in 1571, Franciscans had eagerly taken to the transpacific, founding the province of San Gregorio Magno in the city that extended at various points to missions in China, Japan, and Vietnam. Thus, by the time Cambón made his voyage, to go to Manila meant to go to a city rich with Franciscan architecture, art, and print culture—including work made through the cooperation of European Franciscans, Filipinos, and Chinese and other Asian immigrants to the city. While both of these long-term contexts facilitated Cambón’s voyage, they did not specifically precipitate it. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that the catalyst for his voyage was the American Revolution (1775–83)—and the threat of rupture that Anglo-Spanish conflict posed both to the Spanish and the Franciscan presence in Asia and the transpacific. Once again, this third context—global inter-imperial war—has been hard to grasp from the perspective of the thirteen colonies or even the Atlantic. But by the time of Cambón’s voyage, global Anglo-Spanish conflict had taken a heavy toll in the Pacific. Only decades before, Britain had successfully invaded the city of Manila and captured the transpacific Santísima Trinidad, bearing a vast cargo of Asian goods bound for the Americas and the Atlantic. During the invasion, moreover, British forces engaged in widespread looting of churches and convents belonging to the religious orders. These events posed a significant threat to both Spaniards and Franciscans, imperilling the transpacific link and security in Manila.12 Further, these disruptions took place against the backdrop of another context of change, uncertainty, and rupture: the competitive and convoluted relations among the religious orders. This context is not always rendered legible by prevailing literatures, which, in addition to casting individual Franciscans as homogenous and interchangeable, sometimes imply a sameness and mutuality among the religious orders as corporate entities. Recognizing the complexity of these relations can help us better understand the situation faced by Franciscans on both sides of the Pacific in Cambón’s time, beginning with the Americas. Here, as is well known, a seismic shift took place in the same decade as Spain’s bruising encounter with Britain, when in February 1767 Carlos III issued an order expelling the Jesuit Order from the entire Spanish Empire. Historians of New California have tended to see this event as a harbinger of Franciscan demise—one among many reasons for the order to dwell on the “epic struggle” over “state power” and its “failure to win it.” Throughout the Americas, however, Franciscans were not the victims of the Jesuit expulsion but, rather, its major beneficiaries. This was particularly so in New Spain, where in all cases in the viceroyalty where Jesuit missions were not secularized or closed, the Franciscans took charge. In the borderlands, which across the Americas had been strongholds of the Society of Jesus, Franciscans also gained. In the instance of one Jesuit chapel in Louisiana, images and objects were turned over to Capuchin Franciscans before civil authorities razed the building. And in New California, where the continental borderlands met the increasingly contested Pacific, the Bourbons allowed the Franciscans to build the only new missions of the period. Thus, while the Bourbon state’s consolidation of sovereignty presented

Pedro Cambón’s Asian Objects: A Transpacific Approach

103

Franciscans with long-term challenges, in the immediate period of the Jesuit expulsion it opened new possibilities, including the potential for imagining themselves in new ways and expressing that identity in visual and material forms.13 On the other side of the Pacific, an even greater tendency toward competition characterized relations between the orders, intensified by the fact that eastwardtraveling Jesuits, following in the tracks of the Portuguese Empire, had been able to gain a foothold in Japan and China before other orders were able to return to Eastern Asia via the Pacific, and by the intense desire of all the orders to establish themselves in both places. When Franciscans, Augustinians, and Dominicans began to arrive in Japan from Manila in the 1570s, some Jesuits responded with intimidation and keeping regular reports on mendicant activities. In turn, almost from the moment of their arrival in China, rivals to the Society of Jesus attempted to dislodge the Jesuits from the prime place the Jesuits, through a strategy of cultural accommodation and the pursuit of elites, had obtained in the Ming and early Qing dynasties.14 This rivalry turned to open conflict, with disastrous results for all European missionaries. In an event known as the Chinese Rites Controversy, mendicants and members of the secular Collège des Missions Étrangères took their case to Rome, arguing that Jesuit practices including the toleration of Chinese ceremonies honoring ancestors and Confucius and the apparent suppression of the crucifix contravened Church norms. Following papal condemnation of Jesuit accommodation of the Chinese rites, the Kangxi emperor overturned his own 1692 edict promising toleration, and in 1721 he banned European Christian missionaries. Some Jesuits continued to enjoy access to the imperial court well after this point. However, the end came quickly and painfully for non-Jesuits. As an Augustinian, Ignacio Gregorio de Santa Teresa, wrote in anguish from Guangzhou in 1709, “The affairs of this Mission are in a bad state, and with little hope of remedy I have remained to guard the walls of this, our house in Canton, and with danger enough of being accused and thrown from China.” By Cambón’s time, this situation had not improved for his order or for the Franciscans: rivalry with the Jesuits had irreparably broken the link to China.15

Transpacific Angles of Vision I have proposed here that the presence of Asian objects in eighteenth-century California has been under-recognized because the art history (and history) of the United States and early America has failed to grapple with several global contexts that shaped the lives of people like Pedro Benito Cambón. Thus, at the very least, my purpose in presenting these contexts was to help explain how a missionary to Amerindians in eighteenth-century California managed to cross the Pacific and return with twentytwo cases of Asian objects, materials, and products. Cambón went because he could: both long-term practice and immediate circumstances set the stage for such a voyage. But recontextualization also provides a possible framework for approaching more interpretative questions, which are also only partially illuminated by the contexts and analysis most frequently applied by scholars—the Franciscan experience in California

104

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

as exemplified by Serra; the Franciscan-Indigenous relationship in California; and/or “medieval” Catholic doctrine as expressed and reiterated through iconography. For example, the floral decoration on the lavishly painted red silk vestments associated with Cambón in Mission San Gabriel (Figure 6.4) or the lotuses and peonies on the font plate, following existing interpretations, could be said loosely to evoke the image

Figure 6.4 Vestments at Mission San Gabriel Arcángel. Painted Chinese silk. Photo: author.

Pedro Cambón’s Asian Objects: A Transpacific Approach

105

Cambón had earlier successfully given to Serra of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which was “decorated profusely with flowers”; or that their bright colors were desirable to Franciscans for their ability to “catch the Indians’ eyes.”16 Yet, if these objects’ obvious material association with Asia is treated as more than incidental, then additional interpretations derived from the other contexts that shaped Cambón’s world may be offered, such as the threatened Pacific link itself. As Cambón embarked for Manila, he must have reflected gravely on what would happen to the Franciscans in the Philippines if the British returned and took the city for good. After he arrived in Manila, he would have seen with his own eyes the destruction the previous war had wrought and heard first-hand accounts of how religious and Filipinos had resisted British rule. With this in mind, might Cambón’s outfitting of the California missions with Philippine and Chinese objects and materials have been designed to embody—materially and aesthetically—the vital transpacific link that had been broken during the Seven Years’ War but to whose protection during the War of Independence he himself had successfully contributed?17 If the application of new contexts allows for current interpretations to be expanded, it also allows them to be challenged in some cases—as with the common assumption that Franciscans in California resisted syncretism. Steven Hackel, for example, makes this argument, emphasizing that “the padres saw [as] superstition” Indian worship of birds and use of feathers in the material culture of religion. Yet, the central image of one of the Mission Dolores font plates is of a bird, possibly a pheasant, nestled among flora; the San Gabriel vestments are painted with large feather-flowers; and the hidden Mission Dolores mural has a large avian figure, described by Ben Wood as “obviously a rooster, with intricately painted feathers and a heart in the center.” If Cambón sought confluences between Indigenous and Franciscan iconography, avian motifs would have been an obvious choice. Not only is the rooster a Resurrection symbol, but birds also referred to Franciscan images such as Saint Francis and the Pheasant in Bonaventura da Bagnoregio’s official life history of the saint, the Legenda Maior, and Preaching to the Birds, in the Saint Francis cycle in the Upper Church in Assisi. Such an effort toward material and symbolic hybridity across the lines of culture and orthodoxy, while perhaps atypical in eighteenth-century California, would have linked Cambón to Franciscan practice in other places and epochs, ranging from the first generation of Franciscans in New Spain, to Franciscans in seventeenth-century Bethlehem, to Franciscans in Bohemia in the tumultuous century before the Reformation.18 Similarly, it is often suggested that there was a unitary iconographic program in California, supposedly derived from “medieval” practice and theology. And yet, the aesthetic, material, and iconographic preferences Cambón exercised appear to have set him apart from his associates, for example the maker of the portrait of Serra in Palóu’s life history. This widely circulating image casts Serra brandishing a crucifix, towering above a crowd of onlookers. Some of these observers cower before him, including an Indian with a crown of feathers who averts his eyes, perhaps from the fear of crosses some scholars attribute to Amerindians. In contrast, the inventory of Cambón’s vast shipment did not include a single crucifix and only one painted and gilt cross. Moreover, Cambón’s objects differed from their medieval counterparts in specific ways: unlike his

106

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

vestments, medieval chasubles often featured figural images, including narrative sequences depicting scenes from the lives of the saints such as Francis receiving the stigmata.19 Here, perhaps, another context shaped Cambón’s privileging of avian, floral, and Marian imagery over the crucifix, the tools of penitence, or stigmatization: the broken Franciscan link to China (which followed a traumatic rupture with Japan in the early seventeenth century that had resulted in the expulsion of all the religious orders). As noted, a major precipitant to this heavy loss for the Franciscans was intolerance toward the Jesuits’ strategy of cultural accommodation. This dispute over accommodation turned on questions not only of ritual but also of visual representation. Jesuits were accused of suppressing the Crucifix and thus of converting Chinese to something quite other than Christianity. Such an accusation, in turn, had roots in the images and objects the Jesuits circulated in China. As Craig Clunas argues, Crucifixion prints had been one of the barriers to effecting conversion that Jesuits had encountered in the late Ming. These turned away potential converts whose aesthetic sensibilities made them unwilling to accept violence and pain in religious images, and whose more general aversion to didactic images made them skeptical of narrative, picture-and-text art. In response, Jesuits “stress[ed] the image of the Virgin and Child, to the extent that wellinformed seventeenth-century Chinese writers ‘knew’ that the Westerners’ God was a woman shown holding a baby.” This strategy allowed Jesuits not only to skirt Chinese aversions but also to appeal to the existing material culture of religion. Images of the Virgin Mary had both an aesthetic and a religious parallel in China in figures of the bodhisattva Guanyin, in whose guise as a female “giver of sons” Chinese makers modeled ivory figures in direct interplay with Christian figures of Mary.20 Understanding this context as potentially relevant to Cambón’s actions allows us to ask additional questions regarding his actions. Was his choice of open-ended, hybrid iconography and of objects in Chinese materials (whose original function, in some cases, was not even liturgical) a response to the calamitous loss of China—a loss that had been triggered by mendicant inflexibility toward cultural accommodation and jealousy toward the Jesuits? Cambón could not go to China. But he could bring China to California, in the form of beautiful objects in Chinese materials. From their place in the visual and material heart of his mission, these objects could also serve as bridges to Indians. With the Jesuits gone, perhaps Cambón understood his era as another kind of new beginning that might recover something from the Franciscan past: not the imagined purity Serra ascribed to converting a “first generation” of Indians, but the Franciscan habits of aesthetic and cultural accommodation that had been lost in the scuffle of interpolity rivalry.21

Reimagining Mission Dolores In 1785, Francisco Palóu left the Californias for good. Cambón remained at Mission Dolores, on whose design he and Palóu had worked for many years and through several iterations (Figure 6.5). In 1787, a furious storm destroyed the temporary church next

Pedro Cambón’s Asian Objects: A Transpacific Approach

107

Figure 6.5 Mission San Francisco de Asís (Mission Dolores), San Francisco, California. Photo: author.

to the foundations of the permanent structure the two had designed. Cambón had been Palóu’s subordinate: now alone, he redesigned the church, with construction beginning in 1788. He introduced paired columns on bulky pediments and widened the building’s foundations by 2⅔ varas (about 2 meters). It is not known to what extent the rest of the design deviated from what he and Palóu had devised. But, as Maynard Geiger writes, “The façade . . . is Cambón’s contribution to the mission.”22 The structure designed by Cambón, built by Ohlone Indians, and dedicated in 1791, is, after the Presidio, the oldest building in San Francisco. It is rectangular in plan, with a pitched roof. Its façade, which is roughly equal in height and width, has two tiers, the lower with the paired columns mentioned above on either side of a round-arched central door, and the upper with six stepped columns supporting pyramidal finials. Pierced into the upper tier of the façade are three openings, one rectangular and two topped with round arches, which are the niches for the mission’s bells. Unlike so many of the missions, this building has remained substantially intact. Despite the period of neglect following Mexican independence and secularization, despite the 1906 earthquake, and despite a 1916 renovation by Willis Polk, in which it was retrofitted with steel and some of its decorations restored, Mission Dolores retains its original foundation, walls, and façade as well as its rawhide-tied timber roof.23

108

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

In Lugar: Essays on Philippine Heritage and Architecture, Augusto Villalón writes that most churches built in the Spanish colonial Philippines were designed not by architects working from plans but by members of the religious orders working from memory. This also describes the design of Mission Dolores. Pedro Benito Cambón was not a trained architect, and his design necessarily emerged from memory and on-thespot experimentation. Like his efforts to develop a nexus of images, objects, and materials, this process entailed the making of choices within a framework of possibilities and limitations. But, in this case, those limitations were also physical: as Cambón knew, structures in California would have to withstand violent winds and terrifying earthquakes, such as tremors that were recorded in July 1769.24 But which memories did Cambón use? In the course of his life and travels, he had the opportunity to observe many different options. Was his design, following Kubler’s characterization of Franciscan architecture in California, “essentially European”? Or does Cambón’s Mission Dolores also embody the interactive, interlinked culture of the transpacific world? A better sense of the possibilities open to Cambón may be gauged by looking at the Philippine architectural context in comparison with other architectural contexts he knew. Several elements are typical of early modern Philippine church architecture, including Franciscan churches. One is a single-nave, rectangular construction. Another is the use of pitched roofs, often in conjunction with pentagonal façades, frequently divided into tiers that were themselves adorned with columns or pilasters, frequently paired. Another is the tendency to avoid belfries in the form of steeples built above the roofline: as Villalón notes, many early modern churches had detached bell towers. Others had bell niches pierced into rectangular or hexagonal pseudobelfries of the same height as, and essentially integrated into, the front elevation. Finally, most early modern churches in the Philippines exhibit a distinctly horizontal orientation. Along with the treatment of bell placement, this characteristic may be specifically understood as a response to building in a seismically active zone. Taken to a monumental extreme, the style of church architecture in this vein has been described as “earthquake baroque.”25 The greater heterogeneity of church architecture in early modern New Spain makes it more difficult to describe a single “typical” approach. Nonetheless, several differences may be noted. In contrast to the Philippines, the use of cruciform plans and/or multiple nave bays was common in New Spain; so, too, was vaulting. Moreover, despite the prevalence of earthquakes in New Spain (which gave rise to modifications toward horizontality in some places, notably Oaxaca), in many parts of the viceroyalty, architects were much less reluctant than their Philippine counterparts to construct churches with soaring bell towers and an extreme vertical orientation. One specific example is the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Ocotlán near Tlaxcala, a site Cambón may have seen due to its importance to Franciscans and proximity to Mexico City. The most common forms for bell placement in New Spain were towers or parapets with niches known as espadañas—even though, as architectural historian Stephen Tobriner argues, both tower belfries and parapets present a significantly higher risk of collapse during earthquakes than the buildings to which they are attached.26

Pedro Cambón’s Asian Objects: A Transpacific Approach

109

A final architectural context Cambón knew that ought to be compared with Philippine architecture is the city in Spain where he became a Franciscan, Santiago de Compostela. This city is and was a pilgrimage site of significance to all European Catholics (and, before the Reformation, to all Latin Christians). It is associated with Francis of Assisi, who is known to have embarked on a pilgrimage toward it in 1214: local tradition holds that Saint Francis “was the founder of the convento that carries his name.” Moreover, the period of Cambón’s youth was an especially dynamic one in the history of the city’s sacred architecture, during which it underwent a substantial, durable transformation. In the year of his birth, 1738, work began on Fernando Casas y Novoa’s new façade to the city’s Cathedral, the Obradoiro façade. Erected between two seventeenth-century bell towers that exceed 200 feet in height, this “remarkably exuberant” addition is notable for its “accentuated verticality.” The Franciscans joined this mid-eighteenth-century building boom, beginning work on a new church on the site of the thirteenth-century Convent of San Francisco in 1742. Although much more austere than the Obradoiro façade, the church’s neoclassical design echoed the changes to the cathedral in its new vertical orientation.27 In various respects, then, Pedro Cambón’s design for Mission Dolores overlapped with typical elements of Philippine church architecture and apparently with Franciscan buildings Cambón definitely saw in the Philippines, in the walled city of Manila. Evidence of this complex is scarce: it was completely destroyed during World War II, and most of the extant images depict a building that had been altered since the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, the Topographia de la ciudad de Manila suggests that in the eighteenth century the Franciscan church had a rectangular plan, a pitched roof with no dome, a pentagonal façade with horizontal tiers, a round-arched door, and integrated façade columns. However, Mission Dolores deviates from church architecture in the other contexts Cambón knew. With this in mind, is it possible to imagine Mission Dolores as the product of a deliberately transpacific consciousness? To make this argument is not to argue that Mission Dolores was “not European,” “not New Spanish,” or “not Indian.” As Villalón emphasizes, Philippine church architecture was itself a fusion of European and Asian elements: thus, to bring to California a Philippine model necessarily meant adapting an approach that was already hybrid. Cambón’s pyramidal finials, which are used in Galicia and which also feature in Manila architecture, might have embodied such a return. To argue that Cambón designed from a transpacific consciousness is not merely to argue that he copied forms he remembered seeing in the Philippines—whether European, Asian, or a combination. Rather, it is to argue that he participated in the creation and transmission of a transpacific architecture, whose practitioners shared membership in common institutions and culture; a toleration and even enthusiasm for hybridity; and the desire to respond actively to the problems posed by building in the earthquake-prone Pacific Rim. Thus, I would suggest that the most unusual feature of Cambón’s façade—Mission Dolores’s integrated bell niches, which directly emulated neither the New Spanish espadaña nor the Philippine pierced pseudobelfry—might be considered not the straightforward appropriation of a form specific to either side of the

110

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Pacific but a transpacific form created of transpacific practice. As such, it is a fitting emblem of the complex, interactive transpacific world to which Pedro Benito Cambón’s California belonged.

Notes 1 This essay is a condensed reprint of J. M. Mancini, “Pedro Cambón’s Asian Objects: A Transpacific Approach to Eighteenth-Century California,” American Art 25, no. 1 (2011): 28–51. Versions of this paper were presented at the British Group in Early American History, Cambridge University, 2005; the College Art Association, Boston, MA; American History Research Seminar, Oxford University; and Religion and Ritual Theme Seminar, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA, 2006; and the Philippine Academic Consortium for Latin American Studies, Manila, 2008. I would like to thank the Getty Research Institute, the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study, Guire Cleary, and Aaron Olivas. The author would like to acknowledge and direct readers to more recent scholarship in the field, such as Dennis Carr, ed., Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia (Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, 2015); Dana Leibsohn and Meha Priyadarshini, eds., “Transpacific: Beyond Silk and Silver,” Special Issue, Colonial Latin American Review 25, no. 1 (2016); J. M. Mancini, Art and War in the Pacific World: Making, Breaking and Taking from Anson’s Voyage to the Philippine-American War (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018). 2 At the time of Cambón’s voyage, both the present-day US state of California and the present-day Mexican states of Baja California and Baja California Sur were claimed by Spain. Both mainland and peninsular California were administered together as “the Californias,” within a larger jurisdiction, the Provincias Internas, but were informally known as “Old California” (the Baja Peninsula) and “New California” (the present .S state, plus further territory inland). Scholars frequently call New California “Alta California,” but that designation (along with “Baja California”) did not come into official use until a later period. However, a border between the two regions did exist from 1773, when Palóu marked the dividing line between the Franciscan settlements of New California and the older missions to the south, which had been turned over to the Dominicans. On Cambón, see Francisco Palóu, Historical Memoirs of New California, translated by Herbert Eugene Bolton, 4 vols (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1926); Cambón’s departure and arrival are in vol. 4, 186–7 and 197. On Cambón, see also Junípero Serra, Writings, ed., Antonine Tibesar, 4 vols (Washington, DC: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1955–66); Guire Cleary, “Pedro Benito Cambón,” in Encyclopedia of San Francisco, available at: www.sfhistoryencyclopedia. com/articles/c/cambonPedro.html (accessed September 12, 2018); Maynard Geiger, Franciscan Missionaries in Hispanic California, 1769–1848: A Biographical Dictionary (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1969), 38–40; and Frank J. Portman, “Pedro Benito Cambón, OFM: Mission Builder Par Excellence,” Argonaut 5, no. 2 (1994): 8–15. 3 “Great consignment” and “empty hands,” Palóu, Historical Memoirs, vol. 4, 198 and 189. “Procured elsewhere,” Junípero Serra to Rafael Verger, quoted in Kurt Baer, “Spanish Colonial Art in the California Missions,” Americas 18, no. 1 (1961), 40–1. “Linen Cloth,” Francisco Palóu, Relación histórica de la vida del Venerable Padre Fray Junípero Serra (Mexico City, 1787), 130:

Pedro Cambón’s Asian Objects: A Transpacific Approach

111

Overcome with the sight of such a Beautiful Simulacrum, . . . [they] flung their bows and arrows to the ground, running hastily . . . to put at the feet of the Sovereign Queen the valuables they carried at their necks, as gifts of their highest appreciation; manifesting with this action the peace that they wanted with us.

4

5

6 7

8

9 10

11

12

13

“Register of San Blas,” Palóu, Historical Memoirs, vol. 4, 198. The complex political situation that delayed Cambón’s departure is discussed in Palóu, Historical Memoirs, vol. 1, 296–8 and 300–1, and vol. 3, 319 and 370–2. John Galvin translated the inventory in “Supplies from Manila for the California Missions, 1781–1783,” Philippine Studies 12, no. 3 (1964): 494–510. Administrative documents related to the shipment are in the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, but the inventory itself appears to be missing. Galvin, “Supplies from Manila.” On hand mills, see James A. Sandos, Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 101. Galvin, “Supplies from Manila,” 101. Ibid. On Fujian ware in the Philippines, see the display in the Ayala Museum, Makati City, Metropolitan Manila; Rita C. Tan, Zhangzhou Ware Found in the Philippines: “Swatow” Export Ceramics from Fujian, 16th–17th Century (Manila: Yuchengco Museum, Oriental Ceramic Society of the Philippines, Artpostasia, 2007). Quotations are from artist Ben Wood, “The Hidden Mural at Mission Dolores,” available at: www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Hidden_Mural_at_Mission_ Dolores (accessed September 12, 2018). Along with archaeologist Eric Blind, Wood conducted the most recent investigation of the mural. Caroline Frank, Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011). David Weber, “The Spanish Legacy in North America and the Historical Imagination,” Western Historical Quarterly 23, no. 1 (1992): 22; “unresolved,” Amy Turner Bushnell, “Missions and Moral Judgement,” OAH Magazine of History 14, no. 4 (2000): 20–3; “Pioneer,” Steven W. Hackel, “The Competing Legacies of Junípero Serra: Pioneer, Saint, Villain,” Common-place 5, no. 2 (2005), available at: http://www.common-placearchives.org/vol-05/no-02/hackel/index.shtml (accessed September 12, 2018). See, e.g., Sandos, Converting California; in addition to the ethnohistory and “theohistory” distinction, Sandos uses “medieval” to describe virtually every Franciscan practice. Hackel, too, emphasizes Franciscans’ interchangeability and lack of agency (“their strict vows, particularly that of obedience, worked . . . by design, to thwart individuality”) and emphasizes how Serra was “a mighty anachronism” in Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian–Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), quotation on 55 and “The Competing Legacies of Junípero Serra.” For further discussion, see J. M. Mancini, “Siege Mentalities: Objects in Motion, British Imperial Expansion, and the Pacific Turn,” Winterthur Portfolio 45, nos 2/3 (2011): 125–40; and J. M. Mancini, “Disrupting the Transpacific: Objects, Architecture, War, Panic,” Colonial Latin American Review 25, no. 1 (2016), 35–55. “Epic struggle” and “failure to win,” Hackel, Children of Coyote, 130. On Franciscan succession, see Olga Merino and Linda A. Newson, “Jesuit Missions in Spanish America: The Aftermath of the Expulsion,” Revista de Historia de América, no. 118 (July–December 1994): 10–11, esp. table 1. On Jesuit militarization, see Alberto

112

14

15 16 17

18

19

20

21

22 23

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Armani, Ciudad de Dios y ciudad del sol: El “estado” jesuita de los guaraníes (1609–1768) (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982); Stuart F. Voss, “Societal Competition in Northwest New Spain,” Americas 38, no. 2 (1981): 185–203. Nuno Senos suggests that Franciscans in Brazil engaged in such a process of reimagination and expression following the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1759. Discussion with author, College Art Association, February 2006. See Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe: A Century of Advance (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993); James S. Cummins, “Two Missionary Methods in China: Mendicants and Jesuits,” España en Extremo Oriente: Filipinas, China, Japon, edited by Víctor Sánchez and Cayetano S. Fuertes (Madrid: Publicaciones Archivo Ibero-Americano, 1979), 33–108. Gregorio de Santa Teresa to Francisco de Zamora, February 17, 1709, Philippine Mss, Ms. 21524(2), Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington. “Profusely,” quoted in Baer, “Spanish Colonial Art,” 41; “Catch” in Hackel, Children of Coyote, 153. East India Company officials lamented that, “the Natives of these Islands have been alienated from us . . . through the means of the Augustine Friars and other disaffected Persons, now in actual Rebelion [sic].” “Papers concerning the Philippines and Penang 1762–1820,” January 15, 1763, IOR/H/77, British Library, London. Hackel, Children of Coyote, 132; Wood, “The Hidden Mural.” On syncretism in the Franciscan artisan school of San José de los Naturales, see Claire Farago, entry for “Mass of Saint Gregory,” in Pierce, Gomar, and Bargellini, Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life, 1521–1821 (Denver, CO: Denver Art Museum, 2004), 100. Franciscans also trained artisans in Bethlehem; materially and symbolically hybrid works include a painted olive-wood and mother-of-pearl cross with lotus design (c. 17th century; Museo de Terra Santa, Santiago de Compostela); Petr Hlaváček, “Bohemian Franciscans Between Orthodoxy and Nonconformity at the Turn of the Middle Ages,” in The Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice 5 (Prague: Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 2003), 167–89. On the Serra image, see Kelly Donahue-Wallace, “Picturing Prints in Early Modern New Spain,” Americas 64, no. 3 (2008): 325–49; on figural vestments, see Nuria Torres Ballesteros, “La casulla de Cisneros del Museo Lazaro Galdiano: Aproximación a San Francisco de Asís,” Goya 239 (March–April 1994): 282–8. Clunas, Art in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 120–1; Derek Gillman, “Ming and Qing Ivories: Figure Carving,” in Chinese Ivories from the Shang to the Qing, edited by William Watson (London: Oriental Ceramic Society and the British Museum, 1984), 35–52. Serra’s enthusiasm for encountering Indians who had not previously been evangelized was discussed by Robert M. Senkewicz and Rose Marie Beebe in, “What they Brought: The Alta California Franciscans before 1769,” presented at “Alta California: Peoples in Motion, Identities in Formation,” Huntington Library, September 29, 2006. Maynard Geiger, “New Data on the Buildings of Mission San Francisco,” California Historical Society Quarterly 46, no. 3 (September 1967): 195–205. Ibid.; James Beach Alexander and James Lee Heig, San Francisco: Building the Dream City (San Francisco, CA: Scottwall Associates, Publishers, 2002), 17–23; Guire Cleary, Mission Dolores: The Gift of St. Francis (Orange, CA: Paragon Agency, 2004).

Pedro Cambón’s Asian Objects: A Transpacific Approach

113

24 Palóu, Historical Memoirs, vol. 2, 129. Augusto Villalon, Lugar: Essays on Philippine Heritage and Architecture (Makati: Bookmark, 2001). 25 Alicia M. L. Coseteng, Spanish Churches in the Philippines (Manila: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) National Commission of the Philippines, 1972); Pedro G. Galende and Rene B. Javellana, Great Churches of the Philippines (Makati: Bookmark, 1993), including “typical church plan,” 10–11; Villalón, Lugar; Pedro G. Galende, Angels in Stone: Augustinian Churches in the Philippines (Manila: San Agustín Museum, 1996). 26 Robert J. Mullen, Architecture and Its Sculpture in Viceregal Mexico (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1997); John McAndrew, The Open-Air Churches of SixteenthCentury Mexico (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). Stephen Tobriner, “The Quest for Earthquake-Resistant Construction in Europe and the Americas, 1726–1908,” lecture, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, September 14, 2006; for a figure representing the earthquake dangers posed by parapets and a list of belfries that collapsed in 1906, see Tobriner, Bracing for Disaster: Earthquake-Resistant Architecture and Engineering in San Francisco, 1838–1933 (Berkeley, CA: Bancroft Library and Heyday Books, 2006), 64 and 163. 27 Alejandro Lapunzina, Architecture of Spain (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 36. Francisco J. Castro Miramontes, El mensaje de la piedra: Convento de San Francisco de Santiago de Compostela; Historia, arte y espiritualidad (Santiago de Compostela: Convento de San Francisco), 8.

114

7

Making it Ours Religious Art in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Spanish American Newspapers Kelly Donahue-Wallace

The 1744 inaugural issue of the Gazeta de Lima explained that its purpose was to be a “summary of the news with which is established and cultivated the urbanity of the people.”1 It is consequently no surprise that notices involving works of art regularly appeared in the paper. In fact, the very first story in this issue told of Lucas de Valladolid, who was arrested for the “grave and sacrilegious crime of having stolen the Sun of the monstrance from the main Convent of San Agustín” in the Peruvian city of Huancavelica.2 The Gazeta story described the thief ’s modus operandi, revealing that he entered the church through the choir clerestory. The paper promised its readers that the account was “in total the history of the theft” and likened the crime to one in Rome four years earlier; on that occasion, however, the missing monstrance never reappeared. In Peru, on the other hand, authorities recovered the object, which stimulated pious giving from the local people, including a nobleman’s gift of 1,124 diamonds for a new monstrance. It also led to Valladolid’s execution, followed by the removal of his hands, one of which the authorities displayed outside San Agustín and the other where the booty had been hidden. The remainder of his corpse was quartered and displayed around Huancavelica “to terrorize and [serve as] example for evildoers.”3 Striking a more positive tone, the Gazeta de México began its inaugural issue in 1728 by declaring that its mission was to “promote [Mexico’s] greatness” by publishing notices concerning “our news.”4 Art appeared amply in this publication, too. The lead story in the first issue described the New Year Mass held for Mexico City’s municipal council. The group assembled at the Convent of Santo Domingo where their confraternity—“one of the most opulent in the Realm, consisting of the Principal Subjects of the republic”—processed around the city with the sculpture of Our Lady of the Rosary.5 The same issue also announced the death of the “famous Mexican Apelles,” painter José Rodríguez Juárez and described the renovation of a now “sumptuous” church in Querétaro following the recent addition to its “exquisite cloisters” of paintings made by the “excellent brushwork” of Juan Rodríguez Juárez, brother of the newly deceased José Rodríguez Juárez.6 115

116

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

That the gruesome execution tale and the stories of processing sculptures and decorated churches appeared in these newspapers is the subject of this essay. Spanish American eighteenth-century newspapers offer a unique and largely unexplored source for understanding both local and global art in Spain’s American colonies.7 Periodicals in Lima, Mexico City, and Havana reveal the participation of these cities within the global art market, noting goods arriving from Asia, Europe, and regions of the American viceroyalties.8 At the same time, colonial newspapers published on local themes: advertisements for artists’ shops, descriptions of newly built churches and newly discovered native antiquities, notices of artworks lost or stolen, and narratives of miracle-working cult images.9 Approaching art—specifically religious painting, sculpture, altar screens, and decorative arts—through the newspapers permits consideration of both the macrocosmic universe of global trade and the microcosmic sphere of local concerns.10 Analysis of descriptions of sacred art in colonial newspapers demonstrates that religious purpose and economic matters were frequently blurred, with cost getting as much attention as spirituality. Moreover, the periodical was a space that localized works from diverse sources and made them, as the Gazeta de México prologue claimed, “our news.” It did so in a manner quite distinct from, to borrow Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s description, the now-outdated historiographic explanation of “deploying concepts of center and periphery to account for artistic forms and differences.”11 In fact, this essay shows that colonial papers made relatively little distinction between European and colonial art, and instead used a variety of strategies to make the works “ours.”

Spanish American Newspapers Following two centuries of printed news-bearing broadsides, the first periodicals in Spanish America appeared in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The Gazeta de México y noticias de Nueva España lasted six months in 1722. The paper’s second iteration appeared from 1728 to 1739, then became the Mercurio de México from 1740 to 1742. Finally, from 1784 to 1809, the biweekly Gazeta de México: Compendio de noticias de Nueva España became the newspaper’s third manifestation; it enjoyed viceregal approval but was not a state publication.12 Its two major local competitors in the late colonial era were the monthly Gazeta de literatura de México from 1788 to 1794 and the daily Diario de México from 1805 to 1817. In the Viceroyalty of Peru, readers first sought their news from the irregularly printed Diarios y memorias de los Sucesos Principales y Notables de esta Ciudad de Lima from 1700 to 1711. The first regularly published Lima newspaper was the Gazeta de Lima, the official organ of the viceregal government. Like its Mexican peer, the bimonthly Gazeta de Lima operated in several periods, from 1744 to 1767, 1792 to 1793, 1795, 1798 to 1804, and 1805 to 1821. Other limeño papers during the late colonial era included the Diario de Lima from 1790 to 1793, the Mercurio Peruano published by the Sociedad Académica de Amantes del País from 1791 to 1794, and the Semanario Crítico that existed for a single year in 1791.

Religious Art in Colonial Spanish American Newspapers

117

While readers living outside Mexico City and Lima regularly subscribed to their papers, they could also find more local news in such papers as the Gazeta de Guatemala (1729–31), Gazeta de La Havana (1764–6 and 1782–3), Papel Periódico de la Havana (1789–91), Papel Periódico de la Ciudad de Santa Fe de Bogotá (1791–7), and others. Like the newspapers in the viceregal capitals, these occasionally discussed works of art. The dedicatory statement by editor Manuel Antonio Valdés in the 1784 inaugural issue of the third Gazeta de México typifies the goals of most Spanish American newspapers. It echoes the prefatory statement to the first Gazeta de Lima and notes how useful periodicals were in the “most cultured courts of Europe.” Yet, without a similar local outlet, the viceroyalty’s “curious Literati lack[ed] a review of passing news.” Valdés’ new periodical fortunately remedied this lacuna, its purpose being “to archive for posterity and with method those notices that perhaps one has little room for in the memory.”13 Similarly, like these other Spanish American papers, the Mercurio Peruano explained in 1790 that its goal was “to make the country we live in better known” at home and abroad.14 Stories in these papers came from their editors, local informants, and European newspapers. Valdés explained what he called “gazette-able facts” when he invited submissions on agriculture, elections, inventions, new constructions, natural disasters, and notable deaths. The viceregal governments contributed to many issues, publishing royal and viceregal decrees and notices of political appointments. Local functionaries supplied information about geography, commerce, and natural history, while individual readers and Church officials offered stories about droughts, epidemics, religious and secular festivals, trade, discoveries, and clerical appointments. Many of these stories appeared without a by-line, and editors sometimes provided historical background information and commentary where they believed their audiences needed it. The Spanish American newspapers’ readership was, as Valdés notes for the Gazeta de México, literate men and women curious about the world around them. This educated population understood, for example, references to Apelles, Doric pilasters, and Etruscan urns, and included bureaucrats both locally born and hailing from Spain, merchants, hacienda owners, nobles, miners, and clerics. The papers served an elite, educated class—those Jean Sarrailh identifies as the “select minority.”15 As in the broader eighteenth-century European context studied by Jürgen Habermas, these royal functionaries and colonial subjects existed within a bourgeois public sphere in which men and women debated the issues that affected their lives and livelihoods.16 It is important to note, however, that this enlightened community in Mexico City, Lima, and Havana was not yet a dissident population and Spanish American eighteenthcentury newspapers typically did not become sites of political debate. While the locally born Creoles (colonists of supposedly pure Spanish blood, as distinct from peninsularborn Spaniards or mixed-race, Indian, and black populations) were at odds with some Crown programs, particularly the overwhelming representation of peninsular-born Spaniards within the viceregal governments during the Bourbon reforms, they nevertheless generally shared the Spanish government’s desire for modernity, progress, education, and economic expansion. They likewise considered themselves “Spanish,”

118

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

with many shared interests not just with peninsular bureaucrats working in the colonies, but also with Spaniards living in the metropolis.17 Eighteenth-century Spanish American newspapers consequently bear little that was openly hostile to the government or even critical of the Crown’s policies and actions. They were likewise unapologetically Catholic. As I have argued elsewhere, for this audience the newspaper was not a passive listing of news; it was instead a primer for the select minority on Mexican, Peruvian, or Cuban identity.18 The newspaper texts crafted Mexico City, Lima, and Havana, or at least the idea of these cities, for this elite population. As Benedict Anderson has claimed, the newspaper was the public sphere and imagined community that created a sense of national identity in the eighteenth-century world, especially in colonial contexts.19 Speaking specifically of Latin America, Anderson states, “what brought together, on the same page, this marriage with that ship, this price with that bishop, was the very structure of the colonial administration and market-system itself. In this way, the newspaper of Caracas”—or Lima or Mexico City—“quite naturally, and even apolitically, created an imagined community among a specific assemblage of fellowreaders, to whom these ships, brides, bishops, and prices belonged.”20 The juxtaposed stories, notices, and advertisements that appeared in Spanish American newspapers consequently defined the nation (as represented by the city) or, to borrow from Henri Lefebvre, produced the space of the elite, literate reader, complementing or contradicting the lived existence of work and social intercourse.21 The periodicals’ layout visualized this role. Like all newspapers, each began with a masthead with the city’s name in large type (although “Gazette” was frequently larger), claiming via typesetting all that appeared in smaller letters below as conceptually linked and subordinate to Mexico City, Lima, or Havana—and, by extension, the readers who lived there.22 Several papers followed the masthead with the city’s coat of arms, illustrating what the title accomplished with font size; Lima’s escutcheon was held aloft by Mercury, for example, in some issues of the Gazeta de Lima (Figure 7.1). The 1728–39 iteration of the Gazeta de México (Figure 7.2) followed its device with a one-paragraph historical vignette: stories of Aztec gods or emperors, the arrival of the first mendicant missionaries, the biographies of past viceroys, and so on; the 1744–67 Gazeta de Lima issues opened with an update on the viceroy’s health. Along with the title and the city arms, these microhistories set the stage for the reader to appreciate all that followed through this city-focused lens. They frame the actions of the exemplary contemporary individuals named in the issue—donors, appointees, even artists advertising their wares—as modern contributors to Mexico City’s ongoing history or as members of Lima’s body politic within this imagined community they all shared. The newspapers justifiably claimed to represent the people and the places where they were printed.

Religious Art in Colonial Spanish American Newspapers

119

Figure 7.1 Gazeta de Lima, February 8–March 28, 1745. Ink and paper. John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

120

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 7.2 Gazeta de México, January 1730. Ink and paper. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.

Religious Art in Colonial Spanish American Newspapers

121

Sacred Art in the Newspapers Newspapers in eighteenth-century Spanish America varied slightly in their organization and in where works of religious art appeared in their pages. The Gazeta de México is typical. Like all imprints in this periodical’s three iterations, the December 1729 issue began with news organized by city. The viceregal capital came first and the initial story described the festival of Saint Francis Xavier at the Church of the Santa Vera Cruz, home of the “admirable, exquisite sculpted Image [of the saint] that throughout time has offered great and wonderful miracles.”23 Another story from Mexico City in this section described art sent from Spain to celebrate the beatification of Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, including a painting of Our Lady of the Book and a painted portrait of Ágreda. News from other regions followed (although these precede Mexico City in the last iteration of the paper), including a description of a new five-story gilded altar screen in the Church of San Francisco in Querétaro, with exquisite carvings, paintings, and sculpture of “great artistry and resplendence.” Similarly, news from Celaya detailed the inauguration of a new college, home to paintings of the lives of the Virgin and Christ “of excellent brushwork” by an unnamed artist, several “admirable” altar screens, a sculpture of Our Lady of the Pillar, and religious ornaments made of silver, gold, diamonds, and precious stones. Finally, the issue ended with news from Veracruz celebrating the efficient shipment of goods arriving with the Spanish merchant fleet and destined for the trade fair in Xalapa. As these examples suggest, the scope of the stories involving works of religious art in Spanish American newspapers was relatively narrow, focusing principally on processions with sacred images and newly constructed or renovated buildings or altar screens.24 Among the former, many involved processions held for saints’ days or a beatification or canonization. In June of 1738, for example, the Gazeta de México described Mexico City’s celebration for the canonization of Saint John Francis Regis. The story began with a procession from the cathedral to the Jesuit church involving all of the city’s principal citizens: religious orders, confraternities, nobles, and government functionaries. Members of the city’s monastic orders carried sculpted images of Saints Francis Borgia, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis of Assisi, and Dominic Guzmán, as well as a likeness of Regis. The viceroy, wearing a cascading silver cape, followed the images. The entourage ended its procession at the Jesuit Casa Profesa, lavishly outfitted for the event with triumphal arches, an unattributed painting of the new saint, and an altar “adorned with indescribable richness.”25 In other cases, the procession narrated in the paper appealed for relief from a natural or man-made crisis.26 The February/March 1745 issue of the Gazeta de Lima, for example, told of the eruption of Mt. Cotopaxi, near Quito. Following the violent eruption that crushed, drowned, and buried an untold number of locals, townspeople “took from the churches the sacred images and the holy sacrament, . . . pledged themselves to the Glorious Apostle of the Indies Saint Francis Xavier as their Patron, [and] the Fathers of the [Society of Jesus] took his statue in procession.”27 Similarly, the December 1737 issue of the Gazeta de México described the processions to end Mexico City’s devastating plague. As thousands died, the city processed the miraculous images

122

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

of Our Lady of the Remedies, Our Lady of Loreto, the Christ of Ixmiquilpan, and other “very holy and miraculous images.” The story explained that when these efforts failed to end the plague, Mexico City decided to make “as its Patron the Miraculous Image of Our Lady of Guadalupe of Mexico.” At a lavish ceremony before the painting, attended by the imperial, municipal, and religious tribunals, as well as an “innumerable crowd,” the archbishop promised to celebrate her festival each December.28 On still other occasions, the event described in the newspaper commemorated the installation of a sacred object in a new or renovated altar screen or chapel. A story in the September 1761 issue of the Gazeta de Lima, for example, explained that on the festival of Our Lady of the Light, the city’s Franciscan monastery installed the “Sacred Likeness in a magnificent and costly altar screen, adorned with exquisite ornament, entirely paid for by the Faithful and those Devoted to the Holy Virgin.”29 A July 1763 issue of the Gazeta de Lima featured similar stories. One described a chapel built “of such perfection, that it gloriously emulates the delicateness of Art with the preciousness of its material, principally in its Main Altar made of the best Cedar according to new ideas, by which it achieves the most appropriate adornment.”30 The space and its altar were inaugurated by representatives from the university, the secular clergy, the Inquisition, and the city’s principal citizens. From these and other similar stories in Spanish American newspapers, readers understood that the objects and their spaces were embedded into their local context. Rather than privileging the artists responsible for the works’ manufacture, the newspaper stories prioritized the images’ function within Spanish colonial society. Reading the newspaper revealed that the images existed in an active relationship with both the holy characters they represented and the local populace, particularly the city’s principal citizens and members of the secular and ecclesiastical hierarchies. The colonists read that engaging with the saints’ images activated their holy originals, as people like themselves took sculptures from their shrines, processed them through the streets, and prayed before them. As a result, skies cleared after volcanic eruptions, plagues subsided, and rains returned to normal. The objects were part of Mexican or Peruvian society, with affective and effective power (at least through their holy originals) deployed on behalf of the locality. And while some processions with images described in Spanish American eighteenth-century newspaper stories featured native communities, more often these miraculous objects were sanctified by the local Creole and Spanish social and political elite—that is, the readers themselves—who participated in the ceremonies. Further, modern scholarship on these objects and sites has tended to distinguish their devotional purpose—their role within miraculous histories and cults—from their representation of discrete artistic styles like the Baroque. The newspaper stories, on the other hand, paired the miraculous nature (or at least the sacredness) of the holy images and the stylistic newness of the constructions they inhabited. Stylishness and immanence cohered. Moreover, newspaper readers learned of the works’ costliness. The newspapers described objects and spaces not merely as beautiful and ornate, but specifically as expensive. The stories told of precious materials, sumptuous settings, and rich ornaments. Far from promoting poverty or humble simplicity as virtues of

Religious Art in Colonial Spanish American Newspapers

123

these objects and the devout who prayed before them, the stories had ever more hyperbolic descriptions of expense and lavishness, like the 1,124 diamonds donated to the recovered monstrance. They consequently conflated the readers’ civic responsibility as members of the elite, the cultic and even miraculous value of the object, beautiful stylishness, and lavish expenditure. This was, of course, an expression of Catholic charity that helped to secure salvation after death, resulting in luxurious settings for the faith. In his study of piety and splendor in eighteenth-century Mexico City, Brian Larkin explained that when the clergy and parishioners strove to create glorious church interiors, they complied with the 1585 Third Provincial Council of the Roman Catholic Church in New Spain, which encouraged churches with “the greatest splendor and ornamentation.”31 As Larkin writes, “During the colonial period decoration of sacred space was not an optional matter of taste, but a requirement for proper worship.”32 Well-to-do colonists throughout Spanish America embraced this role and spent lavishly on the Church.33 While some contemporary Spanish critics, like José de Cadalso, decried luxury as a vice, others promoted it as a tradition within the Catholic Church. Juan Sempere y Guarinos, for example, chronicled the history of appropriate Catholic luxury from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, stating that luxury was essential to human wellbeing.34 Spanish economist Lorenzo Normante y Carcavilla furthermore argued that this lavishness was the “byproduct of the riches and security of the government.”35 This view agreed with the broader European context, where, by the eighteenth century, as Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger have explained, luxury had “lost its former associations with corruption and vice” and was instead evidence of progress and prosperity.36 Yet, drawing attention to the cost of religious objects and sites was apparently a particularly colonial practice. Spanish newspapers of this era rarely referenced the value of religious works or sites. Nor did the peninsular papers so often list those principal citizens who participated in processions of sacred art. By contrast, Spanish American newspapers routinely conflated the qualities of immanence or miraculousness, stylishness, and costliness, and placed its readers directly in the event. This made clear to readers that religious art and its settings were simultaneously effective sacred objects, sites of economic and social exchange, and consumer goods. Doing so evinced, to borrow from the Gazeta de México’s mission statement, the robust financial health of our city, our viceroyalty, and of the well-heeled readers themselves. Unlike their peninsular peers, many of these readers earned their noble titles through economic activity rather than by birth.37 Shipping records helped Spanish American newspapers reinforce this image of religious objects as valuable goods, by their presence in the paper and their terminology. The earliest detailed cargo lists appeared in the Gazeta de México, in which a 1730 inventory of the latest Manila Galleon listed 120 crates of Chinese porcelain. Additionally, a 1731 inventory told of 51 boxes from Asia filled with 3996 individual vessels, and a 1737 record mentioned 78 crates of Chinese ceramics.38 Alongside Asian luxury items as well as spices, olives, wine, silver, and other trade goods, the shipping records regularly included religious art. To cite just a few examples, in 1791 the Mercurio Peruano listed 19 crates of the famous quiteño sculpted efigies (polychrome

124

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

wood figures) shipped from Guayaquil to Lima. The paper explained that Guayaquil had shipped along the same route fifty-one crates of sculpture in 1784, seven in 1785, ten in 1786, thirty-four in 1787, and twenty-four in 1788.39 The Cuzco School of painters likewise sent their works abroad, including a 1791 shipment of an unspecified number of paintings on canvas sent from Peru to Buenos Aires; another consignment the same year sent Peruvian paintings to Cádiz, Spain.40 Mexican religious art traveled as well, as described in the 1785, 1786, and 1792 issues of the Gazeta de México, which each listed one or two crates of wood effigies shipped to Havana and Cádiz.41 Finally, a 1786 consignment of “49 Saints painted on copper plates” followed the same route from New Spain to Spain.42 When these and other works of art came up for sale, this, too, appeared in Spanish American newspapers. This reminded readers that most of the venerable objects in local churches—just like the ones purchased for their homes—were once part of a financial transaction. An August 1794 issue of the Papel Periódico de Havana, for example, included an advertisement selling four sculpted images of the Evangelists.43 A 1796 advert in the same paper offered paintings of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, St. Michael, and St. Gabriel alongside other items.44 An advertisement in a February 1792 issue of the Gazeta de México offered Roman prints of the newly beatified Sebastián de Aparicio.45 Adverts in 1784, 1787, and 1792 offered for sale small sculpture groups of the Holy Family known as nacimientos, while a listing of the estate for sale following its owner’s death in 1795 included imágenes de bulto or sculpted images.46 In short, the physical proximity of the stories of images taken in procession and placed in rich spaces to the shipping records and advertisements that listed the same types of works as so many mere goods within the space of the newspaper laid bare for readers the fact that the images they venerated were commodities. The language in the adverts and shipping lists was the same: effigy, sculpture, image. Once embedded into the local context and activated by their interaction with the community, however, these became the “sacred effigy” or the “holy image.” The newspaper structure thus revealed that the sculptures carried in procession had once been made, shipped, and sold before their installation within shrines where they became venerable thanks to their subject, costliness, interaction with the community, and, in select cases, their miracles. Readers saw in the newspaper the process by which commodities became venerable objects of local devotion. Significantly, despite colonial art scholarship’s persistent claim that the arrival of foreign objects, artists, ideas, and forms marked foundational or transitional moments in local art history, the newspapers show little evidence that residents of the viceroyalties attached superior value to these imports, or even that their status as imports mattered.47 While shipping records spoke of the arrival of foreign objects, once embedded in the local context, foreign provenance was infrequently mentioned and newspapers only rarely disclosed that these venerated objects came from elsewhere. The paintings sent from Ágreda, Spain, mentioned earlier count among the few examples in the Gazeta de México. So, too, does the 1737 story of the procession with the Holy Christ of Ixmiquilpan in Mexico City, which explained that the miraculous sculpture had arrived from Spain in 1545.48 Generally, however, provenance did not appear in the newspapers’ discussion of these works of art. Nor was the European pedigree of foreign artists

Religious Art in Colonial Spanish American Newspapers

125

working locally mentioned; instead, foreignness was conspicuously absent in most newspaper stories on religious art. In 1737, on the birthday of Spain’s crown prince, for example, Mexico City celebrated the debut of an altar screen in the cathedral’s apse. The Gazeta de México described the new Altar of the Kings (Figure  7.3), with its “showy corpulence, even reaching

Figure 7.3 Jerónimo de Balbás, Altar of the Kings, 1737. Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral. Photo: Robert Harding/Alamy Stock Photo.

