Beyond Chinoiserie 2018

Beyond Chinoiserie
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

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East and West
Culture, Diplomacy and Interactions
Edited by
Chuxiong George Wei (University of Macau)
volume 4
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ewcd

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Beyond Chinoiserie
Artistic Exchange between China and the West during
the Late Qing Dynasty (1796–1911)
Edited by
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu

Jennifer Milam
LEIDEN | BOSTON

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Cover Illustration: Fan with foreign factories at Canton, made in China, 1790–1800. Bone, paper, and gouache,
10 6/16 × 17 1/8 in. (26.3 × 43.5 cm). Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John E. Rogerson,
1977 (E80202).
Names: Chu, Petra ten-Doesschate, editor. | Milam, Jennifer Dawn, 1968–

editor.
Title: Beyond chinoiserie : artistic exchange between China and the West
during the late Qing dynasty (1796–1911) / edited by Petra ten-Doesschate
Chu, Jennifer Milam.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2019] | Series: East and West:
culture, diplomacy and interactions, ISSN 2467-9704 ; volume 4 |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018038658| ISBN 9789004387829 (hardback : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9789004387836 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Civilization, Western—Chinese influences. |
Arts—Chinese influences. | China—Foreign public opinion, American. |
China—Foreign public opinion, European. | China—History—Qing dynasty, 1644–1912. |
Europe—Relations—China. | China—Relations—Europe. |
United States—Relations—China. | China—Relations—United States.
Classification: LCC CB245 .B49 2019 | DDC 909/.09821—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038658
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
ISSN 2467-9704
ISBN 978-90-04-38782-9 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-38783-6 (e-book)
Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi,
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
List of Illustrations viii
Introduction: Beyond Chinoiserie 1

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam
1 The China Trade and the Classical Tradition in Federal America 16

Patricia Johnston
2 Jefferson’s Interest in China and the Gongs of Monticello 45

Jennifer Milam
3 Copying in Reverse: China Trade Paintings on Glass 72

Maggie M. Cao
4 Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Art from China, and Nineteenth-Century

French Painting 93
Kristel Smentek
5 Staging China, Japan, and Siam at the Paris Universal Exhibition of

1867 122
Meredith Martin
6 Victor Hugo and the Romantic Dream of China 149

7 Chrysanthemums and Cultivated Visions of the Victorian Garden 178

Elizabeth Chang
8 The Musée d’Ennery and the Shifting Reception of Nineteenth-Century

French Chinoiseries 204
Elizabeth Emery
9 Fashion, Chinoiserie, and the Transnational: Material Translations

between China, Japan and Britain 235
Sarah Cheang

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vi Contents
10 From Shanghai to Brussels: the Tushanwan Orphanage Workshops and

the Carved Ornaments of the Chinese Pavilion at Laeken Park 268
William Ma
Conclusion 297
Abstracts 301
Index 308

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Acknowledgments
This edited volume grew out of a symposium at Seton Hall University that
was generously supported by a Comparative Perspectives on Chinese Culture
and Society grant underwritten by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for
International Scholarly Exchange and awarded by the American Council for
Learned Societies. Additional funding for the symposium was provided by the
Confucius Institute of Rutgers University as well as by Seton Hall University.
The concept for the symposium and the resulting volume were devel-
oped by the editors in Sydney in March 2015, a process made possible by an
International Researcher Collaboration Award (IRCA) from the University of
Sydney.
We are grateful to ACLS for allowing us to apply a part of the grant that was
not used for the symposium towards the production of the book. Additional
production expenses were borne by the Sydney Intellectual History Network at
the University of Sydney and the Future Fellowship Scheme of The Australian
Research Council.
Many individuals have contributed to this volume’s completion. Our thanks
go, first and foremost, to the participating authors. Their enthusiasm and pro-
fessionalism have made it a pleasure to work with them. We are also grateful
to the anonymous reviewer, who provided valuable commentary that we have
put to good use. We thank Johanna Seasonwein for her professional and effi-
cient copy-editing of the manuscript and Cynthia Col for preparing the index.
We are very appreciative of the help and support of the members of Brill’s
editorial and production team, including Qin Higley, Victoria Menson, Lauren
Bissonette, and Kayla Griffin, who were part of the effort to make this book
a reality. Others who in various ways have contributed to this book include
Dong Dong Chen (Seton Hall University), Ya-Chen Ma (National Tsing Hua
University), and Dietrich Tschanz (Rutgers University).

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Illustrations
0.1 Henri Meyer (French, 1844–1899), China Carved up by European Nations.

Illustration in Le Petit Journal, January 16, 1898. Bibliothèque nationale de
France, Paris. [photo: Wikimedia Commons] 3
0.2 Woodcut by A-lae in Peter Perring Thoms, A Dissertation on the Ancient
Chinese Vases of the Shang Dynasty from 1743 to 1496, B.C. (London: printed by
the author, 1851), plate 1. [photo: Wikimedia Commons] 5
0.3 The Pavillion. An Apartment in the Mansion of a Chinese Noblemen. Illustration
of one of the exhibits in Dunn’s exhibition of “One Thousand Things” in
London, from William B. Langdon, Ten thousand things relating to China and
the Chinese: an epitome of the genius, government, history, literature, agriculture,
arts, trade, manners, customs, and social life of the people of the celestial empire,
together with a synopsis of the Chinese collection (London, 1843). [photo: Petra
Chu] 7
0.4 George Chinnery, Riverscape, c. 1840? Bonham Sale, London, May 17, 2018.
Current whereabouts unknown. [photo: Wikimedia] 8
1.1 Emanuel Bowen, A New and Accurate Map of China, in Complete System of
Geography, vol. 2 (London, 1747), 41. Salem Athenaeum, Salem, MA 20
1.2 Detail of figure 1.1 21
1.3 Man’s waistcoat, French or Chinese, ca. 1790–95. Silk, linen, silver spangles.
Salem Maritime National Historic Site, National Park Service (SAMA 938) 27
1.5 “Spero” plate, made in China, ca. 1786, porcelain. Yale University Art Gallery,
Mabel Brady Garvan Collection (1948.57d) 30
1.6 Soup plate (one of ten), made in China for American market, ca. 1750–99.
Porcelain, 1 1/2 × 9 × 9 in (3.81 × 22.86 × 22.86 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
Gift of Richard Edwards (1972.467). [photo © 2018 Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston] 33
1.7 “Society of the Cincinnati” plate, made in China, ca. 1785. Hard-paste porcelain,
Diam. 9 1/2 in. (24.1 cm). Diplomatic Reception Rooms, U.S. Department of
State, Washington D.C. 34
1.8 Thomas Sheraton, “A View of the South End of The Prince of Wales’ Chinese
Drawing Room,” in The Cabinet-maker’s and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book
(London: printed by Thomas Bensley, 1793), plate 31. [photo: Smithsonian
Libraries] 36
1.9 Chaise longue, made in China, ca. 1805–15. Padouk and rattan, 70 × 25 in. (177.8
× 63.5 cm). Manchester Historical Museum, MA 37

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Illustrations ix
2.1 South Terrace, Monticello, Charlottesville, VA. [photo: Jennifer Milam] 46

