Prints and Porcelain: Spaces of Cultural Connection
In this blog, Curatorial Assistant Grace Fannon explores European print sources behind the decoration on eighteenth-century Chinese export porcelain in the Chitra Collection.
Seated at the centre of this Chinese porcelain saucer is a female figure, painted in enamels and gilding. Several clues point to her identity. The crown and sceptre, the peacock on her lap, and the cloud beneath her are iconographical symbols telling us that this is Juno, Queen of the Gods.
Qianlong period (1736 – 1795), China, Chitra Collection
Her origins lie in ancient Greek and Roman myths, but here she appears on Chinese porcelain from the Qianlong Period (1736 – 1795). As such, this tea bowl and saucer are examples of what historian Anna Grasskamp calls “entangled objects” – objects which blur regional and cultural boundaries, acting as tangible traces of global trade and cultural exchange.1 This version of Juno is likely a combination of several designs which made their way to China as prints and were then refigured through the eyes of the Chinese enameller.
Such multi-layered objects raise several questions; Why do these European motifs appear on Chinese porcelain? How did European prints arrive in China? Was European imagery altered in its transfer to porcelain? To explore this process of reinterpretation, we can look to print and porcelain pairings in the Chitra Collection.
‘White Gold’ – East Asian Porcelain in Europe
Europe’s tea trade with China escalated dramatically in the eighteenth century. With tea came Chinese porcelain – known in the West as “white gold” due to its luxury status. Wealthy European consumers began to commission specific designs on Chinese porcelain, which could cost up to ten times more than regular export porcelain. The completion of these commissions could take two years. Family coats of arms were fashionable decoration, for example this teapot in the Chitra Collection, dating to c.1745 – 1765, which is painted with the crest of William Webber, who was a Director of the English East India Company.
Misunderstandings are not uncommon in these wares, reflecting the clash of two different visual cultures. Naturally, Chinese enamellers copied a design as they received it. This sometimes resulted in misinterpretations – for instance, the patron’s annotations included in the reproduced crest. One such example in the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem is a porcelain charger decorated with the Dobree family coat of arms. Clearly, the family sent an annotated, rather than coloured in, design. Faithfully, the Chinese enamellers copied the actual words “red” and “green” into sections of the arms.
Responding to this new and profitable export market, there were specific enamellers based in Guangzhou (then called Canton by Europeans) who worked to decorate porcelain on short notice. Undecorated wares known as “blanks” were produced at Jingdezhen, an inland manufacturing centre.2
The Global Print
Alongside family arms, print compositions began to be reproduced on export Chinese porcelain. Christian engravings were brought into China by Jesuit missionaries, who used art as a tool for preaching and proselytizing. Christian symbols appear on Chinese porcelain from the sixteenth century.3 This plate in the Metropolitan Museum in New York depicts the baptism of Christ by John the Baptist.
Secular prints also made their way to China through well-trodden trade routes. Northern European centres for publishing, particularly Antwerp and Amsterdam, played an important role in establishing a thriving network of print culture, which facilitated the circulation of imagery around the globe. In 1597, a Dutch ship was trapped in ice at Novaya Zemlya in Northern Russia on its way to China.4 Findings from the ship are physical evidence of a large cargo of prints being transported from Amsterdam to China. The Kangxi emperor (1662 – 1722) was also an avid collector of European prints.5
Finding the Source: Print and Porcelain Pairings
Pairing porcelain wares with their print inspiration is challenging, as Chinese enamellers could base their compositions on not one but an amalgamation of several sources.
For example, the teabowl and saucer depicting Juno resting on a cloud relates to several possible European designs. One of which is a tapestry from a series designed 1740 – 1760 by Claude Audran III for the French royal tapestry manufactory, the Gobelins, and later reproduced in engravings. However, the composition on the teabowl also corresponds to a 1698 Flemish engraving in the British Museum, where Juno is once again enthroned upon a cloud, but with her peacock held under one arm (as in the porcelain version). Several other prints depict Juno in a similar manner. Juno’s iconography (the system of symbols identifying her) was well established in early modern Europe, so her visual representation follows a repeated pattern. This makes it difficult to determine which exact print the Chinese enamellers were working from. It is also possible that they too learned this system of visual signs, and were constructing their own image of Juno.
Some designs have much clearer origins. Another teapot in the Chitra Collection, also from the Qianlong period (1736 – 1795), features a composition based on a series of prints depicting a fox hunt, by Thomas Burford after James Seymour.
It is not uncommon to see the same composition reiterated across several porcelain objects. The seamstress depicted on this teabowl and saucer in the Chitra Collection was a popular design and is found on numerous examples of Chinese export porcelain, with slight variations. An entire tea set in the Metropolitan Museum features this same seamstress, replicated on each object. The composition can be traced to a print produced ca. 1710 by Bernard Picart, an important engraver in Amsterdam. While the print is not blatantly erotic in nature, the seamstress on the teabowl and saucer in the Chitra Collection takes on a more provocative tone, with exposed breasts. Such eroticism feels incongruous on a tea bowl, and one wonders at the evolution from the original print, and where these objects were used. Some evidence suggests that seamstress and dressmaker were euphemisms for sex worker in eighteenth-century Europe, which may explain the sexually suggestive depiction of the woman.