126

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

thirty varas tall and fifteen wide, . . . the height and robustness of the estípite [columns], . . . the airiness and gracefulness of its statues,” and so on. It celebrated the “skill and effort [seen in] the paintings, lights and shadows of the canvases, color and fabrics of the sculptures,” praising the artists of “this most celebrated work, which, without any debate, is the most brilliant and costly in the Americas.”49 The description omitted naming the altar screen’s Spanish architect Jerónimo de Balbás, whose immigrant status caused controversy among Mexico City’s sculptors and architects, and the paintings’ Mexican artist, Juan Rodríguez Juárez. Nor did it explain the peninsular provenance of the estípite columns Balbás introduced with this structure. Likewise, the June 1737 story about a new altar screen facing the Jubilee door of the Mexico City cathedral—also by, but not attributed to, the Spaniard Balbás—praised its robust estípites, cornices, platforms, moldings, medallions, niches, and statues. It explained that the altar screen’s “Miraculous Image of Our Lady, painted with great skill” was “said to be by the hand of a Prisoner . . . who was freed for it,” leading to its name: Our Lady of the Pardon (Figure 7.4).50 The article not only failed to identify the altar screen’s Spanish maker, but also omitted that the painting was the effort of Flemish émigré artist Simon Pereyns in the sixteenth century, a fact known to church officials at the time.51 On the rare occasion that artists of religious objects were named, the artists were largely local, with some significant exceptions. In August of 1739, the Gazeta de México told of the installation of a new altar screen in Mexico City’s Franciscan convent. Following a Mass, onlookers celebrated the: beautiful, costly, and glittering sculpture, which consists of the old and modern [styles]; of the latter, the rising estíptes . . . , and of the former, the excellent statues by the famous Amaro and the celebrated brushwork by he who for his skills was called divine, his proper name being Fray Alonso de Molina, both famous and well-known for their works last century.”52

Likewise, the June 1731 issue of the Gazeta de Mexico described a new altar screen in the Chapel of Our Lady of the Rosary in Necaltitlán. The screen, dedicated to Souls in Purgatory, consisted of a single “beautiful and robust” painting, described in the paper as “a work so singular, and costly, that it appears as if all of the skills of art are exhausted in it, and it shows off the gifted brushwork of the celebrated Mexican Master D[on] Nicolás Enríquez.”53 To these we may add the examples cited earlier, including the death notice for the “famous Mexican Apelles,” painter José Rodríguez Juárez and the paintings displaying the “excellent brushwork” of his brother, Juan.54 The exception to this pattern of naming only local artists is in the case of the Spanish artists who came to staff Mexico City’s new Real Academia de la Tres Nobles Artes de San Carlos. The Gazeta de México’s treatment of these foreigners may shed light on the elision of foreignness and, on the whole, of named artists at all. A February 1795 issue of the Mexican newspaper described the groundbreaking for the new cathedral in Monterrey. The story explained that plans began in 1793 with drawings by Antonio

Religious Art in Colonial Spanish American Newspapers

127

Figure 7.4 Simón Pereyns, Our Lady of the Pardon, 1570. Oil on canvas. Formerly Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral, destroyed 1967. Photo: Archivo Fotográfice Manuel Toussaint, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. González Velázquez, director of architecture at San Carlos, and approved by the Mexican academy. Academy-sanctioned architect Juan Crouset would build the new structure. The time capsule inserted in the cathedral’s foundation included gold and silver religious medals, medals from Charles IV’s coronation, and Mexican coins. The medals and coins were made locally under the supervision of academy director

128

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Jerónimo Antonio Gil, but were left unattributed. The capsule also contained three copperplate paintings by academy painting instructor José de Alcíbar. Nowhere in the story is González identified as a Spaniard, Crouset as a Frenchman, or Alcíbar as a Mexican. Instead, all belong to the “Royal Academy of San Carlos of this New Spain.”55 That is, rather than attaching greater value and esteem to foreign artists, or even to Mexican artists, and the objects they made, the newspaper story localized them as part of the “Mexican academy” and the academy of “this New Spain.” Thus, while our familiar narrative of the San Carlos academy stresses the Crown’s imposition of Spanish artists on New Spain—which it did, as academy officials declared that Mexican artists were not up to the task of directing the school, leaving Alcíbar and other Mexicans in lesser positions—the newspaper’s readers learned only that these skilled artists belonged to New Spain. At a historical moment when differences between Mexican and Spanish interests were about to explode into rebellion, the paper made Spaniards into Mexicans. Much like the venerable sculptures, the European academics were activated and nativized by their efforts in the local context and for the local population. So, too, were the local artists—named and unnamed—who produced the sculptures taken in procession and the lavish settings in which the readers celebrated their faith. The newspaper similarly let them rest in the shadows, making their works “ours.” As the writers put it: we paid handsomely for them, we process them, and they perform for us. Seen in summation, Spanish American eighteenth-century newspaper stories stripped European objects (or ones made locally by European artists) of their foreignness and localized viceregal and imported religious art. They also absorbed these works into what Nuno Senos calls the “normality” of the local scene and into the dominant decorative discourse of colonial visual culture.56 The difference between foreign and local was elided; instead, works of art were appreciated for their local actions, beauty, expense, and sacredness. If, returning to Anderson, the newspapers’ joining of “this marriage with that ship, this price with that bishop” created an imagined community, then this procession with that sculpture allowed objects of divergent provenance to become Peruvian, Mexican, or Cuban. They became “ours” thanks to the newspapers’ typographic intervention.

Notes 1 Gazeta de Lima, no. 1 (January 1744), n.p. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Portions of this chapter are adapted from my essays, “La corte vestida de gala: The Royal Academy of San Carlos and the Spectacle of Colonial Life,” in Festivals and Daily Life in the Arts of Colonial Latin America, edited by Donna Pierce (Denver, CO: Denver Art Museum, 2014), 97–110; and “A Taste for Art,” in Buen Gusto and Classicism in Latin America, edited by Paul Niell and Stacie G. Widdifield (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2013), 93–113. 2 Gazeta de Lima, n.p. 3 Gazeta de Lima, n.p.

Religious Art in Colonial Spanish American Newspapers 4 5 6 7

8

9

10

11 12 13 14

15 16 17

129

Gazeta de México, no. 1 (January 1728), n.p. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 2–6. Interest in Spanish American newspapers is growing. For example, Susan Deans-Smith has brilliantly analyzed the construction of taste through Mexico City’s newspapers; see her forthcoming book, Matters of Taste: The Politics of Culture in Mexico and the Royal Academy of San Carlos (1781–1821). This area of research is a burgeoning field in colonial Spanish American studies as exemplified by the work of Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire. Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Spanish America is likewise included in studies examining the global networks within which material culture circulated, such as Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004); The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, edited by Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (London: Routledge, 2015); and Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World, edited by Dana Leibsohn and Jeanette Peterson (London: Routledge, 2012). Local artistic production for a largely local audience has likewise been amply studied by historians of Spanish American art. Current literature is particularly rich in regional studies such as Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, Object and Apparition: Envisioning the Christian Divine in the Colonial Andes (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2013) or James Cordova, The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico: Crowned-Nun Portraits and Reform in the Convent (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2014). Various kinds of art appear in the newspapers, including secular images, furniture, and objects from indigenous history. For the limited space of an essay, however, I shall limit the discussion to religious art. Kaufmann, Toward a Geography, 242. Patricia Ann Drwall Adank, “Accommodation and Innovation: The Gazeta de México, 1784 to 1810,” PhD dissertation, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, 1980, 91. Gazeta de México 1 (1784), n.p. Jacinto Calero y Moreira, “Prospecto para un periódico llamado Mercurio Peruano,” (Lima: Imprenta Real, 1790), n.p. The Mercurio Peruano is analyzed in an interesting study of gender images in Mariselle Meléndez, “Representing Gender, Deviance, and Heterogeneity in the Eighteenth Century Peruvian Newspaper Mercurio Peruano,” in Colonialism Past and Present. Reading and Writing about Colonial Latin America Today, edited by Alvaro Féliz Bolaños and Gustavo Verdesio (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 175–95. See Jean Sarrailh, La España ilustrada de la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII, translated by Antonio Alatorre (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1957), 110–21. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). On the relationship of Creoles and Spaniards, see Brian Hamnett, “Absolutismo ilustrados y crisis multidimensional en el período colonial tardío,” in Interpretaciones del siglo XVIII mexicano: El impacto de las reformas borbónicas, edited by Josefina Zoraida Vázquez (Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1991), 67–108; and Horst Pietschmann, “Protoliberalismo, reformas borbónicas y revolución: La Nueva España en el último tercio del siglo XVIII,” 27–66, in the same volume.

130

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

18 Donahue-Wallace, “A Taste for Art,” in Buen Gusto and Classicism in Latin America, edited by Paul Niell and Stacie G. Widdifield (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2013), 93–113. 19 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 25. Anderson’s ideas about state formation have been rightly challenged, but I still find compelling and convincing his analysis of the newspaper as a powerful force in creating a sense of shared identity within colonial contexts. On the criticism of Anderson’s theory in Latin America, see Claudio Lomnitz, “Nationalism as a Practical System: Benedict Anderson’s Theory of Nationalism from the Vantage Point of Spanish America,” in The Other Mirror: Grand Theory Through the Lens of Latin America, edited by Miguel Angel Centeno and Fernando López-Alves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 329–59. 20 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 62. 21 See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991). 22 On the semiotics of newspaper design in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Robert Craig, “Ideological Aspects of Publication Design,” Design Issues 6, no. 2 (1990): 18–27. 23 Gazeta de México, no. 25 (December 1729), 194. Unfortunately, a tiny percent of stories were illustrated, even at the end of the eighteenth century. 24 Religious processions and their social implications in Spanish American have been amply studied. See, for example, Jay Kinsbruner, The Colonial Spanish American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005); Linda Curcio-Nagy, The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City: Performing Power and Identity (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2004); and Stephanie Merrim, The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010). 25 Gazeta de México, no. 127 (June 1738), 1012. 26 The most eloquent spokesperson for the miraculous images of colonial New Spain is William Taylor. See Taylor, Marvels and Miracles in Late Colonial Mexico: Three Texts in Context (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2011); Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico Before the Reforma (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2010); and Theater of a Thousand Wonders: A History of Miraculous Images and Shrines in New Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 27 Gazeta de Lima, no. 10 (February/March 1745), n.p. 28 Gazeta de México, no. 127 (December 1737), 965–6. 29 Gazeta de Lima, no. 19 (July 2–September 14, 1761), n.p. 30 Gazeta de Lima, no. 7 (July–September 1763), n.p. 31 Brian Larkin, The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), 82. 32 Ibid. 33 On the Mexican nobility’s expenditures, see Doris Ladd, The Mexican Nobility at Independence, 1780–1826 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1976), 53–6, and Edith Boorstein Couturier, The Silver King: The Remarkable Life of the Count of Regla in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 131–50. 34 Juan Sempere y Guarinos, Historia del luxo y leyes suntuarias de España (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1788).

Religious Art in Colonial Spanish American Newspapers

131

35 Cited in Rebecca Haidt, “The Name of the Clothes: Petimetras and the Problem of Luxury’s Refinements,” Dieciocho: Hispanic Enlightenment 23, no. 1 (1999): 71. 36 Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, “The Rise and Fall of the Luxury Debates,” in Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods, edited by Berg and Eger (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 7. 37 It is no surprise, therefore, that attempts to limit the showy display of Catholic practice in Spanish America had a hard time taking effect. See Larkin, Very Nature, 187. 38 Gazeta de México, no. 26 (January 1730), 207; ibid., no. 39 (February 1731), 310–11; and ibid., no. 110 (January 1737), 879. 39 Mercurio Peruano 1, no. 27 (April 1791), 252. Most of the shipping records used as examples here date from after Spain relaxed its prohibition against trade between the viceroyalties in 1778. 40 Mercurio Peruano 1, no. 26 (March 1791), 244. 41 Gazeta de México vol. 1, no. 27 (January 1785), 113; vol. 2, no. 15 (August 1786), 168; and vol. 5, no. 6 (March 1792). 42 Ibid., vol. 2, no. 17 (September 1786). 43 Papel Periódico de la Havana, no. 63 (August 1794), 251–2. 44 Ibid., no. 81 (October 1796), 327. 45 Gazeta de México vol. 5, no. 4 (February 1792). 46 Ibid., vol. 7, no. 19 (April 1795), 162. 47 For example, the arrival of the Italian Jesuit Bernardo Bitti in South America or the introduction of the estípite column inspired by Spanish Churrigueresque architecture in New Spain continue to be viewed as major milestones in colonial art. 48 Gazeta de México, no. 113 (April 1737), 902. 49 Ibid., no. 118 (September 1737), 93. A vara is a unit of measurement just under the length of an English yard. 50 ibid., no. 115 (June 1737), 916. 51 Advertisements, such as the Roman prints of Saint Aparicio, sometimes mentioned European provenance of religious images. Another example offered “a collection of prints of Saints by the best Professors from [Europe].” Ibid., vol. 6, no. 77 (November 1794), 644. 52 Ibid., no. 141 (August 1739), 1124. 53 Ibid., no. 43 (June 1731), 338. Half a century later, the Gazeta de México again praised Enríquez, this time in an advertisement. This December 1787 advert had the following: “Offered for sale are 25 copperplate paintings measuring more than a vara tall and ¾ wide: of very appreciable and delicate Mexican Work, by their artist the famous Nicolás Enríquez.” Ibid., vol. 2, no. 46 (December 1787), 460. 54 Ibid., no. 1 (January 1728), 2–6. 55 Ibid., vol. 7, no. 4 (Feb. 1795), 26–8. Emphasis mine. 56 Nuno Senos, “The Empire in the Duke’s Palace: Global Material Culture in SixteenthCentury Portugal,” in Gerritsen and Riello, eds., The Global Lives of Things, 128–44.

132

8

Tortoiseshell and the Edge of Empire Artistic Materials and Imperial Politics in Spain and France Mari-Tere Álvarez and Charlene Villaseñor Black

Tortoiseshell was one of the most highly valued materials in eighteenth-century Europe, coveted by artists, collectors, and kings. Derived from the scutes of the Hawksbill sea turtle, indigenous to the waters of the Americas and Indo-Pacific, tortoiseshell was as treasured in the decorative arts as lapis lazuli in painting or cochineal in tapestry manufacture. One finds tortoiseshell in countless art objects, portraits, and still lives of the period—in the peinetas worn by Spanish grandees, in double-sided combs produced for export in Jamaica, in English tea caddies, and inlaid as veneer into French desks, boxes, and lecterns. The warm, luminous striations of this natural material clearly appealed to many. As several of the essays in this volume discuss, possessing and displaying exotic materials from faraway places carried a range of specific local significations. For elite European audiences, tortoiseshell not only symbolized wealth and sophistication, but more importantly, territorial control of the globe. The areas where tortoiseshell was harvested, though, were under contestation, disputed, claimed, and fought over by several European powers. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spain successfully maintained its monopoly of the tortoiseshell trade in the face of smuggling, piracy, and even war. But by the eighteenth century, France and Britain would wrest control of tortoiseshell from the Spanish Empire. This essay examines this global shift in power by looking at objects made of tortoiseshell in dialogue with unpublished archival documents, printed sources of the period, and three key treaties that shifted power broadly understood from Spain to France. Under the terms of these treaties, Spain and its overseas empire were claimed by the Bourbons. France became the legal majority stakeholder in Spain’s global empire, which consisted of colonies in the Americas, Asia, Oceania, and Africa. This unique historical moment allows us to compare the role played by materiality in imperial politics in two very different empires, as well as the role politics played in artistic creation. Along with the transfer of key colonial possessions from Spain to France, materials also assumed new identities when territories that were once Spanish 133

134

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

became French. The approaches to and aesthetics of valued materials, tortoiseshell in particular, would alter as well. This essay will take tortoiseshell, procured in the colonies and prized by both Spain and France, as an exemplar to unpack the larger, and still understudied, issues surrounding materiality and imperial narratives in the eighteenth century. Empire did not mean the same thing in France as it did in Spain, and the differing attitudes toward colonial culture in these two countries can be traced in their material culture, particularly the use of tortoiseshell. We read these historical issues through more contemporary theoretical lenses, informed by the work of political theorist Antonio Gramsci, poststructuralist philosopher Michel Foucault, and deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. What role did tortoiseshell play in global imperial politics? Where and how was this material acquired? How did eighteenthcentury artists, patrons, and viewers understand tortoiseshell decoration in the context of imperial encounter and European attempts at global domination?

Obtaining Tortoiseshell Now an endangered species, with its sale banned worldwide since 1973, the Hawksbill sea turtle was plentiful in both the Atlantic and Pacific worlds in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. It was harvested off the coasts of Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador in South America; throughout the Caribbean, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republican, and Haiti (including Tortuga Island); in Central America, off the coasts of El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica; and in Mexico, in Yucatán and Baja California. The English pirate and explorer, William Dampier (1651–1715), provided an early account of the Hawksbill sea turtle to curious Europeans, including a map of its habitat, in his famous and widely read text, A New Voyage Round the World, published in 1697.1 He describes four types of sea turtles, among them the Hawksbill: “They are so called because their mouths are long and small, somewhat resembling the Bill of a Hawk.” According to Dampier, they are the smallest of the turtles: “The largest of them may have 3 pound and an half of Shell: I have taken some that have had 3 pound 10 ounces . . .” They are not fit for eating, but “[o]n the backs of these Hawksbill Turtle grows that Shell which is so much esteem’d for making Cabinets, Combs, and other things.”2 The turtles can be seen in a number of contemporaneous paintings, as well as in depictions of cabinets of curiosities.3 Dampier’s account also includes a map (Figure  8.1), indicating where Hawksbill turtles were found, and he specifies good places to hunt for them. “Hawksbill Turtles are in many places of the West Indies,” he notes. “There are some Bays on the North side of Jamaica, where these Hawksbills resort to lay. In the Bay of Honduras are Islands which they likewise make their breeding places, and many places along all the Coast on the Main of the West Indies, from Trinidado to La Vera Cruz in the Bay of Nova Hispania.” Furthermore, “[t]he Hawksbill Turtle are not only found in the West Indies, but on the Coast of Guinea, and in the East Indies: I never saw any in the South Seas.”4 He correctly identifies their various habitats, including the Americas, as well as the seas of the Indian Ocean, the coasts of Africa, and New Zealand.

Artistic Materials and Imperial Politics in Spain and France

135

Figure 8.1 Herman Moll, “A Map of the Middle Part of America.” Hand-colored engraving from William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (London: James Knapton, 1729). Image provided by Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc. at www.RareMaps.com.

A later printed source, from 1838–9, explains the technique of culling the shell after the turtles have been captured.5 The top or dorsal of the shell, called the carapace, which consists of bony sections and scutes made of keratin, similar to horn or nails, is comprised of thirteen separate plates, five on the back with rows of four on each side. The edge of the shell is created from 25 smaller plates. The size and thickness of the shell depends on age, since turtles produce a new layer of shell each year.6 While the carapace was most valued, the shell’s bottom, or plastron, was also at times employed to fabricate objects.7 The value of the shell was determined by its thickness and quality and by how vivid and/or distinct its colors were.8 The author notes that: “Sometimes one or more of the plates will be of a plain yellow colour and such are in great request among the Spanish ladies, who will give twelve or fourteen dollars for a comb of plain tortoiseshell, while a similar one of the mottled kind will not sell for more than six dollars.”9 In order to separate the plates from the shell, the bottom of the shell and then the turtle’s body was removed.10 Once this was achieved, the carapace, or “the arch of the shell,” was placed “over a fire, which soon causes them to start from the bone, by the help of a slender knife.”11 The shell was then boiled in water with salt to soften it. Too little salt caused the shell to lose its color; too much salt rendered the shell brittle. The pieces of tortoiseshell were then rejoined by pressing with an iron. If the iron was too hot, the shell turned black. The shell could also be molded, another difficult process that used heat, because the shell changed color with high temperatures.12 Molded objects, mostly from the sixteenth century and associated with Gujarat or Goa can be identified in museum collections across the world.13

136

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Tortoiseshell in the Spanish and French Empires Numerous sources describe the commerce in tortoiseshell and provide a sense of its use and value. Among these, primary sources record the export of tortoiseshell, or “carey,” from Mexico to Spain and then to the rest of Europe. Alexander Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain of 1822 includes a table documenting the amount of tortoiseshell shipped from Mexico to Spain, 439 pounds, with a value of 2,290 pesos fuertes.14 A proclamation dated April 24, 1775, issued by the Viceroy of New Spain, Antonio María Bucareli (r.  1771–9), exempted certain goods being imported into the port of Cádiz from taxes, including “Campeche wood, and other woods . . . pepper from Tabasco or Malaguete, salted fish, and wax, tortoiseshell, annatto, and coffee from the dominions of his majesty in America.”15 Objects using tortoiseshell were manufactured all over Mexico, including in Campeche, Puebla, Zacatecas, Durango, and Guadalajara, as well as elsewhere throughout the Americas.16 Many of these objects were sent back to Spain. In 1648, a large tortoiseshell cross, reddish in color, was sent to Seville to be used in Holy Week processions. High-ranking Spanish officials commissioned elaborate furniture decorated with tortoiseshell in New Spain to be shipped back via “la flota” to Old Spain for their personal use.17 Other objects were created for the Americas. A document from Oaxaca, directed to the city’s magistrate, records contraband writing desks, or escritorios, made in Peru of tortoiseshell and silver, discovered in a shipment to Oaxaca.18 An inventory of a mission in Sonora, Mexico noted two dozen tortoiseshell combs (peinete de carey) among its contents, alongside numerous objects from Asia, large, fine boxes from Brussels, and paintings from Rome.19 According to three sixteenth-century accounts of the Conquest written by Spaniards, as well as the Codex Mendoza, authored by indigenous scribes in the 1540s and glossed in Spanish, tortoiseshell was also commonly used to create objects in the ancient Americas.20 Only one pre-Columbian object made with tortoiseshell, though, has thus far been identified, a postclassic Mayan mosaic mask dating from the eleventh to twelfth century, and now part of the Dumbarton Oaks Collection in Washington, DC. Archeologists and pre-Columbian art historians have convincingly argued that tortoiseshell was widely used in the ancient Americas, but because it decays readily, little material trace of the material has been left behind.21 Other documents remind us that tortoiseshell was just one type of merchandise among many different goods in the eighteenth-century global economy. A four-page relación, a tax document issued by the Spanish Royal Treasury (Hacienda Real) dated 1796, records a variety of imported merchandise, including “large plates from China, Pueblan glassware, images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, little crystal figures, tortoiseshell, and silver.”22 The frigates Santa Gertrudis and Esmeralda, originating in “Cartagena de Indias” (Colombia) and landing in Havana, Cuba, in 1772, carried privately owned goods as well as cocoa, tortoiseshell, and notions (cuentas particulares, cacao, carey y merceria).23 Likewise, tortoiseshell has its own particular history in France and French America that was determined, in part, by three major treaties enacted between Europe’s imperial

Artistic Materials and Imperial Politics in Spain and France

137

powers. The Peace of the Pyrenées of 1659 brought the 1635–59 war between France and Spain to an end. In 1697, the Treaty of Ryswick brought to an end the Nine Years’ War (1688–97), fought by France against England, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the United Provinces. This treaty between Louis XIV and Spanish king Charles II gave France control of what is now Haiti, including Tortuga Island in the Caribbean. A few years later, sparked by the death of the last Habsburg king of Spain, Charles II, who passed away without leaving heirs, succession to the Spanish throne was in question.24 With no clear heir to the Spanish monarchy, Europe’s imperial powers became embroiled in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). With the Treaty of Utrecht in 1715, the French Bourbons assumed control of the Spanish royal house from the Spanish Habsburgs.25 The end result of these imperial machinations was the loss of Spanish power in the areas rich in tortoiseshell. France now had a stake in these global materials, ending Spain’s absolute monopoly over it, as it had with other precious materials such as cochineal.26 Global power shifts leave material traces in art objects, documenting imperial change. An important text on French commerce by a government official identified as M. Chambon, Receiver General of Finances, provides valuable information on trade in tortoiseshell in eighteenth-century France and the Americas, with particular attention to the French Antilles and French Guiana.27 Chambon remarks, rather defensively, that tortues were well known in France before the New World discoveries: Before the discovery of the New World, we were not lacking in tortoiseshell. Asia, Africa, even Europe itself furnished our Commerce with sufficient quantities. There was not a single person among us who did not know what a tortoise was. Its figure is too remarkable, its species too common, and its usage too frequent for our sickness of the chest and consumption so that I am obliged to make an ample description.28

The passage is fascinating because it reveals that tortoiseshell was not being used to create material objects, but rather served medicinal purposes, a topic on which Chambon dwells in some detail. He provides multiple recipes for turtle bouillon, or broth, and syrup, with instructions on its use for illnesses of the chest and consumption, or tuberculosis.29 Chambon also provides valuable information on tortoiseshell imports into Marseille, noting that before carret, the shell of the Hawksbill sea turtle, considered the most desirable shell for making objects, began arriving from the Americas, there was little to be found in France. In fact, he finds no references to its import in Marseille customhouse documents before 1688. He also notes the loosening of laws governing trade, making commerce with the Americas easier, a reference to the Bourbon reforms.30 In contrast to the seventeenth century, 835 pounds of tortoiseshell arrived in the port of Marseille in the space of a year beginning in 1716. Of that, 351 pounds were destined for Italy, 150 for the Levant (the eastern Mediterranean), and 332 pounds for Marseille and the “Meridional Provinces,” presumably French-speaking areas in the south of France.

138

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Chambon’s text also sheds light on import taxes on tortoiseshell and other goods. A tariff of 12 livres was levied in 1664 on carret, as well as on the shells of green sea turtles and loggerhead sea turtles, with lower taxes of 4 and 6 livres, respectively. According to Letter-Patents issued by the king, later tariffs were levied in January 1716, April 1717, and February 1719. Disturbingly, the tortoiseshell tariff was linked to the tariff on enslaved blacks from Africa, being double the tariff levied on human property.31 Chambon’s text is also helpful for understanding how period viewers perceived carret: Of all the tortoise shell, carret, which is that which comes from the turtles of our colonies, where the back is more convex than that of the “French turtle” [the green sea turtle], is undoubtedly more beautiful and justly merits being the most sought after. It is shinier, smoother, and more transparent and of a color that satisfies the eye. It is more manageable than that of the “French turtle” and is also worth much more.32

He describes the shell in detail: “One sees that it is marbled, undulating, composed of several parts joined, and fitted together, of diverse colors, and of different sizes, forming squares, pentagons, etc.” He adds, It is necessary to choose carret that is very transparent, uniform, shiny, beautiful black or a beautiful red or well nuanced. The biggest and thickest pieces are worth more than the others. It is necessary to examine whether the worms have pierced it, which happens when it is kept too long without being shaken and handled.33

And furthermore, the most desirable part of the shell is that in the center, and it is used to make material objects: It is the piece in the center of these figures that is smoother, finer, and more transparent than the rest, that we understand in commerce as tortoiseshell (carret), from which are made boxes, combs, razor sleeves, spectacles, and several other pieces of furniture and instruments of great propriety.34

This discussion of a key primary source provides important information on the historic trade in tortoiseshell. Most significantly, although tortoises from Europe, Asia, and Africa were known in France, as Chambon remarks in the introductory discussion, there appears to have been no trade in tortoiseshell from the Americas until the early eighteenth century. In fact, the figures he presents suggest that imports of the material only rose around 1716, which is logical given the state of war in Europe. The 1697 Treaty of Ryswick had given France control of Haiti and Tortuga Island. In 1715, control of the Spanish royal house passed to the French Bourbons after the war. As a consequence, the Spanish monarchy lost control of areas where tortoiseshell was harvested. Thus, French objects employing tortoiseshell become more frequent in the eighteenth century, in contrast to Spanish examples, which are documented as early as the sixteenth. Tortoiseshell objects thus are primary witnesses

Artistic Materials and Imperial Politics in Spain and France

139

to the links between shifting imperial geographies and the material world in the eighteenth century.

Tortoiseshell Objects in the Spanish Empire Tortoiseshell is so common in sixteenth- through eighteenth-century objects created in the Spanish Empire as to be ubiquitous. It usually appears in intricate marquetry found on furniture, boxes, frames, liturgical items, fans, combs, and other items. Bargueños, also called arquimesas and escritorios (writing desks), are considered a typically Hispanic type of furniture, originating in Spain and derived from mudéjar, or Spanish-Islamic, prototypes. An example from the González Martí Museo Nacional de Cerámica y Artes Suntuarias from the seventeenth century is typical (Figure 8.2).35 The

Figure 8.2 Bureau, Spain or Spanish Empire, 17th century. Wood, bronze, and tortoiseshell inlay, with forged iron handles and pulls. Museo Nacional de Cerámica y Artes Suntuarias “González Martí,” Valencia (Inv. No. CE3/01171).

140

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

main body is of wood, bronze, and tortoiseshell inlay, with forged iron handles and pulls. It is a stunning example of the type of workmanship common throughout the Spanish Empire in the seventeenth century. Four pairs of drawers, each veneered with tortoiseshell, borders an ornamented main section with eight Solomonic columns. These frame an image representing Hercules vanquishing the monster Cacus, an episode from Hercules’ tenth labor, obtaining the cattle of Geryon (Figure 8.3). Although the patron of this piece is not known, iconography featuring Hercules had been associated with the Habsburg Spanish monarchy since Charles V in the sixteenth century.36 As “Hercules Hispanicus,” Hercules represented triumph over discord, a common theme in the politically tumultuous period, as well as virtue and strength. A pediment with a golden eagle crowns this central unit, with a niche enclosing a statuette of Minerva, goddess of war, wisdom, and the arts. The sides of the escritorio are fashioned of geometric marquetry based on mudéjar patterns, and thus typical of woodwork in Spain and throughout the Americas.37 Its tonality is limited to brown and brownish-red, a direct result of the maker’s choice of wood, bronze, and tortoiseshell. As a result, the various materials employed become hard to distinguish from one

Figure 8.3 Detail of Figure 8.2.

Artistic Materials and Imperial Politics in Spain and France

141

another. Given how precious tortoiseshell was, one might expect it to be foregrounded. Instead, it loses its individual identity as a material, becoming integrated or even subsumed into the larger whole to create a unified piece of furniture. This unified aesthetic can also be seen in another tortoiseshell object, an octagonal sewing box from seventeeth-century Puebla, Mexico (Figure  8.4). Made of wood, it is covered completely in tortoiseshell veneer with mother of pearl accents in geometric shapes, along with paired swords, rampant lions, and birds. Many of these inlays have been engraved, with dark lines adding details. The mother of pearl pieces lay flush with the surface of the inlaid tortoiseshell, creating a smooth, even surface. Upon close inspection, one notices subtle variation in the colors of the tortoiseshell, with the darker tones strongly relating to the nearly black wood employed for the box’s body. Even with the addition of mother of pearl, there is strong uniformity, as in the previous piece. Once again, the presence of the tortoiseshell is downplayed as a distinct material. Tortoiseshell was also commonly employed in sacred objects throughout the Spanish Empire, and was also used specifically for women’s accessories, including the peinetas used by women to hold up their lace mantillas, as well as in fans, jewelry, and even for simulated beauty marks that women attached to their faces, called chiqueadores.38A 1776 portrait by Mexican artist Andrés de Islas portrays the sitter with a large applied beauty mark (or chiqueador) made of tortoiseshell on her right temple.39 Peinetas commonly appear in portraits of the period, as in Francisco de Goya’s famous Portrait of the Duchess of Alba of 1797 (Figure 8.5). The tortoiseshell peineta is hidden from view (Figure 8.6), just barely visible under the diaphanous black mantilla, as was common, despite being

Figure 8.4 Sewing Box, Puebla, 17th century. Wood, tortoiseshell, mother of pearl. Museo de América, Madrid. Photograph by Joaquín Otero Ubeda.

142

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 8.5 Francisco de Goya, Portrait of the Duchess of Alba, 1797. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America, New York.

Figure 8.6 Detail of Figure 8.5.

Artistic Materials and Imperial Politics in Spain and France

143

elaborately drilled and engraved. Tortoiseshell fans also frequently appear in women’s portraits, although few examples survive from the eighteenth century. This brief survey suggests how coveted and common this material was in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish Empire. Tortoiseshell was abundant, easily acquired, and as a result was pervasive worldwide. It was employed in furniture, in the decorative arts, in religious objects, frames, and accessories. But what is fascinating about the use of tortoiseshell in these Spanish examples is how understated and inconspicuous it was. Artists employed it unobtrusively. It appeared as one material among many, along with various woods, mother of pearl, ivory, or bone. The objects seem to display an aesthetic of incorporation, in which tortoiseshell is never showcased, but included and integrated into a larger artistic whole. Plentiful and prized throughout the Spanish Empire, in Hispanic artworks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tortoiseshell seems almost obscured. Materiality becomes material invisibility.

Tortoiseshell in France In contrast to the Spanish Empire, objects employing tortoiseshell were not frequent in France until the eighteenth century. They are commonly associated with French furniture-maker André Charles Boulle (1642–1732), who was named premier ébéniste du Roi in 1672. The cabinet on a stand shown in Figure  8.7 typifies his early work, which specialized in complex wood marquetry while hinting at his later mastery of metal marquetry, both of which employed tortoiseshell. Standing at seven-and-a-half feet in height, the cabinet commemorates Louis XIV’s victory in the Dutch Wars of 1672–8, which ended with the Treaty of Nijmegen. The cabinet’s martial iconography includes the two large, carved and painted statues representing Hercules and Hippolyta, the Amazonian Queen, at the base of the piece and a profile portrait of Louis XIV flanked by military trophies at the top. Below the royal portrait, a large central panel of marquetry depicts the French cockerel triumphant over the eagle of the Holy Roman Empire and the lion of Spain and the Spanish Netherlands. Significantly, both the royal portrait and the symbolic triumph of France over its Spanish rivals are framed by tortoiseshell, whereby both the cabinet’s iconography and materials celebrate French military prowess and testify to the global reach of French imperial power and commerce. The snakewood, used for the drawers, is from South America, as is the inlaid horn, probably from a bull or cow, also imported from South America.40 The tortoiseshell, which is prominently featured as a framing device around the main marquetry panel, is also from the Americas. Other materials, such as ivory and ebony wood, were imported from Africa.41 In contrast to Spanish objects, the materials here maintain their separate identity within the piece, each to be admired for its own unique beauty, and each a signifier of an exotic, distant land. As a result, the tortoiseshell is much more evident. The overall tonality of Boulle’s cabinet is lighter and warmer, in contrast to the dark tone of Spanish furniture, which enhances the distinct character of the individual materials. Additionally, Boulle employed the tortoiseshell here to frame important parts of the

144

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 8.7 André Charles Boulle, Cabinet on Stand, 1675–80. Oak veneered with pewter, brass, tortoiseshell, horn, ebony, ivory, and wood marquetry; bronze mounts; figures of painted and gilded oak; drawers of snakewood. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (77.DA.1). decoration, such as the triumphant coq gallois (Gallic Rooster, the national symbol of France) in the central panel. Tortoiseshell acts as a framing device, set off from the other materials, available for the viewer’s inspection and delight. While one could argue that frames are by definition marginal, both literally and figuratively, and therefore not visually important, the use of tortoiseshell framing devices in eighteenth-century French decorative arts calls up another characterization, that by French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. In his theorization of the frame, or parergon, he suggests that the frame is a key artistic element that stages or determines our understanding of the image within it.42 Boulle’s techniques of showcasing tortoiseshell and other exotic materials within works that referenced French imperialism became even more explicit in later works, including his pedestal clocks of the 1720s, such as the example shown in Figure 8.8 from the collection of the Detroit Institute of Art, one of five similar clocks with allegorical figures representing the four continents: Europe and Asia on the front, and

Artistic Materials and Imperial Politics in Spain and France

145

Figure 8.8 André-Charles Boulle, Pedestal Clock, c. 1720. Carcass of oak with veneer of tortoiseshell; tortoiseshell and brass marquetry; and gilt bronze mounts. Detroit Institute of Art (1984.87).

Africa and America behind. Tortoiseshell is visible on the sides, in strips on the front, and on the base, material evidence of the riches alluded to by the allegories of the continents. The dark-red color of the tortoiseshell is plainly apparent, set off by the golden hue of the gilt brass figures. Two remarkable objects commissioned at the time of the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of Spanish Succession, brings the interconnections between imperialism and materiality into sharp focus. The pieces are in the style of Boulle, whose influence was facilitated by Pierre-Jean Mariette’s publication of engravings after his designs. The object in Figure 8.9 is a marquetry cabinet with the coat of arms of King Philip V of Spain, the first Bourbon King. Made by cabinetmaker Henry Van Soest (1659–1726), possibly in Antwerp, it belongs to a group of eight that all feature the monogram of

146

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 8.9 Henri Van Soest, Cabinet, c. 1701–13, detail. Oak, ebony, pine, tortoiseshell, bronze, copper, and pewter. Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid. Photo: Daderot.

Philip V and were mentioned in an inventory of Van Soest’s workshop in 1713. It is possible that Francisco María de Paula Téllez Girón, the 4th Duke of Osuna, may have requested the pieces while in attendance at the signing of the Peace of Utrecht. This example in Madrid’s National Museum of Decorative Arts was crafted from oak, ebony, pine, and tortoiseshell, with bronze, copper, and pewter, and includes carved and gilded wooden figures. An aedicule rises from the top of the cabinet, flanked by rampant golden lions representing Spain, and a pair of golden statues. The seated figure on the left represents Mars, and the semi-reclining figure wearing a feather headdress on the right is the Americas. Within the aedicule, an allegory of Peace holds an olive branch aloft, a vanquished enemy supine at her feet, both expertly rendered in marquetry. A panel of military trophies floats above her. The military trophies and allegory of Peace align with the central panel of the cabinet, bearing a full-length portrait of a triumphant King Philip V. The king appears at the center of a Roman-style tropaeum, with radiating military accoutrements, a composition that valorizes his military prowess. He stands in triumph, enemies at his feet in chains, the figure of Fame sounding her trumpet and holding Philip V’s monogram aligned below. At the bottom edge of the cabinet, aligned with this central spine of powerful images, sits a small medallion portrait of Moctezuma II, ruler of the Aztec Empire at the time of Spanish conquest. The diminutive portrait includes a depiction of the eagle and serpent, a reference to the founding of Tenochtitlán, an allusion to New Spain that amplifies the

Artistic Materials and Imperial Politics in Spain and France

147

allusion to the Americas above. Flanking the main portrait of King Philip V, four pairs of drawers, each front embellished with battle scenes in marquetry, proclaim victories in the War of the Spanish Succession. Various additional portraits of the Bourbon king, Philip V, as well as the Bourbon coat of arms, and various other escutcheons, decorate the cabinet.43 The style of Van Soest’s cabinet is very much in keeping with the previously examined objects by Boulle. The artist carefully preserved the unique identity of individual materials, highlighting their different qualities. This is achieved through the material contrast. Lighter materials form the background of the marquetry scenes, heightening the visibility of the tortoiseshell. Gilt sculptures and architectural mounts provide further contrast with the darker tortoiseshell and wood. Van Soest also reserved tortoiseshell for particular prominence, using it, as Boulle did, as a framing device. For example, a very prominent frame of reddish brown carret shell sets off the main portrait of Philip V and Fame below. Tortoiseshell also highlights the separation between the cabinet’s main body and the aedicule above, the latter created from distinctive strips of the material. French Bourbon dominion over parts of the Americas is given material form here in the use of tortoiseshell.

Empire and Materiality As our comparative examination of objects using tortoiseshell in the Spanish and French empires has demonstrated, different cultures approached and aestheticized prized materials in different ways. In this final section, we would like to suggest that these differing conceptions of empire and aesthetics are linked. The approach to tortoiseshell displayed by Spanish objects could be described as incorporative. The material was subsumed into the whole, not usually singled out or highlighted. One could further describe this approach as hegemonic, to borrow a political term, a strategy that posits parallels between the worlds of politics and materiality. We refer here to the theory of cultural hegemony first articulated by Antonio Gramsci, who observed that “[t]he power of cultural hegemony lies in its invisibility.”44 We extend Gramsci’s notion of hegemony as an invisible cultural code to the material world of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to articulate a theory of visual cultural hegemony for the Spanish Empire. With this Gramscian lens, tortoiseshell functions as a visual analogue for Spanish hegemony. Interestingly, Spanish artists’ strategies for using tortoiseshell parallel attitudes about the imposition of the Castilian language in the early modern era. The use of Castilian to join together the “member and pieces of Spain,” which were “scattered in many parts,” can be analogized to the spread of the visual arts as a tool to unify the Spanish colonies. The way that artists employed tortoiseshell, highly prized and abundant in the American colonies, is a manifestation of Spanish artistic style; it also provides a material analogue for hegemony. Tortoiseshell was incorporated into empire, normalized as yet another new, rich natural resource in the vast Spanish holdings, the empire where the sun never set.45

148

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Tortoiseshell was used differently in the French cultural sphere. With the shift in power away from Spain and to France, tortoiseshell became increasingly available in the eighteenth century. Instead of obscured or undetectable, artists in the French cultural sphere accentuated the material’s unique qualities when they used it. It, too, became an analogue for empire, but one that emphasized difference. Tortoiseshell was visible and highlighted; it was a novelty that attested to the reach of French colonialism and commerce. If the Spanish approach to empire is analogized to Gramsci’s concept of the hegemon, the French approach is more in line with Michel Foucault’s panopticon.46 In these objects, the exotic imported materials are surveilled. What was once unseen was now seen, on display for all to inspect, consume, enjoy, and control. Furthermore, the various materials displayed in French decorative objects are frequently highlighted and set off by frames of tortoiseshell, bringing to mind Derrida’s argument of the centrality of frames for understanding images. At issue are the different approaches to materiality in Spanish and French cultures. Spain possessed the largest empire that had ever existed, with trade routes around the world, and monopolies on valuable natural resources. Yet, Spanish art objects seem to hide or obscure imperial wealth. The byproducts of imperial ambition become invisible. In contrast, in the case of French decorative arts during the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV, a different visual language is at work, one that values the singular, the inimitable, the exotic, the rare. Artists employed strategies to highlight different materials, to differentiate their innate qualities, to create contrast, and thereby proclaim the geographic reach of the French king. Decorative arts objects from Spain and France articulate different visual and material syntaxes, analogues for differing languages of empire. To return to Gramsci’s discussion of cultural hegemony and consent, “If it is true that every language contains the elements of a conception of the world and of a culture, it could also be true that from anyone’s language one can assess the greater or lesser complexity of his conception of the world.”47 Or, to paraphrase, “every language contains the elements of a conception of the world.”48 We see this idea visualized in the use of tortoiseshell. The distinct visual languages employed in the Spanish and French empires encode particular conceptions of their worldviews. How artists implemented materials reveals a great deal about the conceptions of empire under which they operated. The authors wish to thank UCLA for its support of this research, as well as UCLA graduate student research assistant JoAnna Reyes Walton and Charissa Bremer-David, Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Notes 1 Dampier’s description of the Hawksbill turtle is very early; Linnaeus did not record its existence until 1766. Carolus Linnaeus, Systema naturae sive regna tria naturae, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis,

Artistic Materials and Imperial Politics in Spain and France

2 3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18

19

149

vol. 1, 12th ed. (Stockholm: Laurentii Salvii, 1766). Charles Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (London: James Knapton, 1697). Available at: http://quod.lib.umich. edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=eebo;idno=A36106.0001.001 (accessed March 8, 2017). Dampier, New Voyage,104. Examples include a biombo, or multi-screen painting, created by Mexican artist Juan Correa, The Liberal Arts (Mexico City, Franz Mayer Museum, 1690s); and a still life by Neapolitan painter Giuseppe Recco (Madrid, Museo del Prado, c. 1680), both brought to our attention by JoAnna Reyes Walton. Books about Kunstkammern feature the turtle in printed illustrations, such as in Wonder Theater of Nature, by Levinus Vincent, of 1715, and the frequently reproduced Museum Wormianum of 1655 documenting the cabinet of Danish collector Ole Worms. Dampier, New Voyage, 105. Also see, “On Horn and Tortoiseshell,” Transactions of the Society, Instituted at London, for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, 52: II (1838–9): 344. “On Horn and Tortoiseshell,” 334–49. Ibid., 344. Ibid., 345. Ibid., 344. Ibid., 345. Dampier, New Voyage, 103. “On Horn and Tortoiseshell,” 344. Ibid., 345. Several notable objects are on display in the Kunstkammer of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Noted by José Ignacio Aldama González, “Trabajos mexicanos de carey. Siglos XVII y XVIII,” in Trabajos mexicanos de carey. Siglox XVII y XVIII (Mexico City: La Cartuja, 1996), 11. Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Mexico City, Indiferente Virreinal, vol. 809, exp. 9, 47 fs., “Productor: Don Antonio Maria Bucareli Bando que libra de pago de derechos a varias mercancias de América y aminora el pago a otras para su comercio como: maderas, carey, achiote, café; publicado por Don Antonio Maria Bucareli, México. 24 de Abril de 1775”: “Que por ahora gozen de entera libertad de Derechos de entrada en Cadiz, y de mas Puertos habilitados, el Palo de Campeche, y demas maderas, sean, ò no para Tintes, de aquella, y otras partes de nuestras Indias, que vengan en nuestros Navios: Que sean igualmente libres de Derechos de entrada la Pimienta de Tabasco, ó Malaguete, las Pescas saladas, y Cera, el Carey, ô Concha, el Achiote, y el Café de los Dominios de S. M. en America.” Aldama González, Trabajos mexicanos de carey, 14. Virginia Armella de Aspe, El carey en México (Mexico City: Multibanco Comermex, 1979), 24, where she publishes the archival documents recording these objects. AGN, General de Parte, vol. 31, Exp. 131, “Marzo 14 de 1737. Para que el corregidor de la ciudad de Oaxaca proceda a entregar los escritos que se expresan a quien por parte del Gobernador don Joseph Rodesno, oidor de la Real Audiencia de Guatemala, y de dona Maria Artundaga, fuere parte legitima, ejectuando lo que se previence, los escritorios estaban fabricados de carey y plata. Oaxaca.” AGN, Archivo Histórico de Hacienda, vol. 278, Exp. 4, Sonora: 2 dozen “peinete de carey,” “estuches grandes finos de brusela,” “láminas de Roma,” and objects from Asia.

