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Seeing through Asia in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Europe and her Colonies
Organizer: Jennifer G. Purtle, University of Toronto, Canada
Chair: Heping Liu, Wellesley College
Discussants: Timothy Brook, University of British Columbia; Timon Screech, SOAS, University of London
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries European viewers saw the things of Asia in kaleidoscopically-shifting encounters of material, cultural, and intellectual exchange. As objects crossed geographic and cultural boundaries with increasing frequency and in greater number, Europeans applied their own strategies of seeing to objects from Asia. Yet motile objects challenged Europeans to see differently. Such objects transformed the way that Europeans saw, and the schema by which Europeans represented what they saw. To explore the dynamics of seeing and representing generated by European trade with Asia, and to elucidate the mechanisms that shaped seeing in an increasingly global cultural economy, this panel presents three diverse encounters of Asian and European visual fields: the seventeenth-century construction of French ideas of sacral kingship in printed images informed by, and made to document, the diplomatic exchanges of Louis XIV and Phra Narai the Great; the seventeenth-century emergence of images on porcelain vessels made for the Dutch-Chinese trade that manipulate established Chinese and Dutch notions of content, meaning, and knowledge; and, the eighteenth century modeling and inscription of ideas of China and revolution in silver objects made in Britain’s American Colonies. These cases reveal how multiple European visions of objects from disparate parts of Asia transformed European ideas of the epistemology, schema, materiality of the visible. Responses from an historian of China and an historian of Japanese art whose current work examines such issues will further elucidate how objects, moving across boundaries within and beyond Asia, reshaped European practices of seeing and representing.
“Un autre respect pour les lettres des rois”: Thai Kingship as Seen by the Court of Louis XIV
Rebecca Zorach, University of Chicago
This paper addresses the printed images of the 1680s, when the Thai ruler Phra Narai the Great and Louis XIV exchanged embassies. French accounts of the exchange reveal an exaggerated concern with Thai courtiers’ devotional attitude toward the official letters exchanged by their own monarch and the French king. Two aspects of the French context are especially significant for understanding the events and this particular characteristic of their reception. Firstly, this was the decade of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; idolatry (and a corresponding over reliance on “the letter” as opposed to “the spirit”) was a charge leveled both by Protestants against Catholics and by Catholics against Protestants in this moment of intense religious and political conflict. Secondly, this era gave birth to a visual culture of sacral kingship in which the image of Louis XIV, proliferated wildly. By issuing almanacs – pictorial calendars that documented military and diplomatic events, showcased Louis’s mastery, and measured the temporal rhythms of daily life – Louis attempted to establish a conceptual dominion over space and time. These almanacs might be considered the French king’s “letters,” this time to his subjects. To understand whether French audiences were conscious of the ironies of this juxtaposition, I will analyze several of the almanacs illustrating the Thai ambassadors’ visit to France, especially those that depict the audience accorded by French king to the Thai ambassadors (which followed a ceremonial protocol closely modeled on what Louis had been able to learn of his counterpart’s court).
Between the Dutch Republic and China: Trade and Travel across Ceramic Surfaces
Dawn Odell, Virginia Tech
Tea was the commodity most heavily imported from China into Holland in the seventeenth century but porcelain is the material good that survives in large quantities today, and its painted surface presents important visual evidence for how aesthetic taste was articulated, commodified and exchanged between China and Europe in the period. This paper examines East Asian porcelain special-ordered for the Dutch market and European earthenware produced in imitation of Chinese ceramics. The objects are decorated with unexpected imagery, including depictions of physical punishment, self-mutilation, and dissected fetuses. In addition to questioning the purely decorative status of ceramics, these pieces also demonstrate that the surface of porcelain had become an innovative venue for imagery derived from a variety of Chinese and European print sources. My paper focuses on one aspect of the relationship between print and porcelain by tracing the evolution of a series of images that were originally presented in two texts written by Dutch “experts” on China. Following the books’ illustrations from Amsterdam print shop to Chinese brush pot and then back to Delftware bowl, my paper aims to demonstrate how the meaning of these representations, which claimed in their original context to be scientific and objective, was transformed when repositioned on a ceramic surface. The transformation involved manipulations of style as well as content and sought, I argue, to emphasize certain marketable aspects of cultural distinction, while suppressing other obvious markers of cultural difference, in order to create value within the commercial world of the seventeenth century.
The Liberty Bowl: China, Silver, Tea, and Revolution in Britain's American Colonies circa 1775
Jennifer G. Purtle, University of Toronto, Canada
Scholarship of eighteenth century American silver often views its clean, spare forms as precious embodiments of austere colonial values. Silver objects were not mere baubles made for a colonial elite. At a time when nascent revolutionary ideology questioned Britain’s right to mediate colonial relations with the rest of the world, silver objects made in Britain’s American Colonies sat at the nexus of complex, far-ranging webs of formal, material, and intellectual exchange. This paper reconsiders Paul Revere’s Liberty Bowl of 1768 vis-à-vis Britain's American Colonies’ engagement with China in the revolutionary period. This paper examines the Liberty Bowl with respect to the influence of eighteenth-century Chinese export porcelain forms on revolutionary-era silver, an influence shaped by colonial practices of tea-drinking. To understand the replication of modestly expensive porcelain forms used in tea-drinking in the more expensive material of silver, this paper explores the economic relation of porcelain, tea, and silver in colonial America; Britain attempted to regulate the flow of these commodities into -- and in the case of silver, out of -- the American colonies through its trade and economic policies (including taxation and the use of paper money). This paper also addresses the political relation of porcelain, tea, and silver, by examining the ways in which revolutionary ideology formed, at least in part, in response to larger questions surrounding these commodities. This paper thus suggests how the eighteenth-century American reproduction of Chinese porcelain forms in silver helped Britain’s American Colonies see themselves in revolutionary and postcolonial terms.