2.2 Thomas Jefferson, “Notes for Railings on the Terraces,” 1824. Massachusetts
Historical Society, Boston 47
2.3 Jane Braddick Peticolas (American, 1791–1852), View of the West Front of
Monticello and Garden, 1825. Watercolor on paper, 13 5/8 × 18 1/8 in. (34.6 ×
46 cm). Monticello, Charlottesville, VA (1986-13-30). [photo: Wikimedia
Commons] 47
2.5 Aaron Vail (American, dates unknown), View of the West Front of Monticello, ca.
1825. Watercolor and ink on paper, 8 7/8 × 10 7/8 in. (22.6 × 27.6 cm). Le musée
franco-americain du château de Blérancourt, Gift of Miss Phoebe Vail (CFA c
342.8) 48
2.6 Thomas Jefferson, “Benches for Porticoes and Terraces,” 1801. The Coolidge
Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts, Massachusetts Historical Society,
Boston 51
2.7 The Gong House on the roof of Monticello, Charlottesville, VA. [photo: Jennifer
Milam] 52
2.8 The gong inside the Gong House on the roof of Monticello, Charlottesville, VA.
[photo: Jennifer Milam] 52
2.9 James Madison’s Montpelier, Orange, VA. [photo: Jennifer Milam] 56
2.10 Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest, Bedford, VA. [photo: Jennifer Milam] 58
2.11 Fan with foreign factories at Canton, made in China, 1790–1800. Bone, paper,
and gouache, 10 6/16 × 17 1/8 in. (26.3 × 43.5 cm). Peabody Essex Museum,
Salem, MA, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John E. Rogerson, 1977 (E80202) 62
2.12 William Russell Birch (American, born England, 1755–1834), China Retreat, in
Country Seats of the United States (printed by the author, 1808). [photo: The
Library Company of Philadelphia] 64
2.13 Garden pavilion, Monticello, Charlottesville, VA. [photo: Jennifer Milam] 68
3.1 Gilbert Stuart (American, 1755–1828), George Washington, ca. 1803. Oil on
canvas, 29 1/8 × 24 1/8 in. (74 × 61.3 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York, Gift of H. O. Havemeyer, 1888 (88.18) 73
3.2 Chinese artist, after Gilbert Stuart (American, 1755–1828), Portrait of George
Washington, 1800–05. Reverse painting on glass, 32 1/2 × 25 1/2 in. (82.5 × 64.8
cm). Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, Gift of Mr. Howell N. White, 1970
(E78992) 74
3.3 Fatqua, Madonna and Child with Joseph, ca. 1820. Reverse painting on glass 79
3.4 Chinese artist, Jupiter and Calisto, ca. 1770. Reverse painting on glass. Collection
W. and G. Steiner 80
3.5 René Gaillard (French, ca. 1719–1790), after François Boucher (French,
1703–1770), Jupiter et Calisto, 1760. Engraving. Collection W. and G. Steiner 80

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x Illustrations
3.6 Chinese artist, A Glass Painter, ca. 1790. Watercolor and ink on paper, 16 1/2 × 13
3/4 in. (42 × 35 cm). Victoria and Albert Museum, London (D.107–1898). [photo
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London] 81
3.7 Chinese export rosewood cabinet with reverse glass paintings, ca. 1800 84
3.8 Chinese artist, Portrait of Mrs. and Miss Revell in a Chinese Interior, ca. 1780.
Reverse painting on glass, 18 3/8 × 16 1/8 in. (46.67 × 40.91 cm). Peabody Essex
Museum, Salem, MA, Museum Purchase (AE85763) 85
3.9 Chinese artist, Chinese Scholar and Student in an Interior, ca. 1790. Reverse
painting on glass, 44 3/4 × 25 1/4 in. (113.7 × 64.1 cm). Peabody Essex Museum,
Salem, MA, Museum purchase with funds donated in part by the Asian Export
Art Visiting Committee, 2006 (AE86517) 86
3.10 Chinese artist, Portrait of Catharina van Braam Houckgeest, ca. 1790. Reverse
painting on glass, 19 11/16 × 15 ½ × 1 3/4 in. (50 × 39.5 × 4.5 cm). Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam, Purchased with the support of the Van Braam Houckgeest Family,
the M.A.O.C. Gravin van Bylandt Stichting, the K.F. Hein Fonds, the Prins
Bernhard Cultuurfonds, the Mondriaan Stichting and the Rijksmuseum Fonds
(AK-RAK-2003–7) 89
4.1 Étienne-Jean Delécluze (French, 1781–1863), The Emperor Augustus Rebuking
Cornelius Cinna for His Treachery, 1814. Oil on canvas, 84 5/16 × 103 7/8 in.
(214.1 × 263.9 cm). The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, England
(B.M. 367) 97
4.2 “Sketches Taken from an Old Chinese Treatise on Painting.” Illustration in “On
Painting in China. Studio of a Contemporary Chinese Painter. Treatise on
Painting Composed by a Chinese in 1681,” Magasin pittoresque 16 (March 1848):
116. [photo: Harvard University Libraries] 100
4.3 “Book of Trees,” from Mustard Seed Garden: a Chinese Painter’s Manual, part 1,
juan 2. Woodblock printed book, ink and color on paper, each 11 3/4 × 6 13/16 ×
3/16 in. (29.8 × 17.3 × 0.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Reverend J. J. Banbury
(05.583). [photo: Brooklyn Museum] 102
4.4 “Book of Rocks,” from Mustard Seed Garden: a Chinese Painter’s Manual, part 1,
juan 3. Woodblock printed book, ink and color on paper, each 11 3/4 × 6 13/16 ×
3/16 in. (29.8 × 17.3 × 0.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Reverend J. J. Banbury
(05.583). [photo: Brooklyn Museum] 103
4.5 Model landscape composition from the Mustard Seed Garden: a Chinese
Painter’s Manual, part 1, juan 5. Woodblock printed book, ink and color on
paper, each 11 3/4 × 6 13/16 × 3/16 in. (29.8 × 17.3 × 0.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum,
Gift of Reverend J. J. Banbury (05.583). [photo: Brooklyn Museum] 104
4.6 “A Theatrical Performance in the Great Street of Peking,” from Étienne-Jean
Delécluze, “Celebrations in Peking,” Gazette des beaux-arts 12 (May 1862): 441.
[photo: MIT Libraries] 110

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Illustrations xi
4.7 Plate from Grand Ceremony Celebrating the Emperor’s Birthday, Premier
Compilation (Beijing, 1716). Library of Congress, Washington, DC. [photo:
World Digital Library] 111
4.8 Illustrations from Étienne-Jean Delécluze, “Vases antiques chinois,” Gazette des
beaux-arts 13 (November 1862): 418–49. [photo: MIT Libraries] 113
4.9 Illustrations from Étienne-Jean Delécluze, “Vases antiques chinois,” Gazette des
beaux-arts 13 (November 1862): 420–21. [photo: MIT Libraries] 114
4.10 Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse (French, 1784–1844) and Honoré Gabriel Camoin
(French, 1791/92–1856), after René Théodore Berthon (French, 1776–1859),
Baron Vivant-Denon in his Cabinet Surrounded by his Collection, before 1825.
Lithograph, 18 5/8 × 12 3/8 in. (47.3 × 31.4 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris. [photo
© RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Daniel Arnaudet] 117
5.1 Édouard Riou (French, 1833–1900), Salon Royal, from Amédée Gréhan, Le
Royaume de Siam, 3rd ed. (Paris: Challamel aîné, 1869). Widener Library,
Harvard University, Cambridge, Ind 9348.68.3 F 123
5.2 General view of the Exposition Universelle in 1867, taken from the Trocadero
Hill, Paris: Ledot aîné, 1867. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. [photo: Archives Charmet
/ Bridgeman Images] 127
5.3 The Chinese Pavilion, published in Le Monde Illustré, 1867. [photo: Wikimedia
Commons] 128
5.4 Alfred Chapon (French, 1834–1893), wall elevation design for the Chinese,
Japanese, and Siamese exhibits at the 1867 exhibition. Bibliothèque nationale
de France, Paris, Cabinet des estampes, HA-127 (A)-FOL 130
5.5 Universal Exhibition—Products from Japan and Siam, in the Gallery of Machines,
from Grand Album de l’Exposition Universelle (Paris, 1867). Avery Architectural
& Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York 130
5.6 Chinese screen, 1825–65. Lacquered wood with embroidered silk and feather,
66 1/2 × 19 in. (169 × 48.3 cm) per leaf. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
(648–1869). [photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London] 132
5.7 Gensaiken (decorator), Satsuma bowl, 1860–65. Earthenware with a crackled
cream glaze and decoration in overglaze enamels and gilt, H. 1 7/8 in. (4.9 cm);
Diam. 3 3/4 in. (9.5 cm). Victoria and Albert Museum, London (866–1869).
[photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London] 136
5.8 Japanese kimono fabric, 1860–67. Silk crepe with resist-dyed decoration,
709 × 18 1/2 in. (1800 × 47 cm). Victoria and Albert Museum, London (842–1869).
[photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London] 138
5.9 Édouard Riou (French, 1833–1900), Somdetch Phra Paramendr Maha Mongkut,
Suprème Roi de Siam, from Amédée Gréhan, Le Royaume de Siam, 3rd ed. (Paris:
Challamel aîné, 1869). Widener Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Ind
9348.68.3 F 140