150

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

20 Armella de Aspe, El carey en Mexico, 10 (Bernal Díaz), 21 (Codex Mendoza and Fray Bernardino de Sahagún), and 18 (Fray Diego de Landa). 21 Jack Frazier and Reiko Ishihara-Brito, “The occurrence of tortoiseshell on a preHispanic Maya mosaic mask,” Antiquity 86 (2012): 825–37. 22 AGN, Indiferente Virreinal, vol. 3818, Exp. 35, “Real Hacienda. Relación de mercancias procedentes de Puebla, China y Nueva España con su precio, tales como platones de China, vasos poblanos, imágenes de la Virgen de Guadalupe, figurillas de cristal, carey y plata. Año 1796.” 23 AGN, Instituciones Coloniales/Correspondencia de Diversas Autoridades, vol. 18, Exp. 44, fs. 208–15, 220, Navios, “Comunica Miguel Joseph Gason, el arribo de las fragatas Santa Gertrudis y Esmeralda, procedentes de Cartagena de Indias, conduciendo cuentas particulares, cacao, carey y merceria. Habana. Febr 3 de 1772.” 24 For historical information, we have relied on J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (London: Penguin Books, 1990); Henry Kamen, Philip V of Spain: The King Who Reigned Twice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); and John Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 25 The Peace of Paris, 1783, reaffirmed older treaties between France and Spain. 26 Research on cochineal reveals the global importance of this new colorant, as well as the worldwide machinations to control access to the material. See, for example, Raymond Lee, “American Cochineal in European Commerce,” Journal of Modern History 23, no. 3 (1951): 205–24; R. A. Donkin, “Spanish Red: An Ethnogeographical Study of Cochineal and the Opuntia Cactus,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 67, 5 (1977): 1–84; Carmella Padilla and Barbara Anderson, eds., A Red Like No Other. How Cochineal Colored the World: An Epic Story of Art, Culture, Science, and Trade (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2015); Barbara Anderson, “Evidence of Cochineal’s Use in Painting,” in Arts, Crafts, and Materials in the Age of Global Encounters, 1492–1800, edited by Mari-Tere Álvarez and Charlene Villaseñor Black, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Special Issue, 45, no. 3 (2015): 337–66; Paula Susan De Vos, “The Science of Spices: Empiricism and Economic Botany in the Early Spanish Empire,” Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 399–427; and De Vos, “Natural History and the Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 2 (2007): 209–39. 27 M. Chambon, Le Commerce de l’Amérique par Marseille, our Explication des LettresPatentes du Roi, portant Reglement pour le Commerce qui se fait de Marseille aux Isles Françoises de l’Amérique, données au mois de Février 1719, vol. 1 (Avignon, 1764), “Carret ou Écaille de Tortue,” 449–58. 28 “Avant la découverte du Nouveau Monde, nous ne manquions pas d’écailles de tortues. L’Asie, l’Afrique, l’Europe même nous en fournissoient les quantités suffisantes à notre Commerce. Il n’y a personne parmi nous qui ignore ce que c’est qu’une tortue. Sa figure est trop remarquable, l’espéce trop commune, & l’usage trop fréquent dans nos maladies de la pointrine & de la consomption, pour que je sois obligé d’en faire une ample description,” Chambon, Commerce, 449. 29 Ibid., 456–7. 30 “Nous avons un si grand intérét aujourd’hui de connoître particulièrement la Guianne, depuis que le Gouernement nous aplanit toutes les difficultés qui pouvoient nuire au Commerce que nous offrent ces fertiles & vastes contrées, qu’il ne sera pas hors de place de dire ici un mot des tortues que ce pays fournit avec tant d’abondance, que’elles

Artistic Materials and Imperial Politics in Spain and France

31

32

33

34

35 36

37

38

39

40 41

42

151

seules suffiroient pour alimenter toutes les Colonies qu’on se propose d’y envoyer,” ibid., 454. “Les droits d’entrée dans le Royaume sur le carret provenant des Colonies Françoises, ont été fixés par les Lettre-Patentes du mois d’Avril 1717, & du mois de Février 1719, à 7 liv. du cent pesant, & celui de la traite des Noirs par Lettres-Patentes du mois de Janvier 1716, à la moitié, c’est-à-dire, à 3 liv. 10 s,” ibid., 458 The second volume of his text contains extensive information on the trade in enslaved blacks, as well as other trade with Africa. “De toutes les écailles de tortue, le carret que est celle qui provient des tortues de nos Colonies dout le dos est plus convexe que dans les franches, est sans contredit la plus belle, & qui mérite bien justement d’être la plus recherchée. Elle est plus luisante, plus lisse, plus transparente, & d’une couleur dont l’oeil est satisfait. Elle es plus maniable que celle de la tortue franche, & vaut aussi beaucoup plus,” Chambon, Commerce, 451. “Il faut choisir le carret bien transparent, uni, luisant, d’un beau noir ou d’un beau roux, our bien nuancé. Les morceaux les plus grands & les plus épais valent plus que les autres. Il faut examiner si les vers ne l’auroient pas percé, ce qui arrive lorsqu’il est gardé trop long-tems sans être remué & manié,” ibid., 457. “C’est la piéce du centre de ces figures qui est plus lisse, plus fine & plus transparente que tout le reste, que nous entendons dans le Commerce par écaille de tortue, done ou fait des boëtes, des peignes, des manches de rasoirs, des lorgnetes & plusieurs autres meubles & instrumens d’une grande propreté,” ibid., 451. See: https://www.mecd.gob.es/mnceramica/colecciones/seleccion-piezas/mobiliarioobj-decorativos-carrozas/bargueno.html (accessed August 5, 2017). Jonathan Brown and J. H. Elliott, A Palace for a King: The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 156–61; and Juan de Villarroel and Sebastián Matevat, “Don Quijote’s Barcelona: Echoes of Hercules’ Non Plus Ultra,” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 29 (2009): 107–29. On Spanish marquetry, Juan José Junquera y Mato, “La marquetería española,” Curso sobre mobiliario antiguo CD, GE publicaciones, Madrid. Available at: https://ge-iic. com/files/Publicaciones/La_marqueteria_espanola.pdf (accessed August 2, 2017). See the discussion of chiqueadores in Ilona Katzew, ed., Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici, exh. cat. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Fomento Cultural Banamex, Mexico City; Munich, London, New York: DelMonico Books and Prestel, 2017), cat. entries 80, 352–3 (Jaime Cuadriello) and 82–3, 355–7 (Ilona Katzew). This sitter is Doña Ana María de la Campa Cos (Mexico City, Rodrigo Rivero Lake Collection), and the image is reproduced in El Retrato Novohispano en el Siglo XVIII (Puebla: Museo Poblano de Arte Virreinal, 1999), 109. “On Horn and Toiseshell,” 337, for information on the trade in animal horn. For information on trade, see Marloes Rijkelijkhuizen, “Whales, Walruses, and Elephants: Artisans in Ivory, Baleen, and Other Skeletal Materials in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 13, no. 4 (2009): 409–29. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987). On “frame studies,” see Janet M. Brooke, “The Historiography of the Frame: Knowledge and Practice,” Journal of Canadian Art History 35, no. 2 (2014): 24–41.

152

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

43 See http://www.spainisculture.com/en/obras_de_excelencia/museo_nacional_de_ artes_decorativas/papelera_escritorio_ce26531.html (accessed July 30, 2017). 44 See Stuart Hall’s discussion of Gramsci in The Structured Communication of Events (Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1973), 26 and 34. 45 As friar Francisco de Ugalde commented to Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain Charles V (1500–58), Spanish dominions constituted “el imperio en el que nunca se pone el sol,” the empire where the sun never set; Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julia Barlow, The Story of Spanish (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 172; and Joseph Fouché and Alphonse de Beauchamp, The Memoirs of Joseph Fouché: Duke of Otranto, Minister of the General Police of France (Boston, MA: Wells and Lily, 1825), 314. 46 We are inspired here by Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), especially ch. 3. 47 David Forgacs, ed., An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935 (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), p. 326. 48 Ibid., editor’s introduction, 324.

9

Other Antiquities Ancients, Moderns, and the Challenge of China in Eighteenth-Century France Kristel Smentek

In the mid-1760s, the Parisian cabinet maker Pierre Roussel produced a commode in the latest taste for an unknown patron (Figure 9.1).1 Around the same time, another Parisian ébéniste, Antoine Foullet, completed an equally fashionable and costly wall clock, also for an unidentified client (Figure 9.2).2 The gilt bronze ornaments on these objects, ranging from Satyr’s heads and Greek key fretwork on the clock to the heavy swags and smoking urns on both, exemplify the so called goût à la grecque or “taste in the manner of the Greeks” that had taken hold in Paris by the 1760s. Although scholars have typically assumed eighteenth-century engagements with Greco-Roman antiquity to be incompatible with interests in China and its visual culture, in the commode and the clock, Greek elements are combined with identifiably Chinese motifs.3 The vases represented on the commode’s front and side panels are adapted from Chinese woodblock prints of vessels containing auspicious objects or items from the Chinese scholar’s studio such as flywhisks, handscrolls, and folding fans, and the clock and its console are ornamented with elaborate inlays of green, red, and cream painted horn that emulate Chinese cloisonné enamel.4 This essay probes the meanings of this fusion of motifs, arguing that it is suggestive of the comparative dimensions of the French encounter with art from China that the art-historical categories of chinoiserie and neoclassicism elide. Antiquity was multiple in this period. Although most Europeans with interests in antiquity focused primarily on the material culture of ancient Greece and Rome, that of Egypt, China, and India was also incorporated into their research. Although the antiquities of India, for instance, were frequently deployed to shore up, by comparison, the exemplarity of Greco-Roman achievements, the reception of China and its art was more complex.5 Though denigrated by some of eighteenth-century Europe’s most vocal critics, China’s distinctive cultural productions served for others as a vehicle of elite self-definition, while for still others, notably European antiquarians, China posed the conundrum of a civilization verifiably older than the biblical flood. Geographically distant, largely closed to Europeans, and only very partially understood, the Qing 153

154

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 9.1 Pierre Roussel, Commode with two drawers, c. 1765. Musée JacquemartAndré, Institut de France, Paris (inv. M 568). Photo © Studio Sebert Photographes.

imperium lent itself to the imagining of a China—tellingly, a toponym that did not align with the Qing Empire’s representation of itself—that was venerably ancient, highly sophisticated, and even morally superior to the world of the European courts.6 French elites seem to have been particularly invested in this image of China and to have grappled, to varying degrees, with its consequences for their self-understanding and for their constructions of Greco-Roman antiquity. From the invocations of China in the so-called Querelle des anciens et des modernes (the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns) that erupted in France at the end of the seventeenth century, to the presence of Chinese objects in French antiquarian collections, to the conscious emulation of Chinese antiquities at the royal porcelain manufactory at Sèvres, awareness of China’s ancient history subtly informed French constructions of the Greco-Roman past. As Craig Clunas has shown, comparative approaches undertaken by Europeans have historically assumed the superiority of Greco-Roman antiquity, and those investigated here are no exception.7 At the same time, however, these practices and objects could be said to materialize the ways in which the example of China’s great antiquity, its long history of inventions, and its art challenged European presumptions of exceptionalism and the universality of its modes of art making.

Ancients, Moderns, and the Challenge of China in France

155

Figure 9.2 Antoine Foullet, Wall Clock on Bracket, c. 1764. Oak veneered with panels of green, red, and cream painted horn, and brass; gilt bronze; enameled metal; glass. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (inv. 75.DB.7).

156

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Both the Greek and Chinese tastes were roundly critiqued by their French detractors as exemplifying the pernicious effects on art of fashionable consumption. To their eighteenth-century critics, objects in the Greek taste, with their promiscuous mingling of disparate classicizing architectural ornaments, flouted the rules of artistic decorum in ways much like those produced in the goût chinois or Chinese taste.8 (The goût chinois seems to have encompassed both Asian imports and objects made in emulation of them.) Both tastes were deemed incapable of carrying deeper meanings. As scholars have shown, however, ornament and decoration, like collecting and fashionable consumption, are multivalent in their significations, and can embody more complex cultural meanings than the superficiality with which they are often associated. To its European admirers, China was a prosperous, stable, and undeniably civilized empire, and from the beginning of the eighteenth century to its end, objects in the Chinese taste registered both the ambivalence elicited by knowledge of China’s achievements, and the imagined identification of local elites with their refined, courtly counterparts in the Qing imperium.9 At the same time, such objects testify to the asymmetries of eighteenthcentury Europe’s expanding global consciousness. Whereas the clock and its bracket are fabricated from local materials of horn and oak, the commode is veneered with tulipwood, purplewood, and rosewood, all colorful, tropical hardwoods from plantation colonies in the Americas. As Madeleine Dobie has argued, the use of these colonial products to fabricate Chinese-themed scenes can be read as a process of aestheticization in which attractive associations with the sophistication of China are highlighted at the expense of the conditions of slavery in which the wood for veneers was sourced.10 In the commode, the colonial origins of its materials are doubly sublimated by a design that links Chinese refinement to the grandeur of ancient Greece and Rome. Eighteenth-century Europeans were well aware of China’s great antiquity. Though it is not frequently acknowledged, the example of China, at once ancient and technologically advanced, hovered at the edges of the Querelle des anciens et des modernes. This debate over the relative merits of the ancients and moderns in the arts and sciences dominated intellectual life in France from 1680 to 1720 and reverberated throughout the century. In the arts and letters, the Querelle centered on the validity of Greco-Roman art as a model for contemporary European practice, and it had particularly long-lasting effects on eighteenth-century French conceptualizations of the visual arts of antiquity.11 The debate prompted intense reflection on the relation of the present to the past, and it was also the catalyst for sustained reflection on the relation of self to other, the latter incorporating both the alterity of the ancient Greeks and Romans as well as the “otherthan-self ” of the geographically distant, but contemporary cultures of the globe.12 Comparison with other cultures was not only a vehicle of French elite self-definition, but it was also a means to come to terms with the difference, or the “shock,” as Larry Norman has called it, of the antique Greco-Roman world.13 China, whose goods began to arrive in France in significant quantities by the 1680s, shadowed the Querelle from the beginning.14 Critics ranging across the spectrum of the debate leveraged the difference of Chinese art and the antiquity of the land from which it came to support their claims. In his Parallel of the Ancients and Moderns (1688–97), a key text of the Querelle, Charles Perrault celebrated the advances made in

Ancients, Moderns, and the Challenge of China in France

157

perspective, modeling, and composition by modern European painters, particularly those working in Louis XIV’s France. To elaborate his claims, he outlined a model of artistic development in which art progressed from infancy, a period in which art appealed to the senses and which Perrault, a partisan of the Moderns, equated with Greco-Roman antiquity, to one in which visual representations touched the heart, to the art of the moderns which appealed to reason.15 The example of art from China irrupted rather suddenly into his discussion and was just as abruptly dismissed. Perrault linked what he understood to be its shadowless, linear style, and its lack of perspective to art’s infancy. He explained the persistence of these “ancient” characteristics into the present by casting China and its art as static. Perrault thus brought into play a leitmotif of subsequent sinophobic accounts: though Chinese art is very ancient, they have remained at this stage. They will, perhaps, soon learn to draw correctly, and give their figures noble attitudes, and maybe even naïve expressions of the all the passions, but it will be a long time before they attain a perfect understanding of chiaroscuro, the degradation of light, the secrets of perspective, and the judicious organization of a large composition.16

Though Perrault likely saw few if any examples of Chinese or ancient Greek and Roman painting, he, nevertheless, connected visual representations from China to those of the Greco-Roman world and the unthinking (in his view) respect the latter commanded. In so doing, Perrault thoroughly dismissed the claims of either to artistic innovation. Perrault’s positioning of art from China as a foil to the superiority of modern European painting resonated throughout the eighteenth century in France. In a frequently cited passage published in the Encyclopédie in 1753, the writer and art critic Denis Diderot conceded that the Chinese were skilled artisans, but argued that they failed as artists: “The Chinese are quite good at making fabrics and porcelains, but . . . if they excel in the material they fail absolutely in taste and form . . . they have nice colors and bad painting, in short, they do not have the genius of invention and discovery that burns today in Europe.” Diderot concluded with a triumphalist declaration of European superiority: “the sciences and the arts demand a more restless urge, a curiosity that never stops seeking, a kind of incapacity for satisfaction that is more characteristic of us.”17 The shrillness of Diderot’s comments is striking, and it echoes Perrault’s. Elsewhere in the Parallèle, Perrault had explicitly denied the Chinese invention of the mariner’s compass and implicitly challenged Chinese claims to priority in the development of gunpowder weapons and printing, both of which were acknowledged in Michel de Montaigne’s widely read Essais.18 Perrault’s and Diderot’s denunciations suggest that China’s long history of discoveries elicited a sense of European belatedness, one concealed beneath the narrative of modern (European) progress proclaimed throughout their texts. If Moderns like Perrault quelled any anxieties raised by China’s achievements by denying them, advocates for the authority of the ancients could not so easily dismiss China’s long history, and French defenders of the exemplarity of Greco-Roman art deployed the difference of art from China to defend it. In response to critiques by the

158

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

moderns of the “barbarity” of Greco-Roman poetry, for example, ancient apologists historicized it, rationalizing its perceived shortcomings as the result of its production in a distant historical period. They also invoked the difference of geographically remote empires to justify it. Ancients like Jean de La Bruyère and Jean Boivin drew parallels between the pleasures of ancient art and those elicited by encounters with other parts of the world, China chief among them. In 1715, Boivin claimed that the inability to savor the art of Homer’s time was akin to the inability to appreciate: the foreign in the foreigner . . . and to expect that a Turk, an Indian, or a Chinese thinks and acts as we do . . . What pleases me in a Chinese is Chinese manners, and I would be very irritated with a painter who promised me a portrait of the emperor of China but painted him in French clothes.19

French antiquarians similarly mobilized the difference of Chinese art in defense of Greco-Roman painting. Few ancient paintings were known before the eighteenth century, and the presumed preeminence of Greco-Roman art was dealt a severe blow by the ancient Roman wall paintings uncovered at Herculaneum in 1738. Their poor modeling, incongruous proportions, and disquieting lack of perspective led the artist (and Modern) Charles-Nicolas Cochin, who saw them in situ, to describe them in 1754 as “as ridiculous as Chinese paintings.”20 In response to such claims, the prominent French antiquarian, comte de Caylus, prefaced his Recueil de peintures antiques (Collection of Ancient Paintings, 1757) with a long apology for ancient art in which he invoked Chinese painting on the first page.21 The Recueil was a compendium of handcolored reproductions of drawings by Pietro Santi Bartoli after ancient wall paintings discovered in Rome. In defense of the occasionally “shocking” character of the ancient works reproduced in his Recueil, Caylus turned Cochin’s comparison on its head.22 In the opening paragraph of his text, Caylus stated that all cultures aspired to mimetic representation, yet this universal (as he assumed) pursuit resulted in strikingly different outcomes. Just as contemporary Chinese artists working at a great remove from France produced different art, so too did ancient Roman painters: There exists a taste that dominates every age and every nation . . . that has a certain characteristic imprint and, without being able to understand why, makes the choice of colors, distribution of light and shade, and even the arrangement of figures in the composition of a painting pleasing at one time and in one place, and yet not all appreciated in others . . . so it is, to give a striking example, that in the hands of the Chinese, a people so industrious and so measured in all of its actions, painting is so completely different from ours even though we agree completely on its object and purpose. We could perhaps say the same of the painting of the ancients whose ways differ from ours in so many respects.23

Just as Chinese painting (in Caylus’s understanding) subtly challenged the supposed universality of French standards of mimetic representation, so, too, did extant ancient Roman wall paintings complicate received ideas about art in Greco-Roman antiquity.

Ancients, Moderns, and the Challenge of China in France

159

To resolve the contradiction between what he expected of ancient art and the more dismal reality of recent archeological finds, Caylus experimented with ancient painting techniques such as encaustic in order to revive the true splendors of Greco-Roman art.24 China’s antiquity also shadowed the universal histories that structured thinking on ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art. Caylus, like many other eighteenth-century Europeans, struggled to situate China’s antiquity within existing Judeo-Christian histories by connecting its history to that of ancient Egypt. China’s antiquity had exercised European biblical scholars, Enlightenment philosophes and antiquarians alike.25 Basing their work on Chinese historical documents, Jesuit scholars, beginning with Martino Martini in 1658, had established accurate histories of China that challenged biblical accounts of the flood from which Christians believed all of humanity had descended. Martini determined that Fu Xi, the legendary first emperor of China, founded the first dynasty in 2952 bce , nearly 600 years before the biblical flood as dated by European scholars. China’s ancient history thus posed a considerable challenge to the biblical view of Noah as the father of all humanity. In his illustrated, seven-volume Recueil d’antiquités (Collection of Antiquities), published from 1752–67, Caylus sought to prove, through his analysis of antique objects, that China and Egypt had traded with each other, either directly or through intermediaries.26 A demonstrable historical exchange between the two ancient empires would both substantiate Caylus’s belief in the Egyptian diffusionist thesis of the spread of culture in the ancient world, and help to resolve discrepancies between biblical accounts and Chinese annals. Caylus had little positive to say about the Chinese imports flooding into eighteenthcentury France, and he disparaged the French creations emulating them as proof of “the fantasy and bizarreness of fashion.”27 He, nevertheless, collected Chinese objects, and comments by his contemporaries suggest his pursuit of them was integrated with his antiquarian research. According to his eulogist, Charles Lebeau, Caylus repeatedly voiced his wish that he could have traveled on to China from the eastern Mediterranean (where he had been in the 1710s), and “consoled himself by gathering as many curiosities from China as possible, which the captains of India company boats were pleased to bring to him.”28 Period reports suggest Caylus arranged his collection with his claims for historical Egyptian–Chinese contact in mind. Lebeau noted that visitors to Caylus’s collection first encountered a large Egyptian sculpture in the foyer, then mounted a staircase featuring objects from China and the Americas before entering the cabinet of antiquities. A later commentator linked Caylus’s display of his collection to the theory, propounded by the linguist Joseph de Guignes, that China was formerly a colony of Egypt: From the gods to reptiles, everything that was antique found a place in his cabinet. But he preferred that which came to him from ancient Egypt: the entrance to his house, dedicated to this mother of the arts, opened with an Egyptian statue. Medals and curiosities from China covered the walls of the staircase, and this arrangement was not by accident. The comte de Caylus considered China to be a colony of ancient Egypt; he even sought to prove, with monuments, relations of which Mr. de Guignes initially had only an inkling.29

160

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Caylus remained undecided about de Guignes’s thesis, but it attracted many adherents. Founded ultimately on a perceived similarity between Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs, de Guignes’s Egyptian proposal reconciled conflicting biblical and Chinese chronologies, while also denying the Chinese any indigenous claim to their technological and artistic achievements.30 Identifying the Chinese objects Caylus collected has proven difficult. The inventory of his estate taken in 1765 records a number of items from China, including hardstone table screens, paintings, and objects in metal and porcelain, though where they were located in his residence is not always noted. The inventory also documents a small room off the main staircase of his house filled with numerous Chinese imports, mostly porcelain. Perhaps these are the Chinese objects referred to by Lebeau and Gautier Dagoty, as none were inventoried in the staircase itself.31 How Caylus interpreted these objects from China is unclear, as evaluative criteria for them were far from established. A sense of the difficulty faced by Europeans in dating Chinese porcelain, for example, is embedded in the dealer J. B. P. Lebrun’s dismissive comment in 1781 that, “unlike ancient medals, [Asian] porcelains do not provide any knowledge of distant times. Old porcelain, though it may be ornamented with some Chinese characters, marks no point of history.”32 Despite his promotion of historical Sino-Egyptian contact, Caylus did not reproduce any antiquities from China in his many publications, an omission suggestive of his ambivalence but perhaps also of his uncertainty. With very few scholars in eighteenth-century Europe able to read Chinese characters and little sure knowledge about the dating or even the appearance of actual Chinese antiquities, the material study of China’s ancient heritage was limited indeed. This was a gap in knowledge that Caylus’s near contemporary, the French statesman Henri-Léonard Bertin, hoped to fill. Like Caylus, Bertin believed the study of objects to be essential to understanding China and its history. Unlike Caylus, he had a direct conduit to Beijing, a link made possible by his unusual encounter in 1764 with two Chinese Catholics known by their Christian names as Aloys Ko (1732–after 1795?) and Étienne Yang (1733–98?).33 As the minister in charge of the French East India Company at the time, Bertin met the two priests when they sought to return to China on a company ship after several years of study in France. Through the mediation of Ko and Yang and the French Jesuits in Beijing who protected them upon their return, Bertin was able to circumvent Qing restrictions on foreigners and foreign exchange to the port of Canton (Guangzhou). Instead of the “China” fabricated by Canton merchants, from 1766 until he went into exile in 1791, the minister acquired antiquities from China and representations of them unavailable to most Europeans.34 Few of the objects sent to Bertin from Beijing have been matched to extant Chinese artworks, despite the detailed lists of them made at the time. The documents indicate that among the porcelains, jades, and rootwood carvings Bertin received were some items assumed to be antique, including porcelain said by his correspondent to date from its earliest invention in the Han dynasty (206 bce –220 ce ).35 Most of the identifiable Chinese antiquities in Bertin’s collection, however, came to him in either the form of painted images that were executed for him in Beijing or in woodblock printed books.36 Bertin’s ministerial brief included oversight of the French royal

Ancients, Moderns, and the Challenge of China in France

161

porcelain factory at Sèvres, and the images he received from Beijing motivated several experiments at the manufactory. These included the so-called vase Japon (Japanese vase) produced in 1774, which, despite its name, emulates an ancient Chinese bronze you form (Figure  9.3). Bertin encountered the bronze model in the Qinding Xiqing gujian (Imperially Ordained Mirror of Antiquities Prepared in the Xiqing Hall), a comprehensive, illustrated catalog of the imperial collection of bronzes compiled from 1749 to 1755 at the behest of the Qianlong emperor (Figure 9.4). A copy was sent to Bertin from Beijing in the 1760s.37

Figure 9.3 Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, Vase Japon, 1774. Hard-paste porcelain with silver-gilt mount. The Frick Collection, New York (inv. 2011.9.01).

162

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 9.4 Bronze in You form, Qinding Xiqing gujian, Beijing, 1755. Special and Area Studies Collection, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. For Bertin, the Xiqing gujian provided precious documentation of China’s ancient “monuments.” It also constituted remarkable visual evidence of the complementarity of Chinese and Greco-Roman antiquities. As Bertin wrote to Ko and Yang in 1771, he detected a striking similarity in form and quality between the ancient bronzes depicted in the woodcuts and the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities reproduced in recent European antiquarian texts, including those published by Caylus: “I was surprised to see almost all of those that the Greeks and the Romans dedicated to their sacrifices. The beauty of the forms is identical. Some closely resemble the Egyptian monuments that one finds in books of antiquities by Montfaucon, Kircher, La Chausse, Caylus, etc.”38 Although Bertin’s Jesuit correspondents in Beijing insisted on the particularity of China’s antiquity, and sought to convince him that it was “an antiquity very differently antique . . . than that of the Greeks and Egyptians,” the minister persisted in his comparisons.39 In 1774, he referenced the book’s illustrations again, describing them as representing “the most beautiful forms of vases, vases that the Greeks and Romans would not have disdained to place in their collections.” He regretted, however, that he had no one to explain the uses of the vessels to him or to translate the characters accompanying each bronze which he interpreted as articulating the principles regulating their design.40 (Bertin’s complaints that only two or three scholars in Paris could manage to decipher a few Chinese characters and then only with great difficulty is indicative of the challenges faced at the time by those interested in China and its art).41 In the absence of such knowledge, Bertin resorted, much like Caylus before him, to technical experimentation, instructing the ceramicists at Sèvres to interpret the forms and decoration of the bronzes

Ancients, Moderns, and the Challenge of China in France

163

by translating them into porcelain. In so doing, the ceramicists were also engaged in a practice analogous to the Chinese translation of antiquities from one medium into another, a practice with which Bertin’s correspondents in Beijing had familiarized him. Although many in France denounced China’s achievements, Bertin’s initiative suggests that others could imagine the French and the Chinese as similar in some domains while also respecting their differences in others.42 One form this assumed commensurability took was their mutual respect for antiquity. Such complementarity was perhaps what Bertin had in mind when several years later, in 1785, he sent two vases Japon to Beijing to be presented to the Qianlong emperor. Whether the vases were actually offered to the emperor is unknown, but Bertin’s gift would have conveyed French appreciation of Chinese antiquities and his awareness of the practice of translating ancient bronze forms into porcelain in Chinese art. Like the other presents he sent to Beijing, Bertin’s gift was far from disinterested; the minister hoped to interest the Qing court in Sèvres porcelain and other French luxury productions, and he also hoped to forge strategic alliances between the French and Qing empires. At the same time, the gift of the vases also materialized Bertin’s belief “in a conformity of customs, genius and character . . . between the Chinese and the French, the two nations that can be considered the most polite and the most sociable of the universe.”43 The history of the vase Japon is unusual, but the interest in Chinese antiquities among some French scholars and collectors that it exemplifies is not. It was an interest that bridged the years of the French Revolution and continued into the nineteenth century. Napoleon’s art advisor and the first director of the Louvre Museum, Dominique Vivant Denon, for instance, owned numerous Chinese objects, ranging from hand scrolls to bronzes to the figure of a Daoist immortal with which he chose to be depicted (Figure 9.5).44 In this print, after a painting probably dating from c. 1813, a statue of Shou Xing, then identified as representing Confucius, takes its place among Denon’s collection of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquities.45 Among sinophiles, Confucius was the human embodiment of China’s moral philosophy; the portrait thus stages an intriguing juxtaposition of Chinese moral exemplarity with the aesthetic exemplarity of GrecoRoman art.46 The pairing also signals Denon’s openness to the difference of Chinese art. According to Lady Morgan, who visited him in 1816, Denon prized his Chinese figures as much, if not more, than his Egyptian, Greek, and Roman statues: “Among his Grecian bronzes, he most values a beautiful little figure of Jupiter Stator: but he considers the specimens he has obtained of Chinese workmanship in this art as equal, if not superior, to every other.”47 Yet, if the portrait conveys Denon’s appreciation of multiple antiquities, it seems also to register some hesitancy about them. In the picture, the statuette of the seated Jupiter Stator is depicted at a scale much larger than its actual height, and positioned such that it rises above the figure of Shou Xing.48 China’s antiquity was widely, if ambivalently, acknowledged by French commentators, but it was poorly understood in material terms. Few actual antiquities reached European shores in the eighteenth century, and eighteenth-century Europeans were ill equipped to recognize any that had. Like the early Qing woodblock prints Roussel

164

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 9.5 Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse and Honoré Gabriel Camion after René Theodore Berthon, Baron Vivant-Denon in His Cabinet, lithograph. Photo by Daniel Arnaudet, © Musée du Louvre, Paris, France RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York.

Ancients, Moderns, and the Challenge of China in France

165

adapted for his designs and the Chinese enamels Foullet drew upon for the ornamentation of his clock, Denon’s statue of Shou Xing/Confucius was likely recently made. Though not antiques themselves, these imports were the products of an ancient and enduring civilization that had flourished for far longer than that of Europe. Chinese and Chinese-themed objects thus could connote both the sophistication of the distant imperium and its great antiquity. These significations were further heightened by the juxtaposition of objects from China with Greco-Roman art in the collector’s cabinet, or the combination of Chinese motifs with classicizing ornament on objects in the taste in the manner of the Greeks. China was not central to eighteenth-century European conceptualizations of Greco-Roman antiquity nor to the artistic canon of classicism subsequently established upon them; there are far more objects in the gout à la grecque that ignore, rather than include, references to China. Instead, like the implements of the scholar’s studio on Roussel’s cabinet, the Daoist immortal in Vivant Denon’s portrait, or the curiosities displayed in Caylus’s staircase, the example of China hovered at the edges of European thinking about art and its history. China’s art and the long history it metaphorically embodied not only presented a visible alternative to European artistic conventions, but it also put pressure on those who encountered it to define, and defend, the exceptionalism of European art and of the antiquity upon which it was founded. My warmest thanks to the editors for their comments and to Pierre Curie and Caroline Chenevez at the Musée Jacquemart-André for their generous help. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

Notes 1 François Quéré, Les Roussel: une dynastie d’ébénistes au XVIIIe siècle (Dijon: Faton, 2012), 35, 180, 182–3. At least two other eighteenth-century commodes with the same décor are extant. See ibid., 34. 2 Gillian Wilson et al., European Clocks in the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA: Museum, 1996), 108–13, cat. 15. 3 See also the numerous examples of Chinese porcelains mounted in French gilt bronze settings in the “goût à la grecque,” in, for example, Le goût à la grecque: la naissance du néoclassicisme dans l’art français. Chef-d’œuvres du Musée du Louvre, ed. Marie-Laure de Rochebrune and Catherine Gougeon (Athens: National Gallery–Alexandros Soutzos Museum, 2009). 4 For examples of these woodblock prints, see The Printed Image in China: From the 8th to the 21st Centuries, edited by Clarissa von Spee (London: British Museum Press, 2010), 91, cat. 29; and Bertrand Guillet et al., La soie et le canon: France-Chine 1700–1850 (Paris: Gallimard and Nantes: Musée d’histoire de Nantes, 2010), 144, cat. 2.52 and 2.53. 5 On responses to art from India, see Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 6 Lydia He Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 76–81; Jonathan Hay, “Foreword,”

166

7

8

9 10 11

12

13 14

15 16

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

in Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West, edited by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Ning Ding (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2015), viii. Craig Clunas, “Art of Global Comparisons,” in Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the 21st Century, edited by Maxine Berg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 165–76. On critical responses to the gout à la grecque, see Marie-Pauline Martin, “L’ornement rocaille vs l’imaginaire à l’antique?” in Ornements: XVe–XIXe siècles. Chefs-d’œuvre de la Bibliothèque de l’INHA, collections Jacques Doucet, edited by Lucie Fléjou and Michaël Decrossas (Paris: Mare & Martin/Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), 2014), 240–9. Greg M. Thomas, “Yuanming Yuan/Versailles: Intercultural Interactions between Chinese and European Palace Cultures,” Art History 32 (2009): 115–43. Madeleine Dobie, Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), 63. Studies of the afterlife of the quarrel in eighteenth-century French debates on ancient art include Chantal Grell and Christian Michel, “Érudits, hommes de lettres et artistes en France au XVIIIe siècle face aux découvertes d’Herculanum,” Ercolano 1738–1988: 250 anni di ricerca archeologica, edited by Luisa Franchi dell’Orto (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1993), 133–44; Christian Michel, “Les découvertes d’Herculanum et la Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes,” Bulletin de la société de l’histoire de l’art français (1984): 105–17. See also, Élisabeth Décultot, “Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Une ‘esthétique’ en réponse à la Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes,” in Théories et débats esthétiques au dix-huitième siècle: éléments d’une enquête/Debates on Aesthetics in the Eighteenth Century: Questions of Theory and Practice, edited by Élisabeth Décultot and Mark Ledbury (Paris: Honoré Campion, 2001), 233–52. Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Larry F. Norman, The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011). “Other-than-self ” is Salvatore Settis’s term. See Settis, The Future of the “Classical,” translated by Allan Cameron (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 97. See also François Hartog, Anciens, modernes, sauvages (Paris: Galaade, 2005). Norman, Shock of the Ancient. Eun Kyung Min has argued for the centrality of China to the quarrel between the ancients and moderns in England; its role in the French debate is less studied. Eun Kyung Min, “China between the Ancients and the Moderns,” The Eighteenth Century 45, no. 2 (2004): 115–29. On the increasing presence of Chinese objects in late seventeenth-century France, see, H. Belevitch-Stankevich, Le goût chinois en France au temps de Louis XIV (Paris, 1910; reprint Geneva: Slatkine, 1970). On the conceptualization of antiquity as infancy, see Norman, Shock of the Ancient, 63–7. Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences, 4 vols (Paris: Coignard, 1688–97), vol. 1, 208–9, translated in Paul Wood, Western Art in the Wider World (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 67. See also Elizabeth Lavezzi, “Painting and the Tripartite Model in Charles Perrault’s Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes,” in Ancients and Moderns in Europe: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Paddy Bullard and Alexis Tadié (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2016), 160–1 and 168.

Ancients, Moderns, and the Challenge of China in France

167

17 Denis Diderot, “Chinois, Philosophie des,” Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de lettres (Paris, 1751–65), vol. 3, 347. 18 Perrault, Parallèle, vol. 4, 88–90; Michel de Montaigne, Les essais, edited by Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien, and Catherine Magnien-Simonin (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 952; Norman, Shock of the Ancient, 233, n. 16. Montaigne’s essays were first published in 1580 and continued to be widely read in eighteenth-century France. 19 Jean Boivin, Apologie d’Homère et bouclier d’Achille (Paris, 1715), 47; Douglas Lane Patey, “Ancients and Moderns,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 4: The Eighteenth Century, edited by H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 57; Norman, Shock of the Ancient, 39. 20 Charles Nicolas Cochin and Jérôme-Charles Bellicard, Observations sur les antiquités de la ville d’Herculanum; avec quelques réflexions sur la peinture & la sculpture des anciens; & une courte description de quelques antiquités des environs de Naples (Paris: Jombert, 1754), 50. 21 Recueil des peintures antiques, imitées fidèlement pour les couleurs & pour le trait, d’après les desseins coloriés faits par Pietre-Sante Bartoli (Paris: n.p., 1757). For the most recent study of the Recueil de peintures with further bibliography, see Erminia Gentile Ortona and Mirco Modolo, Caylus e la riscoperta della pittura antica attraverso gli acquarelli di Pietro Santi Bartoli per Luigi XIV. Genesi del primo libro di storia dell’arte a colori (Rome: De Luca Editori d’Arte, 2016). 22 The description of a painting representing the birth of Venus reproduced in the Recueil de peintures highlighted the “shocking” lack of proportion among the figures: “one cannot but be shocked by the disproportion of the figures in this composition,” Recueil des peintures antiques, 25, description of plate 25. 23 Ibid., 1–2. 24 Michel, “Les découvertes d’Herculanum,” 114–15. 25 Edwin J. Van Kley, “Europe’s ‘Discovery’ of China and the Writing of World History,” American Historical Review 76, no. 2 (1971): 358–85; Kyung Min, “China,” 116–17. 26 See, for example, Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières, comte de Caylus, Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises, 7 vols (Paris: Desaint et Saillant; Tilliard, 1752–67), vol. 5, 50. 27 Ibid., vol. 4, 256. 28 Charles Lebeau, “Éloge historique de M. le Comte de Caylus,” in Caylus, Recueil d’antiquités, vol. 7, vii. 29 Lebeau, “Éloge historique,” xvii; Jean Baptiste André Gautier Dagoty, Galerie Françoise, ou Portraits des hommes et des femmes célèbres qui ont paru en France (Paris: Herissant le fils, 1770), no. 5, p. 7. 30 Joseph de Guignes, Mémoire dans lequel on prouve que les Chinois sont une colonie égyptienne (Paris: Desaint et Saillant, 1759); S. A. M. Adshead, “China a Colony of Egypt: An Eighteenth-Century Controversy,” Asian Profile 12, no. 2 (1984): 113–27. On Caylus’s reservations about the Egyptian colonization thesis, see, for example, AnneClaude-Philippe de Tubières, comte de Caylus, “Comparaison de quelques anciens monumens des diverses parties de l’Asie,” Histoire de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, avec les Mémoires de littérature tirés des registres de cette Académie 31 (1768): 41.

168

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

31 Caylus’s probate inventory is partially transcribed in Cordélia Hattori, “Le comte de Caylus d’après les archives: première partie,” Les Cahiers d’histoire de l’art 5 (2007): 54–70. 32 J. B. P. Lebrun, Catalogue raisonné des marbres . . . formant le cabinet de Madame la Duchesse Mazarin (Paris: n.p., 1781), 17. 33 Henri-Bernard Maître, “Deux chinois du XVIIIème siècle à l’école des physiocrates français,”Bulletin de l’Université l’Aurore (1949): 154–97. 34 On Bertin’s exchanges with the Beijing court, see Kristel Smentek, “Chinoiseries for the Qing: A French Gift of Tapestries to the Qianlong Emperor,” Journal of Early Modern History 20 (2016): 87–109; Constance Bienaimé and Patrick Michel, “Portrait du singulier Monsieur Bertin, ministre investi dans les affaires de la Chine,” in La Chine à Versailles: art et diplomatie au XVIIIe siècle, edited by Marie-Laure de Rochebrune (Paris: Somogy, and Versailles: Château de Versailles, 2014), 150–7, as well as several catalog entries in the same publication; and Gwynne Lewis, “Henri-Léonard Bertin and the Fate of the Bourbon Monarchy: The ‘Chinese’ Connection,” in Enlightenment and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Norman Hampson, edited by Malcolm Crook, William Doyle, and Alan Forrest (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 69-90. 35 “Extrait d’un catalogue de bagatelles chinoises, envoyées par le père Amiot en 1779,” Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter, BnF), Ms. Bréquigny 3, f. 104v-105. 36 Several examples of the images and books sent to Bertin are reproduced in La Chine à Versailles. 37 Bertin’s copy is now in the BnF, Ms. Chinois 1139. See Monique Cohen and Nathalie Monnet, Impressions de Chine (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1992), 141. For a more extensive study of the vase Japon, see Kristel Smentek, “China and Greco-Roman Antiquity: Overture to a Study of the Vase in Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal18, 1 (Spring 2016), available at: http://www.journal18.org/497 (accessed September 10, 2018). On the use of other models sent from China at Sèvres, see Selma Schwartz, “In the Chinese Taste,” Apollo (September 2012): 68–73; and Kee Il Choi, Jr., “Portraits of Virtue: Henri-Léonard Bertin, Joseph Amiot and the ‘Great Man’ of China,” Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, 80 (2015–16): 49–65. 38 Henri-Léonard Bertin to Aloys Ko and Étienne Yang, Versailles, December 23, 1771, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France (hereafter, BI), Ms. 1521, f. 148r. 39 Joseph-Marie Amiot to Henri-Léonard Bertin, Beijing, September 15, 1776, BI, Ms. 1515, f. 97v. 40 Henri-Léonard Bertin to Aloys Ko and Étienne Yang, Paris, January 18, 1774, BI, Ms. 1522, f. 57r-v. 41 Henri-Léonard Bertin to Joseph-Marie Amiot, Paris, December 11, 1784, BI, Ms. 1524, f. 37r. 42 Thomas, “Yuanming Yuan/Versailles.” 43 [Henri-Léonard Bertin] “Instruction pour M. Ko et pour M. Yang,” BI, Ms. 1521, January 16, 1765, f. 71v. 44 In the otherwise thorough investigation of the contents of Denon’s cabinet in MarieAnne Dupuy, Dominique-Vivant Denon: l’oeil de Napoléon (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1999), Denon’s collection of Chinese objects is mentioned only in passing. His collection of Chinese ceramics is surveyed in Tamara Préaud, “Denon collectionneur de céramiques,” in Les vies de Dominique-Vivant Denon, 2 vols, edited by Daniella Gallo (Paris: La documentation française, 2001), vol. 2, 651–67.

Ancients, Moderns, and the Challenge of China in France

169

45 The figure is identified as Confucius in L.-J.-J. Dubois, Description des objets d’arts qui composent le cabinet de feu M. le baron V. Denon . . . Monuments antiques, historiques, modernes, ouvrages orientaux; etc. (Paris: Hippolyte Tilliard, 1826), 237, lot. 1079. The statue was reproduced, but its identification as Confucius disputed, in the posthumous publication of objects from Denon’s collection, Monuments des arts du dessin chez les peoples tant anciens que modernes recueillies par Vivant Denon, pour server à l’histoire des arts; lithographiés par ses soins et sous ses yeux. Décrits et expliqués par Amaury Duval, 4 vols (Paris: Brunet Denon, 1829), vol. 1, section 4, plate 19. 46 On eighteenth-century French understandings of Confucius, see Paola Dematté, “A Confucian Education for Europeans,” Art Bulletin 98 (2016): 43–71, with further bibliography. 47 Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), France (London: H. Colburn, 1817), 45; Barbara Steindl, “La documentation graphique sur la collection de Vivant Denon et les Monuments des Arts du dessin: un essai de reconstitution,” in Les vies de DominiqueVivant Denon, Gallo, ed., vol. 2, 781–2. 48 Dupuy, L’oeil de Napoleon, 484, no. 614. According the catalog of Denon’s estate sale, the statue of Jupiter measured 7 pouces in height and the figure of Shou Xing/Confucius measured 1 pied, 11 lignes. See, Dubois, Description des objets, 68, no. 303, and 237, no. 1079.