Differences between European designs and their iteration on Chinese porcelain are especially fascinating. These differences reveal how Chinese enamellers were navigating a foreign style of visual representation.
The painting of Juno on the porcelain teabowl is simplified to its essentials; form is conveyed in direct brushstrokes. It avoids the anatomical detail of the Flemish print, or the gradated toning on the Baroque tapestry design. Perhaps the relative lack of figural detail is due to the demands of a fast-moving export market, where porcelain was mass produced at Jingdezhen to meet global demand. In 1721 alone, four East India Company ships loaded 210,000 pieces of porcelain each. There was also the domestic market to consider, and orders from the Chinese Imperial court.6
Porcelain Production at Jingdezhen
Letters written by François Xavier Dentrecolles, a French Jesuit missionary, are a valuable account of the industrialization of eighteenth-century porcelain manufacture at Jingdezhen.7 Work was highly specialised, even for decoration; each component of the design could be completed by a different enameller. “It is surprising to see with what speed these vessels pass through so many hands”, Dentrecolles observed.8 While painters and enamellers worked in the best conditions and were often the highest paid labourers in porcelain manufactories, a surplus of workers kept their wages relatively low.9 Dentrecolles describes Jingdezhen surrounded in smoke due to the constantly working kilns: evoking an image of one giant furnace that bears similarity to depictions of English mining towns during the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, Jingdezhen’s assembly line style production designed for optimised output predates later eighteenth-century industrialisation in Europe.
Yet the fast moving mass production of porcelain at Jingdezhen can’t solely explain the modification of European engraved designs on Chinese porcelain. One must also look to differences in traditions of figural representation. This is best exemplified through comparison with examples of Chinese figural designs, as seen on this yellow porcelain vase (Qianlong Period, 1736 – 1795). Outlines are emphasized over shading or detail, and there is a graceful linearity of style.
In this way, through the transition from print to porcelain, the figure of Juno has moved away from a Western canon of classical art where anatomical detail was prioritised. She has become something more complexly hybrid: composed of both Asian and European visual elements.10
Conventions in figural design are a product of the society and artistic tradition in which they exist. The nude, historically valued in the West as an art subject in its own right, is little emphasised in Chinese art. This difference is made evident on this teapot, produced during the Qianlong period in China. It depicts Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, a story taken from the Bible’s Book of Genesis. While the source for this composition has not been identified, it is comparable to several early modern prints.
Seen in comparison, it is clear that the figures and faces have been distilled to linear fundamentals on the Chinese teapot. There is some shading, but prominence is given to outlines. The figures do not appear to engage with European conventions of beauty. Historical sources suggest that the Chinese craftspeople found European subject matter and styles of representation odd; one Jesuit recorded that “In China, they laugh at figures that get lost under the frame, princes bareheaded and naked on a charger, princesses with their breasts uncovered and dressed in ermine in the face of a garden that clearly speaks of summer, or Christian virgins dressed up like actresses.” 11
Contact Zones
These examples of export Chinese porcelain are a space of connection between two visual cultures. Framed in histories of globalisation, these objects act as a “contact zone.” 12
Coined by Mary Louise Pratt, a scholar of languages and literature, the term “contact zone” refers to “the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and established ongoing relations.” 13
While Pratt originally used the term in reference to colonial encounters, the framework is relevant in this context also. Chinese porcelain decorated after European prints are a conceptual space of interaction between Europe and China, both economically and artistically.
Yet the objects in the Chitra Collection discussed here operate as “contact zones” on more than one level. First, in their enamel decoration, and second, in their function. These objects were designed to serve tea, a drink which forged a network of global connections. Alongside silk, it was a coveted product from China that Europeans, particularly the British, were soon unable to live without.
- Anna Grasskamp, ‘Eur Asian Layers: Netherlandish Surfaces and Early Modern Chinese Artefacts’, The Rijksmuseum Bulletin Vol. 63 (2015), 363. ↩︎
- Godden, Oriental Export Market Porcelain, 16. ↩︎
- Dish with John the Baptist, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Met museum collection search, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/680978 ↩︎
- Grasskamp, ‘Eur Asian Layers,’ 366. ↩︎
- Kee Il Choi Jr, ‘‘Partly Copies from European Prints’: Johannes Kip and the Invention of Export Landscape Painting in Eighteenth-Century Canton’, The Rijksmuseum Bulletin Vol. 66, No. 2 (2012), 130. ↩︎
- Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History. (University of California Press, 2010), 22. ↩︎
- Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History, 17. ↩︎
- Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History, 27. ↩︎
- Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History, 33. ↩︎
- Grasskamp, ‘Eur Asian Layers,’ 363. ↩︎
- Cécile Beurdeley and Michel Beurdeley, Giuseppe Castiglione: A Jesuit Painter at the Court of the Chinese Emperors, translated by Michael Bullock, Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 147. ↩︎
- Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, (London: Taylor and Francis, 2007), 8. ↩︎
- Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 8. ↩︎