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xii Illustrations
5.10 Le Roi et la Reine de Siam, from Le Nouvel Illustré (December 20, 1866).
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, FOL-LC2-3072 143
6.1 Victor Hugo (French, 1802–1885), Chinese room designed for Juliette Drouet at
Hauteville Fairy, 1863. Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris. [photo: Wikimedia
Commons] 150
6.2 Victor Hugo (French, 1802–1885), Nightmarish Head (Tête de cauchemar) or
Chinese Mask (Masque Chinois), 1830s. Pen and wash drawing. Maison de Victor
Hugo, Paris. [photo: Roger-Viollet] 159
6.3 Tibetan mask for ritual dance, 17th century. Papier-mâché, H. 14 1/2 in.
(36.83 cm). Rubin Museum of Art, New York, C2002.35.1 (HAR 65163) 159
6.4 Chinese Idol before a temple with Bulbous Pavilions (Idole chinoise devant un
temple à pavillons bulbeux), 1830s. Pen and wash drawing. Maison de Victor
Hugo, Paris. [photo: Roger-Viollet] 161
6.5 Victor Hugo (French, 1802–1885), Chinese room designed for Juliette Drouet,
1863. Wall with ceramic and porcelain collection. Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris.
[photo: Wikimedia Commons] 167
6.6 Daniel Marot (French, 1661–1752), etched folio from Nouvelles Cheminée [sic]
faittes en plusieurs endroits de la Hollande et autres Provinces (The Hague,
1705–13). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. [photo © Victoria and Albert
Museum, London] 167
6.7 Detail of Victor Hugo’s Chinese Room: wall shelf supporting two Guanyin
figures. Maison Victor Hugo, Paris. [photo: Wei Chu] 169
6.8 Detail of Victor Hugo’s Chinese Room: entrance wall. Maison de Victor Hugo,
Paris. [photo: Wei Chu] 169
6.9 Detail of Figure 6.8. [photo: Wei Chu] 170
6.10 Detail of Figure 6.8. [photo: Wei Chu] 170
6.11 Detail of Victor Hugo’s Chinese Room: red panel with incised and gold-painted
decoration and insert of a Chinese shawl box lid. Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris.
[photo: Wei Chu] 171
6.12 Detail of Victor Hugo’s Chinese Room: panel with mandarin eating fish,
inscribed “SHU-ZAN.” Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris. [photo: Wei Chu] 172
6.13 Canton School, Scholar at his desk, 18th–19th century. Watercolor on pith paper.
Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, CA 173
7.1 Illustration in Wells’ Book on the Culture of the Chrysanthemum for Exhibition,
Decoration, Cut Flower, and Market, 4th ed. (Merstham: W. Wells
Chrysanthemum Market, 1910), 38. [photo: Biodiversity Heritage Library,
digitized by University of California Libraries] 181
7.2 J. Andrews, “Pompon Chrysanthemums,” in The Floral Magazine: Comprising
Figures and Descriptions of Popular Garden Flowers 6 (1867): 331. [photo:
Biodiversity Heritage Library, digitized by The LuEsther T. Mertz Library, New
York Botanical Garden] 182

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Illustrations xiii
7.3 “W. Luxford,” in Percy S. Follwell, The Book of Chrysanthemum (London: J. Lane,

1907), facing p. 30. [photo: Biodiversity Heritage Library, digitized by University
of California Libraries] 183
7.4 “Chrysanthemum Indicum. Indian Chrysanthemum,” in The Botanical
Magazine; or Flower-Garden Displayed 9 (1795): 327. [photo courtesy of Special
Collections and Rare Books, University of Missouri Libraries] 188
7.5 “Chrysanthemum Indicum,” in The Botanical Register 1 (1815), plate 4. [photo:
Biodiversity Heritage Library, digitized by Missouri Botanical Garden,
Peter H. Raven Library] 191
7.6 Spode Ceramic Works, watering pot and cover, early 19th century. Porcelain
with ornament in low relief and gilded, 2 5/8 × 3 7/8 in. (6.7 × 9.8 cm). Victoria
and Albert Museum, London, Given by Miss H. M. Gulson in memory of
Mr. J. Spode (392: 1, 2–1899). [photo © Victoria and Albert Museum,
London] 192
7.7 William Morris, “Chrysanthemum” wallpaper, 1877. Color print from wood-
blocks, 27 × 21 in. (68.5 × 53.3. cm). Victoria and Albert
Museum, London, Given by Morris & Co. (E.504–1919). [photo © Victoria and
Albert Museum, London] 195
7.8 Brown-Westhead, Moore & Co., plate, ca. 1875–85. Transfer-printed
earthenware, Diam. 9 in. (23 cm). Victoria and Albert Museum, London
(C.216–1984). [photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London] 196
8.1 Musée d’Ennery, view of gallery 4 before the 1996–2012 renovation. Musée
Guimet, Paris. [photo: Raphaël Chipault and Benjamin Soligny, Musée
Guimet] 208
8.2 Musée d’Ennery, room 5. Musée Guimet, Paris. [photo: Raphaël Chipault and
Benjamin Soligny, Musée Guimet] 209
8.3 Blue-and-white vase, Ming dynasty, first half of the 17th century. Musée Guimet,
Paris. [photo: Raphaël Chipault and Benjamin Soligny, Musée Guimet] 211
8.4 Sculpted jade finger citron (or hand of Buddha). China, Qing dynasty, 18th
century. Musée Guimet, Paris. [photo: Raphaël Chipault and Benjamin Soligny,
Musée Guimet] 211
8.5 Musée d’Ennery from the exterior. [photo: Elizabeth Emery] 212
8.6 Floorplan of the Musée d’Ennery from the first museum catalog, Petit guide
illustré au Musée d’Ennery (Paris, 1908). [photo: Elizabeth Emery] 212
8.7 Pierre Larousse, excerpt from definition of “Chinoiserie,” Grand dictionnaire
universel du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1869), 4:132. [photo: Elizabeth Emery] 215
8.8 The “Colossal” Megoura Buddha of the Musée Cernuschi. Postcard, ca. 1880.
Private collection. [photo: Elizabeth Emery] 224
8.9 Musée d’Ennery, room 3 and view into gallery 4 (before the renovation). Musée
Guimet, Paris. [photo: Raphaël Chipault and Benjamin Soligny, Musée
Guimet] 229

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xiv Illustrations
9.1 Chinese robe (front), ca. 1880. Brocaded satin and cotton-wool blend. Victoria
and Albert Museum, London (12–1881). [photo © Victoria and Albert
Museum] 236
9.2 Chinese robe (back), ca. 1880. Brocaded satin, cotton-wool blend. Victoria
and Albert Museum, London (12–1881). [photo © Victoria and Albert
Museum] 237
9.3 Chinese robe (side view showing inserted gore), ca. 1880. Brocaded satin and
cotton-wool blend. Victoria and Albert Museum, London (12–1881). [photo
© Victoria and Albert Museum] 238
9.4 Chinese imperial dragon robe, 1780–1850. Silk tapestry, 60 5/8 × 76 3/8 in.
(154 × 194 cm). Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Purchased with Art Fund
support (T.199–1948). [photo © Victoria and Albert Museum] 244
9.5 Detail of figure 9.1, showing bottom edge of garment. [photo © Victoria and
Albert Museum] 244
9.6 Italian banyan and waistcoat tailored from a Chinese dragon robe, 1800–10.
Brocaded silk, satin. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Purchased with
support from a generous individual (T77.1, 2–2009). [photo © Victoria and
Albert Museum] 247
9.7 Liberty evening cape made from a Chinese skirt, from Liberty & Co., “Liberty”
Yule-Tide Gifts (London: Liberty, 1898), 56 248
9.8 Japanese-made silk dressing gowns, ca. 1880. The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, Gift of Katherine Babcock Cavalli (1970.83a, b) 253
9.9 American tea gown made from a woolen paisley shawl, ca. 1891. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Irene Lewisohn and
Alice L. Crowley Bequests, 1985 (1985.39.3) 255
9.10 Japanese-made silk tea gown (rear view), ca. 1890. Gallery of Costume, Platt
Hall (Manchester Art Gallery), 2013.36 256
9.11 Japanese-made silk tea gown (front view), ca. 1890. Gallery of Costume, Platt
Hall (Manchester Art Gallery), 2013.36 256
9.12 “Chinese dressing jacket,” Ladies’ Field (November 14, 1903): 390. [photo: Sarah
Cheang] 258
9.13 “Chinese” evening wrap, Ladies’ Field (April 18, 1903): 243. [photo: Sarah
Cheang] 259
9.14 Japanese-made “Chinese” evening coat (back), 1900–10. Royal Albert Memorial
Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter City Council (132/1969) 261
9.15 Japanese-made “Chinese” evening coat (detail), 1900–10. Royal Albert Memorial
Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter City Council (132/1969) 262
10.1 Postcard (with a stamp dated to 1911) showing the Chinese Pavilion and the
octagonal kiosk. Author’s collection 269