170

10

Drifting Through the Louvre A Local Guide to the French Academy Hannah Williams

Largely thanks to its pre-eminent Academy, France has played a starring role in the story of eighteenth-century Western art. When the institution was established in 1648, the small group of founding artists—among them Charles Le Brun, Sébastien Bourdon, Eustache Le Sueur, and Laurent de La Hyre—had looked to the academies of sixteenthcentury Italy as models. But by the eighteenth century, it was the Parisian school, the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which had become the institution for international emulation.1 This was the center of European art theory, education, and practice; and an exemplar for academic art institutions established across the world, from London, Copenhagen, and Madrid, to St Petersburg, Philadelphia, and Mexico City.2 Yet, somewhat paradoxically, the French Academy’s centrality in the global eighteenth-century art world, and in art history’s subsequent narratives, has led to a certain obscurity when it comes to our understanding of the institution itself. We know the French Academy so well in one sense that we do not realize how little we know of it in another. An abstract megalith of an institution, the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture is immediately recognizable as a signifier of establishment cultural ideologies, early modern art theory, or academic methods of training and styles of artmaking. But what of the living community of artists who composed its membership, those people who actually did the teaching, training, making, and theorizing? And most crucially for this book, what of the Academy as an inhabited place, a physical site occupied by those active agents?3 Making space and place the focus of inquiry, this essay offers a re-encounter with the French Academy as an institution located somewhere. Taking a local view of this global center—a ground-level perspective on this vital node in international cultural and intellectual networks—this essay wanders inside the palace of the Louvre, where the Academy was housed for over a hundred years, to discover lived experiences in material environments. Using eighteenth-century maps, architectural plans, paintings, prints, guidebooks, and inventories, this essay locates the Academy and explores the neighborhood at the center of Paris’s eighteenth-century art world through contemporary sources that suggest how these spaces were viewed, represented, described, used and understood by 171

172

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

their eighteenth-century agents. Pictorial images depicting the interior spaces of the Louvre are quite rare, but other representations (both written and diagrammatic) are more plentiful, and when pieced together permit a reconstruction of the Academy’s former apartments, long since transformed, particularly during the Louvre’s extensive nineteenth-century renovations. Among the most crucial sources for this project are several descriptions and inventories of the Academy’s apartments taken at different moments across the century. Nicolas Guérin, the institution’s secrétaire (secretary), wrote a detailed Description de l’Académie in 1715, complete with engraved elevations showing the distribution of objects in the rooms. At the other end of the century, the amateur, Antoine-Nicolas Dézallier d’Argenville, wrote an updated (though unillustrated) Description sommaire des ouvrages de . . . l’Académie Royale (1781), and a detailed inventory of the apartments was made in Year II (1793), when, following the Academy’s closure, its rooms were appropriated for new museological uses by the emerging republican regime. Walking around the Louvre today, this long-gone Academy is difficult to find. Where its apartments once began, we encounter instead the cavernous hall presided over by the Winged Victory of Samothrace, standing on her prow at the top of the Daru Staircase. In a space of such monumental scale, it is not easy to recapture the human activities and quotidian comings-and-goings of eighteenth-century artists. But, although the Louvre’s spaces have been transformed almost beyond recognition from their eighteenth-century selves, the place is unaltered in its significance. However the material environment evolves, the site itself endures. This is where the Academy was, where its institutional life was lived, where every member was admitted, every arttheoretical lecture delivered, every exhibition hung, every drawing class and meeting held, every decision taken, and where every argument and controversy was launched, played out, and resolved.4 This was the stage on which the great moments of eighteenthcentury French art history were performed, and, to borrow Gaston Bachelard’s words, “in the theatre of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant rôles”.5 Whatever architectural, structural, and decorative changes have altered the space, the place remembers its history. And in the Louvre of today, still such a crucial national site for French cultural heritage and such an important international site for art and material culture, those memories of place are still very present, even if they live on in markedly different ways from their eighteenthcentury past. Drifting through the Louvre with psychogeographical intent, this essay looks for a way into the Academy, to glimpse, for the art-historical wanderer, historical traces of the eighteenth-century art world through the structures of the contemporary city. Reading the past through the present, this approach is informed by the objectives of psychogeography, a study of urban environments that emphasizes inventive explorations of space. But inspiration is drawn as much from the discipline’s eighteenthcentury forerunners as from its twentieth-century theorists.6 Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722), for instance, offers an evocative model of urban exploration and historical narration, while Xavier de Maistre’s delightfully imaginative Voyage autour de ma chambre (1794) provides an intimate encounter with the detail of lived

The Louvre: A Local Guide to the French Academy

173

space. Rather than a complete description, my intention here is instead a creative phenomenological exercise made in the spirit of texts like these. What follows is an imagined dérive, to invoke Guy Debord’s term, a playful but strategic passage through space.7 Reconstructing a walk into and through the eighteenth-century Louvre, this dérive discovers the habitual activities once enacted within the Academy’s rooms, relocates the objects that used to inhabit them, and retraces the daily trajectories of the artists who passed through the palace. Traipsing along city streets, through buildings, down corridors, up staircases, and into rooms, this drift is an effort to put space and place at the center of a historical inquiry into this pre-eminent art world institution. The French Academy has long been encountered and represented in art history through the written word (its art-theoretical lectures, members’ writings, or art criticism), and through images and objects (the artworks its members produced). Space and place—like texts, images, and objects—are important primary sources, but they offer different kinds of historical insights. Exploring, reconstructing, and interrogating space and place is, for instance, an invaluable process in the pursuit of that most elusive goal, the history of experience.8 What was it like being a member of the Academy? What was it like living in the Louvre? What was it like attending the Salon exhibitions? In a phenomenological approach to the past, space and place become powerful sources for understanding the lived experience of historical agents. A spatial lens focuses attention not only on locations and structures (the physical aspects of space and place), but also on temporality, duration, action, and movement (its use and engagement). In other words, a spatial art history invites us to shift momentarily from the well-known whatness of the Academy, to encounter instead its less familiar whereness, whenness, and howness. Staying close to the ground, this essay, in a historiographical sense, also makes a pitch for the “local” in the ever-expanding terrain of global art histories. Politically, socially, and culturally, it is vital to conceptualize the bigger world picture into which traditionally canonical sites (like Paris) fall. But methodologically, a real understanding of any site can only be achieved with depth of cultural knowledge. Art historians need to know spaces, places, and objects with the intimacy of a local inhabitant; like cultural anthropologists, we need to speak the language of our informants and be immersed in their lives and experiences. Without this deep knowledge, the risk is the creation of a vast but thin picture, a basic sketch of eighteenth-century art worlds that lacks the detail and texture that comes from profound cultural understanding. To find the richer picture, we need a local’s eye to fill in the gaps and move us beyond the surface.

From the Street Taking Turgot’s isometric map as a guide (Figure 10.1), imagine a passage through the streets of eighteenth-century Paris (for map-reading purposes, note that Turgot’s map is oriented to the southeast of the city, not to the north). Coming from the center of town, you head west along the major thoroughfare of Rue Saint-Honoré, which runs through Paris’s Right Bank quarters. Walk as far as the Place du Palais Royal, then cross

174

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 10.1 Detail of the “Quartier du Louvre” from Louis Bretez, Plan de Paris dessiné et gravé sous les ordres de Michel-Étienne Turgot, 1739. Engraving. Image in the public domain.

the square, and heading past the Château d’Eau (where locals get fresh water) take the narrow entrance to Rue Frementeau. The street has a slightly dubious reputation as an enclave for “femmes publiques” (public women), but it has also been home to many artists, among them Jean-Marc Nattier, Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, and Augustin Pajou, who chose Rue Frementeau as an address for its convenient proximity to the Academy, like so many of their colleagues who found residences in this warren of streets around the palace.9 Halfway along Rue Frementeau, a gap in the buildings on the left opens up to reveal the large, oddly shaped Place du Louvre, with the west wing of the old palace forming its longest side. Make your way across the square and in the middle of the west wing, flanked by two protective ditches, you will find the palace’s main entrance, the portail du Louvre. The Louvre was the geographical center of Paris’s art world in the eighteenth century. Now home to the Musée du Louvre, the building maintains its artistic vitality within the French capital, but when the First Republic bestowed its modern museological identity, this was merely a perpetuation of the role the palace had played for over a century as the city’s cultural hub.10 When Louis XIV moved the French Court to Versailles in 1682, he left the Louvre to the artists, artisans, and men of letters who had already been occupying parts of the palace for years. The Académie Française had been resident since 1672; in 1685, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres

The Louvre: A Local Guide to the French Academy

175

moved in; the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture and the Académie d’Architecture followed in 1692; and then the Académie des Sciences in 1699. Thus transformed into the nation’s Kulturforum, the Louvre emerged as the focal point of the city’s creative and scholarly life. Along with the academies, it housed the Imprimerie Royale (Royal Printer) and the Menus Plaisirs du Roi (responsible for designing royal ceremonies, spectacles and theater sets), as well as large and important royal collections in the Salle des Antiques, the Cabinet des Tableaux, and the Cabinet des Dessins, and it became the site of the city’s celebrated public art exhibitions, first in the Grande Galerie then later in the Salon Carré. At the same time, it was also home to hundreds of artists and artisans, who lived in logements and apartments all over the palace, mostly in the long Galerie du Louvre (the palace’s long southern limb running along the Seine) but also increasingly in the old Louvre, tucked in between state institutions, royal collections, and the apartments of nobles.11 As the Louvre itself turned into the city’s primary artistic neighborhood in the early eighteenth century, those artists not lucky enough to be granted space within the palace were often drawn to make their home nearby, finding lodgings (like Nattier, Perronneau, and Pajou) in the streets just beyond its walls. Modern urban planning has transformed the Louvre quarter to eliminate every trace of the muddle of side streets through which the eighteenth-century palace was reached. Razed in the nineteenth century—much of it at the hands of Baron Haussmann—to make way for the vast expanse of the Cour Napoléon, the insistent artery of the Rue de Rivoli, and the new Louvre’s northern limb (built to match its southern riverside cousin), the neighborhood has seen dramatic development from residential quarter to national monument. But even in the eighteenth century, major construction was the norm, and residents of the palace and its local streets became habituated to urban change and its necessary inconveniences. One major project was the freeing of Claude Perrault’s grand Colonnade (completed around 1670) from the buildings of Rue des Poulies and Rue du Petit Bourbon, which ran right up along the palace’s east wing. For years during the middle of the eighteenth century, this building site along the eastern perimeter extended the pockets of construction that were already being undertaken around the palace itself, not least in the east and north wings, which, as Turgot’s map shows, were actually even missing roofs for much of the period. For the Louvre, the eighteenth century was a kind of ungainly adolescence, after its elegant renaissance youth, before its debonair nineteenth-century maturity, and long before its eclectic and dynamic present. In this constantly evolving space, with its material renovations, shifting populations, and varying purposes, change was the common experience, even for its grand institutional residents. Although the Academy moved into the Louvre in 1692, it did not find a permanent home there for nearly thirty years. In 1712, it relocated from the first floor to the ground floor, where it stayed until 1721, until finally taking up residence back on the first floor, where it would remain until its end.12 These apartments where the Academy would reside for the rest of the century can be found on Turgot’s map just by the terminal “e” of the words “Place du Louvre,” in that jointed annex that connected the main palace to its riverside limb. With its royal address, the Academy achieved all the prestige and authority that

176

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

a state institution could want, but its location at this fulcrum between the old palace (home to most of the academies and collections) and the Galerie du Louvre (home to the city’s artists) reminds us of the heterogeneous space within which it was nestled: a palace neighborhood where royal, state, institutional, professional, domestic, and public coexisted, overlapping, encroaching, resisting, invading, and living their lives together.13

Getting in Entrance to the Louvre today mostly takes place underground, either by descending through I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid, or by navigating the subterranean shopping center under the Place du Carrousel.14 In the eighteenth century, however, the palace was accessed more conventionally through entrances on the ground floor, like the main portail in the west wing at which we arrived after traversing the Place du Louvre. Here, open doors led through to a covered porch, large enough for carriages to pass through, although it was a tight squeeze and they often clipped the two rows of Ionic columns running down the center.15 Large staircases on either side of the porch led up to the first floor, or you could go straight through to the Cour Carrée, although passage could be blocked by an iron grill, and you had to get past the suisses (the Swiss mercenaries responsible for guarding royal buildings), whose guardhouse was in the porch. Yet, despite this show of security at the main entrance (still a ubiquitous sight, although now in the form of security guards and walkthrough metal-detectors), the Louvre was actually far more porous than this makes it appear. All around the palace there were little doorways and entrances permitting easier access for its residents, who moved into, out of, and through the palace via connecting corridors and stairwells. While today, getting from one side of the old Louvre to the other involves a laborious journey along the entire length of every wing in-between, in the eighteenth century, you could nip down a staircase and take a shortcut across the Cour Carrée to find another door closer to your destination. Not surprisingly then, access to the Academy could be achieved by various routes. Denizens of the palace could reach the apartments from inside, using those internal corridors and stairwells marked on Blondel’s plan of the first floor (Figure  10.2). Anyone with lodgings in the main palace, for instance—like the numerous sculptors with studios around the Cour Carrée (among them Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, and Étienne-Maurice Falconet) or François Boucher who had an atelier in the north wing—would likely have approached the Academy by passing through the Académie des Sciences: first its assembly room (D1 on the plan), and then its instrument room (D2), housing various globes and books, but most remarkable for the enormous skeletons of an elephant and a camel.16 While a privileged insider could then walk right into the Academy’s salle d’assemblée (P5), this was not a route open to all. For ordinary visitors, the appropriate route to the Academy was up a staircase from a vestibule on the ground floor, just near a store room where the Imprimerie Royale kept its paper, to emerge on the first floor in the lodgings of the concierge (P6).17

The Louvre: A Local Guide to the French Academy

177

Figure 10.2 Detail of Plate VI, “Plan au premier étage de la distribution du Louvre dans son état actuel,” Jacques-François Blondel, Architecture Française, vol. 4, 1752–6. British Library, London. © The British Library Board (74/557*.g).

A Visit to the Academy Any visit to the Academy thus began with an encounter with a man called Antoine Reynès. At least it did until 1738, when he was replaced as concierge by his successor, Jean-Baptiste Reydellet.18 Like the suisses on the floor below (there was another small guard post just off the vestibule), the concierge provided security. But the concierge was the Academy’s man, not the palace’s, and his full remit was extensive, from porterjanitor to office manager. In the early days, the Academy had employed a couple of huissiers (bailiffs) as doormen and cleaners, but by the eighteenth century the more elaborate role of concierge had evolved with the institution’s changing needs.19 Responsible for greeting visitors and maintaining the apartments and collections, the concierge also undertook administrative tasks, like keeping up-to-date lists of current members, and in Salon years compiling and selling the livrets (exhibition catalogs) to the public.20 Notwithstanding the concierge’s clerical activities, his role was not to be

178

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

confused with that of secrétaire (secretary), a much more prestigious officer position held by one of the Academy’s admitted members, including artists like Bernard Lépicié and Charles-Nicolas Cochin. The secrétaire was an in-house archivist and historiographer, keeping minutes of company meetings and, most crucially, recording the institution’s history for posterity. What the concierge and secrétaire had in common, however, was that they could both live in the Academy. While many academicians lived elsewhere in the Louvre, these were the only two staff members who were granted official institutional lodgings: the secrétaire in a large set of apartments in the annex (Q on Blondel’s plan), and the concierge in three small rooms (P6), into one of which led that staircase from the ground floor vestibule. With permission to proceed granted by the concierge, you step from his lodgings into a narrow corridor and turn left to find yourself in an antechamber (Figure 10.2, P1). This was the first room of the Academy’s apartments and, like most of those to follow, its walls were adorned with paintings from the Academy’s art collection, its reception pieces, which were works completed by artists in order to gain membership, and gifts from academicians and patrons. This small entry space was hardly the room to showcase the collection’s star pieces, so, aside from a handful of history paintings, it mostly featured still lifes and landscapes.21 Nevertheless, a taste of the richness to come was present in works like Chardin’s Buffet (1728, Musée du Louvre) and Gabriel Allegrain’s Flight into Egypt (1716, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux). Along with the paintings, the antechamber also contained more practical items, or at least objects whose purpose was both aesthetic and functional: plaster models of antique sculptures. Revealing something of the room’s use, copies of works like the Farnese Hercules were arranged here for the students to practice drawing, especially in the early stages of training before they progressed to live models.22 Right at the end of the century, just before the Academy was closed, the institution’s pedagogic collection here was expanded valuably with a gift from the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, who presented several new items including a model of the Torso of the Laocoön and a life-size écorché of a horse.23 Though they would only end up residing in the antechamber for a matter of weeks, their presence is indicative of the constant changes experienced in these active working spaces, right up to the institution’s final moments. Over by the window of the antechamber, there was a doorway leading to the Academy’s pedagogic heart: the école du modèle (life-drawing room; Figure 10.2, P2).24 While the antechamber and its casts formed an educational annex, the école du modèle was the main teaching space, the site for life-drawing classes, that fundamental practice for which the institution was founded. Classes were held every day, except Sundays and holy days, and each lasted two hours, during which the professor on duty would pose one or two models and assist the students as they drew their académies (figure studies), while also drawing his own for them to emulate.25 Upon entering, the école’s purpose would be immediately evident from its distinctive furniture. Nearest the windows (where the light was best) stood a platform for posing the model and around that a large wooden structure of gradins, or rows of benches at tiered heights.26 Nicolas Guérin’s elevation of the école du modèle (Figure  10.3) in the former ground floor apartments (occupied between 1712 and 1721) offers a sense of this arrangement.

The Louvre: A Local Guide to the French Academy

179

Figure 10.3 Plan and elevation of the École du modèle in Nicolas Guérin, Description de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 1714. © The British Library Board (7807.e.3.B3-4-289).

Though a different room, the layout upstairs was similar, designed to create a space of raked seating permitting a large number of students a vantage on the model. But if you took a moment to test a few positions around the benches, you would discover that not all views were equal. And if you were present at the beginning of a class, this lack of equality would allow you to witness something of the hierarchical nature of academic life. As the students filed in, they would take their seats following a complex order of precedence based on the Academy’s typical commendation of skill tempered by nepotistic privilege: first to choose their seats were the sons of academicians (following the order of their fathers’ ranks); next came the prize-winning students (those who had received médailles du quartier for their académies), who took seats according to the

180

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

level of their award; and finally, those without connections or decorations could fill up whatever undesired places remained.27 Before leaving the life-drawing room, you might pause to notice the walls, adorned with the fruits of the training undertaken on those benches. Along with numerous académies drawn by professors, the walls also bore the paintings and bas-reliefs that had won their makers the coveted grand prix (the annual prize for senior students that secured the winners a trip to Rome), like Joseph-Marie Vien’s David and the Plague (1743, École nationale supérieure des BeauxArts) or Jean-Germain Drouais’s Christ and the Canaanite Woman (1784, Musée du Louvre).28 Interior decoration thus reinforced the guiding principles of academic training, as even the walls presented themselves as models for emulation. Leaving through a door at the back of the life-drawing room returns us to that narrow corridor. Proceeding in the other direction (away from the antechamber), we move along a passage that marks a transition between the Academy’s pedagogic endeavors and its rituals as a state institution. At the end, we arrive at the Academy’s largest and grandest room, the grande salle (Figure 10.2, P3), where the décor clearly indicated its very different use and the elevated status of its expected audiences. A reception room for ceremonial occasions and semi-public assemblies (including some of the celebrated conférences, or art-theoretical lectures), the grande salle was a veritable display case of the Academy’s most highly regarded products: history painting and sculpture.29 From Le Brun’s Death of Cato (1646, Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Arras) to Boucher’s Rinaldo and Armida (1734, Musée du Louvre), and from Robert le Lorrain’s Galatea (1701, National Gallery of Art, Washington) to Pajou’s Pluto Enchaining Cerberus (1760, Musée du Louvre), these were the works at the top of the Academy’s art-theoretical hierarchy, displayed here like the embodiment of the theories debated around them.30 More resources for artistic swagger were contained in armoires filled with portfolios of hundreds of prints and drawings, by both French and foreign masters, all ready to be shown to the important visitors and curious amateurs who came to marvel. Perhaps fittingly, given the prestige of the grande salle, it is about here in the modern museum that the Winged Victory now stands, atop her staircase plunging through where the floor once was, against a stone wall once covered with history paintings and portraits of the Academy’s protectors. Those effigies of powerful figures—Chancellor Séguier, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquis de Louvois, and Louis XIV himself—are long departed, but the current tenant seems an appropriate inheritor of a site habituated to grandeur.31 The grande salle was undoubtedly impressive. But it was also somewhat predictable. Indeed, it was probably exactly what we might have imagined we would see on a visit to this elite royal institution. But crossing the room on the diagonal, and passing through the doorway by the window embrasures, we emerge into a truly unexpected experience. Known as the salle ronde (for its distinctive shape) or the salle des portraits (for its distinctive inhabitants), the next room was one of the most unusual and visually striking interiors anywhere in the palace (Figure 10.2, P4). With its round walls almost entirely covered, the room was filled with life-size portraits of artists (nearly a hundred of them), circling the visitor like a dense two-dimensional crowd, among which one could glimpse familiar faces like Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Louis-Michel Van Loo, Edmé Bouchardon, or

The Louvre: A Local Guide to the French Academy

181

older legends like Philippe de Champaigne, Pierre Mignard, and Noël Coypel.32 For the artists working in the Academy, these effigies of academic forefathers (and even a foremother, thanks to Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron’s self-portrait) played a totemic role as collective representations of this community, symbolizing its ancestral history in the painted bodies of members dating from the institution’s earliest years to its present.33 For more casual visitors without insider status, this deeper significance might be lost, but the sheer volume of the crowd would still make an impression, clearly demarcating this as the Academy’s territory and claiming its artists (both living and painted) as the rightful occupants. The room’s form and position, moreover, made it an ideal site to make this claim. Its central location and three key doorways—leading to the grande salle, the Galerie d’Apollon (Figure 10.2, S; granted to the Academy by the king when its collections started to overflow the apartments34), and the salle d’assemblée (P5)—made this a focal point, a busy roundabout constantly distributing people going about their daily business. Despite the substantial decorative transformations this room has experienced (Figure 10.4), the Rotonde d’Apollon, as it is now known, is more than anywhere else the place where the Louvre’s eighteenth-century past is most palpably felt, both in structural remains and memorializing traces.35 For the eye, the room’s surfaces look completely different, but for the body, the corporeal experience of the Academy’s salle ronde is present still in its enduring architectural structure—its size, its round shape, and its three unchanged thresholds. This phenomenological resonance is intensified by the central doorway in particular, still leading to the Galérie d’Apollon, which has itself

Figure 10.4 Rotonde d’Apollon (formerly the Salle ronde or Salle des portraits), Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: © Hannah Williams.

182

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

been recently restored to recapture its ancien régime glory. Moving around this space it takes only a little imagination to summon the memories of its erstwhile academic life. But on closer inspection, we find the connection between past and present quite literally carved into the walls. Stone plaques all around the room record the museum’s origins and the agents involved in its development. Long panels of gilded names list the donors upon whose patronage the institution has depended, from Général Bertrand Clauzel in 1799 right up to Madame Monique Chevrier in 2010.36 And above the central door, a bold inscription proudly declares the moment of the museum’s founding: “The Musée du Louvre was founded on September 16, 1792 by a decree from the Assemblée Législative and was opened on August 10, 1793 in execution of a decree issued by the Convention Nationale.”37 That latter date has great significance in France’s national history. When the Louvre opened as the Muséum Français on August 10, 1793 it did so as part of the Festival of National Unity, which marked the first anniversary of the Republic.38 But this date also strikes an immediate and poignant chord in the lived history of Paris’s academicians. Exactly a week earlier, on August 3, the company unknowingly gathered for its final ever meeting in the salle d’assemblée next door; and two days before the museum opened, on August 8, the Academy was officially shut down by a decree from the National Assembly.39 Even without the inscription, this room embodies the transition between its two institutional residents, but with that direct marking of temporality comes a vivid activation of the site. Suddenly it becomes the place where that transition occurred, as though we are standing at the very point of exchange between the Academy and the museum. As it happens, this was not exactly where the new museum opened (that was around the corner in the Grande Galerie), but making its monument here the museum once again affords an echo with the space’s former use.40 The Academy’s totemic portraits have gone, but, as though remembering what it was, the salle ronde remains the site for staking a territorial claim of rightful occupancy. Having hovered so long at its entrance, we can finally pass through the last door of the Academy’s apartments leading to its innermost chamber, the salle d’assemblée (Figure 10.2, P5). This was the most exclusive of the Academy’s spaces, the site of all its secret business, where decisions were made, new members admitted, prizes judged, punishments determined, and all deliberations debated. Like the grande salle, it was adorned with gems from the Academy’s collection, though in this more intimate space the selection included some of their more amatory pieces: Jean Raoux’s Pygmalion in Love with his Statue (1717, Musée Farbre, Montpellier), Dumont le Romain’s, Hercules and Omphale (1728, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours), and Jean-Baptiste Van Loo’s Diana and Endymion (1731, Musée du Louvre). Yet, despite the tone of the walls you could not mistake the salle d’assemblée for an aristocratic cabinet, for its function was, like that of the life-drawing room, readily revealed by its furniture. In the middle of the room, seating was arranged in a large horseshoe, much as it had been on the ground floor in the 1710s, when Jean-Baptiste Martin made his incredibly rare depiction of A Meeting of the Académie Royale (Figure 10.5). If you arrived just before a meeting (the moment captured by Martin), you could once again watch the institutional hierarchy take shape in this formation, with the

The Louvre: A Local Guide to the French Academy

183

Figure 10.5 Jean-Baptiste Martin, A Meeting of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in the Louvre, c. 1712–1. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais/Musée du Louvre/Adrien Didierjean.

director assuming the place of honor at the top of the curve, and his colleagues arranging themselves in rank order on both sides. Given that the salle d’assemblée was the hardest space to access, particularly when it was in use, it is somewhat ironic that this is the only room in the apartments that was ever represented in such intimate detail, not in a diagrammatic plan, but in a painted sketch that seems intent on describing an inhabited space. Among all the guides we possess for our drift through the eighteenth-century Louvre, Martin’s painting is arguably the most evocative. Although not an academician himself, he views his artistic colleagues with a local’s eye, witnessing their casual exchanges as they mill about their natural habitat.41 Made by a professional observer of the moment (best known as a battle painter, Martin also painted events like the king’s coronation), this tiny canvas resonates in this context because of the shared objectives of maker and beholder; like us, Martin was a visitor, exploring the apartments and capturing a glimpse of the life lived in this place.

Back on the Threshold At the end of the visit, you might retrace your steps through the salle ronde and the grande salle, then go past a spiral staircase and along another narrow corridor. Turning

184

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

right at the end, you would find yourself in the very antithesis of the private salle d’assemblée. This large room, more than twice the size of the grande salle, was probably the most accessible space in the entire building, a space which formed a veritable threshold between the restricted space of the palace and the public space of the street. This was, of course, the celebrated Salon Carré (Figure 10.2, T), where the Academy’s exhibitions were held from 1737 onwards. But this was not the way the room was normally accessed by the thousands of people who flocked to one of the city’s most popular cultural spectacles. Now ‘Salle 3’ on the first floor of the Musée du Louvre’s Denon Wing and home to the Italian painting collections, the room is still adorned with masterpieces—Cimabue’s Virgin and Child (c. 1280) and Bernardo Daddi’s Annunciation (c. 1335) among them—hung on beige panels and partition walls that have transformed a palace interior into a museum installation. But in the eighteenth century, this now fairly unassuming room witnessed a turning point in the social history of European art. The Salon Carré was a pivotal site in the birth of the modern art exhibition. Described by Thomas Crow as “the first regularly repeated, open, and free display of art in Europe,” the Academy’s Salons detached art (to an extent) from its former confines in royal, religious, or aristocratic spaces to be appreciated instead in an arena devoted to aesthetic discourse.42 Though not quite as classless as they are sometimes held to be, the Salons nevertheless made art accessible to a much wider audience, with no restrictions based on rank or gender, no entrance fee, and generous opening hours. Of course, the Louvre itself still imposed an elitism of sorts; for many Parisians, approaching this imposing bastion of royal power and cultural authority would have been a daunting task. But perhaps conveniently, for those entitled (or brave enough) to attend, the Salon Carré had a special entrance that did not require (or allow) salon goers to move through the main palace. Getting there would mean going back to Rue Frementeau where we started (Figure 10.1), and instead of turning off at the Place du Louvre, continuing almost as far as the long riverside gallery. On the left an opening in the wall led into the tiny Cour de la Reine, and just off to the right of the courtyard was a door to a vestibule, where a staircase led directly up into the northwest corner of the Salon Carré. Some sense of this trajectory into the room is granted by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s well-known etching of 1753 (Figure 10.6), which ostensibly shows a View of the Salon, but in fact devotes half its pictorial surface to this staircase. Saint-Aubin’s etching is undoubtedly as much about the entrance as the exhibition. While his later depictions of Salons in 1765, 1767, and 1779 focus on the hang, by flattening out the room to show the objects on three of its walls, here his concern is more with the passage into the room, as he dwells on the people making their way up each flight of steps, from the shadowy ground floor, toward the brightly lit exhibition space above. Nor was Saint-Aubin alone in his entryway engagement. MathieuFrançois Pidansat de Mairobert takes a similar interest in his Salon review of 1777: You emerge through a trapdoor of a staircase, which despite its width is often choked; extricating yourself from this painful struggle, you can hardly breathe before finding yourself plunged into an abyss of heat, a whirlpool of dust, and air so rank that . . . it should in the end produce either lightening or plague.43

The Louvre: A Local Guide to the French Academy

185

Figure 10.6 Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, View of the Salon at the Louvre in 1753, 1753. Etching. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2006.84).

Paused on the landing, these local witnesses suggest that a key part of the exhibition visit was the very experience of getting inside the Louvre, both physically and metaphorically. As the Salon permitted anyone to become a cultural insider, so the process of getting in became a symbolic act. The Salon Carré formed a liminal space between the Louvre’s rarefied world of elite artists and amateurs and the plebeian world of the street, but it was this staircase that formed the threshold to that threshold—the passage that transformed ordinary Parisians into connoisseurs of contemporary art.

Concluding the Drift Drifting through the Louvre to encounter its eighteenth-century past, this imagined dérive has sought out the long-emptied rooms once inhabited by Paris’s Academy, where the history of French art unfolded in countless quotidian moments. Although concerned with the historical significance of place, this essay has been less a study of the Louvre as lieu de mémoire (a site of memory) than an effort to capture its “mémoires de lieu” (the memories of that site). In other words, it is not so much an exercise in the

186

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

vein of Pierre Nora, to explore the Louvre as “a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of [the French] community,” but rather as a somewhat less grand, but more intimate, search for the memories of place which hold in place the histories and experiences of the people who once belonged to the Louvre’s local community.44 Now materially transformed into museum rooms, the Louvre, nevertheless, still resonates as the theater of its many pasts. Perhaps not quite haunted by the people who once resided there, this building is still, at least for the art-historical drifter, a stage setting that powerfully maintains its characters. Most potent of all of these characters might be the agents of the past that continue to dwell in the Louvre to this day. Many of the objects that began their lives in this place (made in artists’ studios, sketched in the life-drawing room, presented as reception pieces in the salle d’assemblée, or hung as star attractions in the Salon Carré) are still present in the palace. Among these many artworks are some that were singled out during our visit—Chardin’s Buffet, Boucher’s Rinaldo and Armida, Pajou’s Pluto Enchaining Cerberus, even Martin’s little Meeting of the Académie Royale (Figure 10.5). Now museum pieces, they are mostly located in the galleries devoted to ancien régime painting (hanging in the north and east wings of the old Louvre) or sculpture (housed in the nineteenth-century’s new northern limb). In their new homes, we tend to forget their past lives and encounter them aesthetically, as exemplars marking a moment in the chronological history of the French School. Yet, despite the museological role they dutifully perform, it is possible to retrieve from these objects a very different history of art. Encountered instead as part of the archaeology of this building, these artworks become not a history of style or taste, but a social history of people, places, and moments. Walking through the corridors of the Louvre, whether through the galleries where these objects now reside, or through the former apartments of the Academy where they used to reside, is to experience the terrain and material traces of a crucial site in the cultural geography of eighteenth-century France. Moving through these spaces with psychogeographical intent has not only forcefully evoked the memories of place held within these walls, but has also revealed a more intimate understanding of the social context of art’s production, reception, and theorization, by relocating those processes in the very spaces in which they occurred. Finding where the Academy was has, in other words, offered a richer sense of what it was: a deeper cultural understanding of this local Paris neighborhood that had such a determining influence throughout the global art world of the eighteenth century and beyond. I would like to thank Stacey Sloboda and Michael Yonan for insightful comments on this text. The essay was written with the support of a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellowship.

Notes 1 Although a ubiquitous feature in any study of eighteenth-century French art history, the Academy has only recently been retrieved as a subject in its own right. Recent

The Louvre: A Local Guide to the French Academy

2

3 4 5 6

7

8

9

10

11

187

books devoted to the Academy include: Reed Benhamou, Regulating the Académie: Art, Rules and Power in Ancien Régime France (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009); Gudrun Valerius, Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 1648–1793: Geschichte, Organisation, Mitgleider (Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2010); Christian Michel, L’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (1648–1793): la naissance de l’École française (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2012); and Hannah Williams, Académie Royale: A History in Portraits (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). The Royal Academy of Arts (London) was established in 1768; Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi (Copenhagen) in 1754; Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Madrid) in 1744; Imperial Academy of Arts (St Petersburg) in 1757; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia) in 1805; and Academia de San Carlos (Mexico City) in 1781. This effort to go behind the scenes and find a more intimate understanding of life in the institution draws and builds on the project of my book, Williams, Académie Royale. The Academy moved to the Louvre in 1692 and remained there until it was closed in 1793. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994), 8. On the importance of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers to the development of psychogeography see Merlin Coverly, Psychogeography (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2010). Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive” (1958), in Situationist International Anthology, edited and translated by Ken Knabb, revised edition (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 62–6. My thinking on this has been informed by writings like Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Towards a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, 2nd edition (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009); and David Carr, Experience and History: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Nattier lived on Rue Frementeau in 1719 and 1720; Perronneau in 1754 and 1755; and Pajou from 1768 to 1793. For the locations of artists’ homes and studios, see Hannah Williams and Chris Sparks, Artists in Paris: Mapping the 18th-Century Art World, available at: www.artistsinparis.org (accessed September 10, 2018). On Rue Frementeau’s associations with prostitution see: Histoire de la ville de Paris, vol. 5 (Paris: Chez Gissart, 1735), 29–31. On the history of the Louvre see Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, ed., Le quartier du Louvre au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2001); Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, Le Louvre, une histoire de palais (Paris: 2008); Hannah Williams, ed., “Louvre Local,” Journal18, no. 2 (Fall 2016), available at: http://www.journal18.org/past-issues/2louvre-local-fall-2016/ (accessed 10 September, 2018); Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, Yannick Lintz, Françoise Madrus, and Guillaume Fonkenell, Histoire du Louvre, 3 vols (Paris: Fayard & Louvre, 2016). The most comprehensive study of artists living in the Louvre is still Jules Guiffrey, “Succession des artistes dans chacun des logements de la Grande Galerie,” Nouvelles Archives de l’Art Français (Paris: 1873), 127–35. More recent interventions include Yvonne Singer-Lecocq’s Quand les artistes se logeaient au Louvre 1608–1835 (Paris: 1998); “Louvre Local,” Journal 18; and studies of individuals, such as Dena Goodman and Emily Talbot, “Documenting Art, Writing Biography: Construction of the Silvestre

188

12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21

22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Family History 1660–1868,” Journal of Family History 40, no. 3 (2015), 277–304; and David Maskill, “A Good Address: Living at the Louvre in the Eighteenth Century,” in Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century: Essays in Art History from the XVth David Nichol Smith Seminar, edited by Jennifer Milam (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming). On the Academy’s different locations in the Louvre, see Udolpho van de Sandt, “Note sur les collections de tableaux et leur présentation dans les salles de l’Académie,” in Les peintres du Roi, 1648–1793, Ex. Cat. (Toulouse: Musée des Beaux Art de Tours and Musée des Augustins, 2000), 69–76; and Williams, Académie Royale, 124–5. On the social histories of the Louvre as an artistic neighborhood, see the special issue of Williams, Journal 18, “Louvre Local.” There are other ways in, but these are the principal entrances. Jacques-François Blondel, Architecture française (Paris: 1752–6), vol. 4, 28. Ibid., 30–1 and 35–6. Ibid., 30 and 39. Octave Fidière, État-civil des peintres et sculpteurs de l’Académie Royale. Billets d’enterrement de 1648 à 1713 (Paris: Charavay Frères, 1883), vi–vii. The huissiers’ role is defined in Article XX of the Statuts et Règlements of 1663, in Procès-Verbaux de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, edited by Anatole de Montaiglon (Paris: J. Baur, 1875), vol. 1, 255. The name of the concierge usually appears in the back of the livret. See Collection des livrets des anciennes expositions depuis 1673 jusqu’en 1800, edited by Jules Guiffrey (Paris: Liepmann Sohn et Dufour, 1869–72). Antoine-Nicolas Dézallier d’Argenville, Description sommaire des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture et gravure exposés dans les salles de l’Académie Royale (Paris: Chez de Bure, 1781), 1–4; André Fontaine, Les Collections de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (Paris: H. Laurens, 1910), 141–2. Blondel, Architecture française, 437–8; Dézailler d’Argenville, Description sommaire, 4. Houdon’s gift was made on July 27, 1793. Procès-Verbaux, 10, 221; Fontaine, Les Collections, 141–22. Dézailler d’Argenville indicates that after 1776 the Academy had two drawing rooms, one here and one on the floor below, which appears to have been reached by a small staircase just off the other side of the antechamber. Dézailler d’Argenville, Description sommaire, xx, 4. Blondel, Architecture française, vol. 4, 38. Ibid., vol. 4, 38; Dézailler d’Argenville, Description sommaire, xx–xxi. Dézailler d’Argenville, Description sommaire, xxiii–xxiv. On the impact of family relations on academic hierarchies, see, Williams, Académie Royale, 162–6. Fontaine, Les Collections, 143. Some conférences were also delivered in staff meetings in the salle d’assemblée, but the grande salle was the site for the more formal conférences, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century. Dézailler d’Argenville, Description sommaire, 6, 23, and 33; Fontaine, Les Collections, 146, 148, 160, and 162. Dézailler d’Argenville, Description sommaire, 6, 23, and 33; Fontaine, Les Collections, 146, 148, 156, and 158. For the 92 portraits hanging in this room by 1793, see appendix 2 in Williams, Académie Royale, 319–20.

The Louvre: A Local Guide to the French Academy

189

33 For a more extensive analysis of the salle des portraits and the totemic role of the portraits, see, Williams, Académie Royale, 144–51. 34 Dézailler d’Argenville, Description sommaire, xxx. 35 The ceiling of the Rotonde d’Apollon was decorated in the 1810s and 1820s with allegorical paintings, several of them executed by Merry-Joseph Blondel, incidentally the grand-nephew of Jacques-François Blondel, whose architectural plans and description of the Louvre has facilitated our imaginary visit. 36 The price of entry to this gilded list apparently begins at a million euros. Pierre Rosenberg, Dictionnaire amoureux du Louvre (Paris: Plon, 2007), 320. 37 Le Musée du Louvre fondé le 16 septembre 1792 par décret de l’Assemblée Législative a été ouvert le 10 août 1793 en exécution d’un décret rendu par la Convention Nationale. 38 Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 95–9. 39 Procès-Verbaux, vol. 10, 223–4. 40 For an evocative engagement with the Grande Galerie’s origins as the Louvre museum, see, Mark Ledbury, “Art versus Life: A Dissenting Voice in the Grande Galerie,” “Louvre Local,” Journal18. 41 For an extended analysis of Martin’s painting and his positionality in this space see Williams, Académie Royale, 125–34. 42 Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 3. 43 Mathieu-François Pidansat de Mairobert, L’espion Anglois, ou Correspondance secrète entre Milord All’Eye et Milord All’Ear (1777), cited in “Lettres sur l’Académie Royale de Sculpture et de Peinture,” Revue Universelle des Arts 19 (1864), 185. 44 Pierre Nora, “Preface to the English-language Edition,” in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xvii. For a recent and insightful discussion of the Louvre’s symbolic and historical significance, see Dominique Poulot, “Coda: L’Histoire du Louvre en perspective,” in Williams, ed., “Louvre Local,” Journal 18.

190

11

The Art World of the European Grand Tour Carole Paul

The cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Europe was in large part shaped by the ever increasing number of travelers who traversed the continent, moving from north to south and back again on what is known as the “Grand Tour.” Those who undertook the tour traveled largely for cultural enlightenment and social engagement, but others who may have journeyed primarily for different reasons—commercial, political, military, or religious—could also take part in tourist activities. Some few Grand Tourists journeyed from as far away as North America, at first from the British colonies and then from the United States that succeeded them.1 The primary destination of visitors was the Italian Peninsula, a cultural mecca for all those of European descent and a religious one for Catholics. Many of these travelers were Northern European aristocrats and nobles, especially young men from the British Isles, who sometimes included in their entourages artists, dilettantes, scholars, and women. Tourists enjoyed Italy’s warm climate, the beauty of its landscapes, and musical performances, such as opera. Escaping social constraints at home, some also indulged in gambling, drinking, and illicit sex. Most ostensibly, elite young men journeyed to Italy to finish their education, and other travelers joined them in visiting the sights and collections where they could study its antiquities and early modern art. Framed by the perspective of its international travelers, the study of the Grand Tour has tended to exclude that of its local hosts, according them a more passive role.2 However, it was Italians—or their ancestors—and other residents of Italy who created and sustained the Grand Tour’s attractions, actively responding to the growing influx of foreigners by luring them to the peninsula. Each region had its distinctive character and artistic interest and, before 1871 when Italy became a unified nation, its own form of government. Private art collections were routinely made accessible through letters of introduction or possibly through tour guides, the first to practice this travel-related profession. Tourist demand for cultural sightseeing in part gave rise to the first public art museums, the appearance of which soon spread throughout Europe. Tourists wanted not only to see but also to acquire antiquities and early modern art, which engendered an international art trade that still accounts for the dissemination of such works in collections and museums all over Europe. The sights of the Grand Tour as well sparked an industry to create the souvenirs with which travelers returned and exercised significant influence on European interior design. 191

192

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Considered in this way, the art world of the Grand Tour may be understood as a fluid international network that centered around travel to the peninsula and various forms of engagement with its cultural riches. Concomitantly, it was a “mega” art world, comprised of different kinds of antiquarian and artistic communities, institutions, objects, monuments, sites, markets, products, and services from the diverse regions of Italy. This essay examines some of the major aspects of that world—those worlds—and their interrelationships, considering the effects of tourism from the perspective of both visitors and their hosts.

Defining the Grand Tour The term Grand Tour was first used in 1670 in Richard Lassels’ The Voyage of Italy, or, a Compleat Journey through Italy, one of the earliest guidebooks for travelers to the Italian Peninsula.3 Today, we use the term to describe the phenomenon of cultural tourism that began in sixteenth-century Europe and extended into the nineteenth century and even later, usually recognizing the eighteenth century as its heyday. From the Early Christian period, Italy had been a site of religious pilgrimage, and from at least the Renaissance it was a cultural one as well, with the number of visitors increasing steadily throughout the seventeenth century. Some scholars estimate the number of British tourists per year in the mid-eighteenth century to have been between fifteen and twenty thousand, low in comparison to present-day crowds, but a significant number at the time.4 Usually, the journey was made primarily by land. Many traveled by coach along predetermined routes, with standard stops at posts where horses would be changed. The wealthiest tourists bought or hired their own carriages and set their own itineraries, but the ride was hardly luxurious, even if porters carried travelers and their luggage over the high Mount Cenis pass in the Alps, which connects France and Italy.5 In the mid-sixteenth century, it took five days to get from Rome to Naples, in the early nineteenth century one day, and now one hour and ten minutes by high-speed train. The British usually journeyed south through Germany; their main stops were in Paris, Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples, but they also might have gone to other cities, such as Milan, Genoa, Bologna, Parma, and Pisa.6 In the mid-eighteenth century, travelers would tour for two to three years, usually beginning in the fall or spring; by the 1820s, they would stay abroad for four to six months. For shorter stops visitors lodged at inns, but for longer ones they rented rooms. Tourists, especially those from the same homeland, tended to form communities that intersected with those of permanent residents in various ways. Those living in the regions that were traversed and visited offered travelers desired goods and services, affecting an economy between hosts and guests that remains essential to tourism. In some cities there were areas that catered to the needs of travelers, like that around the Piazza di Spagna (Spanish Steps) in Rome, where visitors often found accommodations.7

The Art World of the European Grand Tour

193

Regional Attractions and Sightseeing Each region and city had its own character and attractions. Paris was the place to buy fashionable clothes—no surprise there.8 Venice was known for its opera and its famous carnival and other religious festivals. It was also known for its state-sponsored gambling houses and prostitution.9 Florence was enjoyed for its Renaissance treasures and easy access to the Tuscan countryside. Rome, the culminating destination, was a veritable museum, representing the artistic and cultural heritage of the Western world, from ancient to modern times. Naples, also admired for its art and antiquities, boasted a beautiful location and a spectacular site—Mount Vesuvius erupting—to which guides pulled visitors up by rope.10 Prospective travelers might have been advised by those who had already been abroad or were there; bankers and diplomats were especially good sources of information.11 Visitors could also have taken advantage of the substantial body of travel writing engendered by the Grand Tour, a genre unto itself. The literature ranged from manuscript and published accounts of a personal nature to guidebooks written in various languages and intended to be used on site.12 In larger cities, particularly Rome, some visitors were led around by guides, a profession to which the Grand Tour gave rise. Known in Italian as ciceroni or in English as “cicerones,” literally Cicero’s or orators, these guides explicated the great antiquities, artworks, buildings, and sights of Italy.13 Those who worked as guides were usually antiquarians, artists, or connoisseurs and might also have been art collectors and dealers. Some were Italian or German, but most were Britons, especially Scottish Jacobites or Jacobite sympathizers, who had settled in Italy not only because of their interest in art and antiquities but also because of their political and religious affiliations. The cost of touring with a cicerone, the itinerary, the number of clients involved, and the amount of time spent sightseeing each day varied. However, by the late eighteenth century, these tours must have been fairly standardized, as John Moore, a physician and author who visited Rome in 1775–6 in the company of Douglas Hamilton, the eighth Duke of Hamilton, described them in his account of his travels: What is called a regular course with an Antiquarian, generally takes up about six weeks; employing three hours a day, you may, in that time, visit all the churches, palaces, villas, and ruins worth seeing, in or near Rome . . . [T]here are about thirty palaces in Rome, as full of pictures as the walls can bear . . . There are also ten or twelve villas in the neighborhood of this city, which are usually visited by strangers.14

Moore cautions that, because of the volume of images and sites that travelers would take in, if they did not revisit the most interesting ones again and again and really reflect on what they had seen their recollections of them would be dim.15

194

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Sites of Artistic and Antiquarian Interest Although Moore describes a cicerone’s “course” in Rome, the same kinds of sites were visited by tourists throughout Italy for their artistic and antiquarian interest: churches, palaces, villas, and ruins or ancient monuments. To this list should be added excavations, catacombs (most famously in Rome), and the first public art museums (in Rome and Florence). These sites could range in date from ancient to early modern and were of interest for their architecture, painting, sculpture, decoration, and other types of objects. The physical remains of antiquity were understood to represent the cultural and political heritage of all Europeans, who considered themselves to have descended from the ancient Romans. Classical architecture and statuary and Renaissance and Baroque paintings, especially Italian pictures from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were upheld as aesthetic and didactic models throughout Europe. The taste for these works had been established beginning in the Renaissance in Italian writings on art—academic art theory—that set an international standard. By “academic,” I refer to the approach to art sustained by the institutional framework of artistic academies and the theoretical system that they propagated.16 Churches were visited for their architecture and decorations—including famous paintings and sculptures—which could have ranged in date from ancient to recent. Some tourists were also interested in observing Catholic rituals, so even those who were not Catholic may have attended Mass on occasion, especially if it was officiated by the pope.17 In the early eighteenth century, one well-known cicerone, Francesco de’ Ficoroni, took his aristocratic clients to the Roman catacombs, where they could see the burial chambers of pagans, Jews, and Christians.18 Other travelers were shown excavations, as, for example, when the painter and antiquarian Gavin Hamilton led a party of them to see his dig at the site of the ancient city of Gabii, outside of Rome.19 The classical monuments and ruins that were among the greatest attractions of Italy were most abundant in Rome. Some ciceroni began their courses with a visit to the Capitoline Hill, where they would point out the city’s seven hills and its principal sights of antiquity, to which tourists would be taken.20 These included the Forum, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Baths of Titus and Trajan, and the Palatine Hill. Even without guides, educated travelers would have been acquainted with the historical and literary contexts of these sites through their schooling in the classics. Seeing what remained of them not only allowed viewers to appreciate their aesthetic qualities, too, but also brought the past to life in their imaginations, where they could recreate the ambience of the ancient city. For example, James Boswell, the famous biographer of Samuel Johnson, whose tour of Italy from 1765 to 1766 is perhaps best known for his sexual escapades, visited the Palatine Hill with his cicerone, the Scottish antiquarian and artist Colin Morison: We walked to where the house of Cicero had stood. A statue there resembles him a great deal. Struck by these famous places, I was seized with enthusiasm. I began to speak Latin. Mr. Morison replied. He laughed a bit at the beginning. But we

The Art World of the European Grand Tour

195

made a resolution to speak Latin continually during this course of antiquities. We have persisted, and every day we speak with greater facility, so that we have harangued on Roman antiquities in the language of the Romans themselves.21

Despite its playfulness, this episode illustrates both the imaginative depth and the social and cultural sophistication of the ritual involved in looking at and discussing antiquity on the Grand Tour. That Morison, a Roman resident, at first hesitated to play along with Boswell indicates a difference in the ways that locals and visitors experienced the eternal city. Churches and ancient monuments could, for the most part, be freely visited, but access to the private palaces and villas of aristocrats and nobles, where great art collections were displayed, was more restricted, even if it seems to have been routine. Although palace courtyards and the gardens and parks at villas were sometimes open to the public, visitors gained access to other areas of these properties through letters of introduction or possibly through ciceroni who may have taken them there.22 Rome boasted the largest number of art collections at its palaces and villas, devoted primarily to ancient sculpture and early modern painting, as accorded with the standards of academic art theory. In the eighteenth century, painting and sculpture tended to be exhibited separately in elite Roman collections, pictures in urban palace galleries and statuary indoors and outside at suburban or rural villas. Throughout the century, as tourism grew, such collections were increasingly installed in spaces dedicated exclusively to their display and easily accessible to visitors.23 In some cases, these exhibition spaces were lavishly decorated, intending to dazzle viewers with the artworks and their elegant settings. Roman villas had been renowned since the Renaissance for their collections of antiquities, which abounded as nowhere else in Europe and set an international standard for the display of ancient sculpture.24 While some antiquities were exhibited outdoors, on the grounds of villas, over time the finest works came to be installed in buildings on the properties, especially large casini or palaces. Sometimes displayed together with early modern sculpture, ancient statuary was usually grouped for exhibition by subject, theme, or type—bust, statue, relief and such—encouraging viewers to make historical or literary associations with the works, as they did with larger classical monuments and sites. Thus, as with the latter, most ancient statuary was valued as much for its function or subject matter—for its antiquarian interest—as for its aesthetic qualities. The thematic and typological display of antiquities had the added advantage for patrons of being easily adapted to flatter them by suggesting a link between them and their families and the ancient gods, heroes, and rulers represented in their collections. That link was sometimes supported by other decoration in exhibition spaces, such as grand ceiling paintings containing imagery or narratives that related to the statuary and glorified the patrons. This strategy was implemented, for example, in the display of the two greatest princely collections of antiquities in eighteenth-century Rome, installed at the Villa Albani and the Villa Borghese.25 Even if tourists didn’t buy into these celebratory conceits, they could appreciate them and were duly impressed with such exhibits, which were designed to address the interests of an educated international audience.

196

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

The display of paintings in the palace galleries of Rome was equally impressive. One of the most dazzling was the gallery at the Colonna Palace, where the exhibition of early modern paintings was accented with ancient statues and busts (in this case pictures and statuary being installed together) as well as painted mirrors, lavish furnishings, and ornamentation, and a ceiling fresco cycle glorifying the family (Figure 11.1).26 The French statesman Charles de Brosses, who toured Rome in 1739 and 1740, proclaimed the Colonna gallery “preferable perhaps to that at Versailles, and filled with exquisite pictures.”27 De Brosses was less impressed by the display of paintings in the twelve-room suite that constituted the picture gallery at the Borghese Palace, contending that the crowded installation was “more tiring than attractive to the eye.”28 He did, however, understand that the exhibit, which included a cycle of ceiling paintings, was intended for the benefit of tourists, noting that, “All these grand apartments, so vast and so superb, are only there for foreigners.”29 As was the case with the display of antiquities at villas, the exhibition of early modern paintings in Roman palace galleries spoke to the interests of its visitors.

Figure 11.1 View of the Colonna Palace gallery in Rome showing early eighteenthcentury decoration. Vault fresco by Giovanni Coli and Filippo Gherardi, 1675–8. Photo: Carole Paul.

The Art World of the European Grand Tour

197

Paintings were typically installed in crowded symmetrical displays, with pictures sometimes juxtaposed in a variety of personal, regional, and historical styles in order to prompt viewers to compare their diverse qualities, a practice termed “comparative viewing” by Andrew McClellan.30 Ideally, elite viewers from all over Europe would already be knowledgeable about art and its history when they visited private collections, and they would discuss the things they saw with one another, so looking at art—like looking at antiquities—was a social activity where social skills were demonstrated. Manuals written for visitors of all nationalities emphasized the “formal” qualities of paintings, corresponding to the precepts of academic art theory, which understood the goal of the visual arts to be “to instruct and delight.”31 The effectiveness of pictures in achieving this goal was typically analyzed or judged by reference to a more or less standard list of various aspects of painting: beauty, coloring, composition, decorum, design or drawing, expression, grace, imitation, invention, and proportion. In judging pictures, viewers would make comparisons between them, upholding different artists’ works as exemplary of different aspects. For example, the works of Michelangelo, Raphael, and other central Italians invariably would be admired as models of good design or drawing, while those of Titian and the Venetians would be valued for their handling of color. Viewers were concerned mostly with judging quality, but also with other aspects of connoisseurship, such as making attributions and determining authenticity. Visitors responded to paintings in different ways, demonstrating that the practice of comparative viewing was not as inflexible or formalized as might seem. At the Borghese gallery, for example, the British tourist and writer, Hester Lynch Piozzi, described Domenichino’s Diana and Her Nymphs of 1616–17, a classical subject, as “very laboured, and very learned,” but then added, “Why did it put me in mind of Hogarth’s strolling actresses dressing in a barn?” Thus she exhibited her cleverness and wit by creating an unexpected comparison.32 It was partly the demand of tourists like Piozzi to see and study art that gave rise to the establishment in Italy of three of the first major public art museums, the Capitoline Museum in Rome, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and the Museo Pio-Clementino in Vatican City (now part of the Vatican Museum), which opened as or became public institutions in 1734, 1769, and 1770, respectively.33 Consolidating the attraction of Rome and Florence as tourist destinations, the founding of these museums was also motivated by the desire of their patrons to preserve the cultural patrimony of Italy and, more broadly, by the spread of Enlightenment values that engendered the creation of other new kinds of public institutions in eighteenth-century Europe.34 Unlike the settings of private collections, all three of these museums were established in official or governmental buildings, the Capitoline Museum in the Palazzo Nuovo (new palace) on the Campidoglio or Capitoline Hill in Rome, the site of the city’s municipal government; the Uffizi Gallery in the state administrative offices (uffizi) in Florence of the Medici family, the grand ducal rulers of Tuscany; and the Pio-Clementino Museum at the villa connected to the Vatican Palace, one of the sites of the papal government. The Capitoline and Pio-Clementino museums were both founded by the popes, the first with a newly acquired collection of antiquities and the second with large additions to the nucleus of famous ancient statuary installed in the sixteenth century in the

198

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

courtyard of the papal villa. The Uffizi Gallery had its inception in the private collections of the Medici family. Although these museums were created with artists and elite or scholarly visitors in mind, they were accessible to the public without letters of introduction or the accompaniment of ciceroni. In the eighteenth century, they displayed the same kinds of works as contemporary private collections, privileging antiquities and early modern paintings, especially Italian examples of the latter.35 Similarly, painting and sculpture tended to be exhibited separately and would have been thought about and discussed as in private collections. In some public museums, spaces were reserved for the most prized works, as in the Uffizi Gallery’s celebrated Tribuna, where famous pictures and statues were, however, installed together. While not an entirely accurate representation of the room or the display, Johan Zoffany’s well-known painting of the Tribuna (Figure  11.2) includes portraits of some of its recognizable staff and visitors: the diplomat Sir Horace Mann, the artist Thomas Patch, the gallery’s curator Pietro Bastianelli, Zoffany himself, and various British tourists.36 The picture also gives us a sense of the lively way that the Grand Tour audience engaged with art. The installations of artworks in public museums tended to be less highly ornamented than those in private collections, creating a more scholarly atmosphere, and some new

Figure 11.2 Johan Zoffany, The Tribuna of the Uffizi, 1772–7. Oil on canvas. Royal Collection Trust. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2017.

The Art World of the European Grand Tour

199

exhibition strategies were introduced. In this respect, the Capitoline Museum, the first of these institutions, was particularly pioneering.37 Although the Capitoline antiquities were grouped for display by conventional subjects, themes, and types, as in private collections, they were installed in innovative ways that reflected the public nature and educational mission of the museum, as in the case of the busts of the Caesars. Sets of emperor busts were commonplace in private collections, where they were exhibited to decorative effect, in niches or on pedestals, but not necessarily in any particular order and usually with other types of statuary, sometimes not even ancient. At the Capitoline, ancient imperial busts were not only placed in historical order by subject, but they were also displayed together in their own room, on simple shelves, inviting visitors to reflect on the sitters and compare the quality of their likenesses—especially when multiple images of the same individuals were placed side by side—as well as on the trajectory of Roman history. Other novel strategies were developed at the Pio-Clementino Museum, where the desire to give viewers an “authentic” experience of antiquity led to the creation and ornamentation of rooms that approximated the kinds of spaces in which ancient art would have been exhibited in antiquity.38 The Pio-Clementino influenced the future of museum display both in the design of these forerunners of “period rooms” and in its spacious and well-lit installations. In addition to their accessibility, public museums thus enhanced the opportunities afforded visitors to study and appreciate art.

Educating Artists Unlike other tourists, aspiring and even established artists most often traveled to Italy to develop and perfect their skills. Guided by the standards of academic art theory, they sought to study the canonical works of antiquity and early modern art and synthesize them, as appropriate, in their own creations. In this way, the development of personal style was based upon the study of models; originality came to be defined, paradoxically, as the inventiveness and subtlety of reference to past art. The primary way for artists to study models was to draw them, and drawing—or design—(each and both together denoted by the word disegno in Italian) was the skill that in the academic tradition was basic to creating all forms of art: painting, sculpture, architecture, printmaking, and so on. Back home, academies and workshops might have had plaster casts of famous antiquities or engravings of celebrated paintings from which artists could draw, but these never fully captured the experience of seeing the originals in Italy. Artists on the Grand Tour may have gained access to private collections through aristocratic patrons with whom they traveled or by way of membership in academies, such as the French Academy in Rome, but sometimes had to request permission to draw what they saw, in public museums as well as in private collections. At the Capitoline Museum, for instance, artists could freely draw the statuary in the entrance portico, because the entrances and courtyards of Roman palaces were traditionally unrestricted to the public.39 However, those who wanted to draw the antiquities in the galleries had to get written permission from the director, and the production of plaster

200

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

casts was tightly controlled into the nineteenth century. The same was the case for paintings when picture galleries were opened on the Capitoline Hill in 1751, even if the pope appointed times for art students to draw and copy the works. Clearly there was a desire to control the circulation, and perhaps the quality, of copies. This was no doubt in part because there was money to be made in selling copies of various kinds, the demand for them having been bolstered by tourism. In addition to copying exemplary works of the past, artists working in the academic tradition learned to draw the human figure from nude posed models—known as life drawing—and for this, too, the Grand Tour was an important training ground. Rome especially provided various venues where artists could practice life drawing: the two “official” art academies, the Accademia di San Luca, the artists’ academy of Rome, and the French Academy in Rome; academies held by leading Roman painters that met in the evenings; and independent classes arranged by students themselves.40 However, neither the life-drawing classes at the Accademia di San Luca nor those organized by students met on a regular basis, and painters usually charged a small fee. Responding to the need to make life drawing more accessible to young artists in the city, in 1754 Pope Benedict XIV established a studio known as the Accademia del Nudo (Academy of the Nude) in the same building as the Capitoline picture galleries where art students, attending free of charge, could draw posed male models (both the students and the models in all the aforementioned venues would have been male).41 By the mideighteenth century, Rome was considered to be the place where young artists from all over Europe and even America went to learn drawing and improve their skills. Its importance as such continued, for in the 1780s, the German painter and theorist, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, observed: “Rome is the place where one learns to draw.”42 Offering opportunities unmatched outside of Italy for artists to study life drawing and copy master works, the Grand Tour, particularly in Rome, served to reinforce the foundations of the academic tradition that originally had been disseminated from the peninsula and, in so doing, influenced the production of contemporary art throughout Europe and even beyond.

The Art Trade and Souvenirs Tourists wanted not only to see works of art in Italy, but also to buy and export them. A thriving art trade existed to respond to the demand for antiquities and early modern paintings, even though the popes controlled or prohibited exportation through edicts that they had been issuing since the sixteenth century.43 When original artworks could not be obtained, travelers might have purchased copies, the production of which, as we have seen, was controlled as well. Tourists’ interest in returning with mementos of their journeys also sparked the beginning of an industry in newly created souvenirs, which took a variety of forms and ranged greatly in size and value.44 Some were monumental works of art, others were mass-produced in factories, but all were made and marketed for travelers. Both the souvenir industry and the art trade generated business opportunities of which Italian residents took advantage.

The Art World of the European Grand Tour

201

Antiquities and early modern paintings could be acquired through dealers, who may have been antiquarians, connoisseurs, or scholars, some also active as ciceroni, the latter having a ready clientele in the tourists that they guided.45 Dealers were expected to procure export licenses from the papal antiquarian, and sometimes profited shamelessly through duplicitous or shady practices. For example, the aforementioned cicerone, Ficoroni, failed to inform the papal antiquarian of a work he had acquired through an excavation, an antique head of porphyry that he had bought “from certain masons who had found it in a dig” and was put on trial and fined.46 Even worse, the cicerone and dealer, Thomas Jenkins, would overcharge unwitting clients and pass off modern objects made under his supervision, such as cameos, as antiques.47 Most egregiously perhaps, the cicerone and dealer, James Byres, secretly negotiated for the Bonapaduli family to sell their coveted series of paintings of the seven sacraments by the seventeenth-century French artist, Nicolas Poussin, to the Duke of Rutland. These celebrated pictures were such a tourist attraction, however, that they were replaced with copies, which Byres then passed off as the originals.48 Among the new works of art that served as souvenirs, the most monumental were portraits and vedute or views of famous sites, sometimes including contemporary public events. No vedute were more admired than the Venetian views painted by Giovanni Antonio Canal, called Canaletto, many of which were sold through Joseph Smith, a banker, collector, and dealer as well as the British consul to the Venetian Republic, who established a flourishing business as the artist’s agent (Figure 11.3).49

Figure 11.3 Giovanni Antonio Canal, called Canaletto, Piazza San Marco, Venice, c. 1730–4. Oil on canvas. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum. © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

202

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Printed views, such as the brilliant and popular Roman vedute by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, were less expensive and more portable alternatives to paintings.50 The grandest portraits were Pompeo Batoni’s full-length images of travelers in Rome, including lifesized figures, often posed with antiquities, the more of which were featured in the picture, the higher the price (Figure 11.4).51

Figure 11.4 Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of John Talbot, later 1st Earl Talbot, 1773. Oil on canvas. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

The Art World of the European Grand Tour

203

Some of the smaller souvenirs were mass-produced in factories, an indication of the future direction of the industry.52 These included bisque (unglazed porcelain) figurine copies of famous antiquities, produced in a factory set up by the printmaker, Giovanni Volpato, and objects, such as jewelry and snuff boxes, decorated, in imitation of ancient mosaics, with tiny mosaics, called micromosaics, first developed in the Vatican’s mosaic factory. Other small souvenirs, however, such as fans embellished with vedute, were handcrafted (Figure 11.5) and could be purchased whole or the painted vellum leaves could be bought and mounted at home, usually in ivory, lacquer, mother of pearl, or tortoiseshell. The development of the souvenir industry is one of the clearest examples of the innovative ways that Italian residents capitalized on local tourism, not just responding to demand, but also inspiring it among an international clientele of travelers. Other instances include the professionalization of ciceroni, the production of guidebooks and maps, and the emergence of public art museums. Each of these examples, as well as others cited in this essay, had an impact beyond the local level, some leading to the formation of new markets and institutions, others expanding or transforming older ones. What is perhaps most striking is the way in which the various products, services, and less tangible things that Italian residents offered visitors together created a blueprint for the modern industry in cultural tourism, affirming the importance of the Grand Tour as its archetype.

Figure 11.5 Fan with Views of Vesuvius and the Environs of Naples, c. 1770. Black and gold lacquer fan, the sticks and guards of fine imitation lacquer, the head reinforced with ivory and tortoiseshell. The Fan Museum, Greenwich, London.

204

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

The Grand Tour Back Home In returning with artworks and souvenirs, travelers literally brought the impact of the Grand Tour back home, and in other ways, too, especially in Britain, its influence was pervasive. Former tourists established clubs, such as the Society of Dilettanti in London, the ostensible purpose of which was to continue their studies, although the British writer, Horace Walpole, famously described it in 1743 as “a club, for which the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one being drunk.”53 Italian opera singers traveled and performed throughout Europe. Artists and architects from the peninsula ventured north to adorn aristocratic residences with ceiling paintings and stucco ornaments in the Italian style, some of their decorations serving as backdrops for displays of antiquities and pictures that had been acquired in Italy.54 The Scottish architect and decorator, Robert Adam, was greatly inspired in his innovative neoclassical designs for such clients by what he had seen in Rome.55 Public museums filled with ancient sculpture and early modern painting, some purchased on the Grand Tour or through agents in Italy, appeared throughout Europe.56 While Italian institutions initially set the standards for collecting and display at these museums, institutions outside of the peninsula emphasized regional contributions, too, and, in a truly transnational process, successive museums adopted and transformed the character and practices of their predecessors. Reliving the Grand Tour at a distance must have been even more desirable when travel to Italy greatly slowed with the invasion of the peninsula by Napoleonic troops in 1796. Tourism would not fully resume until 1815, by which time the Congress of Vienna had stipulated that artworks looted by the French from Italy and elsewhere be returned. Not all the spoils made their way back to the peninsula, but even as travel picked up, the nature of the Grand Tour was changing.57 Although it remained a finishing school for the elite throughout the nineteenth century, middle-class travelers ventured abroad in ever greater numbers. Under the influence of Romantic ideals, tourists became more interested in visiting the countryside to see picturesque and sublime landscapes. And the parameters of the Grand Tour expanded to include the Eastern Mediterranean as a taste for ancient Greek art and architecture, newly discovered, began to supersede that for Roman antiquities. Nonetheless, the multifaceted, interconnected, and cosmopolitan art world of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, actively cultivated at home and on the peninsula by travelers and Italian residents alike, left a lasting cultural imprint.

Notes 1 For a reference to tourists from America, see note 17, below. 2 This is clear partly from the dominance of British literature on the Grand Tour. Some recent and standard accounts by British authors include Rob Holland, The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018); Rosemary Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy,

The Art World of the European Grand Tour

3 4

5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12

13

14

15 16

17

205

c. 1690–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2003); Clare Hornsby, ed., The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond (London: British School at Rome, 2000); Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Bruce Redford, Venice and the Grand Tour (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1996); Andrew Wilton and Ilaria Bignamini, eds., Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1996); Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour (London and Dover, NH: Croon Helm, 1985); and Christopher Hibbert, The Grand Tour (NewYork: Putnam, 1969). There are fewer studies presenting more of the Italian viewpoint, as, for example, Carole Paul and Louis Marchesano, eds., “Viewing Antiquity: The Grand Tour, Antiquariansim, and Collecting,” Richerche di Storia dell’arte 72 (2000); and Cesare de Seta, L’Italia del grand tour: da Montaigne a Goethe (Naples: Electa Napoli, 1992). Richard Lassels, The Voyage of Italy, or, a Compleat Journey through Italy (Paris: Vincent d Motier, 1670). John Towner, An Historical Geography of Recreation and Tourism in the Western World 1540–1940 (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), 98, and for his account of the Grand Tour 96–138. Towner’s account is unusual among Grand Tour literature in its sociological perspective and presentation of statistical information. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 96–138, presents a detailed discussion of patterns of travel. Ibid., 133. Brian Dolan, Ladies of the Grand Tour (London: Flamingo, 2002), 177–84. For the attractions of Venice, see Robert Davis and Garry Martin, Venice: The Tourist Maze (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 30–51; and Redford, Venice and the Grand Tour, 58–65. Towner, An Historical Geography, 134. Ibid., 135. For an overview of Grand Tour journals and guidebooks, see Black, Italy and the Grand Tour, 17–22; and Chard, Pleasure and Guilt, for a compelling analysis of travel writing as a literary genre. John Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701–1800 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1997), includes entries with bibliography on many of the well-known British ciceroni. John Moore, A View of Society and Manners in Italy, vol. 1 (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1787), 489–93. The View was first published in 1781; for Moore and Hamilton, see 446–7 and 674. Moore, A View of Society, 489–90. For a fuller discussion of the academic tradition as it related to these issues, see Carole Paul, “Introduction: The Grand Tour and Princely Collections in Rome,” in Paul, ed., The First Modern Museums of Art: The Birth of an Institution in 18thand Early 19th-Century Europe (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), 1–19. For example, Samuel Powel and Dr. John Morgan, two tourists from Philadelphia (who at the time of their tour in 1764 would have considered themselves Britons), heard a papal Mass at the Oratorian church of S. Maria in Vallicella, called the Chiesa Nuova

206

18

19

20

21 22

23

24

25

26

27 28 29 30 31

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

(new church), with James Byres, a well-known cicerone. See Jules David Prown, “A Course of Antiquities in Rome, 1764,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 1 (1997): 93. Tamara Griggs, “The Local Antiquary in Eighteenth-Century Rome,” in The Rebirth of Antiquity: Numismatics, Archaeology, and Classical Studies, edited by Alan M. Stahl (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 83. The Gabii excavation was sponsored by the Borghese family. Giuseppe Cades made a drawing of Hamilton taking tourists there; see Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby, Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome, 2 vols, (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2010), vol. 1, 199. For example, James Boswell’s tour with Colin Morison, discussed below, began this way; Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle, eds., Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica, and France, 1765–66, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 60. Ibid., 62. The cicerone William Patoun noted that ciceroni, not their clients, should also pay “the servants who shew the palaces”; see William Patoun’s manuscript of 1766, “Advice on Travel in Italy,” in Ingamells, A Dictionary, xlv. See Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces: Use and the Art of the Plan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 58–60; Waddy (59) observes that in Rome in the 1660s and 1670s, apartments for the display of artworks became increasingly autonomous in function, location, and accessibility. For antiquities collections in Renaissance Rome, see Kathleen Wren Christian, Empire without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350–1527 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2010), with extensive bibliography. For the display of Roman collections of antiquities and their reception in the early modern period, see Paul, The First Modern Museums, 8–19, also with bibliography. For the Villa Albani, see Elisa Debenedetti, ed., Il cardinale Alessandro Albani e la sua villa. Documenti (Rome: Multigrafica Editrice, 1980); Herbert Beck and Peter C. Bol, eds., Forschungen zur Villa Albani. Antike Kunst und die Epoche der Aufklärung (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1982); and Peter C. Bol, ed., Forschungen zur Villa Albani. Katalog der antiken Bildwerk, 5 vols (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1989–98). For the display of antiquities at the Villa Borghese, see Carole Paul, Making A Prince’s Museum: Drawings for the Late-Eighteenth-Century Redecoration of Villa Borghese, with an essay by Alberta Campitelli (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2000); and Paul, The Borghese Collections and the Display of Art in the Age of the Grand Tour (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008; repr. London and New York: Routledge, 2016). For the Colonna Gallery, see Christina Strunck, “ ‘The Marvel Not Only of Rome, but of All Italy’: The Galleria Colonna, Its Design History, and Pictorial Programme, 1661–1700,” in David R. Marshall, ed., Art, Site, and Spectacle: Studies in Early Modern Visual Culture; Melbourne Art Journal 9–10 (2007): 78–102. Charles de Brosses, Le Président de Brosses en Italie, edited by Romain Colomb, 2nd ed., 2 vols (Paris: P. Didier, 1869), vol. 2, 94. Ibid., 43. Ibid. Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 31ff. For an expanded discussion of the relationship between academic art theory, display strategies in eighteenth-century European painting collections, and the discursive

The Art World of the European Grand Tour

32

33

34

35 36

37

38

39 40

41 42 43

44 45

207

practices of their viewers, see Paul, The Borghese Collections, 7–18; Paul, “Introduction,” 18; and Paul, “The Grand Tour and the Economy of Display,” in Display of Art in the Roman Palace 1550–1750, edited by Gail Feigenbaum (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2014), 296–308 and 354–6. Hester Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, 2 vols (London: Strahan & Cadell, 1789), vol. 2, 432. The painting by Domenico Zampieri (called Domenichino) to which Piozzi refers is also known as The Hunt of Diana; a print of William Hogarth’s 1738 etching and engraving of Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn is in the British Museum in London. For the emergence and development of early public art museums, see Paul, ed., The First Modern Museums, with bibliography and individual accounts of major museums. The British Museum, opened in London in 1759, was also one of the first public institutions, but was most important in its early days for its library and natural history collection, rather than its antiquities, as it is today. Jürgen Habermas has famously proposed the notion of the public sphere as a distinctive achievement of the Enlightenment. See Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989; original ed. 1962). Picture collections were opened at the Capitoline and Pio-Clementino museums in 1751 and 1790, respectively. For Zoffany’s painting of the Tribuna, see Mary Webster, Johan Zoffany, 1733–1810 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 280–301; for the Uffizi Gallery, see Paula Findlen, “Uffizi Gallery, Florence: The Rebirth of a Museum in the Eighteenth Century,” Paul, ed., The First Modern Museums, 73–111. For exhibition strategies at the Capitoline Museum, see Carole Paul, “Capitoline Museum, Rome: Civic Identity and Personal Cultivation,” in Paul, ed., The First Modern Museums, 21–45; and Carole Paul, “Benedict XIV’s Enlightened Patronage of the Capitoline Museum,” in Benedict XIV and the Enlightenment: Art, Science and Spirituality, edited by Rebecca Messbarger, Christopher Johns, and Philip Gavitt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 341–66. For the Pio-Clementino Museum, see Jeffrey Collins, “Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican City: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Age of the Grand Tour,” in Paul, ed., The First Modern Museums, 113–43. For the Capitoline’s role in educating artists, see Paul, “Capitoline Museum, Rome,” and Paul, “Benedict XIV’s Enlightened Patronage.” See Edgar Peters Bowron, “Academic Life Drawing in Rome, 1750–1790,” in Visions of Antiquity: Neoclassical Figure Drawings, edited by Richard J. Campbell and Victor Carlson, exh. cat. (Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1993), 75–85. For the Accademia del Nudo, see Paul, “Benedict XIV’s Enlightened Patronage,” 354–7. Marsha Morton, “ ‘Imitating the Ancients’: The Revival of Art in Northern Europe,” in Campbell and Carlson, eds., Visions of Antiquity, 48. For an excellent discussion of this issue, see Christopher M. S. Johns, The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 132–3. See Antonio Pinelli, “L’indotto del Grand Tour settecentesco: l’industria dell’antico e del souvenir,” Ricerche di Storia dell’arte 72 (2000): 85–106. See Bignamini and Hornsby, Digging and Dealing.

208 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56

57

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Griggs, “The Local Antiquary,” 88–9. Ingamells, A Dictionary, 553–6. Bignamini and Hornsby, Digging and Dealing, 247. For Canaletto and Smith, see Charles Beddington, Venice.Canaletto and His Rivals, exh. cat. (London: National Gallery; New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2010). For Piranesi’s vedute, see Luigi Ficacci, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Complete Etchings (Cologne and New York: 2000). For Batoni’s portraits, see Edgar Peters Bowron and Peter Björn Kerber, Pompeo Batoni: Prince of Painters in Eighteenth-Century Rome, exh. cat. (New Haven, CT, and London, Yale University Press, 2008). Wilton and Bignamini, eds., Grand Tour, includes images of and catalog entries on many small souvenirs. Jason M. Kelly, The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 7. Redford, Venice and the Grand Tour, 65–80. See Eileen Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2001). See Paul, ed., The First Modern Museums. After the Capitoline and Pio-Clementino Museums and the Uffizi Gallery, other public museums opened in the eighteenth century, including the Kassel Picture Gallery in 1775, Vienna’s Belvedere Museum in 1776, Stockholm’s Royal Museum in 1792, and Paris’s Musée du Louvre in 1793. London’s British Museum had opened in 1759, but see note 33 above. See Towner, An Historical Geography, 96–138, for changing patterns of tourism in the nineteenth century.

12

The African Geographies of Angelo Soliman Michael Yonan

It is one of the most striking images in eighteenth-century art (Figure 12.1). A man stands before us, cloaked in a fur-lined costume and beturbaned, holding a staff with a lion curled around its tip. An earring glistens from the side of his face as he looks at us with confidence. Thunderclouds suggest turbulent weather over the rough landscape behind him, which is barren except for a pair of pyramids and a lone palm tree. Those clouds do not take away from the figure, who dominates the scene around him. His dark skin identifies his African ancestry, but other than that, the image itself divulges little about who he is. To learn more, we must turn to the inscription below, which in translation reads “Angelo Soliman, from the royal family of the Numidians, a man with beautiful features, a great spirit, similar to Jugurtha in appearance and build, beloved by all residents of Africa, Sicily, France, England, Franconia, and Austria and a true friend of princes.”1 This description clarifies and confuses in equal measure. Is this really a member of the Numidian royal family? Was he truly known to “all residents” of diverse lands? And which princes did he befriend? At least the inscription elucidates the figure’s name: Angelo Soliman (c. 1721–96). Born somewhere around Lake Chad and probably of Kanuri ethnicity, Soliman was captured and sold into slavery as a child. He arrived in Sicily in 1729 and from that point forward lived an exclusively European life, spending much of it—over forty years—in Vienna, Austria. There, he was a member of the noble Liechtenstein household and served under Joseph Wenzel I, Prince of Liechtenstein, who is, in fact, the prince referenced in the inscription. Soliman converted to Catholicism, married a European woman, and briefly owned his own home, all markers of subjecthood in eighteenthcentury society. In modern terminology, we might say that he assimilated. Yet after his death, his remains met a gruesome fate. Against his daughter’s vociferous objection, Soliman’s corpse was not interred, but stuffed and put on display in Vienna’s Imperial Natural History Cabinet at its director’s command. There it was viewed publicly for over fifty years as a quasi-ethnographic display of an exotic, African body. This horrifying act indicates that despite his social standing in life, in death Soliman signified exclusively through his blackness. The term “blackness” here describes something more than simply Soliman’s dark skin. Adrienne Childs and Susan Libby have distinguished the concepts of “black” and “blackness” as different registers of racial understanding. “Black” refers to people of African descent, particularly those of 209

210

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 12.1 Johann Gottfried Haid, after Johann Nepomuk Steiner, Angelo Soliman, c. 1760. Engraving. Bildarchiv, ÖNB, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

The African Geographies of Angelo Soliman

211

sub-Saharan African descent like Soliman, especially in Western cultural contexts. “Blackness” is a more fluid concept. It is “the condition of being black as formulated by Europeans with interests at stake in notions of race.”2 Blackness is a function of representation, of symbolism, and of ideology; black and blackness thus parallel the distinction between sex and gender in feminist thought. With that in mind, we might ask how the Austrian world that Soliman traversed understood his blackness, and furthermore how that blackness was imbricated into notions of geography, space, and place. In answering that question, one might expect to find something Kanuri about Soliman’s image, some visible traces of his original identity in it. That would be a modern expectation, one not in tune with the thought structures of the eighteenth century. What Austria knew about the Kanuri was vague, and we must remember that Soliman probably remembered only fragments himself, having experienced the profound dislocation of slavery as a child. Instead, his image reveals a different conceptual structure, namely imaginative geography, the projections and narratives about places that emerge when societies confront difference. The picture locates Soliman in a geographical universe legible to the culture in which he lived. Rather than dismiss this image as a European fantasy about an African-born man, I shall argue for seeing it as a kind of historical understanding, however imprecise, of a person whose black skin was a defining characteristic of his subjectivity. What seems to us a hodgepodge of misapplied signifiers operated to position Soliman logically into a legible world. The legibility of that representation was further linked to the visual culture of the period. Eighteenth-century Europe was awash in portraits, with huge numbers of painted likenesses proliferating on the continent as never before. Yet far from everyone became the subject of a portrait. In order for Soliman’s image to be made, he needed to engage with the Viennese art world. Understanding how and why an African-born Austrian came to be represented in this way reveals how imaginative geography contributed to identity formation in eighteenth-century Europe. One of Soliman’s most distinguishing characteristics was that he was portrayed, something that cannot be said of most other Africans who lived in Europe at this time. It was the Viennese art world, which existed as a constituent of the city’s cultural universe, that enabled Soliman’s otherness to become understandable. That his representation does not read easily to us today is less the result of increased knowledge about Africa than it is of changing conceptual structures that define truth and authenticity. Let us begin by reviewing what we know about Soliman’s life. His place of birth and early life are a near total mystery. Virtually no written records for him survive before his baptism in 1731. The Austrian poet Caroline Pichler wrote a brief text about him in 1807, which is one of the few sources we have. She named his country of origin Pangusitlang, a land somewhere in Africa, but no such land with that name has ever existed. Based on her text, some scholars have associated Soliman with the Galla people of modern Ethiopia and Kenya, but given that he arrived in Europe through Sicily, his enslavement was almost certainly the result of the trans-Saharan slave trade. That would imply that he came from somewhere in Kanem-Bornu, a kingdom that straddled

212

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

the modern nations of Nigeria, Cameroon, and Chad.3 The trans-Saharan slave trade transported at least as many Africans to the Mediterranean region as did the more familiar transatlantic trade.4 Research suggests that over half a million slaves entered Europe through that route in the eighteenth century alone.5 The Kanem-Bornu people were deeply involved in the slave trade, which they undertook in order to finance broader economic activities with the Ottoman Empire and to solidify their dominance among neighboring peoples in central Africa.6 If Soliman was Kanuri and captured by Bornu enslavers, he most likely traveled to Tunis before embarking to Sicily.7 Although Pichler’s Pangusitlang is certainly mythical, her text provides some details about Soliman’s youth that might be factual. She reports that he was given the name Mmadi Make at birth. Philipp Blom has suggested that Mmadi may be a variation of the name Mohammed, a not implausible idea, since Islam had long thrived in the Bornu Empire.8 Once in Sicily, Soliman was purchased by a “marchesa” in Messina about whom again nothing is known. When he converted to Catholicism in 1731, he assumed the name of Angelo Soliman, a choice that provides further hints about his life. He chose Angelo, Pichler tells, after he was cared for during a sickness by another slave named Angelina. The name Soliman would have been taken from the household for which he worked, and since there was a prominent Sicilian family named Sollima, one with close connections to the Austrian Habsburgs, that may be the source of his name. It likewise may have mattered that Soliman sounded a lot like the Turkish name Suleiman, about which we will say more in a moment. At some point, Soliman began to work in for Prince Georg Christian von Lobkowitz, another Sicilian representative of an important Austrian dynasty. Soliman apparently accompanied Lobkowitz on military campaigns in Bohemia and Hungary, which brought him to Central Europe. Otherwise, nothing is known about his life during the 1730s and 1740s.9 Lobkowitz died in 1753 and sometime thereafter Soliman was freed and came to work for another major central European clan, the Liechtensteins. Being released from enslavement did not mean total social liberation in this Habsburg setting, however; since Soliman was in the service of a princely family, he had significant obligations to them, but from this point forward he was never again a slave. Nor was he a Hofneger, one of the African-born pages common at European courts in this period, although scholarly writing has persistently referred to him by both of these terms.10 Beginning in 1754, the year in which he first appears in the Liechtenstein records, the details of Soliman’s life become significantly clearer. His first title in their household was Chef der Dienerschaft, or chief valet, a position that came with substantial responsibilities. Later, Soliman served as tutor to the young Liechtenstein princes, a position of great importance, since it required an educated, religiously devout, and socially refined individual.11 He was not the first African to work for the Liechtensteins, but he was the first to hold such prominent positions in their service.12 Soliman also appeared with the Liechtensteins in numerous public ceremonies, including processionals, Masses, dinners in state, and hunts. We know that he traveled to Frankfurt in 1764 with the Viennese delegation to the imperial coronation of Emperor Joseph II.13 While there, he won a large sum of money playing cards. Upon returning to Vienna, he entered into a secret marriage with a widow named Magdalena Kellermann,

The African Geographies of Angelo Soliman

213

which occurred with the approval of Christoph Anton Migazzi, Archbishop of Vienna. The marriage took place on February 6, 1768 and provides one of the only statements by Soliman himself of his origins, albeit a brief one: in the marriage contract, he described himself as natus in Africa Parentibus Accatholicis, born in Africa to nonCatholic parents.14 Now financially solvent, Soliman gave up his position with the Liechtensteins and purchased a home in Vienna’s Third District, where he lived with his new wife.15 Unfortunately, this autonomy was short lived. In 1773, he was forced to return to the Liechtensteins when he could no longer sustain himself financially.16 He remained in their service until 1783, when he retired with a pension at age 63. Soliman’s later life was filled with social engagements. He was a member of the Freemasonic lodge Zur wahren Eintracht, whose membership included Mozart and Haydn, and he was a respected presence in circles frequented by educated Viennese. Even the Emperor himself knew Soliman personally and consulted with him on matters of state. His was a life that few of his contemporaries, even European-born ones, could have attained, and for an African transported to Europe as a child slave, it is nothing short of astonishing. In this life about which so many important details are unknown, we do know one significant thing about Soliman. Sometime around 1760, he sat for a painted portrait. The painting was made by the Bohemian artist, Johann Nepomuk Steiner (1725–93), and, once finished, was transferred into a print by the Augsburg-born printmaker Johann Gottfried Haid (1710–76). The painting no longer survives; we know the image only from the print. It turns out that this print is one of the more valuable historical artifacts associated with Soliman, telling us much about how Austrian society understood this person and his history. Although he strikes us as unusual today, the presence of a sub-Saharan African in European society was not the extreme anomaly it might first seem to be.17 Black Africans had become visible components of eighteenthcentury urban life, especially in port cities like Messina and court capitals like Vienna.18 There are many examples of Africans living at early modern European courts, usually as slaves, servants, or Hofneger, and they often appear as subsidiary figures in group portraits. Distinctive in this case is how Soliman is imaged in his portrait, which is far from a typical representation of an African in eighteenth-century European art. This brings us to the question of how much Europeans, and particularly Central Europeans, might have known about Africa. They had a wide range of explanations at their disposal for categorizing the identity of an African-born man in their midst. However poorly individualized the cultures of sub-Saharan Africa may have been, centuries of interaction with its coastal cities meant that there was a long history of conceptualizing Africa as a distinct geographical space, one marked by (among other things) the skin color of its inhabitants. Africa was one of the Four Continents known in early modern Europe and was represented allegorically in numerous works of art, most famously Giambattista Tiepolo’s ceiling fresco in the Würzburg Residenz, produced between 1750 and 1753 (Figure 12.2).19 Eighteenth-century Africa therefore was not exactly the “unknown continent” that the nineteenth-century European imagination would later devise. As Ann Thomson has demonstrated, quite a bit was

214

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 12.2 Giambattista Tiepolo, Africa, detail from Apollo with the Four Continents. Ceiling fresco, Residenz, Würzburg, 1750–3. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, New York.

known about Africa before 1800, although that knowledge was generalized and superficial, equal parts abstraction and factuality.20 The main role Africa played in European understanding was as a source of wealth, usually of raw materials like ivory or gold. It is this role as a trading partner that Tiepolo emphasizes in the Würzburg ceiling. In addition, educated Europeans knew something of the hierarchical structures of many African societies, however sketchily.21 There were also many images of Africans in European art, which the multivolume Image of the Black in Western Art illustrates amply, and these images helped Europeans to impose “complex and incoherent imagined attributes and associations” onto the black people they encountered.22 By far the smallest subset of imagery was pictures of living people, and among these, portraits of servants predominated. Yet there were many examples in European art and legend of Africans who were not enslaved. One example was Prester John, allegedly the king of a Christian monarchy in Ethiopia, who was thought to be the descendant of one of the three Magi. The myth of Prester John indicated that Christianity could exist in Africa, which rendered it partially civilized in European conceptions of societal development, since Christianity was a precondition for civilization in much eighteenth-century political theory.23 There were other myths of princely Africans

The African Geographies of Angelo Soliman

215

as well, including the Queen of Sheba and Caspar, King of the Moors. They offered prototypes, albeit fantastic ones, for envisioning Africa as home to structured, courtly, religious societies. An important quality we should note about Soliman’s portrait is that it engages this grandiose conception of Africa. Although he was once a slave, Haid’s print does not depict him as one. The symbols of servitude and slavery in eighteenth-century art— shackles, chains, platters, pitchers—are absent. He attends to no one in this image, and the sole reference to a high-ranking superior occurs indirectly in its inscription, where he is named a friend to the prince, not his faithful servant. The print exalts Soliman and represents him emanating authority. Emerging from this observation is that if Soliman is exalted, he is not a savage, which is how eighteenth-century Europeans usually termed people from cultures seemingly less developed than their own and a concept that would be applied to Africa regularly in the nineteenth century. This should not surprise us, since in eighteenthcentury European understanding, the truly savage sector of the globe was not Africa, but rather the Americas. Writers sought to differentiate Africa from America precisely according to degrees of civilization, and again one sees this in Tiepolo’s ceiling, where America is the continent where manners have made the fewest inroads. Unlike America, Africa was understood as somewhere between savagery and civilization, which made it difficult to characterize in the European imagination. As Thomson has noted, African societies “could apparently not be assigned a clear place in the stadial scheme of history in view of the conflicting evidence about their degree of civilization.”24 For this reason, Africa was excluded generally from thinking about history; not because it had none, nor because Europeans were unaware of it, but because the outward signs of civilization did not seem to apply.25 African societies resisted quick summarization into tidy Enlightenment schema. This confusion appears in texts that attempted to describe Soliman’s ancestral home, the Kingdom of Kanem-Bornu, in proto-ethnographical terms. Heinrich Zedler’s multivolume Universallexicon, the major German-language encyclopedia of the eighteenth century, described the Bornu (including the Kanuri) as godless people who lived like animals, sharing wives and only occasionally covering themselves with crude animal hides. Crucially, however, it also says that they have a king, one so rich that his entire household is made of pure gold.26 Fanciful descriptions, no doubt, but this discrepancy between social underdevelopment and powerful richness, between naked pagans and an extremely wealthy monarch, is not only hyperbolic, it reveals an incongruity between civilization and savagery that eighteenth-century Europeans were unable to resolve when conceptualizing an image of Africa. Zedler’s entry indicates something further. In order to understand Soliman’s origins, eighteenth-century Europeans would not have been able to rely on a modern topographical sense of a real place, and this brings us to what we see in Haid’s print. Instead of representing Soliman in a “real” setting, it relies instead on an imaginative geography. The term comes from Chloe Chard, who characterizes it as “a space of privileged protection for desires, aspirations, affective memory, the cultural memory of a subject,” but at the same time a space defined by a field of knowledge.27 Imaginative

216

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

geography is where knowledge and desire intersect, or, better said, where fantasy is invested with the truth associated with knowledge. It is geographical insofar as it is rooted in a sense of locale, but it is imaginative in that it overlays onto that place a fantasy. Imaginative geography, I would argue, is the representational paradigm at work in Haid’s print. David Bindman has called the portrait a “fascinating mélange of conflicting signifiers,” and, indeed, to a modern mindset it confuses references to multiple cultures into a single hybrid.28 But let us look at each of its components in turn, beginning with Soliman’s clothing, recently the subject of an article by Heather Morrison, who argues that Soliman negotiated his public and private roles in European society partly through his choice of dress.29 Soliman wears a fur-lined suit of the kind common among central European courtiers. Its European form contrasts with the turban he wears, a headdress associated with non-European regions, most directly the Ottoman Empire, which was often figured as the ultimate exotic space in the European imagination. His name’s similarity to the Turkish name Suleiman also evokes the Ottomans, although as far as we know, Soliman never stepped foot in Turkey. Here we might note that Suleiman the Magnificent was the longest-reigning sultan in Ottoman history and a historical figure of considerable glamour to educated Europeans.30 Soliman is the local iteration of this powerful namesake. This blending of Ottoman east with African south is not unusual, since Turks and Africans were often confused with each other, and, indeed, the figure of the Moor, the dark-skinned Muslim from North Africa, could combine elements of both. The depicted figure stands in a landscape that evokes yet a third culture, ancient Egypt, the clear signifiers of which are the colossal pyramids shown in the print’s lower right. Bindman argues that they are “loosely an emblem of Africa,” as is the palm tree shown above them.31 That is true, but they also function to render Soliman’s geography imaginative in precisely the way Chard described. Certainly it was known in Europe that there are three great pyramids at Giza; the Austrian architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach had illustrated this clearly in his Entwurff einer historischen Architektur, a treatise on global architectural styles, published in 1721 (Figure  12.3). It is then noteworthy that we see only two pyramids in Haid’s print. Intentionally or otherwise, they recall Egypt as a known locale while also pushing it into a fictional place, which functions to keep this image partly in the imaginary space of art. Chard helps us understand this in her observation that imaginative geography is predicated on the appearance of sights, of lone, special, monumental, and unusual natural formations or human-made edifices.32 Soliman’s Egyptian pyramids function in exactly this way, as does the palm tree on the hill beside them. This reference to Egypt may further have indicated freemasonry to some viewers, although whether Soliman was involved in freemasonic activities at this point in his life remains uncertain. A more layered component of the portrait is the lion staff Soliman holds. This may be yet another reference to his Viennese ceremonial costume, but its prominence in Haid’s image makes it hard to overlook. At one level, the lion references the AfricanMiddle Eastern continuum that Soliman occupied. Yet although the lion was exotic

The African Geographies of Angelo Soliman

217

Figure 12.3 Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Pyramides Aegyptiaca. Copperplate engraving from Entwurff einer historischen Architektur, 1721. Image in the public domain.

to Europe, it had a long history as a European heraldic symbol. It is part of the coat of arms of multiple royal and noble dynasties, but intriguingly neither the Duchy of Liechtenstein nor the Habsburg House of Austria are among them. The lion therefore conveniently links Africa and Europe through a symbol of eliteness, power, strength, and royalty, but does so independent of heraldic references to Soliman’s actual immediate superiors. The insightful viewer might be tempted to trace a connection between the lion staff and the traditions of African art, in particular the linguist staff. Held by a person of authority to mark his power visually, the staff was a long wooden pole topped with a carved animal as its finial. These animals held religious or symbolic value and could be made of precious materials, as with a gilt wooden leopard finial now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Figure 12.4). There is no way to know if European viewers would have been familiar with African carvings like this. Most likely were not, but the few that did would have seen the lion as a “true” sign of Soliman’s exoticism. Yet another association, this time literary, is that the lion echoes the name of the great Renaissance documenter of African culture, Leo Africanus. Born in Islamic Spain and given the name al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, his Descrittione dell’Africa of 1550 was the primary source of information about Africa available to Europeans prior to nineteenth-century colonization. His moniker literally means “the African lion,” and that trace evocation

218

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 12.4 Akan Peoples (modern Ghana and Ivory Coast). Linguist staff finial representing a leopard with a cow in its mouth, 1895–1905. Wood and gold. Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Gift of Alfred A. Glassell Jr. (97.1277).

here further serves to position Soliman as learned and respected. Leo Africanus was also, like Soliman, an individual whose life crossed the boundaries of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.33 The print’s symbols identify Soliman as European, Ottoman, Egyptian, and subSaharan African simultaneously. Its text, in contrast, overlays a totally different narrative onto him. It associates Soliman directly with Numidia, which certainly was not the region from which he hailed.34 Although Numidia had not existed as a discrete state since antiquity, it did, indeed, still exist in eighteenth-century designations of North Africa. Maps often referred to the stretch of the African Mediterranean Coast in Algeria and Tunisia as Numidia.35 Mapmakers did this to avoid referencing this area either through the Arabic-speaking dynastic families who governed Algeria or the Ottomans who controlled Tunisia. There is a belief at work here, one particularly meaningful in the Holy Roman Empire, that the status of these areas in antiquity formed the basis for their modern comprehension.36 Here we can remember that Tunis was the likeliest point from which Soliman departed Africa for Europe. To a European viewer, then, Numidia is the most familiar, intelligible African locale in Soliman’s life story. It is the point where he entered the European collective consciousness, and perhaps to some, the place at which he stepped into the civilized world. Numidia is not just a random reference, then, but is appropriate to the represented person when understood in eighteenth-century terms. It is not a factual truth based in the actual circumstances of his origins, but a truth that becomes meaningful through imaginative geography. It is the fiction that creates a truth.