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Illustrations xv
10.2 A Tushanwan art worker carving a statue of a dog. Still from the documentary
film Ageless China (1947). [photo courtesy of the Fr. Francis A. Rouleau, S. J.,
Archives, Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, University of San
Francisco] 274
10.3 Brother Aloysius Beck and Chinese orphaned art workers posing with a
finished chest, ca. 1929. [photo: California Jesuit Archives at Santa Clara
University] 275
10.4 A horizontal beam from Shuyinlou, Shanghai, 18th century. [photo:
William Ma] 278
10.5 “The Battle between the Three Heroes and Lü Bu.” Lintel above the front
entrance to Chinese Pavilion, Brussels. Museums of the Far East, Brussels.
[photo © Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels] 278
10.6 Undated postcard of Shanghai Public Tea Gardens, 1890–1900. Tinted
photograph. Author’s collection 285
10.7 A page from Beck’s album to King Leopold II, ca. 1910. Chromolithographic
print. The Bibliotheca Zi-ka-wei (The Xujiahui Library). [photo:
William Ma] 288
10.8 Undated postcard showing interior of the Chinese Pavilion, Brussels. Author’s
collection 290
10.9 Section of lower facade, Chinese Pavilion, Brussels. Museums of the Far East,
Brussels. [photo © Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels] 291
10.10 Detail of Chinese Pavilion, Brussels. Museums of the Far East, Brussels. [photo
© Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels] 292

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Introduction
Beyond Chinoiserie
Willow pattern plates; China trade paintings; James McNeill Whistler’s La

Princesse du pays de la porcelaine; the Chinese pavilion in the Water Garden at
Cliveden, Buckinghamshire (UK); the photographs of Lai Afong1—these are
but a few of the numerous and diverse examples of works of art and artifacts
that testify to the lively artistic exchange between China and the West during the
late Qing dynasty, the period between the abdication of the Qianlong emperor
in 1796 and the end of the dynasty in 1911. The Chinese and European objects
resulting from this nineteenth-century exchange have remained largely under-
studied, in contrast to the products of the artistic exchange between China and
the West that took place a century earlier, during the reigns of emperors Kangxi
(r. 1662–1722), Yongzheng (r. 1723–1735), and Qianlong (r. 1735–1796). In recent
decades the latter have been the subject of a spate of books, articles, sympo-
sia, and exhibition catalogs. The majority of these publications have focused
on the most visible aspect of that artistic exchange, chinoiserie,2 defined in
the Grove Dictionary of Art as “a type of European art dominated by Chinese
or pseudo-Chinese ornamental motifs.”3 Over the course of the last decades,
however, attention has newly focused on chinoiserie’s counterpart, alternately
referred as “européenerie,” “euroiserie,” or “occidenterie.”4
1 The Whistler painting is in Washington, DC, at the Smithsonian’s Freer|Sackler. The Cliveden
“Pagoda,” made for the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, was bought by the 4th Marquess
of Hertford for the garden of his “summer house,” Bagatelle, in the Bois de Boulogne. It was
subsequently acquired by William Waldorf Astor, who transported it to Cliveden. On Lai
Afong and other early Chinese photographers, see Jeffrey W. Cody and Frances Terpak, eds.,
Brush & Shutter: Early Photography in China (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011).
2 On the term chinoiserie, see p. 7–9. Among the numerous publications on the subject are
Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (London: J. Murray, 1961); Oliver R. Impey,
Chinoiserie: The Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decoration (New York: Scribner’s,
1977); Dawn Jacobson, Chinoiserie (London: Phaidon, 1993); David Beevers, ed. Chinese
Whispers: Chinoiserie in Britain, 1650–1930 (Brighton: Royal Pavilion & Museums, 2008); and
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Ning Ding, eds., Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between
China and the West (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2015).
3 Monique Riccardi-Cubitt, “Chinoiserie,” in Grove Art Online, accessed April 3, 2018, http://
www.oxfordartonline.com.
4 All these terms were coined by English and American authors. George N. Kates coined the
term “européenerie” in 1952; Jonathan Hay preferred the term “euroiserie.” See Chu and Ding,
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004387836_002

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2 Chu and Milam
Perhaps the lack of interest in the nineteenth-century artistic exchange

between China and the West is related to the fact that some of the most com-
monly known products of this artistic exchange—Willow pattern plates,
lacquer tea trays, and Chinese export paintings, for example—have long been
considered minor art forms at best, unworthy of serious study. In the case of
Willow pattern plates and lacquer trays, moreover, their decoration has been
seen generally as a belated and vulgarized form of eighteenth-century chinoi-
serie and negligible for that very reason. No doubt, the art historical focus in
the past four decades on nineteenth-century japonisme—which, after about
1870, had a notable impact on “high” art, especially Western painting, and high-
end decorative arts—also has contributed to the neglect of nineteenth-century
chinoiserie, which came to be associated with housewares and knickknacks
for the home collected by women.5
Another reason for the neglect of the artistic exchange between China and
the West in the nineteenth century may be that, politically speaking, it was a
dark period in East-West relations. In China, the nineteenth century is called
bǎinián guóchǐ, the century of humiliation; it is understudied by the Chinese
except for ideological purposes. As far as the West’s relations with China are
concerned, the nineteenth century is not remembered fondly in Europe or
America either. The Opium Wars and the wanton looting and destruction of
the emperor’s Summer Palace, Yuanming Yuan, are clearly among the darker
pages in the dark tale of European imperialist history. Indeed, the mutual
curiosity and open-mindedness that had marked relations between China
and the West during the early Qing Dynasty (roughly the second half of the
seventeenth century) had slowly degenerated in the middle years of that
dynasty—the eighteenth century—to turn, by the 1830s, into mutual antipa-
thy and contempt. This attitude, combined with rampant greed on the part
of Western powers, ultimately led to the carving up of China into spheres of
influence, famously lampooned by Henri Meyer in a cartoon that appeared in
a supplement to Le Petit Journal of January 16, 1898 (figure 0.1).
Qing Encounters, 6n4. The term “occidenterie” is preferred by Kristina Kleutghen, among
others. See below, n15.
5 The literature on japonisme is vast. For publications until 1990, see Gabriel P. Weisberg
and Yvonne M. L. Weisberg, Japonisme: An Annotated Bibliography (New Brunswick, NJ:
Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum; New York: Garland Press, 1990). A special journal de-
voted to the subject, Journal of Japonisme, has been published since 2016. For the relation-
ship between chinoiserie and japonisme, see Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, “Chinoiserie and
Japonisme,” in The Orient Expressed: Japan’s Influence on Western Art, 1854–1918, ed. Gabriel P.
Weisberg (Jackson: Mississippi Museum of Art; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011),
94–105.

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figure 0.1 Henri Meyer, China Carved up by European Nations. Illustration in Le Petit Journal,
January 16, 1898

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4 Chu and Milam
Michael Sullivan, in The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art, has argued
that the “mutual disenchantment” between Europe and China that marked
political relations extended to the arts.6 He devotes less than one page of his
three-hundred-odd-page book to the impact of Chinese art in nineteenth-
century Europe, categorically asserting that, at least in the West, the “admira-
tion of things Chinese [had] turned to contempt.”7 But by broadly equating
soured political relations between China with mutual artistic contempt,
Sullivan discounts the active formation in the nineteenth century of an
ever-broadening cultural knowledge base about China in the West and about
Western culture in China. Indeed, as David Honey, Peter Kitson, and others
have demonstrated, the new academic discipline of sinology that resulted
from the creation of special chairs in Chinese Studies at European universities
beginning in 1814, though focused on the study of Chinese language and lit-
erature, unavoidably brought about a deepened understanding of traditional
Chinese culture as a whole—and this in turn fostered an interest in China’s
material culture and art.8 As early as 1851, for example, the British printer Peter
Perring Thoms, with the help of a Cantonese scholar, produced a short work on
bronze vessels of the Shang dynasty dating from 1743 to 1496 bce.9 The illustra-
tions and descriptions in the book followed a Sung dynasty catalog of Chinese
bronzes that comprised sixteen volumes. Woodcut engravings from the book
produced by a certain A-lae (figure 0.2) were exhibited at the Crystal Palace
Exhibition and led to a growing popular interest in early Chinese art. Ten years
later, the French critic Guillaume Pauthier, in an article in the Gazette des
beaux-arts, compared the decorative patterns on Chinese bronzes with those
on early Greek geometric vases, reminding his readers that the Chinese vessels
preceded Greek geometric art by centuries.10 Another ten years later, collectors
like Henri Cernuschi began to actively collect such bronzes.11
6 Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989), 116.
7 Ibid.
8 David B. Honey, Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of
Classical Chinese Philology (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2001); Peter Kitson,
Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange 1760–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013), esp. chaps. 1–4.
9 P. P. Thoms, A Dissertation on the Ancient Chinese Vases of the Shang Dynasty from 1743 to
1496 B.C. (London: printed by the author, 1851).
10 Guillaume Pauthier, “Des curiosités chinoises exposées aux Tuileries,” Gazette des beaux-
arts 9, no. 6, (March 15, 1861): 366–68.
11 Ting Chang, Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), chap. 2.