The African Geographies of Angelo Soliman

219

Scholars have noted that in designating Soliman a Numidian prince, the Liechtensteins conquered Africa in a kind of fantasy imperialism.37 But if the print associates Soliman with Numidia, it also associates him with one of the most famous figures from Numidia known to eighteenth-century learned audiences, namely Jugurtha (c. 160–104 bce ). The story of Jugurtha’s battles with the Roman Empire was recorded in Sallust’s Bellum Iugurthium, one of the most complete historical texts to survive from classical antiquity. Sallust describes the battles between Jugurtha, King of the Numidians, and the Roman general Gaius Marius, which took place between 112 and 106 bce . Sallust’s story paints a complex picture of Jugurtha, who is at once unscrupulous—he kills his half-brother to gain power and bribes Roman officials— and magnetic in his political cunning and military skill. He outwits the Roman army on several occasions and exploits their weaknesses mercilessly. Impossible to conquer in battle, Jugurtha was finally overthrown when Gaius Marius brokered a deal with the Mauretanian king Bocchus to capture him and bring him to Rome, where he died in prison. The appeal of this story was the potential it offered for imagining Roman power, and by extension European power, over unpredictable enemies on the borders of Europe. Jugurtha appears regularly in eighteenth-century art. Painters focused especially on moments when Gaius Marius and Jugurtha encountered each other face to face. One such image is Tiepolo’s The Triumph of Marius, painted to decorate the grand hall of the Ca’ Dolfin in Venice (Figure 12.5). Although Tiepolo’s painting is filled with exotic references, it does not characterize Jugurtha by giving him dark skin. The tone of his skin is not dramatically different from any other figure in the painting, and, indeed, it is slightly lighter than that of Gaius Marius. Tiepolo’s image shows that it was possible to evoke Jugurtha without referencing either ethnic origin or blackness, even though his shackles do, in fact, recall slave imagery. Haid’s print does something quite different. It melds the Roman history of Jugurtha and Gaius Marius with the modern identities of Soliman and the Prince of Liechtenstein. Gaius Marius’s ability to control a powerful and astute enemy is here absorbed into a narrative about a Central European nobleman having a highly intelligent black African in his household. The prince’s service to his superiors, the Habsburg monarchs, is envisioned through Gaius Marius’s service to Rome, and this is particularly apt, given the symbolic connection between Vienna and Rome through the Holy Roman title. Yet, even as this print associates Soliman with Jugurtha, it also keeps the two at a distance from each other. Soliman is not the new Jugurtha, nor is he costumed as him; he is Jugurthae similis, similar to Jugurtha. It is a rhetoric of approximation that prevents a full coalescing of the two individuals and is again a component of the print’s imaginative geography. If the places associated with Soliman are indistinct, so is his relationship to the classical prototypes upon which eighteenth-century elites based their self-understanding. He is Jugurtha-like enough to call to mind the north African prince, but separate enough from him to be associated with territories elsewhere. The strategy of evoking Numidia was meaningful not just for Africans like Soliman, but could also be applied to individuals with no connections to that continent. Rather surprisingly, this included Mai, known as Omai, the Tahitian man who traveled to Britain with James Cook in 1773 and who sat for a celebrated portrait by Sir Joshua

220

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 12.5 Giambattista Tiepolo, The Triumph of Marius, 1729. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (65.183.1).

The African Geographies of Angelo Soliman

221

Reynolds. On the occasion of Mai’s departure from London, a soliloquy written in his fictive voice was published, and in it, Mai imagines himself as Numidian: Oft’ have I gaz’d, and wish’d with ardor too To paint my skin, and only look like you: Oft’ have I tried, but ev’ry art was vain, No colours hid my dark Numidian stain.38

The fictional Tahitian refers here to painting his skin white, so better to fit into London society. Numidia therefore became a geographical shorthand for the person born outside of Europe, particularly the dark(er)-skinned person, whose wit enabled him to negotiate the spaces of European elite society. Mai’s “dark Numidian stain” was the indisputable visual proof of his non-European ancestry. Of course, as a Tahitian, Numidia probably meant little to Mai, but that both he and Soliman could be understood as Numidian indicates how imaginative geography contributed to social identities. Now I would like to inquire how Haid’s image reveals the ways in which Soliman’s life intersected with the Viennese art world that produced it. The circumstances surrounding the original painting’s production are not well known. The painter Steiner hailed from the area around Jihlava in southern Bohemia. His career was based largely there until he painted an altarpiece that attracted the attention of a high-ranking Austrian diplomat, Prince Anton Wenzel von Kaunitz-Rietberg, State Chancellor at the Habsburg court. Kaunitz summoned Steiner to Vienna, where he became a court artist and fulfilled multiple commissions for the imperial family. Exactly where and for whom he painted Soliman’s portrait is unclear. There is a chance that he did so in Bohemia, before either man arrived in Vienna, although it is also possible that it was made after both had relocated. Soliman and Steiner arrived in Vienna within a year of each other—the former in 1754, the latter 1755—and they traveled in overlapping social circles. Whatever the painting’s genesis, at some point after it was made, the idea came to translate it into a print, which is unquestionably a Viennese product. But here, too, the tendrils of the global reach out from the local. A notable aspect of Haid’s training was that he studied in London under John Boydell, a central figure in the British school of engraving. Boydell’s activities are well known, but exactly what Haid learned from him is somewhat less obvious. We can say for a fact that Boydell’s interest in mezzotint technique, in which the surface of the metal plate is roughened in order to produce textured effects, must have had an impact on Haid. Kaunitz emerges as a likely facilitator, since he was extremely interested in British printmaking innovations, including mezzotints and lithography, which he felt could be adopted in Vienna to enrich the local arts industry.39 One can see the effects of Boydell’s influence in Haid’s print, particularly in the shaded textures of the clouds behind Soliman. The changing densities of ink seen there are hallmarks of mezzotint production. The shading techniques Haid learned in London also enabled him to model Soliman’s face, with the dark coloration of the ink handled to suggest the reflection of light on brown skin. It

222

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

does this much more subtly than earlier printmaking techniques would have permitted. The print therefore represented a familiar, yet exotic, dark-skinned man as it also displayed the latest art-making techniques to the Viennese public. And they appear to have liked it immensely. Haid produced the print initially under the auspices of the Vienna Academy of Art and distributed it from his workshop. It was so popular that sometime after 1770, the burgeoning publishing house Artaria issued a second impression. Artaria was Vienna’s most vibrant late eighteenth-century publisher, known today above all for printing the musical scores of Haydn and Beethoven. Perhaps Haid learned more than just technique from Boydell, since the Englishman was a shrewd manipulator of the London art market. The print therefore places an African man in the center of a combined artistic and economic project. It is through the Viennese art world that the layered possibilities for understanding this person interconnected. Here I will mention Childs and Libby’s observation that the black body became a “star performed in the spectacle of modernity,” a site where modernity could be imagined and experimented with, and that an axis of race needed to be constructed in order for it to serve that role.40 We could note additionally that cultural contact like that between Africa and Europe, as exemplified in Soliman’s image, became an increasingly important driver for artistic advancement in European art.41 The picture demonstrates how a black body could be celebrated and exploited simultaneously at an early moment in the formation of modern racial understanding, and how this was done for the person represented, the people who knew him, and the artists who depicted him. Such an image was valuable because it appeared at a moment when blackness as a concept was transforming. Much like gender, race previously had been, as Dror Warhman has argued, “malleable, unfixed, unreliable, changeable through circumstances or through self-conscious choice.”42 One’s position in the matrix of ethnic identities was relational; it could move around. Yet in the 1760s and 1770s, a shift occurred in which this epistemological openness began to settle into discrete racial/ethnic concepts, which in the nineteenth century would come to be associated with actual topographic spaces.43 Soliman’s image appeared on the cusp of that change. The same openness we find in Soliman’s subjectivity is equally applicable to his geography. The print does not define a geographically accurate place, grounded in the real conditions of contact and experience, but is a tissue of references striking in the looseness of their associations. Egypt, and by association the pharaohs; the palm tree as a generic reference to warm climates; Soliman’s turban, which evokes the Ottoman Empire specifically and the broader practice of wrapped head coverings associated with multiple “exotic” locales (the Maghreb, Persia, India, the South Pacific); the multivalent lion-tipped staff; the textual references to Numidia and Jugurtha. None of these fit together into a modern sense of self and locale, but at this historical moment, a black man could bring them all together meaningfully. The solidification of essentialisms in the later eighteenth century, which Wahrman has charted, has a parallel in the solidification of imaginative geographies into real ones. The increased expectation of geographical empiricism would render Soliman’s image implausible to viewers who looked at it just a few decades after it was made.

The African Geographies of Angelo Soliman

223

My final point will be to note that this transplanting of geographies may not have been just done to Soliman in the process of making this image, but may also have been something he himself encouraged. All of us tell stories about our pasts, many of them true, but some probably less than totally so. Personal mythmaking is essential for fitting the pieces of our lives together coherently. With that in mind, I would suggest that Soliman could have believed in the mythology of this image, that its combinatory fictions were how he could explain his own identity to himself. Ripped from his African home at a young age, transported abroad, thoroughly Europeanized, and exposed to contradictory ideas about Africa’s place in the global system, Soliman may have desired exactly this kind of explanation of what his blackness meant. In sitting for this portrait, he enabled imaginative geography to become a mechanism for a globalized self-understanding. But if that is true, then this understanding did not outlive him. The fate of his body reminds us that the semantic possibilities of the eighteenth century would not survive the transition into the nineteenth. I am most grateful to Stacey Sloboda and Kristel Smentek for their insightful comments on this essay.

Notes 1 The inscription reads: Angelus Solimanus, Regiae Numidarum gentis Nepos, decora facie, ingenio validus os humorosque Jugurthae similis. In Afr. In Sicil., Gall. Angl, Francon. Austriae Ombnibus Carus fidelis Principum familiaris. 2 Adrienne L. Childs and Susan H. Libby, “Figuring Blackness in Europe,” in Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Adrienne Childs and Susan Libby (London: Routledge, 2014), 4–5; see also Childs and Libby, The Black Figure in the European Imaginary (London: Giles, 2017), 17–43. 3 It cannot be confirmed that Pichler actually knew Soliman and her account contains many implausible details. Walter Sauer, “Angelo Soliman: Mythos und Wirklichkeit,” in Von Soliman zu Omofum: Afrikanische Diaspora in Österreich, 17. bis 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Walter Sauer (Innsbruck: Studien-Verlag, 2007), 64–5. 4 David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol. 3: From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition, Part 3: The Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap /Harvard University Press, 2011), xviii. 5 Andreas Eckert, “Sklaverei, Sklavenhandel und politische Ordnung in Westafrika im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Angelo Soliman: Ein Afrikaner in Wien, edited by Philipp Blom and Wolfgang Kos (Vienna: Verlag Christian Brandstätter, 2011), 25. 6 Eckert, “Sklaverei,” 26. 7 Salvatore Bono, “Sklaven in der Mediterranen Welt,” in Blom and Kos, Soliman, 39. 8 Philipp Blom, “Von Mmadi Make zu Angelo Sollima—Eine Spurensuche,” in Blom and Kos, Soliman, 68–69; Eckert, “Sklaverei,” in Blom and Kos, Soliman, 27. See also Peter Martin, Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren: Afrikaner in Geschichte und Bewußtsein der Deutschen (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001); and Hans W. Debrunner, “Négritude im 18. Jahrhundert: Die Bedeutung der afrikanischen Diaspora für die Ausweitung des Horizonts,” Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert und Österreich 13 (1999): 69–90.

224

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

9 Blom, “Von Mmadi Make,” 76. 10 David Bindman, “Subjectivity and Slavery in Portraiture: From Courtly to Commercial Societies,” in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, edited by Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 74–6. 11 Philipp Blom “Soliman’s Körper, Angelos Geist,” in Blom and Kos, Soliman, 15. 12 Walter Sauer, “Zwischen High Society und Vorstadtmilieu,” in Blom and Kos, Soliman, 82. 13 It is incorrect to state that Soliman had a “high position” at the imperial court. Bindman, “Subjectivity and Slavery,” 82. 14 Blom, “Von Mmadi Make,” 67. 15 Sauer, “Zwischen High Society,” 88. 16 Ibid., 92. 17 In the eighteenth century, the term “Africa” often referred strictly to sub-Saharan Africa. See Ann Thomson, “Thinking about the History of Africa in the Eighteenth Century,” in Encountering Otherness: Diversities and Transcultural Experiences in Early Modern Europe, edited by Guido Abbattista (Trieste: EUT Edizioni, 2011), 255. 18 Bindman and Gates, Image of the Black, xix. 19 Werner Helmberger and Matthias Staschull, Tiepolos Welt: Das Deckenfresko im Treppenhaus der Residenz Würzburg (Munich: Bayerische Schlossverwaltung, 2010), 42–9. A similar formulation is found in Gregorio Guglielmi’s fresco depicting Mercury and Global Commerce in the Schaelzerpalais, Augsburg. 20 Thomson, “Thinking,” 257; Bindman and Gates, Image of the Black, 2. 21 Bindman and Gates, Image of the Black, 2. On the geohistorical conditions of African society in this era, see Trevor R. Getz, Cosmopolitan Africa c. 1700–1875 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 2. 22 Bindman and Gates, Image of the Black, 3. See also Elizabeth A. Sutton, Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), ch. 4. 23 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 24–35. 24 Thomson, “Thinking,” 264. 25 Ibid., 262. 26 Johann Heinrich Zedler, “Borno,” in Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, vol. 4 (Leipzig, 1733), 756–7. Available at: www.zedlerlexicon.de (accessed May 24, 2017). 27 Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Georgraphy 1600–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 20. The idea ultimately traces to Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 54–5. 28 Bindman, “Subjectivity and Slavery,” 83. 29 Heather Morrison, “Dressing Angelo Soliman,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 44, no. 3 (2011): 361–82; and also Blom, “Soliman’s Körper,” 18. 30 One sees this in the sheer number of theatrical works that represented him. Gunter E. Grimm, “Soliman—Schwächling und Despot: Facetten des türkischen Herrscherbilds im deutschen Drama des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Europa und die Türkei im 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp (Göttingen: V & R unipress/Bonn University Press, 2011), 45–61; and Larry Wolff, The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Encounters on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2016), ch. 3, with additional bibliography.

The African Geographies of Angelo Soliman

225

31 Bindman, “Subjectivity and Slavery,” 74–6. 32 Chard, Pleasure, 18–20. 33 Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), chs 4 and 6. 34 Blom, “Soliman’s Körper,” 14. 35 As, for example, on the 1718 map of Mauretania and Numidia by the Nuremberg-based cartographer Christoph Weigel the Elder (1654–1725). Practical information remained scarce. Zedler’s entry on Numidia is brief and disdainful, stating in its entirety that: “The inhabitants are a stupid ignorant people who cannot generally see very far because the wind keeps blowing sand up into the air. They lose their teeth very young because they eat a lot of dates.” Zedler, “Numidia,” in Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon, (1658), 24. Available at: www.zedler-lexicon.de (accessed May 24, 2017). 36 For a further example of this phenomenon, see Kristel Smentek’s essay in this volume. 37 Sauer, “Angelo Soliman,” 67. 38 Omiah’s Farewell: Inscribed to the Ladies of London (London: G. Kearsly, 1776). Quoted in Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in EighteenthCentury England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 124. 39 Jiří Kroupa, “Fürst Wenzel Anton Kaunitz-Rietberg: Ein Kunstmäzen und Curieux der Aufklärung,” in Staatskanzler Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz-Rietberg (1711–1794): Neue Perspektiven zu Politik und Kultur der europäischen Aufklärung, edited by Grete Klingenstein and Franz A. J. Szabo (Graz: Andreas Schnider, 1996): 360–82. 40 Childs and Libby, “Figuring Blackness,” 3. 41 Mary D. Sheriff, ed., Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 7–12. 42 Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, 86. On race as a category in eighteenth-century thought, see Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 5–11; and on the role of the visual in categorizing race Anne Lafont, “How Skin Became a Racial Marker: Art Historical Perspectives on Race,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 51, no. 1 (2017): 89–113. 43 Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, 168.

226

13

Toward an Itinerant Art History: The Swahili Coast of Eastern Africa Prita Meier

The Swahili Coast of Eastern Africa has long existed on the edge of multiple geographies, both physical and imaginary.1 It is a kind of frontier zone, where land and sea meet and as such it has been a vibrant arena of global cultural convergence for over a millennium. Swahili Coast society, which is made up of diverse linguistic and ethnic communities, has been shaped fundamentally by centuries of long-distance trade and migration flows across the African continent and across the Indian Ocean world. For centuries, peoples, things, and ideas from the African heartland, the Arabian Peninsula, Asia, and Europe converged here, creating a densely layered cultural landscape. Swahili aesthetic forms invite us to consider what happens when different systems of signification meet in culturally confluent zones like the coastal and littoral regions of Eastern Africa. They require that we un-discipline art-historical canons and museological frameworks in several important ways: they unsettle assumptions about the cultural origins of things, they resist easy categorization, and they present a relational, itinerant view of aesthetics. But they also prompt us to ask larger questions about the geopolitics underwriting art-historical projects. When and why do we feel the need to draw boundaries between people and places? When do we perceive difference or influence? What exactly is the local and global in a story about cultural dimensions of globalization? Why do we find it useful to draw distinctions between Europe and Asia and Africa and between the native (figured as original or authentic) and the foreign (deemed imitative or hybrid) in art-historical narratives? Ultimately, the arts of the Swahili Coast are a platform for showing that the arts are always constituted by the mobility of people, ideas, and things. From the edge of the seas, the prevailing cognitive map of the world with its fixed borders that separate continents, societies, and nation-states simply does not make sense for understanding the history of culture and the arts.

A Material History of the African Indian Ocean Swahili Coast cultural history challenges established oppositions between the local and global and between native and foreign to reveal strikingly fluid practices, where diverse 227

228

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

forms and life worlds interlock and overlap to create densely layered material landscapes.2 Yet, one of the most startling, even disconcerting, characteristics of Swahili Coast material culture is that it does not look distinctly local or indigenous. Especially frustrating to art historians is the fact that even when a local artisan has made an artwork, ornament, or textile, it is likely to evoke or at least pay homage to an objecttype or design element that is part of a genre with connections across the ocean. Like the artists represented at Beijing’s Liulichang Market described in Michele Matteini’s chapter in this volume, local artisans engaged styles, ornamental forms, and images from overseas in their own work. However, unlike those Chinese artists, the success of a local artisan depended on the deftness with which he or she could appropriate and transform imported forms and fashions in the making of local works, and Swahili artists excelled in this regard. Perhaps the most apt example of this phenomenon is the famous carved wooden doorframes of the region (Figure 13.1).

Figure 13.1 A nineteenth-century grand carved doorframe in Stone Town, Zanzibar. The photograph was labeled “Arab Door” in 1906. Photo: Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies Winterton Collection, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

An Itinerant Art History: The Swahili Coast of Eastern Africa

229

Such imposing carved doorways decorated the main façades of most grand merchant mansions, palaces and mosques since at least the fourteenth century, but their designs changed constantly—with local carvers especially keen to incorporate fragments or details from South Asian woodwork, highly valued on the Swahili Coast for its beauty and inventiveness for centuries. On Siyu Island, once an important center of woodcarving in the Lamu Archipelago, oral histories also emphasize the importance of India to local carving traditions. One story focuses on the arrival of Indian carvers in the distant past, who, having shipwrecked off the coast, came to settle on the island and, in turn, helped create the distinct Siyu woodcarving style.3 Beautifully ornamented doorways are very much an ancient Swahili idiom, but the embrace of new influences always constituted its surface treatment. Therefore, this doorframe, carved likely in the 1880s, is today celebrated as a traditional Swahili artifact, but when it was first commissioned and installed in the Stone Town of Zanzibar, it was the emblem of radical newness. Typical of the Omani period, when a highly ornate and opulent type of carving style came to dominate local trends, the doorway’s forms and detailing was very much influenced by the furniture manufactures of British Raj India. The local taste for such densely carved doorways was spearheaded by the third Busaidi sultan of Zanzibar, Seyyid Barghash, who, in his twenties, had lived for several years in Bombay before the British allowed him to return to Zanzibar. Often called East India-style furniture or ornament by Europeans, it was a playfully historicist form of ornament: carvers fused Gujarati, Renaissance, Gothic, or “Islamic” elements to create a playful bricolage of many places and many periods. For example, the teeming three-dimensional floral fretwork of this doorway’s tympanum was reproduced countless times, covering the surfaces of a bewildering range of objects in the nineteenth century. Chairs, beds, and even candlesticks featured some version of it. In fact, by the late nineteenth century, entire doorways in this style were mass-produced in Bombay and sold all over the western Indian Ocean.4 Carved doorways had become a mobile export, easily circulating across the Indian Ocean as a modern commodity. This is exactly why locals coveted such doorways, because they were perfect emblems of the mercurial mobility of littoral aesthetics. Collecting imported objects was and is central to local aesthetic practice. It signals one’s means and expertise to cultivate the beauty of distant places, but how such things were displayed was distinctively “local.” For example, during the nineteenth century, Mombasans had no interest in using imported chairs, sofas, or tables to recreate European or Indian household norms. Figure  13.2 shows a view of the public reception room of Jaffer, Sheriff and Company’s store in Old Town Mombasa, which specialized in selling the family collections of the waning local elite to British colonialists and European visitors to the Swahili Coast. This interior was very much meant to appeal to Western tourists, but it also reflected local interior aesthetics. As we shall see, locals delighted in displaying their collections of the world in insistently non-utilitarian ways. Chairs, tables, and even porcelain dishes were often collected only as things, to intensify the material spectacle of static display.5

230

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 13.2 A postcard showing Jaffer, Sheriff, and Company’s sale room in Old Town, Mombasa, n.d. Photo: National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi.

The Surfaces of Things This display style has its beginnings in the eighteenth century. Patricians staged increasingly baroque displays of exotic objets d’art in their homes, radically reinventing domestic space as a spectacle of layered ornament (Figures 13.3 and 13.4). In fact, latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sources suggest that such displays were expressions of women’s ability to craft spaces of tasteful sophistication, international connectedness, and hospitality in the home.6 A convergence of changing economic and political forces in the eighteenth century undergirded this aesthetic. Formerly powerful empires fell and local trade networks expanded, which linked the Swahili Coast to new markets and societies across the globe. The Portuguese had dominated the Indian Ocean economy since the sixteenth century and they had also colonized many of the key port cities of the Swahili Coast, including Mombasa and Pate, and they wrested control of the local economy from Swahili hands. Patricians no longer had the means to patronize artistic production and few mosques, mausoleums, and palaces were built when Portugal ruled the region. But by the second half of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese increasingly lost control of their Indian Ocean empire. Mombasa, with help from the merchant princes of Oman, permanently defeated their former oppressors in 1698. Omani power in East Africa increased from then onward, but coastal patricians and merchants had more opportunities to participate in the transcontinental trade than they did under Portuguese rule, reviving connections with their former trading

An Itinerant Art History: The Swahili Coast of Eastern Africa

Figure 13.3 The interior of a stone mansion in Lamu Town, Kenya, 1884. Photo: Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Figure 13.4 View of a richly decorated room in a stone mansion in Lamu, Kenya, 1884. Photo: Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

231

232

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

partners in central and mainland East Africa. They also participated in slaving caravans, selling captured men, women, and children to French and Omani plantation owners, who spearheaded the expansion of slave-based production on the islands and coastal regions of the western Indian Ocean in the eighteenth century.7 Northern Europeans, such as the Dutch and English East India Companies, came to dominate the trade in luxury goods between Africa, the islands of the Indian Ocean, South Asia, and the Arab Peninsula. The local elite used their newfound wealth to build luxurious mansions, creating new forms of genteel living. In fact, the eighteenth century has been called a “Swahili Renaissance” because of the opulence of new building projects and the renewed vitality of local centers of artistic production.8 The interiors of local mansions, which in the past had remained relatively unadorned, came to be covered with complex plasterwork designs (Figure  13.5). Elaborate stuccowork compositions, such as deep niches, miniature arches, and other three-dimensional patterns filled entire walls (Figure 13.6), creating the effect of endless textural multiplicity. Often, hundreds of tiny niches spread across the main walls of eighteenth-century living and reception rooms. Walls became a lattice-like screen of ornament. Another popular wall design often featured a single large polylobed niche surrounded by a teeming bilateral composition of interlocking low-relief chip-carvings (Figure 13.7). These niches and their associated carvings transformed the sensorial effect of interior space. Such rooms were often long and narrow spaces, with little natural light. By turning the surfaces of their walls into pierced and sculpted surfaces, carvers created the illusion of a latticed, pierced space. Similar to architectural muqarnas found in Persia or other regions of the Middle East,

Figure 13.5 A view of a zidaka niche system, likely photographed in a stone mansion in Lamu Town, Kenya, c. 1920s. Photo: National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi.

An Itinerant Art History: The Swahili Coast of Eastern Africa

233

Figure 13.6 A view of a zidaka wall and doorway covered with complex stuccowork, photographed in an unidentified stone mansion in Lamu Town, Kenya, c. 1970s. Photo: Mohamed Mchulla.

these long banks of niches transformed solid walls into a honeycomb of horizontal tiers. But unlike muqarnas, such niche grids functioned primarily as miniature display mounds or pedestals: each tiny niche would have held a single piece of imported china or some other rare object.9 The photographs illustrated in Figures 13.3 and 13.4 are the only historical evidence we have of what the interiors of Swahili Coast stone houses looked like before the twentieth century. John Kirk, the British consul general at Zanzibar, took the photos when he spent several weeks in 1884 in Lamu and Mombasa, where he inspected his government’s vice-consular offices and settled property disputes.10 But judging

234

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 13.7 The entrance room of a ruined stone mansion photographed in Lamu Town, Kenya, c. 1970s. Photo: Mohamed Mchulla.

from the sheer number of photos he took on this trip, he was also keen to document the unique culture of Lamu and Mombasa, which was quite different from what he was familiar with in Zanzibar. His photos document interior spaces that are dramatically different from the way “classic” Swahili architecture is presented today. Instead of the sparse elegance of unadorned whitewashed walls and dramatically placed singular objects, these images show that furniture, wood ornaments, clocks, mirrors, and porcelain dishes filled every inch of patrician domestic space. A British officer, who lived in Lamu for two years in the 1880s, also described an elderly woman’s reception hall that featured an even more ostentatious display than documented in these photographs: “[o]ne room in particular I remember well; it was a

An Itinerant Art History: The Swahili Coast of Eastern Africa

235

good thirty feet or more long, by about sixteen in width, and there was not a six-inch square of wall showing” because it was “filled with a vast collection . . . [of] many beautiful bowls.”11 The display of porcelain was an ancient practice on the Swahili Coast. Glazed ware was first shipped from the Persian Gulf to the Swahili Coast around the ninth or tenth century, which is also about the same time Islamic institutions became part of daily practices on the Swahili Coast.12 Chinese-style pottery, already more popular than Persian ware by the fourteenth century, also arrived via trading networks that connected Africa to the Persian Gulf, especially the Red Sea Coast and the Arabian Peninsula. Glazed pottery, especially porcelain, was perhaps the most iconic symbol of the mercantile cultures of the Muslim Indian Ocean for almost over one millennium. During the early modern period, imported ceramics functioned as artifacts of display and were hardly used as utilitarian objects, although one scholar has recently suggested that imported dishes might have been used for very special and symbolically significant feasts.13 Nonetheless, before the sixteenth century, porcelain functioned primarily as a rare form of architectural adornment. Porcelain was pressed into the wet plaster of the ornamental areas of stone memorials and mosques (Figure 13.8), becoming part of the permanent surface articulation of these monuments; their hard, impermeable, and reflective surfaces resisted corrosion for centuries. In this context, porcelain worked

Figure 13.8 Imported glazed pottery dishes decorate the area around the mihrab of the Friday Mosque at Gedi, Kenya, built c. 15th century. Photo: Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

236

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

first and foremost as a luminous and reflective surface element, adding a flash of color to monuments that were otherwise distinguished by the stark, chalky whiteness of their lime-plastered exteriors. Interestingly, while it is often assumed that porcelain carried sacred and talismanic meanings because of its prominence in religious architecture, it is important to note that imported glazed pottery decorated an array of spaces. Both Chinese and Islamicstyle dishes shifted easily from being mortared into wells and palaces to framing the mihrab of mosques and the headstones of venerated sheikhs’ tombs. Glazed dishes moved across different spaces with ease and seemed to invite inventiveness, even irreverence. These photographs document a key transformation in the presentation of porcelain during this so-called Swahili Renaissance period. Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of porcelain dishes were now directly attached to the walls of domestic spaces, instead of being displayed in niches or on shelves. Tiny holes would be drilled into the rim of each dish, which allowed one to hang them easily in new formations on one’s wall. Europeans commented on this practice as well, because it ruined the resale value of locally collected porcelain on the European antiques market. It also fundamentally destroyed porcelain’s everyday use and global exchange value, making it into a permanent wall ornament. The layering of hundreds of porcelain dishes in this manner emphasized their materiality, the hard and luminous light-reflecting qualities of porcelain, creating a screen of beautiful hard surfaces. In the past I argued that these ostentatious displays of porcelain primarily embodied a mercantile materiality, which I saw as an aesthetic practice that expressed the power of merchants and the landowning elite to consume luxurious trade goods.14 I took a longue durée approach, emphasizing continuities and discontinuities in Swahili uses of imported porcelain across several centuries. Seeking to challenge established interpretations that presented porcelain as a symbol of Swahili religious and moral values, I foregrounded its role as a commodity in the trading networks of the western Indian Ocean. While also acknowledging its possible talismanic and sacred dimension, I argued that porcelain was in fact never decommoditized as scholars of Swahili Coast cultural history had been at great pains to prove in the past.15 My approach very much foregrounded the relationship between economics and culture, considering the impact of globalization and plantation slavery on the material fabric in which porcelain was embedded. The flooding of the local market by thousands of mass-produced ceramic dishes in the eighteenth century, in fact, partially divorced porcelain from older use and value systems and foregrounded its role as a mobile commodity. But beyond being connected to the intensification of global trading networks, what is the effect of objects moving across increasingly vast distances and why did architectural interiors become such densely layered spaces? While one could easily answer this question by drawing on Marxist analyses of consumer capitalism—which is exactly what I partially did in my previous work—porcelain dishes have a unique material and physical specificity that allowed them to shape their surrounding in unusual ways, ways that had nothing to do with their global exchangeability as commodities.

An Itinerant Art History: The Swahili Coast of Eastern Africa

237

Porcelain’s material form very much defined what people could do with it in real space. First, the heavy weight and waterproof qualities of porcelain was one of the reasons why it traveled so easily across oceans. It functioned as an excellent ballast cargo, stabilizing ships making passages across open seas. Second, because porcelain was glazed it was relatively resistant to weathering. This was likely one of the reasons why it was used to decorate the interior and exterior of buildings on the Swahili Coast for centuries. Third, porcelain lent itself to all kinds of inventive designs because of its small scale, which permitted its mobility. Once a wealthy patrician had amassed a large collection of porcelain, it could be hung in a range of inventive, dramatic ways. Plates could be easily arranged and imbedded in existing spaces. Their physicality therefore inspired creative ways of playing with their form, in turn inspiring new fashions and tastes. Clearly, sometime in the eighteenth century, it became fashionable to create porcelain arrangements that emphasized porcelain’s surface qualities, its ability to act as a screen of dense, gleaming ornament. In such densely layered rooms, the effect of porcelain was overwhelming and dramatic. Being in the presence of such a screen of teeming surfaces changed one’s experience of the entire interior. It likely aroused a sense of wonder, a feeling that one is in the presence of the extraordinary, or the radically different. This suggests that the act of exhibiting such a mass of exotica was also meant to simultaneously consolidate and displace existing systems of signification. Here, a porcelain plate worked essentially as a shape-shifter, one whose form and meaning were strikingly mutable and always on the verge of becoming something else.16 As trade objects such as porcelain continued to move across increasingly vast distances and came to enter different cultural contexts their ability to compel people also manifested itself in new ways beginning in the eighteenth century. The sheer matter of exotic objects is exactly what seems to have been cultivated as an aesthetic in the interior spaces of Swahili merchants. Hanging dozens of plates next to each other so that they would form an inverted triangle (Figure  13.4) created an uncanny, untranslatable effect. We can apprehend porcelain as a thing, or we see its pure presence, outside of the cultural meaning projected onto it, more easily.

Ornament as Action Stuccowork and imported objets d’art also embodied distinctive local concepts about the nature of ornament and the power of an embellished stone house in the nineteenth century. Ludwig Krapf, a German missionary stationed in Mombasa in the 1840s and 1850s, documented that the art of lime stuccowork was called the uwezo wa niumba, the talent or ability of the house, while porcelain was part of the mapambo ya niumba, the decoration of the house. Uwezo, which can be translated as dignity, ability, achievement, or power, is multivalent concept, signifying the capacity to make something happen. Mapambo simply means decoration or finery, and it describes any form of embellishment added to spaces or objects of daily use, from embroidery on clothes to tassels on curtains to framed photographs—that is, any form of ornament

238

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

one can simply buy in the market. The lime that was necessary for making uwezo stucco plasterwork, which was made out of special shells and coral, often took years to prepare and collect. According to nineteenth-century sources, soon after a patrician girl was born, a new lime pit was prepared for her wedding ceremony, which, of course, would not take place for another two decades or so. In fact, an important component of any patrician wedding celebration was the fola la kuwaza, the feast of the stucco, in which artisans revealed their completed zidaka wall designs to the family of the bride.17 The highlight of all patrician weddings was the exquisitely bedecked bride’s display in front of her new zidaka wall. She would sit in state in front of the finely carved plasterwork, herself covered with expensive silks and jewelry imported from overseas. Marriage ceremonies, which secured the permanence of the next generation, therefore, also depended on the power of ornament on several levels. Stuccowork represented the apex of a mason’s knowledge and craft, since creating these delicate low-relief compositions in lime plaster was extremely complicated. It gave material form to the intense effort and energy of many, many people. This is exactly why stuccowork was categorized as uwezo and not simply as mapambo, or decoration. Uwezo is primarily an attribute of humans, suggesting consciousness and will. Only inanimate things that amplify human actions have uwezo. When things, like stuccowork, are called uwezo, they matter; they are understood to have a direct effect on people. Enacting uwezo through ornament multiplied and intensified the achievements of people. This is one of the reasons why coral-stone architecture is so symbolically significant on the Swahili Coast. Stone architecture reflects, encapsulates, and heightens the uwezo of the owner. Cultivating the material aspects of uwezo took time and the wealth and stamina to plan for the long term, which was a privilege only patrician elite enjoyed until the nineteenth century. Significantly, from the eighteenth century onward, the stuccowork that signified uwezo was increasingly displaced by the accumulation of mapambo, decorative objects like massproduced porcelain dishes.

Transoceanic Chairs In the nineteenth century, new forms of ornamentation and arts of adornment became popular, even in seemingly remote areas such as the Lamu Archipelago, creating a palimpsest of the old and new. For example, in the room in Figure 13.3, we can clearly discern the impact of British Raj and Arab Peninsula (especially Omani) material culture. The seated men, all Lamu patricians, wear turbans and joho robes, a style of high-status menswear made popular by Omani Arabs in the 1830s. Mechanical British wall clocks, gas lamps, French gilt mirrors, chromolithographs, and photographs fill the rest of the room. All these objects were associated with Zanzibar and its mercurial consumption habits. But the most complex objects of ornament present in the room in Figure 13.3 are the six chairs, called viti vya enzi (plural) in Swahili, four of which are occupied by

An Itinerant Art History: The Swahili Coast of Eastern Africa

239

patricians. A kiti cha enzi (singular), which is usually translated as “chair of power,” embodies uwezo, like the stuccowork, with enzi an adjectival version of the noun uwezo. The design of a kiti cha enzi is defined by an overall angular rigidity. It is made out of flat pieces of plainsawn hardwood, pegged together at right angles, which allows each chair to be easily disassembled and reassembled. Many extant examples also feature a raised footrest, rectangular and square string panels, and inlay work in mother of pearl and ivory. The inclusion of ivory was especially significant. Ivory was East Africa’s most important export commodity for centuries and the wealth and prestige of any Swahili port depended on participating in its sale.18 The inlay work was often highly refined and of great artistry. Local craftsmen used the relatively large plane of the cresting rail of the chair’s back to create imaginative compositions of abstracted trees and flowers. Some designs resemble schematic landscapes, its flora and fauna usually arranged in perfect symmetry. Today, the kiti cha enzi is one of the most celebrated icons of Swahili heritage. Old and new versions are still coveted for display in peoples’ homes in Lamu, Mombasa, and Zanzibar and they are on prominent display in museums in Kenya, Europe, and North America. As early as the nineteenth century, it was a romanticized object, one that was seen to be an ancient symbol of authentic Swahili Coast culture. As is often the case in moments of colonization, it became widely popular precisely because it represented a waning tradition. Europeans avidly collected viti vya enzi because, unlike so many other forms of Swahili material culture, it was clearly made locally. Its decorative schema also ignited the European imagination, which interpreted it as the last material remains of the impact of sixteenth-century Portuguese culture on Swahili Coast life. The inlay work on a chair’s crest often took the form of medallions with four V-shaped arms, which Europeans believed represented the Maltese Cross. John Haggard, the British viceconsul who lived in Lamu and Zanzibar from 1883 to 1908, sent two viti vya enzi to his brother in England and explained that “the Mohammedan workers probably don’t know it’s a cross at all but simply perpetuate the old pattern and fashion which was originally Christian.”19 This iconographic reading is doubtful, but the British continued to focus on Portuguese origins of the kiti cha enzi throughout the colonial period. The kiti cha enzi first and foremost shows that the classic art-historical project of creating a taxonomy of stylistic origins, or to try to parse out what is distinctly indigenous about its form, reveals little about the logic of local aesthetics.20 A kiti does, indeed, share compelling similarities with chairs or thrones also found in Mughal India, Renaissance Portugal, or even nineteenth-century Yemen or Egypt, but this is because these regions were connected via the same long-distance systems of transoceanic exchange.21 Mobile prestige objects, like ornate high-backed chairs, have been circulating between these places as gifts, commodities, objects of daily use, and as symbols of wealth and privilege for a long time. But such mobile exotica also meant something specific on the Swahili Coast. Rich merchants or the landowning elite strategically mobilized such globally circulating emblems precisely because they encapsulated their ability to author transcultural connectedness. That is, it gave material form to the uwezo of powerful families and individuals to craft a spectacular fulcrum of global relations in their homes. A kiti was not commissioned to simply look

240

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

like a Portuguese prototype. Rather, a kiti was meant to engender intimate, multisensorial experiences of a range of elsewheres. It is also significant that almost all viti vya enzi, even the ones that functioned as thrones for the indigenous elite, date to the nineteenth century, a period when preindustrial arts and craft styles became globally popular in the making of massproduced furniture. Perhaps then the kiti was a form of historicist pastiche furniture. Indeed, furniture produced in Bombay in a range of “ancient” styles became popular in Mombasa and Zanzibar. Viti vya enzi were, indeed, produced in great numbers in workshops all along the Swahili Coast, and they were available for purchase in souvenir shops (they are on view in the sale room in Figure  13.2, for example). The British colonial government used viti in all kinds of ceremonies and festivals, likely because they wanted to signal their appreciation for local customs. For example, when the Sultan of Zanzibar visited Mombasa in 1906, he sat in state in a kiti cha enzi on a dais in the Jubilee Hall, an architectural space constructed specifically by the British for meetings with the customary elders of the city.22 Princess Margaret was also enthroned on one during her visit to Mombasa in 1958. Imported chairs had long been significant emblems of good taste on the Swahili Coast. Wealthy local women filled the central spaces of their living and reception rooms with them. Women collect as many imported chairs, or locally made chairs based on imported models, as possible. Embellished chairs, especially those with heraldic ornaments, were imported from North America, Europe, and South Asia in large numbers. Although chairs became more readily available during the colonial period, they were connected to patrician power in the local imaginary. To sit on a high-backed wooden chair meant one’s body took on the posture of a highranking member of coastal city life. Its form molded the body of the sitter to embody authority and dignity. To sit in state on a kiti cha enzi meant that the sitter encapsulated the very essence of Swahili autonomous personhood. Sitting like this was the posture of a non-laboring body, a body that was engaged in governance and in control of others. Yet, the kiti cha enzi is, indeed, slightly different from other prestige chairs that were simply imported. It is the material trace of a time on the Swahili Coast when sovereign kings and queens ruled local towns. Its form evoked a type of sacred throne that symbolized indigenous royal authority, an eighteenth-century political system that had been largely destroyed with the establishment of the Busaidi Sultanate in the 1830s. The many viti vya enzi in circulation during the early twentieth century, in fact, were copies of ancient emblems of independence. Ludwig Krapf observed that a kiti cha enzi was the “chair of state of a chief or king” and was no longer in use when he was living in Mombasa in the 1840s. He explained that: “Formerly all the independent chiefs of the Swahili Coast had a kiti cha enzi until the power of the Iman of Muscat [Sultan Said of Zanzibar] swept them away.”23 Before Sultan Said annexed the Swahili Coast into his mercantile empire, only ancient families could use a kiti cha enzi. Such thrones belonged to a group of objects that functioned as sacred relics, which also included magnificent ivory side-blown trumpets and monumental barrel drums. Locals revered these objects because they

An Itinerant Art History: The Swahili Coast of Eastern Africa

241

manifested a sacrosanct environment, a place where the ancestors became present in the space of the living. The physical presence of these insignia transformed ceremonies and festivals into sacred moments. No important funeral or wedding would be considered complete without their public display and use. Most importantly, no new ruler could be installed without them since they were the physical manifestation of his sacred connections to the land and his ancestors. Krapf ’s observations and other fleeting commentaries from the nineteenth century suggest that the first three Omani sultans of Zanzibar were keenly aware of the political and religious power of these objects. They perceived them as a real threat to their authority, believing their presence in the local community could inspire rebellion.24 Sultan Barghash, in fact, finally confiscated the most dangerous insignia, placing them in the hands of British colonial officials, who attempted to deactivate their power by putting them on public display as items of Swahili heritage—that is, as objects of the past that had no political or sacred authority in the present. Indeed, on the Swahili Coast, exotic things and their out-ofplace-ness, the extraordinary ability of prestige chairs to travel across oceans, was what made them so desirable in the making of Swahili aesthetics.

Conclusion Examining how mobile artifacts shape art worlds in such border zones as the Swahili Coast is an especially clarifying exercise because the artifice, or mercurial nature of signification, stands out. Using oceans or seas as a tool of analysis helps one ask different questions about the mobility of material culture. For example, an oceanic perspective dismantles the classic art-historical concern of seeking to understand the mutability and mobility of culture by tracing an image, form, or style from its place of origins to a new site. Considering eighteenth-century art worlds from an oceanic framework, instead, brings into critical focus how culture is not constituted by geography, terrestrial or maritime. Questions of origins become irrelevant. A focus on oceanic relations, whether overtly or tacitly, is an argument for the social, rather than the geographical basis of culture. At first glance, this might be seen as a paradox, since the Indian Ocean is obviously a geographical entity, but to study culture in the Indian Ocean world means one must reject the still popular assumption that discrete geographies produce discrete cultures. That is not to say the environment or environs do not play a role, but my point is that they do not generate communities, identities, or aesthetics in a vacuum. From the perspective of oceans, art is a socially networked practice rather than an autochthonous phenomenon. Finally, it is, indeed, fascinating that the Indian Ocean world can be seen as unified aesthetic space—an art world—in which certain objects and images are so ubiquitous that they do seem to work at the macro scale, manifesting cosmopolitan connectedness. Asian trade ceramics were desired objects of display in many littoral societies for hundreds of years, including colonial Mexico, California, and ancien régime France, as discussed in J. M. Mancini’s and Kristel Smentek’s essays in this volume. Viti vya enzi, although very much locally made, also celebrated oceanic connections.

242

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

But a focus on the similarity of things circulating in the Indian Ocean world also means that the local uses and meanings (which are, of course, in many cases contingent on their role in the network) recede into the background. Considering the Swahili Coast as part of an eighteenth-century art world only from the perspective of the global puts only those aspects relevant to outsiders or people in other nodes of the network in analytical focus. This emphasis on the cosmopolitan translatability of culture obscures the opaque or incommensurate dimension of the local, that aspect of its meaning that is not about appealing to people elsewhere. This essay, then, has emphasized that in order to fully consider the global nature of the eighteenthcentury art world, it is important to examine what happens to objects once they stop being mobile and come to rest in real space, and in specific buildings. The material landscape of Indian Ocean port cities, their mosques, merchant mansions, and even the houses of people who are not powerful traders, are not just the backdrop for the cultivation of moral values or ways of seeing and being in the world. They actively created tactile and embodied experiences that had much to do with issues of power, social status, and economics. Monsoons, long-distance travel, and even faraway places are not just symbolic imaginaries but very much the physical matter of life on the Swahili Coast.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this essay was published as “Unmoored: On Oceanic Objects in Coastal Eastern Africa, circa 1700–1900,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36, no. 3 (2017): 355–67. 2 For a detailed analysis of the architectures of the Swahili Coast as entangled spaces, see Prita Meier, Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (Bloomington, In: Indiana University Press, 2016). 3 Athman Hussein, “Reflections on the Artistry and History of Swahili Carved Doorframes in the Collection of the Lamu Museum,” in World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts across the Indian Ocean, edited by Prita Meier and Allyson Purpura (Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum, forthcoming). 4 Karl Wilhelm Schmidt, Sansibar: Ein Ostafrikanisches Culturbild (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1888), 19. 5 For a pioneering analysis of nineteenth-century consumer desire on the Swahili Coast, see Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008). 6 C. H. Stigand, The Land of Zinj (London: F. Cass, 1913), 155. 7 M. N. Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 161–2; Alessandro Stanziani, Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants: Bondage in the Indian Ocean World, 1750–1914 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 69–79. 8 James de Vere Allen, “The Swahili House: Cultural and Ritual Concepts Underlying Its Plan and Structure,” in Swahili Houses and Tombs of the Coast of Kenya, edited by James de Vere Allen and Thomas H. Wilson (London: Art and Archaeology Research Papers, 1979), 1–32; and ibid., “Swahili Culture Reconsidered: Some Historical

An Itinerant Art History: The Swahili Coast of Eastern Africa

9 10

11 12

13 14

15

16

17 18 19

20

243

Implications of the Material Culture of the Northern Kenya Coast in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Azania: The Journal of the British Institute of History and Archaeology in East Africa 9 (1974): 105–38. I analyzed these niches and the role of imported commodities as symbols of mercantile success in Meier, Swahili Port Cities, 139–48. Item 36 (Notebook, 17 October 1883–1 September 1884), Item 37 (Notebook, 29 January 1883–16 July 1884), and Item 38 (Notebook, 31 August–20 November 1884); Sir John Kirk’s Papers (Acc.9942), National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. Frederick John Jackson, Early Days in East Africa (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), 17. Bing Zhao, “Global Trade and Swahili Cosmopolitan Material Culture: Chinese-Style Ceramic Shards from Sanje ya Kati and Songo Mnara (Kilwa, Tanzania),” Journal of World History 23, no.1 (2012): 46. Jeffrey Fleisher, “Rituals of Consumption and the Politics of Feasting on the Eastern African Coast, ad 700–1500,” Journal of World Prehistory 23, no. 4 (2010): 195–217. See Sandy Prita Meier, “Chinese Porcelain and Muslim Port Cities: Mercantile Materiality in Coastal East Africa,” Art History 38, no. 4 (2015): 702–17. Bing Zhao has also argued that archeological evidence suggests that Chinese ceramics first and foremost served as “exchange goods.” Zhao, “Global Trade,” 70. Mark Horton and John Middleton, The Swahili: The Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society (Malden: Wiley, 2001), 112. Jeffrey Fleisher has recently argued that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, imported ceramic dishes were symbols of competitive feasting and gifting practices. Decorating mosques, palaces, and tombs in this way “were the savvy acts of a leader who knew the challenges he faced.” Fleisher, “Rituals of Consumption,” 20. Many studies have focused on how mobile objects instantiate multiple experiences across different societies. See, especially, Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Patricia Spyer, Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (New York: Routledge, 1998); Fred R. Myers, ed. The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2001); Stacey Pierson, From Object to Concept: Global Consumption and the Transformation of Ming Porcelain (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013). Allen, “Swahili House,” 17. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, East African ivory was shipped almost exclusively to North Atlantic markets. John Haggard to his father, September 29, 1884. Quoted in Patricia W. Romero, Lamu: History, Society, and Family in an East African Port City (Princeton, Nj: Markus Wiener, 1997), 40 and 252. Rene Bravmann suggested it was based on nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian furniture and James de Vere Allen traced its form and method of construction to Egyptian Mamluk chairs. Bravmann, African Islam (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), 109–11; Allen, “The Kiti Cha Enzi and Other Swahili Chairs,” African Arts 22, no. 3 (1989): 56–8.

244

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

21 I argued that the kiti cha enzi form cannot be traced to a single place of origin in previous work. Meier, Swahili Port Cities, 157. Nancy Um has also recently shed new light on the importance of prestige chairs in the western Indian Ocean. “The Many Narratives of the kiti cha enzi: Unresolved Strands of Dispersal and Meaning around the Indian Ocean,” in World on the Horizon, forthcoming. 22 Mombasa Times, December 23, 1903. 23 Ludwig Krapf, A Dictionary of the Suahili Language (London: Trübner and Co., 1882), 59. 24 Franz Stuhlmann and R. Stern, Handwerk und Industrie in Ostafrika; Kulturgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (Hamburg: L. Friederichsen & Co., 1910), 130.

14

St. Martin’s Lane in London, Philadelphia, and Vizagapatam Stacey Sloboda

In a brief but suggestive article published in 1966, the art historian, Mark Girouard, described the existence of “two worlds”—those of fine art and craft practices—in London’s St. Martin’s Lane in the eighteenth century.1 Indeed, the St. Martin’s Lane Academy, founded in 1735 by the painters William Hogarth and John Ellys, was the center of artistic training and community for two generations of British painters, sculptors, and architects, including Henry Cheere, Richard Cosway, Francis Hayman, Thomas Gainsborough, James Paine, Allan Ramsey, Joshua Reynolds, Louis François Roubiliac, Isaac Ware, and Johann Zoffany. In addition to these fine artists, the illustrator Hubert-Francois Gravelot, gold chaser George Michael Moser, and the medalist Richard Yeo were principle instructors at the Academy. At the same time, St. Martin’s Lane and the surrounds of Soho and Covent Garden were replete with the shops of cabinetmakers and upholsterers, carvers, goldsmiths, and print engravers, as well as painters, sculptors, engravers, and other creative trades (Figure 14.1). By midcentury, the best-known cabinetmakers and wood carvers of the period, including Thomas Chippendale, John Channon, William Vile and John Cobb, William and John Linnell, Matthias Lock, Thomas Johnson, and William Hallett, all had workshops in or directly around the lane, while the painters Hayman, Hogarth, and Reynolds as well as the sculptor Roubiliac and the architect James Paine also had studios in St. Martin’s Lane or very nearby. This roll call of names confirms Girouard’s identification of this neighborhood as what we might describe today as an arts district, cultural quarter, or what Vic Gatrell identifies as “the world’s first creative ‘bohemia.’ ”2 Indeed, studying the abundant artistic products and rich social networks that were formed in St. Martin’s Lane suggests not two worlds, but a single art world that was more integrated, collaborative, and inclusive of diverse materials and artistic practices than has been yet recognized. The important role played by the St. Martin’s Lane Academy as a forerunner to the English Royal Academy, formed in 1768, is well known, and by necessity focuses on the professional activities of the painters, sculptors, and architects who principally stood to benefit from its formation.3 Without denying the central role played by the St. Martin’s Lane toward the development of the Royal Academy and the academic fine art world that it promoted, this short essay describes an alternate model of an art world that 245

246

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 14.1 (1) St. Martin’s Lane Academy, Peter’s Court; (2) Mattias Lock, 9 Nottingham Court; (3) Celeste Regnier, Newport Street; (4) Louis- François Roubiliac, 63 St. Martin’s Lane; (5) François and Susan Vivares, 13 Newport Street; (6) James and Ann Pascall, Long Acre, over-against Hanover Street; (7) Gideon Saint, Prince’s Street; (8) Thomas Johnson, 9 Queen Street; (9) James Whittle, Great St. Andrew’s Street; (10) Thomas Chippendale, 61–62 St. Martin’s Lane. Map drawn by Paul Sloboda based on John Rocque’s 1746 map of London.

developed in and around the neighborhood in the middle of the eighteenth century. That art world retained certain elements of the artisanal, communal, workshop-based model had flourished in urban European art centers for hundreds of years prior. At the same time, it was enabled by, and responded to, the contemporary economic structure of mercantilism that promoted the free trade of British goods through commercial means of production and consumption, as well as the linked phenomenon of unprecedented consumer demand for luxurious, convenient, and novel goods of all types that fueled displays of taste and status in a self-consciously polite society. The artists and artisans working in and around St. Martin’s Lane deliberately cultivated this economic orientation toward mercantilism, rather than institutional or private patronage. In doing so, they developed a corporate style, strongly influenced by the

St. Martin’s Lane in London, Philadelphia, and Vizagapatam

247

Continental rococo, or “the modern taste,” as it was known at the time, and predicated upon an advanced and innovative concept of design. Attending to aspects of the mid-eighteenth-century London art world that did not find their culmination in the founding of the Royal Academy reveals an art world in which artists and artisans studied and socialized together, collaborated, and competed with one another. By thinking of the art world, as the sociologist Howard Becker has defined it, as “a network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works that the art world is noted for,” we can better understand the social and artistic conditions under which various kinds of art were produced and received in mid-eighteenthcentury London.4 So, too, is the geographic metaphor of the art “world” particularly apt in this case. A significant portion of the artistic practices and products that constitute our knowledge of mid-eighteenth-century British art was produced in an area of less than half a square mile, centered around London’s St. Martin’s Lane, which itself suggests the extent to which geography is a formative, but often unacknowledged, condition of the histories we tell.5 At the same time, this narrow locale had a global reach. Artists and artisans trained and working in St. Martin’s Lane set off for Continental Europe, North America, and India. London-made furniture was exported by the thousands everywhere British ships sailed, and prints, drawings, and books created and used in St. Martin’s Lane circulated widely in Continental and colonial locales. Indeed, the art world of St. Martin’s Lane extended far beyond the streets and squares of London. At the same time, the artistic production of St. Martin’s Lane could not have formed in the ways it did without an influx of Continental artists and artisans, particularly French Huguenots, and the import of raw and finished materials. These included French, German, and Italian prints; American and Caribbean mahogany and other hardwoods suitable for carving and inlay; Chinese porcelain, lacquer, and wallpaper; and illicit Indian textiles. Indeed, an extremely localized focus on the artistic and cultural geography of a single street cannot be separated from its global context. As the range of imported materials and talent indicates, the art world of St. Martin’s Lane was not a simple case of the cultural codes and products of the increasingly imperial metropole exported to the colonized periphery. Rather, it was a nexus point through which images, materials, and skills from diverse locales passed, and in so doing, created new artistic styles and practices that then traveled outward. Putting “the world” back into the mid-eighteenthcentury London art world, reveals that the intimate geography of St. Martin’s Lane and its surrounds was fostered through a dynamic and reciprocal relationship with the world both within and outside its borders.

Design and the London Art World By the mid-eighteenth century, “design” referred to both the manual skill of drawing and the more intellectual notion of composition, referred to by the Italian term disegno, as well as to the preliminary activity of creating a two-dimensional image that could be

248

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

realized in three-dimension, often by another maker or makers.6 Like many other art academies of the period, the practice of design formed the central activity of the St. Martin’s Lane Academy (Figure 14.1, no. 1), and drawing manuals, perspective treatises, pattern books that emerge from this neighborhood each foreground the importance of design for a range of media and practices outside the walls of the academy.7 While other artistic quarters, such as those around Lincoln’s Inn Fields, St. Paul’s Churchyard, or even nearby Soho were home to substantial creative material and visual production in the mid-eighteenth century, St. Martin’s Lane and the surrounds of Covent Garden were the center of design practice in mid-eighteenth-century London. This cut across the work of painters, sculptors, engravers, cabinetmakers, carvers, and goldsmiths, and formed a shared set of interests, resources, clients, and skills. Design provided the structure for a modern British art world that was linked to manufactures and trade, was diverse in media, and was collaborative. As a concept and as a practice, design was of great philosophical, educational, and professional importance to the majority of artists and artisans working in and around St. Martin’s Lane in the mid-eighteenth century. Hogarth and Ellys founded their drawing academy as an attempt to improve and further the practice of drawing from the nude figure. Various texts of the period emphasize the importance of the mechanical skill of drawing, and the more intellectual practice of design as important for a range of professional trades. Given that drawing was considered a fundamental skill for a range of artistic practices and trades, and that the St. Martin’s Lane Academy was one of the only places in mid-eighteenth-century London that offered organized lifedrawing sessions, it is reasonable to assume that it catered not only to professional and aspiring artists, of whom we know about eighty by name, but also to the far more numerous apprentices, journeymen, and master artisans who worked in the nearby workshops of cabinetmakers, goldsmiths, and other trades, whose names are lost to us today.8 One example that begins to reveal the meaningful artistic connections facilitated by various design practices in St. Martin’s Lane can be found in the career of Mattias Lock, a master carver based in Long Acre (Figure 14.1, no. 2), just around the corner from St. Martin’s Lane. Little is known of Lock until 1744, when he published Six Sconces, a pamphlet of six design drawings, the first extant rococo pattern book made and published in England. Lock followed the success of this publication with a second small book, Six Tables, in 1746 (Figure  14.2), which demonstrates the carver’s increasingly fluid, inventive, and sophisticated two-dimensional designs. This period happens to be the precise moment at which George Michael Moser, a Swiss drawing master and gold chaser, became the principle instructor at the St. Martin’s Lane Academy. Moser overlapped, and then assumed teaching responsibilities from Hubert-François Gravelot, the immigrant French draftsman who served as the principle drawing master at the St. Martin’s Lane Academy from the early 1740s until he returned to France in 1745. Gravelot was the artist most associated with the introduction of the French genre pittoresque, or rococo, style to England. Both Gravelot’s and Moser’s work emphasized fluid, animated lines with a particular focus on figural ornament. It seems more likely than not that Lock, a carver newly successful

St. Martin’s Lane in London, Philadelphia, and Vizagapatam

249

Figure 14.2 Mattias Lock, Plate 8B from Six Tables, 1746. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London (27811:2).

as a published designer and eager to capitalize on the increased social status of being a named artist, availed himself of Gravelot’s and Moser’s life-drawing sessions just around the corner from his workshop, and the increasingly elaborate nature of his published designs are the result of this experience. Sophisticated design and execution such as Lock’s was at the heart of the St. Martin’s Lane project, but it was not limited solely to luxury objects. Indeed, the far more accessible medium of print was central to the dissemination of style, designs, and ideas in the mid-eighteenth-century London art world. Lacking a strong institutional center to organize or dictate artistic developments, prints were an important vehicle through which artists and artisans, even when close neighbors, communicated artistic ideas to one another. At least eleven printsellers, among them those most frequently linked to the sale of Old Master and ornamental prints from the Continent, were located in or immediately around St. Martin’s Lane in the mid-eighteenth century.9 Upon the death of her uncle James in 1754, Celeste Regnier took over her family’s printshop, which was located since at least 1710 in Newport Street, which intersects St. Martin’s Lane (Figure 14.1, no. 3). There she sold artists’ supplies and prints of all kinds. Her 1760 portrait picturing her seated in front of a book of prints suggests that she continued the business even after her marriage to the St. Martin’s Lane sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac (Figure 14.1, no. 4) in the late 1750s.10 Francis and Susan Vivares operated a

250

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

shop from the Golden Head at 13 Newport Street (Figure 14.1, no. 5), which sold prints after Rembrandt and Poussin, as well as genre pittoresque prints by Watteau and Boucher, Italian views by Panini and Piranesi, designs for ornaments by French, German, and Italian designers, including those by De La Cour, and landscapes and genre scenes by St. Martin’s Lane painters Hayman, Lambert, Wooten, and Gainsborough.11 Vivares also produced designs for furniture in the modern rococo style.12 It is worth noting that while the engraver’s final product is two-dimensional—a print—the process is that of carving, as we are reminded of the Latin abbreviation Sculpt., which appends the engraver’s name in prints of this period. In the narrow and rich milieu of St. Martin’s Lane, the skills of a print engraver and those of a wood carver yielded some overlap, while the technically simpler medium of etching made printmaking more accessible to artists with primary skills in both drawing and carving. In some instances, artists worked and dealt in both furniture carving and printmaking. Mattias Lock seems to have etched and printed many of his own publications.13 James Pascall, the carver of a magnificent pair of girandoles now at Temple Newsam (Figure 14.3), carved furniture and sold prints from his shop at the Golden Head in Long Acre, around the corner from St. Martin’s Lane (Figure 14.1, no. 6). His widow Ann continued the print business from James’s death in 1747 until 1754, while Samuel Gribelin sold his father Simon’s engravings of Old Master paintings from the Pascalls’ shop as well.14 The dog upon Pascall’s girandole is the same pooch found in Mattias Lock’s 1746 design (Figure  14.2), who is also seen in a slightly earlier ornamental design by Hubert-François Gravelot.15 Gravelot’s work certainly had a strong influence on Lock as a designer, and given that the drawing is unpublished, Lock must have seen some version of it in person, further suggesting that English carver studied with the French drawing master. Desmond Fitz-Gerald further proposes the French painter, engraver, and tapestry designer Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s hunting dogs as Gravelot’s source for the hound.16 The direct correspondence between Lock’s design and Pascall’s carving, and the fact that they lived just around the corner from one another, has led some to credit Lock as the designer of Pascall’s furniture.17 It is a reasonable proposition, although given Pascall’s access to published designs from the Continent and neighbors alike, it is also possible that he designed his own works, freely borrowing from printed sources. The Oudry/ Gravelot/Lock/Pascall dog finds further outings throughout designs published in Thomas Johnson’s One Hundred and Fifty New Designs (1761) and on the rim of a mirror-frame design published by Thomas Chippendale in his third edition of The Gentleman and Cabinetmaker’s Director in 1762, making it a sort of running, or trotting, motif among St. Martin’s Lane designers who supplied furniture for country houses, where hunt-themed iconography would have been appropriate. These artistic connections, forged through both proximity and print, can be seen repeatedly in the overlapping design sources, references, and styles that emerged in St. Martin’s Lane in the mid-eighteenth century. A rare surviving scrapbook of an otherwise unknown London wood carver named Gideon Saint indicates the tremendous range of design prints collected by mid-eighteenth-century London artisans, and the extent to which they used them as inspiration for their own designs

St. Martin’s Lane in London, Philadelphia, and Vizagapatam

251

Figure 14.3 James Pascall, Girandole, 1745. Gilt pine and iron. Temple Newsam House, Leeds.

(Figure 14.4).18 Saint’s shop, like Pascall’s and many other artists and artisans in the neighborhood, hung a sign of the Golden Head, in Princes Street, Leicester Square (Figure 14.1, no. 7), a few minutes’ walk from the print shops and other wood carvers and cabinetmakers of Newport Street, Long Acre, and St. Martin’s Lane. His book is organized by furniture type, suggesting that it functioned as both a working journal and a design catalog for potential clients. It includes hundreds of examples of Continental and English rococo designs cut from ornament prints and books and pasted in and among Saint’s own pencil sketches. Those sketches borrow iconography and spirit from other English and French published designs, sometimes (but not always) directly copying them. The etched designs on this two-page spread are cut

252

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 14.4 Gideon Saint, Pages 180–1 from a Scrapbook of Working Designs, c. 1760. Pen and ink, engraving and etching. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (34.90.1). Photo: Art Resource, New York.

from published designs by Thomas Johnson, while the red chalk drawing is a particularly lively copy of another of Johnson’s well-known designs.19 Johnson was a master carver and designer, who published wildly imaginative rococo designs, beginning in the 1750s from his house in Queen Street to the immediate north of St. Martin’s Lane in the area known as the Seven Dials (Figure  14.1, no. 8). He was mentored as a draftsman and carver by Mattias Lock in the 1740s, when both were working in the workshop of the cabinetmaker James Whittle, who was based one street over in the Seven Dials in Great St. Andrew’s Street (Figure  14.1, no. 9).20 On the opposite page of Saint’s design book, an exuberate frame comprising acanthus leaves, C scrolls, pediments, vases, figures, and the now familiar hound show Saint bringing together the motifs and styles of Lock and Johnson, as well as Lock’s sometimecollaborator, H. Copland, who was deeply influenced by, and sometimes copied, the work of Hubert-François Gravelot.21 The intertwined world of artists and artisans in St. Martin’s Lane fostered a remarkable number of carvers’ and cabinetmakers’ ambitions as published designers. By the early 1750s, an obscure cabinetmaker living just at the end of St. Martin’s Lane in Northumberland Court named Thomas Chippendale took note of this trend. In

St. Martin’s Lane in London, Philadelphia, and Vizagapatam

253

collaboration with the engraver and designer Mattias Darly, Chippendale produced an ambitiously large collection of designs, which he published in 1754 from his new address in the heart of St. Martin’s Lane (Figure 14.1, no. 10) as The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director. The subsequent use of Chippendale’s name as a metonym for the modern style he espoused indicates the extraordinary reach of the book, which was quickly reprinted as a second edition in 1755, and then expanded to a third edition and published in French in 1762. In many ways, Chippendale was just one more artisan participating in the St. Martin’s Lane milieu of maker-designers who realized the potential of print as a tool in artistic communication, collaboration, exhibition, and marketing.22 In other ways, his work is unique because of its global scope, as it influenced carvers, cabinetmakers, and patrons across the Continent, in the Americas, and in key Asian locales.

Colonial Style: Philadelphia Chippendale In environs outside London, the rococo style articulated in design prints, including Chippendale’s, was understood simply as “London” fashion, while within London, the style was understood far more narrowly as relating to a set of St. Martin’s Lane designers, cabinetmakers, and carvers, with its attendant associations with French-style and highquality design and production. The understanding of this specific style as characteristic of “London” was particularly true in colonial North America, where transatlantic networks of people, goods, and ideas facilitated the communication and adaptation of metropolitan style among artists and artisans in both urban and rural locales. The art worlds of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston were centers for the production of furniture that was closely related to English forms and fashions. These markets were enabled by both an influx of London-trained, or more specifically St. Martin’s Lane-trained, craftsman in the 1760s and the design prints and books that they, and sometimes their patrons, brought with them.23 Philadelphia, in particular, had strong economic and cultural ties to London, with a merchant elite who allied themselves stylistically with its fashions. The established nature of the Boston furniture trade, and the shifting economic fortunes of the colonies in the mid-eighteenth century provided opportunities for immigrant craftsmen particularly in the mid- and southern Atlantic centers of New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. In the 1760s, a remarkable number of London-trained artisans made their way to Philadelphia, probably lured by Pennsylvania’s booming economy in agriculture and transatlantic trade, in contrast with the relative economic slump in England following the Seven Years War (1756–63). This migration supported the development of a vibrant art world in Philadelphia that both directly referenced, and departed from, London fashion, particularly with the development of the style commonly referred to as Philadelphia Chippendale. London-trained, Philadelphia-based artisans included the carvers Hercules Courtenay, James Pollard, Nicholas Bernard, Martin Jugiez, James Reynolds, and the cabinetmaker Thomas Affleck. Whether for convenience for patrons or proximity to materials, or out of some sense of affinity or collaboration, each of

254

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

these immigrant artisans had shops on, or immediately around, Chestnut Street in Philadelphia in the 1760s, making the street an Atlantic outpost of St. Martin’s Lane. Prior to his arrival in Philadelphia, Courtenay was apprenticed to the St. Martin’s Lane carver and designer Thomas Johnson at the very moment in the late 1750s in which Johnson was publishing the patterns that would later be compiled into One Hundred and Fifty New Designs. By 1765, he was indentured to the Philadelphia cabinetmaker Benjamin Randolph, along with James Pollard, whose extant work suggests similar training to Courtenay.24 Randolph’s trade card (Figure 14.5), which would have served as an advertisement for his shop, indicates the orientation of his business and his evident need to employ St. Martin’s Lane-trained carvers. The trade card is a vibrant collage of rococo designs and ornaments taken directly from three separate St. Martin’s Lane pattern books: Chippendale’s Director, Johnson’s 1758 Designs for Furniture, and Household Furniture in the Present Taste . . . by a Society of Upholsterers, a pattern book published in London 1760 that compiled previously published designs of Chippendale and Johnson as well as designs by Robert Manwaring, Matthew Ince, and Robert Mayhew, all of whom worked in the vicinity of St. Martin’s Lane.25 It is likely that Courtenay and Pollard would have brought those books, or their own scrapbooks that included those designs. Randolph may have had access to his employees’ books and design collections, or could have acquired them through the Philadelphia bookseller Robert Bell, or the Library Company of Philadelphia, which owned a copy of Chippendale’s 1762 Director, and to which Randolph, along with at least eight other Philadelphia cabinetmakers, was a subscribing member.26 Cabinetmakers such as Randolph satisfied their elite patrons’ desires for technologically advanced furniture in the latest metropolitan styles. At the same time, local and widespread colonial resistance to England’s economic dominance, and attendant boycotts on London imports, created a market for Philadelphia artisans to supply sophisticated furniture in London style, by London artisans, but made in Philadelphia. This was not always a straightforward matter of import substitution; instead, Philadelphia Chippendale was also sometimes a colonial hybrid, in which new work emerged from a process of creative adoption and adaption of metropolitan forms and styles. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the form of the American high chest. In London, the high chest was a baroque form, comprising a flat-topped chest of drawers set upon six turned legs. It was largely out of fashion by the first decades of the eighteenth century. In New England, cabinetmakers adapted this form by adding a scroll top with a central drawer, a large central bottom drawer, reducing the number of legs to four, and updating them with a carved cabriole form. The form continued to develop in Philadelphia in the 1750s and 1760s, when a carved appliqué cornice replaced the pediment drawer and additional carved panels appeared on the skirt. The splendid example, formerly known as the “Pompadour Chest” (Figure 14.6), perfectly exhibits these characteristics, blending a distinctly colonial form with direct references to metropolitan designs.27 A similar broken pediment with scroll and acanthus leaf volutes, a finial bust, and draped urns appear in Nos 107 and 108 of the third edition of

St. Martin’s Lane in London, Philadelphia, and Vizagapatam

255

Figure 14.5 James Smither, Trade Card of Benjamin Randolph, 1769. Engraving. The Library Company of Philadelphia.

Chippendale’s Director, while the serpent-and-swan motif in the central bottom drawer adapts a design published in Johnson’s 1762 A New Book of Ornaments (Figures 14.7 and 14.8). While the chest has not yet been attributed to a specific cabinetmaker or carver, there is no doubt that it is the work of a London-trained Philadelphia carver with ready access to St. Martin’s Lane designs.

256

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 14.6 Philadelphia, High Chest of Drawers, 1762–5. Mahogany, tulip poplar, yellow pine, white cedar. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (18.110.4).

St. Martin’s Lane in London, Philadelphia, and Vizagapatam

Figure 14.7 Detail of Figure 14.6. Photo: Art Resource, New York.

Figure 14.8 Thomas Johnson, “Design for a Tablet for a Chimney-Piece with Two Swans in Combat, Enclosed within a Scrolling Cartouche with a Water-Spouting Dragon’s Head,” from A New Book of Ornaments, 1762. Stipple engraving. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1985.1099).

257

258

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Anglo-Indian Ivory Furniture Those same printed designs traveled beyond the transatlantic world to Asia through the mercantile networks of the East India trade. Furniture workshops in India and China that catered to local merchant and elite demand as well as the export trade were well established by the middle of the eighteenth century. At Vizagapatam, on the eastern Coromandel Coast of India, Indian cabinetmakers developed a new, hybrid style of furniture that married European forms with Indian materials and carving techniques to become known as Anglo-Indian furniture. Workshops in Vizagapatam were established by Indian artisans who were familiar with the skills of ivory working that had been developed earlier in Orissa, just to the north on India’s eastern coast. The common method of commissioning furniture in mid-eighteenth-century India required the patron to supply both the timber and a muster or model (probably from the Portuguese mostrar, to show) from which the cabinetmaker would make the piece.28 This gave the patron an exceptionally important role in the design process. Although there were no known English cabinetmakers or carvers working in Vizagapatam in this period, this patron-driven design system facilitated the transfer of European objects and designs to Indian craftsmen that could then be used freely within one or more workshops. Perhaps drawing upon the model of Dutch settlements on the Coromandel Coast and in Ceylon, which had an Ambachtskwartier or “craftsmen’s quarter,” the cabinetmaking industry in Vizagapatam was clustered on what is now Beach Road, with other workshops operating on the coast in Waltair, the European part of town. Vizagapatam was well situated as a port between Bengal and Madras within a highly developed trading network of European and inter-Asian maritime trade. Its location offered easy access to forests of teak and rosewood as well as ivory and tortoiseshell, and European merchants were drawn to the area for its proximity to productive inland textile industries and lucrative coastal trade.29 The English annexed the region under the administration of the East India Company in 1768, drawing further British residents to Vizagapatam. As Nancy Um has noted, European merchants and soldiers of the East India companies provided a steady demand for furniture for their households and offices as well as for diplomatic and personal gifts at East India Company trading posts and in Europe.30 Vizagapatam furniture was commissioned locally by these merchants, and was also sold in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras both through direct importation and second-hand estate sales. Indian patrons such as Ananda Rangai Pillai, translator to the French East India Company’s Governor Dupleix in Pondicherry, and other wealthy collectors owned ivory-inlaid Vizagapatam furniture in both European and Indian forms, and Muhammad Ali Wallajah, Nawab of Arcot, presented ivory objects from Vizagapatam as diplomatic gifts.31 Within this mercantile and diplomatic milieu of British and Indian elites, the ivoryinlaid furniture of Vizagapatam offered a distinctly hybrid style for its Anglo-Indian patrons. One such example can be found in a series of chairs commissioned by at least two separate English patrons (Figure  14.9). The back splat comprises interlocking S and C curves capped with serpent heads, inspired directly from plate XVI of the 1762 edition of Thomas Chippendale’s Director (Figure 14.10).

St. Martin’s Lane in London, Philadelphia, and Vizagapatam

259

Figure 14.9 Vizagapatam, Side Chair, c. 1770. Cane, ivory, sandalwood, and black lac. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA (E84004). Photo: Jeffrey R. Dykes. Copies of Chippendale’s pattern book and other English designs circulated in India, and Indian craftsmen also had access to such designs through furniture supplied by clients as models.32 Adopting the iconic cabriole leg, ball-and-claw feet, and fluid, curvilinear back-splat made the chair immediately recognizable as Chippendale in

260

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 14.10 Thomas Chippendale, Plate XVI “Backs of Chairs,” from The Gentleman and Cabinet-Makers Director, 3rd ed. (London, 1762). Houghton Library, Harvard University (Typ 705.62.277).

form, while the novel serpent heads on the splat and rail, as well as the incised decoration in black lac and gilding upon a smooth white ivory veneer, announce it as Indian in style. The origin of the chair was thus a hybrid, equally Anglo and Indian. At the same time, those designs, materials, and treatment reference far more specific locales. While Chippendale’s style was understood globally as representative of British taste, this essay has argued for its more specific origins in St. Martin’s Lane. At the same time, ivory-inlaid and veneered furniture with floral black and gilded inlay was associated specifically with the workshops at Vizagapatam. The chair is thus a product of two local art worlds connected by imperial networks of people, objects, and designs. The importance of place, and the possibility of imagining the object as both a product and a point of contact between two places, is finally revealed in an ivory and rosewood cabinet on a stand made in Vizagapatam around 1765 (Figure 14.11). The form derives from an earlier eighteenth-century English piece, likely supplied to a cabinetmaker in Vizagapatam, who both widened and elongated the body and clawand-ball feet. Like the previously discussed chair, ivory-inlay articulated with incised lac replaces decoration that would have been carved in relief from the carcass wood on an English example. The floral border framing the two front doors is similar in treatment to floral chintz patterns made in the region’s nearby textile workshops. By the 1760s, ivory plaques with architectural and figural decoration were common to Vizagapatam furniture, perhaps speeding up the intricate decorative process. The effect is similar to the contemporaneous French fashion for furniture mounted with porcelain plaques, a fashion probably unknown to Vizagapatam artisans, although familiar to at

St. Martin’s Lane in London, Philadelphia, and Vizagapatam

261

Figure 14.11 Vizagapatam, India. Cabinet on a Stand, c. 1765, Rosewood, inlaid and partly veneered with ivory, with silver mounts. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London (IS.289&A-1951). least some of their English and French patron-collaborators. The eleven drawers of the cabinet (eight are hidden by the doors on the front) are incised with architectural scenes set in generic Arcadian landscapes and the British countryside. The drawers at the top, by contrast, depict a rather surprisingly specific place, Montagu House, then the site of the British Museum, which opened in 1753 in Russell Street, London. The scenes are taken directly from prints made from watercolors by the St. Martin’s Lane artist Samuel Wale for the 1761 book London and its Environs Describ’d (Figure 14.12). The provenance of the cabinet reveals no special familial relationship to

262

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

Figure 14.12 James Green after Samuel Wale, “Entrance of the British Museum, from Russet [sic] Street/Garden Front,” from London and its Environs Describ’d (London, 1761). © Trustees of the British Museum.

Montagu House, making it likely that the image functioned, along with its form, as a generic reference to England, while its material and decoration referred equally generically to India. The material, stylistic, and formal references to place that have been discussed in these examples of English, American, and Indian furniture reveal that the dense social and artistic connections of one art world expanded via prints, objects, and people across global networks to shape other equally complex art worlds. English art was never as English as some art histories would have us believe.33 This essay, and, indeed, the book as a whole, suggests that consideration of the geography of art from a simultaneously local and global perspective is an essential tool in coming to terms with the multivalent objects that make up so much of the artistic legacy of the eighteenth century, but have been poorly served by its art-historical narratives. Locating the center of the English art world in a specific place that articulated its identity around the concept of design, rather than fine art, argues for an alternate understanding of orientation and values of English art in the period. Tracing the influence of St. Martin’s Lane in other geographic locales and the works they produced, rather than within a chronological history of British art, likewise reorients and expands the definition of English, American, and Indian art to accommodate these objects, not as products of two distinct cultures, but as transnational objects situated within cultures that were both local and global in their outlook.

St. Martin’s Lane in London, Philadelphia, and Vizagapatam

263

Notes 1 Mark Girouard, “The Two Worlds of St. Martin’s Lane,” Country Life (February 3, 1966): 224–7. The article was the third in the Girouard’s series “English Art and the Rococo,” published in Country Life in January and February of 1966. 2 Vic Gatrell, The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London’s Golden Age (London: Penguin Books, 2013), xi. 3 Particularly, Ilaria Bignamini, “The Accompaniment to Patronage: A Study of the Origins, Rise and Development of an Institutional System for the Arts in Britain, 1692–1768,” 2 vols, PhD thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1988; and Bignamini, “George Vertue: Art Historian and Art Institutions in London, 1680–1768: A Study of Clubs and Academies,” Volume of the Walpole Society 54 (1988): 1–148; Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts 1680–1768 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Holger Hoock, The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture 1760–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Matthew Hargraves, Candidates for Fame: The Society of Artists of Great Britain 1760–1791 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 4 Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), xxiv. 5 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Towards a Geography of Art (Chicago, Il: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 6 See Anne Puetz, “Design Instruction for Artisans in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of Design History 12, no. 3 (1999): 217–39; and Puetz, “Drawing from Fancy: The Intersection of Art and Design in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London,” RIHA Journal 88 (March 2014). 7 Unlike other art academies of the period, the St. Martin’s Lane Academy was founded by Hogarth and Ellys with the explicit goal that it be artist-led, rather than royally sponsored. Hogarth had a particular antipathy for organized curricula, and conflicting views about patronage and pedagogy were a characteristic feature of the Academy’s history. 8 There were also private drawing schools, and most artists and artisans would have been expected to be given training in drawing during their apprenticeship, but neither of these methods typically included life drawing, particularly from female models, as St. Martin’s Lane did. The documents of the Academy, if they ever existed in the first place, have been lost since at least the early nineteenth century, but three extant contemporary sources give us the names of 80 fine artists and engravers, among them the most well-known artists of the period, a handful of gold chasers, and one cabinetmaker (John Linnell), who attended as members. George Vertue and William Hogarth both estimated about 30 members per year, which leaves us with somewhere between 900 and 1,240 members to account for over the period from 1735 to 1768 when the Academy was active, although many members probably belonged for more than one year, so the number of unique members would be smaller. 9 Including Celeste Regnier, Francis and Susan Vivares, Samuel Harding, Samuel Wale, John Pine, Thomas Jefferys, James and Ann Pascall, Charles Grignion, Nathaniel Smith, George Bickham Jnr., and John and Mary Ann Rocque.

264

Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds

10 François-Xavier Vispré, Madame Roubiliac, c. 1760, oil on canvas, Victoria and Albert Museum (P.43–1953). 11 Terry F. Friedman, “Two Eighteenth-Century Catalogues of Ornamental Pattern Books,” Furniture History 11 (1975): 71–3. 12 Ibid., 69. 13 Lock’s original solo publications of the 1740s indicate only his own name and invoke copyright protection. Many of the extant copies of his work were reprinted by Robert Sayer in 1768, after Lock’s death in 1765. 14 Daily Advertiser (June 16, 1740). 15 Desmond Fitz-Gerald, “Gravelot and His Influence on English Furniture,” Apollo 90 (August 1969): 143–7. Gravelot’s drawing is at the British Museum (1890,0512.91). 16 Fitz-Gerald, “Gravelot,”145–6. He suggests specifically Oudry’s L’arret du cigne, which depicts a similar hound menacing a swan amid bulrushes, although it is probably too contemporary a source, as Oudry’s painting of the subject (now in the North Carolina Museum of Art) was only completed in 1745 and not engraved by Gabriel Huquier until later. 17 Anthony Wells-Cole, catalog entry for the Temple Newsam girandoles in Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts, edited by Martina Droth (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2008), 97. Lock lived at 9 Nottingham Court in Castle Street and the Pascalls’ shop was two blocks away in Long Acre at Hanover Street. 18 Morrison H. Hecksher, “Gideon Saint: An Eighteenth-Century Carver and His Scrapbook,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 27, no. 6 (1969): 299–311. 19 The two etchings on the upper and lower right of p. 179 appear in Plate 14 of One Hundred and Fifty New Designs (London: Robert Sayer, 1761), a compilation of Johnson’s designs of the 1750s, while the two etchings on the left of p. 178 appear in Plate 38. The red chalk drawing is printed in this compilation in Plate 52, and was realized as a wall-light, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 20 On Johnson, see Jacob Simon, Thomas Johnson’s “The Life of the Author” (London: Furniture History Society, 2003); Helena Hayward, “Newly Discovered Designs by Thomas Johnson,” Furniture History 11 (1975): 40–2; and Hayward, Thomas Johnson and the English Rococo (London: Alec Tiranti, 1964). 21 H. Copland’s A New Book of Ornaments (London: H. Copland, 1746). 22 Anne Puetz usefully identifies the design print as a public exhibition space for mid-century artisans. See Puetz, “Drawing from Fancy,” as well as “The Emergence of a Print Genre: The Production and Dissemination of the British Design Print, 1730s–1830s,” PhD thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2007. 23 Luke Beckerdite notes that at least half of the carvers who advertised in New York during 1750–75 were immigrants. Ibid., “Immigrant Carvers and the Development of the Rococo Style,” American Furniture (1996), available at: http://www.chipstone.org/ article.php/238/American-Furniture-1996/Immigrant-Carvers-and-the-Developmentof-the-Rococo-Syle (accessed June 21, 2017). 24 On Courtenay and Pollard, see Luke Beckerdite, “Pattern Carving in 18th Century Philadelphia,” American Furniture (2014), available at: http://www.chipstone.org/ article.php/705/American-Furniture-2014/Pattern-Carving-in-Eighteenth-CenturyPhiladelphia (accessed September 2, 2017); and ibid., “Philadelphia Carving Shops, Part III: Hercules Courtenay and His School,” Antiques 131, no. 5 (1987): 1044–64.

St. Martin’s Lane in London, Philadelphia, and Vizagapatam

265

25 Fiske Kimball, “The Sources of the Philadelphia Chippendale II: Benjamin Randolph’s Trade Card,” Bulletin of the Pennsylvania Museum 23, no. 115 (1927): 4–8. 26 Morrison H. Heckscher, “English Furniture Pattern Books in Eighteenth-Century America,” Furniture History (1994), available at: http://www.chipstone.org/article. php/48/American-Furniture-1994/English-Furniture-Pattern-Books-in-EighteenthCentury-America (accessed September 29, 2017); and Ibid., “Philadelphia Furniture, 1760–90: Native-Born and London-Trained Craftsmen,” in The American Craftsman and the European Tradition, 1620–1820, edited by Francis J. Puig and Michael Conforti (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989), 99. 27 Heckscher, “English Furniture Pattern Books.” 28 Amin Jaffer, Luxury Goods from India: The Art of the Indian Cabinetmaker (London: V&A Publications, 2002), 11. 29 Ibid., Furniture from British India and Ceylon: A Catalogue of the Collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum (London: V&A Publications, 2001), 173; and ibid., “The Anglo-Indian Ivory Furniture,” Masterpieces of English Furniture: The Gerstenfeld Collection (London, Christie’s Books, 1998), 131. 30 Nancy Um, “Chairs, Writing Tables, and Chests: Indian Ocean Furniture and the Postures of Commercial Documentation in Coastal Yemen, 1700–40,” Art History 38, no. 4 (2015): 718–31. 31 Jaffer, Furniture from British India, 173–5. 32 A copy of Chippendale’s Director was advertised for sale in the India Gazette on January 31, 1785. Jaffer, Furniture from British India, 197 and 200. 33 The reference, of course, is to Nikolaus Pevsner’s The Englishness of English Art (London: Penguin Books, 1956).

266

Notes on Contributors Mari-Tere Álvarez is Project Specialist at the J. Paul Getty Museum. She is interested in the movement of new materials and techniques via interlinked networks and how that altered the artistic landscapes of Europe and the Americas during the early modern period. She is currently co-authoring, with Charlene Villaseñor Black, The Road to El Dorado: Kings, Explorers and Artists in the Age of Empire. Charlene Villaseñor Black is Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, Associate Director of the Chicano Studies Research Center, editor of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and founding editorin-chief of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. Her 2006 book, Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire, won the College Art Association Millard Meiss Prize. In 2016 she was awarded UCLA’s Gold Shield Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence. Kelly Donahue-Wallace is a Professor of Art History at the University of North Texas. Her research addresses the history of prints and print culture in colonial New Spain. She is the author of Art and Architecture in Viceregal Latin America, 1521–1821 (2008) and Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment (2017). Kristina Kleutghen is David W. Mesker Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research has been supported by the Blakemore Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Getty Research Institute. Her first book, Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces, was published in 2015. Yeewan Koon is Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong. She is the author of A Defiant Brush: Su Renshan and the Politics of Painting in Guangdong (2013), which examines how artists responded to the violence and trauma of the Opium War. She is the recipient of numerous awards and was visiting professor at Cambridge University and Columbia University. More recently, she was awarded a Fulbright senior scholar fellowship for her new research project on China trade art and “Canton” as a portable place. J.M. Mancini is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, Maynooth University, Ireland. She is a historian of the United States and early America, with a particular interest in the intersections between history and the history of art, and the interactions between U.S. and world history. Her publications include Art and War in the Pacific 267

268

Notes on Contributors

World (2018), Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show (2005), and Architecture and Armed Conflict (2015), co-edited with Keith Bresnahan. Michele Matteini teaches at the Department of Art History, New York University, and The Institute of Fine Arts. He has written on late eighteenth-century court art, Beijing’s urban arts, and intercultural exchanges across East Asia. He is completing a book manuscript on experimental ink painting in late eighteenth-century Beijing. Prita Meier is Associate Professor of African art history at New York University. She is the author of Swahili Port Cities: Architecture of Elsewhere and is completing a book about the history of photography in eastern Africa. Carole Paul is Director of Museum Studies in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a scholar of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art in Italy. Her publications include The Borghese Collections and the Display of Art in the Age of the Grand Tour (2008) and The First Modern Museums of Art: The Birth of an Institution in 18th- and Early-19th-Century Europe (2012). She is currently writing a book on the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Timon Screech is Professor of the History of Art at SOAS, University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is an expert on the Edo Period and has published a dozen books, including Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan 1700–1820 (1999) and Obtaining Images: Art, Production, and Display in Edo Japan (2012; paperback 2017). His Oxford History of Japanese Art is expected in 2019. Stacey Sloboda is the Paul H. Tucker Professor of Art at University of Massachusetts Boston. She writes on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, design, and material culture, with a special interest in cross-cultural contact, including her book, Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2014). She is currently at work on a book on the artists and artisans working in and around London’s St. Martin’s Lane. Kristel Smentek is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Architecture at MIT. Author of Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2014), her research interests include the history of collecting and display, the history of the art market, and the impact of Asian-European exchange on eighteenthcentury art and aesthetic theory. The latter is the subject of her book in progress, Objects of Encounter: China in Eighteenth-Century France. Hannah Williams is Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London. She specializes in the visual and material culture of eighteenth-century France, with a special interest in artistic communities in Paris. She is the author of Académie Royale: A History in Portraits (2015), which

Notes on Contributors

269

won the Prix Marianne Roland Michel, and creator of the digital mapping project www.artistsinparis.org (2018). She is currently writing her second book, Art and Religion: Making the Parish Churches of Eighteenth-Century Paris. Michael Yonan is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Missouri. A specialist in eighteenth-century art, particularly in central and northern Europe, he is the author of Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art (2011) and Messerschmidt’s Character Heads: Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art History (2018), as well as numerous essays on the decorative arts, art historiography, and the theory and practice of material culture studies.

270

Selected Bibliography Adshead, S. A. M. “China a Colony of Egypt: An Eighteenth-Century Controversy.” Asian Profile 12, no. 2 (1984): 113–27. Allen, James de Vere. “Swahili Culture Reconsidered: Some Historical Implications of the Material Culture of the Northern Kenya Coast in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Azania: Journal of the British Institute of History and Archaeology in East Africa 9 (1974): 105–38. Allen, James de Vere. “The Swahili House: Cultural and Ritual Concepts Underlying Its Plan and Structure.” In Swahili Houses and Tombs of the Coast of Kenya, edited by James de Vere Allen and Thomas H. Wilson, 1–32. London: Art and Archaeology Research Papers, 1979. Allen, James de Vere. “The Kiti Cha Enzi and Other Swahili Chairs.” African Arts 22, no. 3 (1989): 56–8. Álvarez, Mari-Tere, and Charlene Villaseñor Black, eds. Arts, Crafts, and Materials in the Age of Global Encounters, 1492–1800. Special Issue, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 45, no. 3 (2015). Anderson, Carrie and Nancy Um, eds. Coordinates. Special Issue of Journal 18, 5 (Spring 2018). Available at: http://www.journal18.org/ (accessed October 10, 2018. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Armitage, David. “Is there a Prehistory of Globalization?” In Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective, edited by D. Cohen and M. O’Connor, 165–80. New York: Routledge, 2004. Baird, Ileana and Christina Ionescu, eds. Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. Bal, Mieke, ed. The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People. Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 2005. Becker, Howard. Art Worlds. Revised edition. Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, 2008. Beckerdite, Luke. “Immigrant Carvers and the Development of the Rococo Style.” American Furniture (1996). Available at: http://www.chipstone.org/article.php/238/ American-Furniture-1996/Immigrant-Carvers-and-the-Development-of-the-RococoSyle (accessed June 21, 2017). Beckerdite, Luke. “Pattern Carving in 18th Century Philadelphia.” American Furniture (2014). Available at: http://www.chipstone.org/article.php/705/AmericanFurniture-2014/Pattern-Carving-in-Eighteenth-Century-Philadelphia (accessed September 29, 2017). Benhamou, Reed. Regulating the Académie: Art, Rules and Power in Ancien Régime France. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009. Berg, Maxine, ed. Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

271

272

Selected Bibliography

Berg, Maxine and Elizabeth Eger, eds. Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003. Beurdeley, Cécile and Michel. Giuseppe Castiglione: A Jesuit Painter at the Court of the Chinese Emperors. Translated by Michael Bullock. Rutland, VT, and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1971. Bienaimé, Constance and Patrick Michel. “Portrait du singulier Monsieur Bertin, ministre investi dans les affaires de la Chine.” In La Chine à Versailles: art et diplomatie au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Marie-Laure de Rochebrune, 150–7. Paris: Somogy, and Versailles: Château de Versailles, 2014. Bignamini, Ilaria and Clare Hornsby. Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Bindman, David and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition, Part 3: The Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA : Belknap /Harvard University Press, 2011. Bleichmar, Daniela. Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 2012. Bleichmar, Daniela and Peter C. Mancall, eds. Collecting across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Philadelphia, PA : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Blom, Philipp and Wolfgang Kos, eds. Angelo Soliman: Ein Afrikaner in Wien. Vienna: Verlag Christian Brandstätter, 2011. Bravmann, Rene. African Islam. Washington, DC : Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983. Brooke, Janet M. “The Historiography of the Frame: Knowledge and Practice.” Journal of Canadian Art History 35, no. 2 (2014): 24–41. Cahill, James. Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Vernacular Painting in High Qing China. Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, 2010. Carr, David. Experience and History: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Carr, Dennis, ed. Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia. Boston, MA : MFA Publications, 2015. Carrier, David. A World Art History and Its Objects. University Park, PA : Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Casalilla, Bartolomé Yun. “ ‘Localism,’ Global History, and Transnational History: A Reflection from the Historian of Early Modern Europe.” Historisk Tidskrift 127, no. 4 (2007): 659–78. Casey, Edward. Getting Back in Place: Towards a Renewed Understanding of the PlaceWorld. Second edition. Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press, 2009. Casid, Jill H. and Aruna d’Souza, eds. Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn. Williamstown, MA : Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2014. Childs, Adrienne L. and Susan H. Libby. The Black Figure in the European Imaginary. London: Giles, 2017. Childs, Adrienne L. and Susan H. Libby, eds. Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century. London: Routledge, 2014. Christian, Kathleen Wren. Empire Without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350–1527. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Chard, Chloe. Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.