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figure 0.2 Woodcut by A-lae in Peter Perring Thoms, A Dissertation on the Ancient
Chinese Vases of the Shang Dynasty from 1743 to 1496, B.C., 1851.

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6 Chu and Milam
While nineteenth-century scholarly interest in China was ever expanding,

Chinese artifacts traveled to Europe and America in large numbers. Porcelains,
(embroidered) textiles, wallpapers, lacquerware, paintings, and knickknacks
made of wood, bone, or ivory were among the export goods that traveled from
Canton (and other harbors, after the Treaty of Nanjing of 1842) to the West.
While living in Canton, American businessman Nathan Dunn (1782–1844)
formed a large collection of such artifacts and more ordinary manufactured
goods, which he displayed in Philadelphia in 1838 and subsequently in Lon-
don in 1842 and 1851. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalog entitled
Ten thousand things relating to China and the Chinese: an epitome of the genius,
government, history, literature, agriculture, arts, trade, manners, customs, and
social life of the people of the Celestial Empire, together with a synopsis of the Chi-
nese collection (figure 0.3). Dunn’s collection was clearly formed with a general
educational purpose in mind, but it was also meant to highlight the artistry
and skill of Chinese artists and craftsmen. Chinese artifacts were sold in tea-
shops across Europe and in Chinese specialty stores, such as J.-G. Houssaye’s
“A La Porte Chinoise” in the rue Vivienne in Paris12 or Madame Desoye’s “La
Porte Chinoise” at 220 rue de Rivoli (though the latter shop sold more Japanese
than Chinese objets d’art).13 From the late nineteenth century onwards, stores
might be run by Chinese expatriates, such as Arrhee “Albert” Taen, who in the
1880s opened a shop in Berlin in the Leipziger Strasse where he sold Chinese
and Japanese goods.14 The flood of artifacts and consumer goods that traveled
from China to Europe was matched by a similar flood that went from Europe
to China. We are somewhat less well informed as to its nature, but it certainly
12 Houssaye lent his collection to the 1855 International Exhibition in Paris. See his Notice sur
la Chine pour servir de catalogue à la grande exposition chinoise (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1855);
full text online at Hathi Trust at http://www.hathitrust.org. His collection was auctioned
off in 1856. See Catalogue d’une très-importante collection d’objets d’art et de curiosité com-
posant le Musée Chinois … appartenant à M. J.-G. Houssaye … dont la vente aux enchères
publiques aura lieu les 20, 21 et 22 novembre 1856 (Paris: Impr. Maulde et Renou, 1856).
13 On the shop of Madame Desoye, which opened sometime in the early 1860s, see, among
others, Geneviève Lacambre, “Sources du Japonisme au XIX siècle,” in Le Japonisme (Paris:
Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1988), 17–24. At the Institute for Art History
and the Centre for Art Market Studies at Technical University Berlin, Bénédicte Savoy and
Christine Howard are currently building a database of the actors in the European market
for East Asian (i.e., Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) art between 1842 and 1939. This will
vastly increase our knowledge of the commercial exchange of Asian art beyond what is
currently known.
14 On Taen, see, among others, Phillip Van den Bossche, Xavier Tricot, Patrick Florizoone,
and Norbert Hostyn, Bij Ensor op bezoek (Brasschaat: Pandora, 2010), 134–35.

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figure 0.3
The Pavillion. An Apartment in the Mansion of
a Chinese Noblemen. From William B. Langdon,
Ten thousand things relating to China and the
Chinese, 1843.
included such useful gadgets as watches, clocks, binoculars, glasses, and cam-
eras, as well as Western images—prints and, later, photographs.15
The question addressed by the authors of this book is what happened to
artistic relations between China and the West in the antagonistic atmosphere
of the nineteenth century. There is no doubt that, hostility notwithstand-
ing, the playful fantasy vision of China—what Hugh Honour has called the
“vision of Cathay” formed in the eighteenth century—continued far into
the nineteenth—in literature, plays, and the decorative arts. At the same time,
however, a more realistic vision of China was formed through travel accounts
(by merchants, missionaries, and others), paintings and watercolors, prints,
book illustrations, and, by the later part of the century, photographs. This
vision, though at times picturesque, as in the watercolors of George Chinnery
(1774–1852; see figure 0.4), increasingly became focused on negative aspects
of China: the squalor of the big cities, the poverty of the countryside, opium
dens, prostitution, crime, cruelty, etc. Simultaneously, as mentioned above, the
new nineteenth-century discipline of sinology led to a deepening of the under-
standing of Chinese cultural history.
The complex interweaving of the different Western visions of China in the
nineteenth century, as well as the imperialist inroads into China by the West,
make the study of the artistic exchange between China and the West during
this era both fascinating and challenging. This book’s title, Beyond Chinoiserie,
is meant to express the new complexity of this exchange in the nineteenth
century as it moved away from, but also further than, eighteenth-century chi-
noiserie and européenerie, which were grounded in mutual admiration. It is
ironic in this context that the French word chinoiserie has its origins in the
15 Kristina Kleutghen’s study, “Chinese Occidenterie: The Diversity of ‘Western’ Objects in
Eighteenth-Century China,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 47, no.2 (January 2014), 117–35,
though focused on the eighteenth century, gives some idea of the kind of Western objects
that came to China. Many of them continued to be in demand in the nineteenth century.

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8 Chu and Milam
figure 0.4 George Chinnery, Riverscape, c. 1840? Bonham Sale,

London, May 17, 2018. Current whereabouts unknown.
nineteenth century, though its initial meaning was rather different from its cur-
rent one. In chapter 4 of this volume, Kristel Smentek mentions that one of the
first writers to use the term was Charles Fourier, who used the word chinoiserie
in 1823 to mean conservatism, unwillingness to make changes.16 He referred to
the rule of convention (l’empire de l’habitude) as chinoiserie universelle.17 The
term chinoiserie, of course, was derived from the French adjective chinois, or
Chinese. By adding the suffix “-erie,” Fourier created a noun describing quali-
ties or properties thought of as being typical of the Chinese. Twelve years after
Fourier used the term chinoiserie in what might be seen as a negative sense, the
French poet Théophile Gautier wrote a poem entitled “Chinoiserie,” in which
he used the word to evoke that happy fantasy of China that we associate with
the modern use of the term “chinoiserie.”
The meaning of the word chinoiserie became codified by the third quarter
of the nineteenth century. In Émile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française
(1863–72), the word is defined as “Petits objects venus de Chine ou dans le goût
chinois.”18 The Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, published by Pierre
Larousse between 1866 and 1884, has a very similar definition: “Petits objets de
luxe et de fantaisie venus de Chine ou exécutés dans le goût chinois” (Small
16 See chapter 4 in this volume, especially note 7.

17 This is in a footnote related to “l’âge moderne,” which, according to him, is “frappé
d’immobilisme, comme les choinois qu’il ridiculise.”
18 Dictionnaire de la langue française, vol. 4 (Paris: Hachette, 1863–72), s.v. “chinoiserie.”