Selected Bibliography

273

Chu, Petra ten-Doesschate and Ning Ding, eds. Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West. Los Angeles, CA : Getty Publications, 2015. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1997. Conner, Patrick. “Mysteries of Deeper Consequences: Westerners in Chinese ReverseGlass Painting of the 18th Century.” Arts of Asia 46, no. 5 (2015): 124–36. Cordova, James. The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico: Crowned-Nun Portraits and Reform in the Convent. Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 2014. Coseteng, Alicia M. L. Spanish Churches in the Philippines. Manila: UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines, 1972. Coverly, Merlin. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2010. Crow, Thomas. Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Cummins, James S. “Two Missionary Methods in China: Mendicants and Jesuits.” In España en Extremo Oriente: Filipinas, China, Japon, edited by Víctor Sánchez and Cayetano S. Fuertes, 33–108. Madrid: Publicaciones Archivo Ibero-Americano, 1979. Curcio-Nagy, Linda. The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City: Performing Power and Identity. Albuquerque, NM : University of New Mexico Press, 2004. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, 1984. De Vos, Paula Susan. “The Science of Spices: Empiricism and Economic Botany in the Early Spanish Empire.” Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 399–427. De Vos, Paula Susan. “Natural History and the Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 2 (2007): 209–39. Dematté, Paola. “A Confucian Education for Europeans.” The Art Bulletin 98 (2016): 43–71. Dobie, Madeleine. Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Donahue-Wallace, Kelly. “Picturing Prints in Early Modern New Spain.” Americas 64, no. 3 (2008): 325–49. Donahue-Wallace, Kelly. “A Taste for Art.” In Buen Gusto and Classicism in Latin America, edited by Paul Niell and Stacie G. Widdifield, 93–113. Albuquerque, NM : University of New Mexico Press, 2013. Donkin, R. A. “Spanish Red: An Ethnogeographical Study of Cochineal and the Opuntia Cactus.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 67, no. 5 (1977): 1–84. Droth, Martina, ed. Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts. Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2008. Dupuy, Marie-Anne. Dominique-Vivant Denon: l’oeil de Napoléon. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1999. Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. Accumulating Culture: The Collections of Emperor Huizong. Seattle, WA : University of Washington Press, 2008. Elkins, James. Stories of Art. New York: Routledge, 2002. Elkins, James. Is Art History Global? New York: Routledge, 2007. Feigenbaum, Gail, ed., The Display of Art in the Roman Palace 1550–1750. Los Angeles, CA : Getty Publications, 2014. Fitz-Gerald, Desmond. “Gravelot and his Influence on English Furniture.” Apollo 90 (August 1969): 143–7.

274

Selected Bibliography

Fleisher, Jeffrey. “Rituals of Consumption and the Politics of Feasting on the Eastern African Coast, ad 700–1500.” Journal of World Prehistory 23, no. 4 (2010): 195–217. Flynn, Dennis K. and Arturo Giraldez. “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571.” Journal of World History 6 (1995), 201–21. Forgács, Éva. “The Necessity of Writing Local Art History in the Global Context.” Acta Historiae Artium 49 (2008): 103–8. Frank, Caroline. Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America. Chicago, IL , and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Frazier, Jack and Reiko Ishihara-Brito. “The Occurrence of Tortoiseshell on a Pre-Hispanic Maya Mosaic Mask.” Antiquity 86 (2012): 825–37. French, Calvin. Shiba Kōkan: Artist, Innovator and Pioneer in the Westernization of Japan. New York & Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1974. Galende Pedro G. and Rene B. Javellana. Great Churches of the Philippines. Makati: Bookmark, 1993. Galvin, John. “Supplies from Manila for the California Missions, 1781–1783.” Philippine Studies 12, no. 3 (1964): 494–510. Gerritsen, Anne and Giorgio Riello, eds. The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World. New York: Routledge, 2016. Getz, Trevor R. Cosmopolitan Africa c. 1700–1875. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Gies, David T. and Cynthia Wall. The Eighteenth Centuries: Global Networks of Enlightenment. Charlottesville, VA : University of Virginia Press, 2018. Girouard, Mark. “The Two Worlds of St. Martin’s Lane.” Country Life (February 3, 1966): 224–7. Grell, Chantal and Christian Michel. “Érudits, hommes de lettres et artistes en France au XVIIIe siècle face aux découvertes d’Herculanum.” In Ercolano 1738–1988: 250 anni di ricerca archeologica, edited by Luisa Franchi dell’Orto, 133–44. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1993. Guillet, Bertrand, et al. La soie et le canon: France-Chine 1700–1850. Paris: Gallimard, and Nantes: Musée d’histoire de Nantes, 2010. Hackel, Steven W. Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian–Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850. Chapel Hill, NC : University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Hawkins, Harriet. “Geography and Art. An Expanding Field: Site, the Body, and Practice.” Progress in Human Geography 37, no. 1 (2012): 52–71. Hay, Jonathan. Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China. Honolulu, HI : University of Hawai’i Press, 2010. Hayward, Helena. Thomas Johnson and the English Rococo. London: Alec Tiranti, 1964. Hevia, James L. Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 1995. Ho, Wai-kam. “The Literary Concepts of ‘Picture-Like’ (Ru Hua) and ‘Picture-Idea’ (Hua Yi) in the Relationship between Poetry and Painting.” In Words and Images: Chinese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting, edited by Alfreda Murck and Wen Fong, 173–98. New York and Princeton, NJ : Metropolitan Museum of Art and Princeton University Press, 1991. Hornsby, Clare, ed. The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond. London: British School at Rome, 2000.

Selected Bibliography

275

Horton, Mark and John Middleton. The Swahili: The Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society. Malden, MA : Wiley, 2001. Ingamells, John, ed. A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701–1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Jackson, Anna and Amin Jaffer, eds. Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500– 1800. London: V&A Publications, 2004. Jaffer, Amin. Furniture from British India and Ceylon: A Catalogue of the Collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum. London: V&A Publications, 2001. Jaffer, Amin. Luxury Goods from India: The Art of the Indian Cabinetmaker. London: V&A Publications, 2002. Jeffery, Celina and Gregory Minissale, eds. Global and Local Art Histories. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007. Johns, Christopher M. S. The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment. University Park, PA : Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. Katzew, Ilona, ed. Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici. Ex. cat. Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Fomento Cultural Banamex, Mexico City, 2017. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta. Toward a Geography of Art. Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 2004. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta and Michael North, eds. Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta, Catherine Dossin and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, eds. Circulations in the Global History of Art. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. Kelly, Jason M. The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Kinsbruner, Jay. The Colonial Spanish American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism. Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 2005. Kleutghen, Kristina. “Chinese Occidenterie: The Diversity of ‘Western’ Objects in Eighteenth-Century China.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 47, no. 2 (2014): 117–35. Kleutghen, Kristina. “Imports and Imitations: The Taste for Japanese Lacquer in Eighteenth-Century China and Europe.” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2017): 175–206. Kleutghen, Kristina, ed. East-Southeast. Special Issue, Journal 18, 4 (Fall 2017). Available at http://www.journal18.org/past-issues/4-east-southeast-fall-2017/ (accessed October 10, 2018). Kobayashi, Hiromitsu. “Suzhou Prints and Western Perspective: The Painting Techniques of Jesuit Artists at the Qing Court, and Dissemination of the Contemporary Court Style of Painting to Mid-Eighteenth-Century Chinese Society through Woodblock Prints.” In The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, edited by John W. O’Malley, Gauvin Alecxander Bailey, and T. Frank Kennedy, 262–83. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Kohara, Hironobu. “The Qianlong Emperor’s Skill in the Connoisseurship of Chinese Painting.” Phoebus 6, no. 1 (1988): 56–73 and 176–82. Lach, Donald F. and Edwin J. Van Kley. Asia in the Making of Europe: A Century of Advance. Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 1993. Lafont, Anne. “How Skin Became a Racial Marker: Art Historical Perspectives on Race.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 51, no. 1 (2017): 89–113.

276

Selected Bibliography

Larkin, Brian. The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City. Albuquerque, TX : University of New Mexico Press, 2010. Lavezzi, Elizabeth. “Painting and the Tripartite Model in Charles Perrault’s Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes.” In Ancients and Moderns in Europe: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Paddy Bullard and Alexis Tadié, 155–70. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2016. Ledyard, Gary. “Korean Travelers in China over Four Hundred Years, 1488–1887.” Occasional Papers on Korea 2 (March 1974): 1–42. Lee, Julian. “Development of Japanese Landscape Prints: A Study of the Synthesis of Eastern and Western Art,” PhD dissertation, University of Washington, Seattle, WA , 1977. Lee, Raymond. “American Cochineal in European Commerce.” Journal of Modern History 23, no. 3 (1951): 205–24. Leibsohn, Dana and Jeanette Peterson, eds. Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World. London: Routledge, 2012. Leibsohn, Dana and Meha Priyadarshini, eds. “Transpacific: Beyond Silk and Silver.” Special Issue, Colonial Latin American Review 25, no. 1 (2016). Lensen, George. The Russia Push Towards Japan: Russo-Japanese Relations, 1697–1875. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1959. Lewis, Gwynne. “Henri-Léonard Bertin and the Fate of the Bourbon Monarchy: The ‘Chinese’ Connection.” In Enlightenment and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Norman Hampson, edited by Malcolm Crook, William Doyle, and Alan Forrest, 69–90. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Liu, Lydia He. The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2004. Lugo-Ortiz, Agnes and Angela Rosenthal, eds. Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Luyendijk-Elshout, A. M. “Ontleedkundige (Anatomy) as Underlying Principle of Western Medicine in Japan.” In Red-Hair Medicine: Dutch–Japanese Medical Relations, ed. H. Beukers, 27–31. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991. Mancini, J. M. “Siege Mentalities: Objects in Motion, British Imperial Expansion, and the Pacific Turn.” Winterthur Portfolio 45, nos. 2/3 (2011): 125–40. Mancini, J. M. “Disrupting the Transpacific: Objects, Architecture, War, Panic.” Colonial Latin American Review 25, no. 1 (2016), 35–55. Mancini, J. M. Art and War in the Pacific World: Making, Breaking, and Taking from Anson’s Voyage to the Philippine-American War. Oakland, CA : University of California Press, 2018. Marcon, Federico. The Knowledge of Nature and Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan. Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 2015. Markley, Robert. “China and the English Enlightenment: Literature, Aesthetics, and Commerce.” Literature Compass, 11, no. 8 (2014): 517–27. Martin, Meredith and Daniela Bleichmar, eds. “Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World.” Special Issue, Art History 38, no. 4 (2015). Martin, Peter. Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren: Afrikaner in Geschichte und Bewußtsein der Deutschen. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001. Maskill, David. “A Good Address: Living at the Louvre in the Eighteenth Century.” In Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century: Essays in Art History from the XVth David Nichol Smith Seminar, edited by Jennifer Milam, forthcoming. Newark, DE : University of Delaware Press.

Selected Bibliography

277

Mattos, Claudia. “Geography, Art Theory, and New Perspectives for an Inclusive Art History.” The Art Bulletin 96, no. 3 (2014): 259–64. McAndrew, John. The Open-Air Churches of Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1965. McClellan, Andrew. Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Meier, Prita. “Chinese Porcelain and Muslim Port Cities: Mercantile Materiality in Coastal East Africa.” Art History 38, no. 4 (2015): 702–17. Meier, Prita. Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere. Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press, 2016. Michel, Christian. “Les découvertes d’Herculanum et la Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes.” Bulletin de la société de l’histoire de l’art français (1984): 105–17. Michel, Christian. L’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (1648–1793): La naissance de l’École française. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2012. Millward, James. Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia. Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 1998. Min, Eun Kyung. “China between the Ancients and the Moderns.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 45, no. 2 (2004): 115–29. Mitter, Partha. Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art. Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 1992. Mosca, Matthew W. “Hindustan as a Geographic and Political Concept in Qing Sources, 1700–1800.” China Report 47, no. 4 (2011): 263–77. Mosca, Matthew W. From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China. Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 2013. Mullen, Robert J. Architecture and Its Sculpture in Viceregal Mexico. Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 1997. Myers, Fred R., ed. The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture. Santa Fe, NM : School of American Research Press, 2001. Newby, Laura. “Copper Plates for the Qianlong Emperor: From Paris to Peking via Canton.” Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012): 161–99. Norman, Larry F. The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France. Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 2011. North, Michael, ed. Artistic and Cultural Exchanges between Europe and Asia, 1400–1900. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Nussbaum, Felicity, ed. The Global Eighteenth Century. Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Onians, John, ed. Atlas of World Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Padilla, Carmella, and Barbara Anderson, eds. A Red Like No Other. How Cochineal Colored the World: An Epic Story of Art, Culture, Science, and Trade. New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2015. Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life, 1521–1821. Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2004. Paul, Carole. The Borghese Collections and the Display of Art in the Age of the Grand Tour. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Paul, Carole, ed., The First Modern Museums of Art: The Birth of an Institution in 18th–and Early 19th-Century Europe (Los Angeles, CA : J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012).

278

Selected Bibliography

Paul, Carole and Louis Marchesano, eds. “Viewing Antiquity: The Grand Tour, Antiquariansim, and Collecting.” Special Issue, Richerche di Storia dell’arte 72 (2000). Pearson, M. N. Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era. Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Perdue, Peter C. China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Cambridge, MA : Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2005. Pevsner, Nikolaus. The Englishness of English Art. London: Penguin Books, 1956. Pierce, Donna, ed. Festivals and Daily Life in the Arts of Colonial Latin America. Denver, CO : Denver Art Museum, 2014. Pierson, Stacey. From Object to Concept: Global Consumption and the Transformation of Ming Porcelain. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Powers, Martin. “The Cultural Politics of Brushwork.” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 2 (2013): 312–27. Préaud, Tamara. “Denon collectionneur de céramiques.” In Les vies de Dominique-Vivant Denon, edited by Daniella Gallo, II, 651–67. Paris: La documentation française, 2001. Prestholdt, Jeremy. Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization. Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, 2008. Puetz, Anne. “Design Instruction for Artisans in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Journal of Design History 12, no. 3 (1999): 217–39. Puetz, Anne. “Drawing from Fancy: The Intersection of Art and Design in MidEighteenth-Century London.” RIHA Journal 88 (March 2014). Puig, Francis J. and Michael Conforti, eds. The American Craftsman and the European Tradition, 1620–1820. Hanover, NH : University Press of New England, 1989. Redford, Bruce. Venice and the Grand Tour. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Rijkelijkhuizen, Marloes. “Whales, Walruses, and Elephants: Artisans in Ivory, Baleen, and Other Skeletal Materials in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 13, no. 4 (2009): 409–29. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978. Sandos, James A. Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. van de Sandt, Udolpho. “Note sur les collections de tableaux et leur présentation dans les salles de l’Académie.” In Les peintres du Roi, 1648–1793, 69–76. Ex. cat., Musée des Beaux Art de Tours and Musée des Augustins, Toulouse, 2000. Sauer, Walter, ed. Von Soliman zu Omofum: Afrikanische Diaspora in Österreich, 17. bis 20. Jahrhundert. Innsbruck: Studien-Verlag, 2007. Schafer, Edward. The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of Tang Exotics. Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, 1963. Schmidt-Haberkamp, Barbara, ed. Europa und die Türkei im 18. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: V & R unipress/Bonn University Press, 2011. Screech, Timon. “The English and the Control of Christianity in the Early Edo Period.” Japan Forum 24 (2012): 3–40. Screech, Timon. “A 17th-Century Japanese Minister’s Acquisition of Western Pictures: Inoue Masashige (1585–1661) and his European Objects.” In Transforming Knowledge Orders: Museums, Collections and Exhibitions, edited by Larissa Förster, 72–106. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2014.

Selected Bibliography

279

Settis, Salvatore. The Future of the “Classical.” Translated by Allan Cameron. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Sheriff, Mary D., ed. Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art. Chapel Hill, NC : University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Skelton, Robert. “The Relations between the Chinese and Indian Jade Carving Traditions.” In The Westward Influence of the Chinese Arts from the 14th to the 18th Century, edited by William Watson, 98–110. London: University of London, Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, 1972. Sloboda, Stacey. Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Smentek, Kristel. “China and Greco-Roman Antiquity: Overture to a Study of the Vase in Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal18, 1 (2016). Available at: http://www.journal18. org/497 (accessed September 10, 2018). Smentek, Kristel. “Chinoiseries for the Qing: A French Gift of Tapestries to the Qianlong Emperor,” Journal of Early Modern History 20 (2016): 87–109. Solkin, David. Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in EighteenthCentury England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Spyer, Patricia. Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces. New York: Routledge, 1998. Stafford, Barbara Maria. “The Eighteenth Century: Towards an Interdisciplinary Model.” The Art Bulletin 70, no. 1 (1988): 6–24. Stanfield-Mazzi, Maya. Object and Apparition: Envisioning the Christian Divine in the Colonial Andes. Tucson, AZ : University of Arizona Press, 2013. Stanziani, Alessandro. Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants: Bondage in the Indian Ocean World, 1750–1914. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Summers, David. Real Spaces: Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism. London: Phaidon, 2003. Sutton, Elizabeth A. Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Tan, Rita C. Zhangzhou Ware Found in the Philippines: “Swatow” Export Ceramics from Fujian, 16th–17th Century. Manila: Yuchengco Museum, Oriental Ceramic Society of the Philippines; Artpostasia, 2007. Taylor, William. Theater of a Thousand Wonders: A History of Miraculous Images and Shrines in New Spain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Thomas, Greg M. “Yuanming Yuan/Versailles: Intercultural Interactions between Chinese and European Palace Cultures.” Art History 32 (2009): 115–43. Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1991. Thomson, Ann. “Thinking about the History of Africa in the Eighteenth Century.” In Encountering Otherness: Diversities and Transcultural Experiences in Early Modern Europe, edited by Guido Abbattista, 253–65. Trieste: EUT Edizioni, 2011. Towner, John. An Historical Geography of Recreation and Tourism in the Western World 1540–1940. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1996. Uitzinger, Ellen. “For the Man Who Has Everything: Western-Style Exotica in Birthday Celebrations at the Court of Ch’ien-Lung.” In Conflict and Accommodation in Early Modern East Asia, edited by Leonard Blussé and Harriet Zurndorfer, 216–39. New York: Brill, 1993.

280

Selected Bibliography

Um, Nancy. “Chairs, Writing Tables, and Chests: Indian Ocean Furniture and the Postures of Commercial Documentation in Coastal Yemen, 1700–40.” Art History 38, no. 4 (2015): 718–31. Van Kley, Edwin J. “Europe’s ‘Discovery’ of China and the Writing of World History.” American Historical Review 76, no. 2 (1971): 358–85. von Spee, Clarissa, ed. The Printed Image in China: From the 8th to the 21st Centuries. London: British Museum Press, 2010. Wahrman, Dror. The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Wang, Cheng-hua. “A Global Perspective on Eighteenth-Century Chinese Art and Visual Culture.” The Art Bulletin 96, no. 4 (2014): 379–94. Weber, David. “The Spanish Legacy in North America and the Historical Imagination.” Western Historical Quarterly 23, no. 1 (1992): 5–24. Wheeler, Roxann. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture. Philadelphia, PA : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Williams, Hannah. Académie Royale: A History in Portraits. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Williams, Hannah, ed. Louvre Local. Special Issue, Journal18, 2 (2016). Available at: http://www.journal18.org/past-issues/2-louvre-local-fall-2016/ (accessed September 10, 2018). Williams, Hannah. “Artists; Studios in Paris: Digitally Mapping the 18th-Century Art World,” Journal 18, 5 (Spring 2018). Available at: http://www.journal18.org/issues5/ artists-studios-in-paris-digitally-mapping-the-18th-century-art-world/ (accessed October 10, 2018) Wilson, Gillian, David Harris Cohen, Jean-Nérée Ronfort, Jean-Dominique Augarde, and Peter Friess. European Clocks in the J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles, CA : Getty Publications, 1996. Wilson, Ming. “1760—An Important Year in the Production of Chinese Jade.” Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society 73 (2008): 51–9. Wilton, Andrew and Ilaria Bignamini, eds. Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century. London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1996. Wolff, Larry. The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Encounters on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon. Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 2016. Wu, Yulian. Luxurious Networks: Salt Merchants, Status, and Statecraft in EighteenthCentury China. Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 2017. Yonan, Michael. “Veneers of Authority: Chinese Lacquers in Maria Theresa’s Vienna.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 4 (2004): 652–72. Yu, Peichin. De jia qu: Qianlong huangdi de taoci pinwei 得佳趣: 乾隆皇帝的陶瓷品味 (Obtaining Refined Enjoyment: The Qianlong Emperor’s Taste in Ceramics). Taibei: Guoli gugong bowuyuan, 2012. Zhao, Bing. “Global Trade and Swahili Cosmopolitan Material Culture: Chinese-Style Ceramic Shards from Sanje ya Kati and Songo Mnara (Kilwa, Tanzania).” Journal of World History 23, no.1 (2012): 41–85.

Index Page numbers: Figures given in italics; Notes given as: [page number]n.[note number] aesthetics, Islamic jades 12, 19–33 Africa, Würzburg Ceiling 213–215 Africa Angelo Soliman 14–15, 209–225 Swahili coast 14–15, 227–244 Africanus, Leo 217–218 Akan Peoples 217–218 Akita Museum of Modern Art, Yokote 67 Album of Costumes of China 76–92 album of figures, Peabody Essex Museum 73–92 al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan 217–218 Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio 35–36 Altar of the Kings 125–126 altar screens 116, 121–122, 125–126 Álvarez, Mari-Tere 13, 133–152 America California, 95–113 Cambón’s objects from China 95–106 European Grand Tour 191, 200 Philadelphia, 253–257 Spanish American Newspapers 13, 15, 115–131 tortoiseshell 136–140, 143, 146–147 anatomical books 60, 67 Anderson, Benedict 118, 128 A New Voyage Round the World 135 Angelo Soliman 14–15, 209–222 Anglo-Indian ivory furniture 258–262 “Arab Door” 228–229 art academies Austria, Vienna Academy of Art 222 China, Qing court painting academy 40, 47, 51 n. 19, 82 England, Royal Academy 74, 247, 263 n.3

England, St. Martin’s Lane Academy 245-65 France, Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture 13–14, 171–189 Italy, French Academy in Rome 199–200 Italy, Academy of the Nude 200 Italy, Academy of San Luca 200 Mexico, Royal Academy of San Carlos 126-8, 129 n.7 art worlds, definitions/importance of 4–5 Augustinians 103 Austria 209, 211–213, 216–219, 221 “Backs of Chairs,” 259, 260 Balbás, Jerónimo de 125–126 Barghash, Seyyid 229, 241 Baron Vivant-Denon in His Cabinet 163, 164, 165 Batoni, Pompeo 202 bed hangings 1–2 Beijing, Liulichang Market 12–13, 35–52, 228 The Bell that Rings for 10,000 Leagues in the Dutch Port of Frankai 62–63 Bernard, Nicholas 253–254 Bertin, Henri-Léonard 160–163 Bindman, David 216 Biography of the Dragon Beard Guest 79 “Blackness” 209, 211, 219, 222–223 Boivin, Jean 158 Book of Habits (PEM album of figures) 76 Boucheljon, Battle of Flanders 55 Boulle, André Charles 143–147 Bourbons 102, 117, 133, 137–138, 145–147 Boydell, John 221–222 Bretez, Louis 173–176 British Museum 261–262

281

282

Index

British tourists, European Grand Tour 191–192, 197–198, 201, 204 Bronze in You form, Qinding Xiqing gujian 161–162 Brosses, Charles de 196 Brun, Charles Le 171, 180 Buncho, Tani, Still Life 58–59 bureaus 139–141 Cabinet on Stand 143–144, 260–262, 261 Cahill, James 82 California, Cambón’s objects 13, 15, 95–113 Cambón, Pedro Benito 13, 15, 95–113 Camion, Honoré Gabriel 163, 164 Canaletto, Piazza San Marco, Venice 201 Canal, Giovanni Antonio 201 Canton album of figures 73–92 derivation of name 72 export art 13–14, 35, 47, 71–94 Capitoline Museum, Rome 197, 199 carved doorframe, Stone Town, Zanzibar 228–229 Casalilla, Bartolomé Yun 9–10 Castiglione, Giuseppe 35–37 Catholic churches/faith Japan 53, 55–56, 60 Liulichang Market, Beijing 40–46 Soliman 209, 212–213 Spanish American newspapers 118, 123 Caylus, comte de 158–160, 162–163, 165 Cedid atlas tercümesi viii–ix, 16 ceiling fresco, Würzburg Residenz 213–215 ceramics Cambón’s Asian objects 97–98 challenge of China in France 162–163 Guangdong 85, 87–88 Swahili Coast of Eastern Africa 235–236, 241 chairs 229, 238–241, 258–260 Chambon, M. 137–138 Cheng Jiaxian 41 Che Qua 74–75, 77–78, 84 The Child Yanping Taking Care of His Mother 44–46

chimes, jade stone slab 22–23 China album of watercolor figures 73–92 Beijing’s Liulichang Market 12–13, 35–52, 228 Cambón’s objects from 97–106 challenge of in France 13, 153–169 eighteenth-century France 13, 153–169 export art 13–14, 71–94 holy water fonts 98–99 jades at the Qing Court 12, 19–33 Manila to the Americas 13, 15, 95–113 chinoiserie 9, 82, 153 chintz 1–2, 260 Chippendale, Thomas 1, 16n.1, 245–246, 250–260 churches Beijing 40–46 European Grand Tour 194–195 Franciscans 95, 97–99, 102–109 Spanish American newspapers 121–126 cicerones 193–194, 201 clocks Pedestal Clock 144–145 Wall Clock on Bracket 153, 155, 156 Clunas, Craig 5, 106, 154 colonialism 2, 4, 6, 14, 28, 101, 133–134, 148, 156, 229, 240–241 Cambón’s objects 100–101 identity, 115–131, 253–262 Colonial Spanish American Newspapers 13, 15, 115–131 Colonna Palace gallery, Rome 195 Commode with two drawers 153, 154 concierge services 177–178 Confucius 21–22, 103, 163–165 copperplate etchings 63, 65, 216–217 costumed figure image albums 73–92 Cour Carrée 176 Courtenay, Hercules 253–254 cultural hegemony 147–148 Dampier, William 134–135 Daoist immortal 163, 164, 165 d’Argenville, Antoine-Nicolas Dézallier 172

Index death, Soliman 209–211 Denon, Dominique Vivant 163, 184, 164.165 Derrida, Jacques 134, 144, 148 Descrittione dell’Africa 217–218 design, St. Martin’s Lane Academy, London 247–253 Diderot, Denis 157 disaster reporting 121–122 disruptive relations, Cambón’s objects 102–103 Dominicans 103 Donahue-Wallace, Kelly 13, 15, 115–131 doorframe, Stone Town, Zanzibar 228–229 doorways Louvre: French Academy 176–177, 180–182 Swahili coast, Eastern Africa 228–236 The Dream of the Red Chamber 35, 41, 79 Dutch pictures, Japanese art 13, 54–68 early modern trade routes 5–6 Eastern Africa, Swahili coast 14–15, 227–244 East India Company merchants 1, 11, 54, 57, 67–68, 160, 258 École du modèle 178, 179 Edo, Japanese art 54–55, 58–63, 67–68 educating artists, European Grand Tour 199–200 Egyptian antiquity 153, 159–163 eighteenth century, definitions/importance of 3–4 elephant carrying a vase, symbolic homophone 29–30 Ellys, John 248 embroidery 76, 86–88 Qianlong, Emperor 12, 19–31, 35, 48–49, 71, 161, 163 enamels 40–41, 47–49, 85, 153, 155 Enlightenment 191, 197, 215 entrances Louvre: French Academy 176–177, 180–182 Swahili coast, Eastern Africa 228–236 Erlach, Johann Bernhard Fischer von 216, 217

283

etchings 61, 63–64, 184–185, 250–252 ethnic separation, Beijing 38–40 European antiquarians, challenge of China in France 13, 153–169 European Dimension to Japanese Art 12–14, 53–70 European Grand Tour 14–15, 61, 191–208 “Examination into Falsehoods Concerning the Five Regions of India” 24 exports Canton 71–92 European Grand Tour 200–201 furniture 247, 258 Japanese art 63 pattern books 254–262 Swahili coast 239 tortoiseshell 133, 136 Faden, William viii–ix, 16 Fan Li 79 fans embellished with vedute, Fan Museum, London 203 Figures, Vase with European 47 finished objects, Cambón 97–99 fire of Edo 54 First Kabuki Performance of the Year 61–62 floating pictures 12–14, 53–70 floral chintz 1–2, 260 Florence 192–194, 197 Fogg Museum 201 fola la kuwaza 238 fonts 98–99, 104–105 Forgács, Éva 8–9 Foucault, Michel 134, 148 Foullet, Antoine 153, 155, 165 France challenge of China in France 13, 153–169 tortoiseshell 13, 133–152 Franciscans 13, 15, 95–113, 122, 126 Frank, Caroline 100 freedom, Soliman 212 Freemasonry 213, 216 French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture 13–14, 171–189 The Frick Collection, New York 161, 163 Fridelli, Xavier Ehrenbert 40, 42

284 furniture “East-India style” 229, 234, 240, 258–262 France 13, 143–147, 178 Guangzhou 85 London 1, 247, 250–253 Mexico 129 n. 10, 136, 138-139, 141 Philadelphia 253–257 Spain 143 Swahili coast, Eastern Africa 229, 234, 238–241 tortoiseshell, 136, 138-141, 143 Vizagapatam 258–262 Gaius, Marius 219 Garrick, David 1, 16n.1 “Gathering Interests Pavilion” 41 Gazeta de Lima 115–122 Gazeta de México 115–118, 120, 121–126 Geliang, Zhu 79 Genre Scene with Westerners 35–36 Gentleman and Cabinetmaker’s Director 250, 253, 258–259, 260 George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida 161–162 gilt bronze ornaments 145, 153, 155 Girandole 250, 251 Girouard, Mark 245 glass, Liulichang Market, Beijing 46–49 glazed pottery dishes 235–236 globalization connotations 5–8 Golden Head, 13 Newport Street, London 246, 250 González Martí Museo Nacional de Cerámica y Artes Suntuarias 139–141 González Velázquez, Antonio 127–128 gourd-shaped cup with ram’s head, Xinjiang 27–28 Goya, Francisco de 141–143 Gramsci, Antonio 134, 147–148 Grand Canal Venice 62–63 Grande Galerie 175, 182 grande salle 180–182 Grand Tour 14–15, 61, 191–208 Gravelot, Hubert-François 245, 248–250, 252

Index Greco-Roman antiquity 153–159, 162–165 Greek antiquity 153–165 Guangdong 72, 84–92 Guangzhou 13, 71–73, 84–87, 103, 160 Guérin, Nicolas 172, 178, 179 Guignes, Joseph de 159–160 Gyokuzan, Okada 38–39 Habsburgs, Spanish 140 Hackel, Steven 105 Haid, Johann Gottfried 209–222 Hall of Thirty-Three Bays 63, 64 Hamilton, Douglas 193–194 hanging scrolls 35–36, 37, 44–46, 78, 82 Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum 201 Havana, newspapers 116–124 Hawksbill sea turtles 133–134, 137 Hay, Jonathan 84–85, 90 hegemony 147–148 hemp 86, 89 Hercules 140–141, 143 Het Groot schilderboek 65–66 High Chest of Drawers 255, 256 Hindustan jades 12, 20–30 histoire croisée 11 History of the Former Han 89–90 Hogarth, William 245, 248 holy water fonts 98–99, 104–105 homophonic symbols 29–30 Houghton Library, Harvard University 259, 260 Humboldt, Alexander 136 Illustrated Masterworks of the Han and Song: “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” and “Outlaws of the Marsh” 81 Imperial Natural History Cabinet, Vienna 209–211 imperial politics, tortoiseshell 13, 133–152 Imprimerie Royale 175–176 Indian antiquity, challenge of China in France 153, 159–160 Indian ivory furniture 258–262 Indian Ocean 14–15, 227–244 indigenous relationships 101, 104–109

Index inlaid jade elephant 29–30 Inner City, Beijing 39–40 international travel, European Grand Tour 14–15, 61, 191–208 Islamic jades at the Qing Court 12, 19–33 isometric maps 173–176 Italy, European Grand Tour 191–204 itinerant art history 14–15, 227–244 ivory 85, 203, 239–240, 258–262 jadeite 21 jades and gold chimes 22–23 Guangdong 85, 87 Qing Court 12, 19–33 Xinjiang province (1755–9) 21–31 Jaffer, Sheriff and Company’s store, Old Town Mombasa 229–230 Japanese art, floating pictures 12–14, 30–31, 43–46, 53–70, 161, 163 Jesuits Beijing 35, 38–40, 43, 47 Cambón’s objects from China 102–103, 106 Japanese art 56, 62 Liulichang Market, Beijing 35, 38–40, 43, 47 John, Prester 214–215 Johnson, Thomas 245, 246, 250, 252, 254–255, 257 Jonston, John (or Jan) 60 J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 143–144, 153, 155, 202 Jugurtha’s battles 219 Jun-blue glaze vase 87, 88 kalamkari 1–2 Kanuri people 209, 211–212, 215 Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta 7, 11, 116 Kaunitz-Rietberg, Anton Wenzel von 221–222 Ketelaar, Willem 60 Khotan, now Xinjiang province 21–26 kiti cha enzi 239–241 Kleutghen, Kristina 12, 19–33 Kobe City Museum 58–59, 61–63 Kokan, Shiba 62–67 Koon, Yeewan 13–14, 71–94

285

Korea 38–46, 49 Kulmus, Johann 67 Lairesse, Gérard de 65–66 Lamu Town, Kenya 229–234, 238–239 Latin American 100 layouts, newspapers 118 The Library Company of Philadelphia 254, 255 Liechtenstein household 209, 212–213, 217–219 Lima, newspapers 115–124 lion staffs 216–217 Liulichang Market, Beijing 12–13, 35–52, 228 Liu Mengmei 79–80 Lobkowitz, Georg Christian von 212 local concept 8–11 local guides/views, French Royal Academy 13–14, 171–189 Lock, Mattias 248–252 “Lodge of the Five Willows” 41 London and its Environs Describ’d 261–262 London, St. Martin’s Lane Academy 14–15, 245–265 lotus jade objects 23–26 Louvre, French Academy 13–14, 171–189 Lugar: Essays on Philippine Heritage and Architecture 108 Luo Fumin 40, 47 Luo Tianchi 86–87 Mai, (known as Omai) 219–220 Manchu occupation 38–39, 44 Mancini, J. M. 13, 15, 95–113 Manila 13, 15, 95–113, 123–124 “Mansion of the First Moon” 41 manuals, European Grand Tour 197 manuscript albums, Peabody Essex Museum 73–92 mapambo ya niumba 237–238 maps Beijing’s Inner and Outer City 38–39 Map of the World viii–ix, 16 St. Martin’s Lane Academy, London 245, 246, 248–253 sourcing tortoiseshell 134, 135 marquetry cabinets 145–147

286

Index

Martini, Martino 159 Martin, Jean-Baptiste 182–183 Masanobu, Okumura 61–62 Masashige, Inoue 54–55 Masulipatnam, India 1–2 materiality, tortoiseshells 13, 133–152 Matteini, Michele 12–13, 35–52, 228 Mattos, Claudia 9 Mauzaisse, Jean-Baptiste 163, 164 Mayan mosaic masks 136 Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia 11 Mediterranean, European Grand Tour 14–15, 61, 191–208 A Meeting of the Académie Royale 182–183 Meier, Prita 14–15, 227–244 Meiji era 53–54 Meiping vase with Jun-blue glaze 87, 88 meirenhua 82–83 “A Merchant”, Album of Costumes of China 76–77 Mercurio Peruano 116–117, 123 metals 46–49 Metropolitan Cathedral, Mexico City 125–126 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 20, 26, 219, 220, 252, 255, 256–257 Mexico architecture 108, 125–126 newspapers 115–118, 120, 121–128 tortoiseshell 136, 141 mihrab of the Friday Mosque, Gedi, Kenya 235–236 Mission Dolores/San Francisco de Asís 97–99, 105–110 Mission San Gabriel Arcángel 95, 96, 104–105 modern European painters, challenge of China in France 13, 153–169 Moll, Herman 135 Mombasa 229–230, 233–234, 237–240 Montagu House, London 261–262 monuments 159, 162, 194–195, 200–201, 235–236 Moore, John 193–194 Morison, Colin 194–195 Morokoshi meisho zue, Osaka 38–39 mosaic masks 136

Moser, George Michael 245, 248–249 motif meanings 153–169 Mughal jade 19–20, 23–31 murals, sanctuary of Mission Dolores 99 Musée du Louvre 174, 178–184 Musée Jacquemart-André, Institut de France, Paris 153, 154 Museo de América, Madrid 141 Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid 145–147 Museo Nacional de Cerámica y Artes Suntuarias 139–141 Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican City 197, 199 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 217–218 Nagasaki 54–60, 63–68 Naotake, Odano 67 National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh 230, 231, 235–236 National Museum of Korea 44–46 National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi 231–234 nephrite jades 19–28 A New Book of Ornaments 255, 257 New Comments on Guangdong 85 New Order (Nizam-I Djedid) 16 Newport Street, London 246, 250 Newspapers 13, 15, 115–131 Nizam-I Djedid (New Order) 16 Ni Zan 83–84 Northern Europeans, European Grand Tour 191–204 North, Michael 11 Numidians, Angelo Soliman 14–15, 209–225 Nussbaum, Felicity 6, 10 Okyo, Maruyama 62–66 Omai 219–221 optical views, Japanese art 65 orators, European Grand Tour 193–194, 201 ornaments Cambón, Pedro Benito 96, 99 China in France 153, 156, 165 European Grand Tour 204

Index St. Martin’s Lane Academy, 250–251, 254–257 Spanish American newspapers 121–123 Swahili coast, Eastern Africa 229–240 Ottoman Military Engineering School viii–ix, 16 Our Lady of the Pardon 126, 127 Pak Chiwon 42–43 palaces 195–199 Palóu, Francisco 95–97, 106–107 Papel Periódico de la Havana 117, 124 Parallel of the Ancients and Moderns 156–158 Pascall, James and Ann 246, 250–251 Paul, Carole 14–15, 61, 191–208 Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) 73–92, 258–259, 259 Peace of the Pyrenées of 1659 137 Pedestal Clock 144–145 Pedro Benito Cambón sculpture 95, 96 peinetas 13, 133, 141 PEM see Peabody Essex Museum Pereyns, Simon 126, 127 periodical papers 116–118, 121 Perrault, Charles 156–158 Perrault, Claude 175 Peru, newspapers 115–124 Philadelphia 245, 253–258 Philippines 13, 95, 97–98, 105, 108–109 Philip, Thomas, Earl de Grey of Wrest Park, Bedfordshire 73 Piazza San Marco, Venice 201 Pichler, Caroline 211–212 pictorial sources, PEM album 76–84, 88–92 pigments 40, 46–48, 99 Piozzi, Hester Lynch 197 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 202 “Plan au premier étage de la distribution du Louvre dans son état actuel” 177 Plan de Paris dessiné et gravé sous les ordres de Turgot 173–176 poems Guangdong art 86–87 jade objects 12, 19–21, 24–27, 30–31 Western images, East Asia 43

287

Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain 136 politics Islamic Jades, Qing Court 12, 19–33 tortoiseshell 13, 133–152 Pollard, James 253–254 polycentrism 9–11, 15, 38 “Pompadour Chest” 254–255, 256 porcelain 98–99, 101, 154, 157, 160–163, 229, 234–238 Portrait of the Duchess of Alba 141–143 Portrait of John Talbot 202 Pozzo, Andrea 62 print culture, newspapers 13, 15, 115–131 psychogeography, Louvre: French Academy 172, 186 Putting Out the Lamp 78, 82 Pyramides Aegyptiaca 216, 217 Qianlong Emperor 12, 19–31, 35, 48–49, 71, 161, 163 Qinding Xiqing gujian 161–162 Qing China Canton, painting the local in export art 71, 79, 82–91 challenge of China in France 153–154, 160 jades 12, 19–33 “Western” paintings 35–52 “Qing Imperial Consort” 90, 91 Qiuran Gong 77, 79 “Quartier du Louvre” 173–176 Qu Dajun 71, 85–87, 89 Querelle des anciens et des modernes 154, 156–157 Randolph, Benjamin 254, 255 ranga (Dutch pictures) 13, 59–62, 66–68 rangaku, Japanese art 59–68 Recueil de peintures antiques (Collection of Ancient Paintings, 1757) 158–159 regional attractions, European Grand Tour 193 Regnier, Celeste 246, 249 religion Cambón, Pedro Benito 13, 15, 95–113 Franciscan missionaries 13, 15, 95–113

288 Japan 53–56, 60 Liulichang Market, Beijing 35, 38–47 Soliman 209, 212–215 Spanish American newspapers 13, 15, 115–131 reverse-glass paintings 46–47 rivalries, Franciscans 102–103 Robinson, Thomas 73–74 rococo style 247–254 Rodrigue, Jean-Paul 6 Rodríguez Juárez, José & Juan 115, 126 Roman antiquity challenge of China in France 153–165 European Grand Tour 14–15, 61, 191–208 Rotonde d’Apollon 180–184 Roubiliac, Louis-François 245–246, 249 Roussel, Pierre 153, 154, 163, 165 Royen, Willem van 58–59 ruins, European Grand Tour 194–195 Saint-Aubin, Gabriel de 184–185 Saint, Gideon 246, 250–252 St. Martin’s Lane Academy, London, Philadelphia, and Vizagapatam 14–15, 245–265 salle ronde/salle des portraits 180–184 Salon Carré 175, 184–186 San Blas 95–97, 101 Sandos, James 101 “A scholar,” 79–80 scrapbooks 252 Screech, Timon 12–14, 53–70 scrolls 35–36, 37, 44–46, 78, 82 Sculpt. suffix, engravers’ names 250 sculpture, Pedro Benito Cambón 95, 96 scutes of turtles 13, 133, 135 Seascape with Western Figures and Buildings 47 secrétaire, Louvre: French Academy 172, 178 Sen-oku Hakukokan Museum, Sumitomo Collection, Kyoto 35, 37 Serra, Junípero 95, 100, 104–106 Seven Dials 246, 252 Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory 161, 161

Index sewing boxes 141 Shah Jahan cup 24–25 shells 98–99 Shinobazu Pond 67 shipping records 123–124 shisanhang 86–87, 92 Shiwan ware ceramics 87, 88 shoguns 13, 54–60, 66–68 Shou Xing statute 163, 165 Shozan 66–67 Sicily 209, 211–212 Side Chair 258, 259 Sidotti, Giovanni Battista 55–56 sightseeing, European Grand Tour 191, 193–199 silks Cambón’s Asian objects 97, 104 Japanese art 67 Liulichang Market, Beijing 36–37, 46–49 PEM album of figures 76, 78, 82, 86–87, 90 vestments 104–105 Six Sconces 248 Six Tables 248, 249 sketches globalizing eighteenth-century world 5–7 slavery 138, 209–215, 219, 232, 236 Sloboda, Stacey 1–18, 82, 245–265 Smentek, Kristel 13, 153–169 Smither, James 254, 255 Society of Dilettanti, London 204 Soest, Henry Van 145–147 Soliman, Angelo (c. 1721–96) 14–15, 209–225 Somera, Ángel 95 Song-dynasty objects 20, 27, 79, 81, 86 Southern City, Beijing 39–40 souvenirs, European Grand Tour 191, 200–204 Spain Cambón’s objects from China 95, 98–102, 105, 108–109 tortoiseshell 13, 133–152 Spanish American newspapers 13, 15, 115–131 Steinberg, Saul 9–10 Steiner, Johann Nepomuk 210, 213, 221

Index Still Life 58–59 stone mansions, Lamu Town, Kenya 230–234 stones, Guangdong 85–86, 90 street views, Louvre: French Academy 173–176 Stuccowork 237–238 Sumitomo Collection, Kyoto 35, 37 surfaces of things 230–237 Suzhou, jade 27–28 Swahili coast, Eastern Africa 14–15, 227–244 tabernacles 97–98 Tab’hane-yi hümayun viii–ix, 16 Talbot, Portrait of John Talbot 202 Temple Newsam House, Leeds 250, 251 Thomas, Nicholas 11 Thomson, Ann 213–215 Tiepolo, Giambattista 213–215, 219–220 Titsingh, Isaac 65–66 tortoiseshell 13, 133–152 tours, European Grand Tour 14–15, 61, 191–208 Toyoharu, Utagawa 62–64, 66 Trade Card of Benjamin Randolph 254, 255 trade routes 5–6, 13, 54, 86, 148 Transfergeschichte 10–11 translucent jade bowls 26 transnational art worlds/networks 3–15, 204, 262 transoceanic chairs 238–241 transpacific approaches, Cambón’s objects 13, 15, 95–113 travel, European Grand Tour 14–15, 61, 191–208 Treaty of Ryswick 137–138 Treaty of Utrecht 137, 145–146 The Tribuna of the Uffizi 198 The Triumph of Marius 219, 220 Turgot, de Michel-Étienne 173–176 Tweelandbruk (Ryogoku Bridge) 63, 65 Uffizi Gallery, Florence 197–198 uki-e (floating pictures) 13, 61 unitary iconographic programs 105–106 uwezo wa niumba 237–238

289

Valdés, Manuel Antonio 117 Valladolid, Lucas de 115 vases Jun-blue glaze vase 87, 88 Vase Japon 161, 163 in “Western” enamel painting 48 Vatican Museum 197, 199, 203 vedute works 61, 201–203 vernacular paintings 82 verre eglomisé, 46–47 vestments 95–97, 104–106 Victoria and Albert Museum, London 1–2, 24–25, 248, 249 Vienna’s Imperial Natural History Cabinet, Soliman 209–210 View of the Salon at the Louvre in 1753 etching 184–185 View of the World from 9th Avenue 9–10 Villalón, Augusto 108–109 villas 195–199 Villaseñor Black, Charlene 13, 133–152 Virgin of the Thumb 56–57 viti vya enzi 231, 238–239 Vivares, Francis and Susan 246, 249–250 Vizagapatam 245, 258–262 vues d’optiques 65 Wagenaer, Zacharias 54 Wale, Samuel 261–262 Wall Clock on Bracket 153, 155, 156 wall niche with holy water font 98 watercolors 73–92, 261–262 wax 95, 97 Weng Fanggang 43 “Western art” Japanese art 59–68 Liulichang Market, Beijing 12–13, 35–52, 228 Western Figures and Architecture 35, 37 “Whither Art History?” 9 “Wife of an Official,” 83–84 Williams, Hannah 13–14, 171–189 Winged Victory of Samothrace 172 woodblock prints 40, 61, 63–64, 153, 160–161, 163–164 wooden doorframe, Stone Town, Zanzibar 228–229

290

Index

Xinjiang cup 27–28 Xinjiang province (1755–9) 21–31 xiyang 12–13, 35, 38, 41–42, 49

Yoshimune, Tokugawa 56–57, 59–60, 65 “Young Lady,” 87, 89

Yangzhou, jade 27–28 Yi Kiji 40, 42 Yonan, Michael 1–18, 209–225 Yorke, Philip 73–79, 84 Yoshiatsu, Satake 66–67

Zanzibar 228–229, 233–234, 238–240 Zedler, Heinrich 215–216 Zhuge Liang portrait 81 zidaka niche systems 232–233 Zoffany, Johan 189

291

292

293

294