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luxury and fantasy objects coming from China or executed in Chinese taste).19
In both cases, the term chinoiserie(s) is used to refer to a class of small objects,
though Larousse, in his discussion of the encyclopedic (as opposed to the dic-
tionary) meaning of the word, argues that, strictly speaking, it should apply
to all objects coming from China, since “the same taste and the same bizarre
quality” (le même goût, la même bizarrerie) can be found in Chinese objects
great and small.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the meaning of the word chinoi-
serie broadened to include not only objects but also other creative products
that were marked by fantasy, playfulness, and bizarrerie, especially musical
compositions. The general catalog of the Bibliothèque nationale de France
lists dozens of musical compositions that are referred to as chinoiseries, such as
Léon Benoit’s La Princesse Lili. Chinoiserie pour le piano, op. 178 (Paris: E. Ben-
oit, 1880) or Achille de Campisiano’s Ko-ko, Ki-kavale. Chinoiserie burlesque à
deux et avec danse (Paris: A. Fouquet, 1895).20 In the musical context the term
seems to suggest a playful and/or humorous composition along the lines of a
capriccio or a burlesque.
It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that the term chi-
noiserie took on its current meaning. It now referred to a trend in Western art,
most visible in the architecture and decorative arts of the eighteenth century,
that is marked by the use of certain Chinese figurative and decorative motifs,
forms, and techniques (or imitations thereof) and the favoring of certain
broad characteristics of Chinese art, such as asymmetry. One of the earliest
examples we have found dates from 1911. It is in the title of an exhibition in
the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, curated by Jacques Guérin (1881–1962),
which was called La chinoiserie en Europe au XVIIIe siècle, tapisseries, meubles,
bronzes d’ameublement, céramiques, peintures et dessins. Henceforth, especially
in France, the term (for a while) had a double meaning, until after World War
II, when it was exclusively used for an artistic trend and no longer to refer to a
whimsical trinket, piece of music, or one-act play. In this book, we will use ital-
ics (chinoiserie), when referring to the older meaning of the word and roman
to refer to its current significance.
This book does not present an overview of Chinese-Western artistic relations
in the nineteenth century. Not only does the format—an edited volume—run
19 G
rand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, vol. 4 (Paris: Larousse, 1866–84), s.v.
“chinoiserie.”
20 Some examples of this broadened use of chinoiserie can already be found earlier in the
century (1840s to 1870s), when the term is not only used for musical compositions but also
for (mostly short) plays, such as Un voyage en Chine, chinoiserie en un acte par un Pékin
(Angers: Impr. de Cornilleau et Maige, 1848).

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10 Chu and Milam
counter to such an endeavor, but the endeavor itself is also premature, as too
little groundwork has been done to make it possible. Yet a number of major
themes already emerge from the essays included here. One is the development
in nineteenth-century Europe and America of a sense of cultural specificity—
allowing for clear distinctions to be made between China, Japan, and Siam, for
example—and, relatedly, a tendency towards comparison, not only between
China and Japan, but also between Chinese and Western (or, more specifically,
French, British, etc.) art and culture. Another is the important role of Western
women, as collectors and users, in maintaining the interest in Chinese art and
artifacts. And a third is the complexity of the engagement of Chinese artists
and artisans with Western art, an engagement that ranged from copying West-
ern images for sale to a Western market (in a technique adapted from Western
art) to subverting Western pictorial strategies (perspective, shading) for aes-
thetic or metaphorical purposes.
The tendency in books like this is to group the chapters in categories that
have some common denominator. That often leads to foregrounding one
aspect of an essay at the expense of others to make it fit a particular category.
We have chosen instead to arrange the chapters in this book in roughly chrono-
logical order. Readers will find that they range widely over the entire late Qing
dynasty, or what in the West is often called the “long” nineteenth century.
While the first three chapters in the volume illuminate aspects of the East-
West exchange at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries (Asian
decorative arts imported into Salem, Thomas Jefferson’s Chinese gongs at
Monticello, and Canton trade glass paintings), the next three chapters discuss
attitudes towards China and Chinese art in mid-nineteenth-century France.
Three subsequent chapters move the discussion to the end of the nineteenth
century and show the impact of Chinese culture in the separate areas of col-
lecting, gardening, and fashion. The final chapter coincides with the very end
of the Qing dynasty and shows how, in a very complex process of cultural cir-
culation, Jesuit priests trained Chinese orphans in Shanghai to carve and paint
traditional Chinese ornaments in vernacular style that were sent to decorate
Chinese pavilions in Europe.
The first chapter, “The China Trade and the Classical Tradition in Federal
America,” focuses on the material culture of the merchant class in Salem,
Massachusetts, at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Its
author, Patricia Johnston, demonstrates how this class freely combined neo-
classical and Asian styles in the objects they bought or commissioned for the
adornment of their bodies and their homes. Though it is tempting to think
of this phenomenon as typical of a moment of transition—when rococo and

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chinoiserie were gradually supplanted by neoclassicism—Johnston argues

that the Chinese style practiced at this moment was not belated but rather
went “beyond” chinoiserie in that it became a mark of America’s new identity
as a commercial world empire. Indeed, in the case of the Salem merchants of
the Federal period, the mingling of neoclassical and Asian styles in their cloth-
ing and furniture may be seen as a form of self-identification that stressed both
Americanness and cosmopolitanism.
Also focused on early nineteenth-century America is chapter 2, “Jefferson’s
Interest in China and the Gongs of Monticello,” though it deals with an entirely
different aspect of American attentiveness to China—philosophical and polit-
ical rather than commercial. Jennifer Milam discusses Jefferson’s fascination
with Chinese history and culture as well as architecture, garden design, and
agriculture. Jefferson’s use of imported Chinese gongs on his plantation of
Monticello echoes the reported use of gongs in Chinese villages to call peasant
workers back from the fields. At the same time, the gongs are material evidence
of America’s success in the China Trade, which Jefferson strongly encouraged.
Chapter 3, “Copying in Reverse: China Trade Paintings on Glass,” covers the
same time period as the previous two chapters, but its locus is China rather
than America. Written by Maggie M. Cao, the chapter focuses on reverse glass
paintings, particularly those that copied Western imported prints. Analyzing
the complex process of reverse copying, Cao argues that, more than any other
artifacts that left Canton for the West, reverse paintings on glass encoded the
doublings, reversals, and reflections of their making to allow the medium to
serve as a sophisticated means by which Chinese artisans and their Western
patrons made sense of the replication and imitation at work in the China Trade.
Chapter 4, “Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Art from China, and Nineteenth-Century
French Painting,” by Kristel Smentek, moves the discussion of artistic relations
between China and the West chronologically to the second quarter of the nine-
teenth century and geographically to France. Smentek directs attention to the
unexpected interest of the conservative classicist critic Étienne Delécluze in
Chinese art, which he not only collected but also wrote about—the first time
in an 1838 article entitled “The Studio of a Chinese Painter.” Smentek care-
fully analyzes this article and later writings by Delécluze about Chinese art
and shows how they testify to the critic’s ambivalent attitudes towards the art
from China. This ambivalence may be symptomatic of the degree to which,
well into the nineteenth century, the example of China continued to hover at
the edges of Europe’s construct of its Greco-Roman heritage. Relatedly, dis-
putes over Chinese art’s continuing relevance for contemporary artistic prac-
tice endured even after neoclassicism had seemingly put an end to the rococo

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12 Chu and Milam
and its offspring chinoiserie, suggesting that European classicism was negoti-
ated not only against but also in relation to the artistic traditions of Europe’s
ancient and highly civilized counterpart half a world away.
Meredith Martin’s “Staging China, Japan, and Siam at the Paris Universal
Exhibition of 1867” (chapter 5) examines the organization, display, and recep-
tion of the exhibits from China, Japan, and Siam at the Universal Exhibition of
1867. The author argues that the universal exhibition of 1867 was a watershed
moment for European audiences to begin moving “beyond chinoiserie” and
to consider Asian objects and the cultures from which they derived in more
culturally specific and politically nuanced ways. She also draws attention to
the marked and meaningful differences between the Japanese and Siamese
exhibits, which were organized by the countries themselves, and the Chinese
one, which, because of the country’s refusal to participate, was the work of a
committee of French businessmen, scholars, and military officers.
Four years before the 1867 exhibition, author and amateur artist Victor Hugo
produced two Chinese rooms for the house of his mistress, Juliette Drouet, on
the island of Guernsey. In chapter 6, “Victor Hugo and the Romantic Dream
of China,” Petra ten-Doesschate Chu discusses the only surviving room (trans-
ferred to the Maison de Victor Hugo in Paris) from the point of view of the
Romantic revival of rococo chinoiserie. Using Hugo’s room as a case study, she
shows that, though much of Romantic revival chinoiserie was little more than
insipid imitation and trivialization of Chinese and eighteenth-century chinoi-
serie models, the Romantic interest in China did allow for new and original
artistic contributions. Indeed, the wall decor of Drouet’s room, made up of
authentic Chinese elements reused in their entirety or fragmentarily and in
combination with elements newly designed by Hugo that repeat or pervert
the Chinese examples, is different from anything produced in the eighteenth
century and anticipates postmodern “bricolage” in its emphasis on reuse, frag-
mentation, and assemblage. Speculating as to the artistic purpose of Hugo’s
bricolage, the author draws a connection between the Romantic vision of
China as a dream and the psychoanalytical view of dreaming as a process of
bricolage.
Chapter 7, “Chrysanthemum Reform and Cultivated Visions of the Victorian
Garden,” by Elizabeth Chang, is based on a series of letters that appeared in the
magazine The Garden in 1883 and 1884. Calling for “chrysanthemum reform,”
the letters criticize the increasingly showy varieties of chrysanthemums that
were bred in the nineteenth century, starting from seeds brought to Europe
from China, and advocate the cultivation of a more “natural” chrysanthe-
mum that the article associates with Japan. Analyzing the debate between
those who favored gigantic chrysanthemum specimens and more simple

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varieties, Chang argues that it echoes in interesting ways the contemporane-

ous debate by art connoisseurs on the respective merits of Chinese and Japa-
nese aesthetics.
The last three chapters of the volume are devoted to the fin-de-siècle—in
France, Britain, Belgium, and China. Chapter 8 addresses the collecting of
Chinese artifacts in the nineteenth century. Elizabeth Emery distinguishes
between scientific collecting, which led to museum building at the end of the
nineteenth century, imperial collecting, connected to rival politics and war,
and aesthetic collecting, practiced by the protagonist of her article, Clémence
d’Ennery. While the lines between those three modes of collecting were still
blurry during the nineteenth century, they became more defined in the early
twentieth century, leading to the denigration of d’Ennery’s collection as “femi-
nine” and superficial. Indeed, Emery shows that a shifting institutional land-
scape at the turn of the nineteenth century caused the perception of d’Ennery
to change from the avant-garde collector she had been in the 1850s to a little
old lady with a vanity collection of knickknacks.
Chapter 9, “Fashion, Chinoiserie, and the Transnational: Material Transla-
tions between China, Japan, and Britain,” addresses the turn-of-the-century
interaction between chinoiserie and japonisme in the context of fashion and
dress. Sarah Cheang shows that the exotic Asian fashions in vogue at the time
were the product of a complex process of cultural assimilation and material
translation that does not allow for easy categorization. Indeed, she argues
that such categorization is futile and meaningless—or worse, a hindrance to
the understanding of the continual movement and layering of cultures that
occurred within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century chinoiserie
fashions.
A fascinating episode in the artistic relations between China and Europe
is discussed in the final chapter (chapter 10), “From Shanghai to Brussels:
The Tushanwan Orphanage Workshops and the Carved Ornaments of the Chi-
nese Pavilion at Laeken Park.” Author William Ma discusses the wooden orna-
ments carved by Chinese orphans in the Tushanwan Orphanage in Shanghai
that were sold to Leopold II for the Chinese pavilion in the king’s palace garden
in Laeken, outside Brussels. In his chapter, Ma follows the development of the
facade of the Chinese pavilion, first as derived from vernacular architectural
decorative elements commonly found in the Lower Yangtze region; then as
part of a large study on Chinese superstition printed at the Tushanwan print-
ing workshop; and finally to their integration and use as authentic Chinese
elements on the facade for King Leopold II’s Chinese pavilion in Laeken. In
each step, he gives voice to the different parties involved in this transnational
project and notes the political, religious, and economic rhetoric associated

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14 Chu and Milam
with the use of the various East Asian ornamental styles at a particular place
and moment in time.
Bibliography
Beevers, David, ed. Chinese Whispers: Chinoiserie in Britain, 1650–1930. Brighton: Royal
Pavilion & Museums, 2008. Exhibition catalog.
Benoit, Léon. La Princesse Lili. Chinoiserie pour le piano. Paris: E. Benoit, 1880.
Chang, Ting. Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris.
Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.
Chu, Petra ten-Doesschate, and Ding Ning, eds. Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges
between China and the West. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2015.
Cody, Jeffrey W., and Frances Terpak, eds. Brush & Shutter: Early Photography in China.
Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011. Exhibition catalog.
De Campisiano, Achille. Ko-ko, Ki-kavale. Chinoiserie burlesque à deux et avec danse.
Paris: A. Fouquet, 1895.
Honey, David B. Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Clas-
sical Chinese Philology. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2001.
Honour, Hugh. Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay. London: J. Murray, 1961.
Houssaye, J.-G. Catalogue d’une très-importante collection d’objets d’art et de curiosité
composant le Musée chinois … appartenant à M. J.-G. Houssaye … dont la vente aux
enchères publiques aura lieu les 20, 21 et 22 novembre 1856. Paris: Impr. Maulde et
Renou, 1856.
Houssaye, J.-G. Notice sur la Chine pour servir de catalogue à la grande exposition chi-
noise. Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1855.
Impey, Oliver R. Chinoiserie: The Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decora-
tion. New York: Scribner’s, 1977.
Jacobson, Dawn. Chinoiserie. London: Phaidon, 1993.
Kitson, Peter. Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange 1760–1840. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Kleutghen, Kristina. “Chinese Occidenterie: The Diversity of ‘Western’ Objects in
Eighteenth-Century China.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 47, no. 2 (January 2014),
117–35.
Lacambre, Geneviève. “Sources du Japonisme au XIX siècle.” In Le Japonisme, 17–24.
Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1988. Exhibition catalog.
Larousse, Pierre. Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle. 17 vols. Paris: Larousse,
1866–90.
Littré, Émile. Dictionnaire de la langue française. 4 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1863–1872.

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Pauthier, Guillaume. “Des curiosités chinoises exposées aux Tuileries.” Gazette des
beaux-arts 9, no. 6 (March 15, 1861).
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Sullivan, Michael. The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art. Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1989.
Thoms, P. P. A Dissertation on the Ancient Chinese Vases of the Shang Dynasty from 1743
to 1496, B.C. London: printed by the author, 1851.
Un voyage en Chine, chinoiserie en un acte par un Pékin. Angers: Impr. de Cornilleau et
Maige, 1848.
Van den Bossche, Phillip, Xavier Tricot, Patrick Florizoone, and Norbert Hostyn. Bij
Ensor op bezoek. Brasschaat: Pandora, 2010.
Weisberg, Gabriel P., and Yvonne M. L. Weisberg. Japonisme: An Annotated Bibliogra-
phy. New Brunswick, NJ: Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum; New York: Garland
Press, 1990.
Weisberg, Gabriel P., ed. The Orient Expressed: Japan’s Influence on Western Art, 1854–
1918. Jackson: Mississippi Museum of Art; Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2011. Exhibition catalog.

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chapter 1
The China Trade and the Classical Tradition in

Federal America
Patricia Johnston
Federal America has long been recognized as the foundational period of

American national identity. Its visual culture—dominated by classical
aesthetics—reinforced political efforts to unite disparate colonies into one
nation. Architecture and the decorative arts employed ancient forms as signals
of contemporary republican ideologies. Grand manner portraits of the victori-
ous Revolutionary commander and “father of our country” George Washington
invited viewers to discover models of virtue in a common heritage of Greco-
Roman ideals.1
Besides fostering American national identity, the Federal period (or Early
Republic, ca. 1783–1820) was also a crucial period for the development of
American international identity. Immediately after the Revolution, American
ships ventured outside the Atlantic basin to establish independent trade
with China, followed soon by the emergence of trade with India, Sumatra,
the Philippines, and other Asian locales. Scholars of the classical tradi-
tion in America have typically described a Federal style that utilized Roman
Republican motifs to foster nationalism in the new country. By looking at this
imagery within the context of developing American participation in world-
wide trade, we begin to see that post-Revolutionary classical aesthetics also
incorporated global and imperial references. Since American traders now
observed China firsthand after the Revolution, Chinese and other Asian motifs
and aesthetic principles became integrated in a new type of chinoiserie that
was more than a fascination with distant exoticism expressed through rococo
designs imported from Europe. It was a subtle incorporation of global allu-
sions with references to Greco-Roman antiquity. The resultant Asian-inflected
1 For an example of scholarship connecting neoclassical decorative arts with American

nationhood, see Wendy A. Cooper, Classical Taste in America, 1800–1840 (Baltimore: Bal-
timore Museum of Art; New York: Abbeville Press, 1994). For a reading of portraits of
Washington depicted with both republican and imperial Roman motifs, see Ellen Miles,
“George Washington (The Landsdowne Portrait),” in Gilbert Stuart, eds. Carrie Rebora Barratt
and Ellen G. Miles (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005), 166–75.

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The China Trade and the Classical Tradition in Federal America 17
classical tradition expressed the emerging place of the new United States in
maritime trade and the rise of a nascent commercial empire.2
Objects and images from the seaport of Salem, Massachusetts, demonstrate
how merchant and mariner families blended classical and Asian aesthetics
in their domestic spaces to express both nationalism and internationalism in
the decades following the Revolution. By 1800, the Salem fleet traded from the
Baltic to the Mediterranean and from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific—truly a
global reach. Certainly, the desire for Asian goods predated the Revolution, as
evidenced by the elite colonial fashion for domestic and imported japanned
furniture, blue-and-white ceramics, and silks.3 The American fascination with
Asian aesthetics intensified after the Revolution, when direct trade made
imported Asian luxuries more available and less expensive.
Ideological resonances also stood behind the American fascination with
classical and Chinese-inspired visual arts. Rome and China were great ancient
empires—models of power, hegemonic culture, and long-distance commerce
for the new American state coming into existence. The Chinese “vast empire …
in the highest state of civilization,” described by Jedidiah Morse in his Uni-
versal Geography, had long been a model for American agriculture, industry,
2 American furniture made in the period from 1780 to 1830 is typically called Federal-period
furniture. This follows the convention established by Charles F. Montgomery in his 1966
Winterthur catalog, where he was trying to replace more narrow, European style-based ter-
minology, such as Hepplewhite and Sheraton, with a chronological and cultural designation.
Some scholars use Federal and neoclassical as synonymous terms. I use the terms classicism,
the classical tradition, and neoclassicism as general terms that point to a style derived largely
from antiquity, primarily in the first half of the Federal period. For decorative arts made after
1815 that more precisely employ classical forms, I use the terms Greek Revival, Roman Revival,
Neoclassical (capitalized), Empire, and classical revival. Charles F. Montgomery, American
Furniture: The Federal Period in the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum (New York: The
Viking Press, 1966), 10; Wendy A. Cooper, “The Neoclassical Style in New England and New
York, 1785–1840,” in American Furniture from the Kaufman Collection, ed. J. Michael Flanigan
(Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1986), 98–99; John T. Kirk, American Furniture:
Understanding Styles, Construction, and Quality (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000), 162–65.
3 Caroline Frank has written about the extensive presence and meanings of Chinese objects in
America prior to the American Revolution. She notes the 1694 inventory of Salem merchant
Phillip English listed nearly fifty pieces of Chinese porcelain. Based on a systematic review of
over one thousand estate records, Frank discovered that at the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury about ten percent of probated estates in Salem and Newport and thirty percent in New
York had Chinese porcelain. By the 1760s nearly seventy-five percent of estates in New York,
Philadelphia, and Boston held china wares. Caroline Frank, Objectifying China, Imagining
America: Chinese Commodities in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011),
3, 11.

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18 Johnston
and commerce.4 And the concepts of empire and commerce were inextricably
linked in early America.
The founders spoke in these terms of empire and commerce. In a letter
to the Marquis de Lafayette, George Washington assured him that this “infant
empire” would one day “have some weight on the scale of Empires.”5 In this
and other writings, Washington contended that “the free cultivation of letters,
the unbounded extension of Commerce, the progressive Refinement of man-
ners, the growing liberality of sentiment, and, above all, the pure and benign
light of Revelation” characterized American Enlightenment society at the
“foundation of our Empire.”6 Meanings for the word “empire” have, of course,
evolved over time. To the founders, the term signified primarily a geographic
state, but present from the beginning were concepts of expansion through the
North American continent, domination over native peoples, and development
of global trade.7 Reconsidering classical visual traditions with a focus on the
new nation’s developing place in international commerce and its emerging
direct contact with Asia suggests the style signified more to Americans than
precedents for a moral society. Its complex internationalism became a sign of
a rising power.
1 Global Knowledge
Although few Americans had direct experience of China in the colonial period,
people who lived in seaports—and even many in rural areas—knew a great
deal about China. Particularly in seaports, images of China and the rest of Asia
circulated in maps, geography texts, and popular travel narratives, filling the
desire for general knowledge about the world and more specific educational
4 Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 1 (1771), xix. Jedidiah Morse, The Amer-
ican Universal Geography, 6th ed. (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1812), 2:473, 483.
5 “From George Washington to Lafayette, 15 August 1786,” Founders Online, National Archives,
last modified December 28, 2016, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/
04-04-02-0200. Originally published in W. W. Abbot, ed., The Papers of George Washington,
Confederation Series, vol. 4, 2 April 1786 – 31 January 1787 (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1995), 214–16.
6 George Washington, “Circular to the States,” June 8, 1783, http://www.mountvernon.org/
education/primary-sources-2/article/circular-to-the-states-george-washington-to-the-
states-june-8-1783/.
7 On the meanings of empire in the Revolutionary and Federal periods, see Richard W. Van
Alstyne, The Rising American Empire, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974) and Richard H.
Immerman, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to
Paul Wolfowitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

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and commercial information.8 As early as the 1710s, American colonial news-

papers carried descriptions of Chinese religion, politics, and commodities,
though they sometimes combined inaccurate or idealized reports with factual
information.9 These reports were typically based on English translations of
early Jesuit descriptions of China reprinted in many editions, a seemingly curi-
ous circumstance for this very Protestant and intensely anti-Catholic American
society. Samuel Miller, then a Presbyterian minister in New York, noted in his
1803 Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, “Though the faithfulness of
[Jesuit] narratives has sometimes been called into question, the works com-
piled from their letters and journals may be considered as, on the whole,
the richest sources of instruction in this department of oriental inquiry.”10 The
colonial Philadelphia bibliophile James Logan expressed his concerns more
directly. He wanted to be sure that he understood Confucian philosophy cor-
rectly because “as it Comes thro’ the hands of those great falsifiers the Jesuits is
somewhat to be suspected.”11
In Salem, copies of the most influential of the Jesuit treatises translated
into English could be found in subscription libraries and personal collections.
Salem’s Social Library, founded in 1760 by a group of gentlemen who had met
previously as the Monday Evening Club, sold shares and pooled resources to
develop an extensive collection. Subjects of books in the town’s new subscrip-
tion library ranged widely—novels for entertainment, sermons for spiritual
growth, literature and philosophy for reflection on current affairs, and—
perhaps most characteristic of seaports—voyage narratives and travel reports.12
Social Library members—most of whom were merchants, mariners, law-
yers, physicians, and ministers—had access to elaborate maps, finely engraved
in London and Amsterdam. One of the first map compendiums to enter the
collection, Emanuel Bowen’s Geography, a two-volume folio of maps printed in
8 For an excellent overview and analysis of publications about China available to Ameri-
cans, see A. Owen Aldridge, The Dragon and the Eagle: The Presence of China in the
American Enlightenment (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993).
9 Frank, Objectifying China, Imagining America, 72–74.
10 Cited in Aldridge, Dragon and the Eagle, 17.
11 Cited in Aldridge, Dragon and the Eagle, 24.
12 For a discussion of the holdings of Salem’s Social Library, see Patricia Johnston, “Depict-
ing Geographical Knowledge: Mariners’ Drawings from Salem, Massachusetts,” in New
Views of New England: The Material and Visual Culture of New England, 1600–1830, ed.
Martha J. McNamara and Georgia B. Barnhill (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts,
2012), 17–45. My references to books in the Social Library are to the editions in the original
collection held today by its successor, the Salem Athenaeum. I thank Jean Marie Procious,
Director of the Salem Athenaeum, and board member Elaine von Bruns for sharing their
research on the institution and facilitating my access to their historical collections.

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20 Johnston
figure 1.1 Emanuel Bowen, A New and Accurate Map of China, in Complete System of Geogra-
phy, vol. 2 (London, 1747), plate 41. Salem Athenaeum
London from 1744 to 1747, provided a global overview (figure 1.1).13 Bowen was
a mapmaker and seller who worked for both George II and Louis XV. His large
atlas and other comparable works provided Salem mariners and merchants
with the most vivid and up-to-date geographic information, accompanied by
symbolic and ethnographic visual imagery. Bowen’s map of China proclaimed
its source in the title box: “A New and Accurate Map of China, Drawn from
Surveys made by the Jesuit Missionaries, by Order of the Emperor. The whole
being regulated by numerous Astronomical Observations.” Thus, the work of
the Jesuits in empirical science and the patronage of the Qianlong emperor
were highly valued in a library whose collection also contained such ferocious
anti-Catholic literature as Edward Wigglesworth’s Some Thoughts upon the
13 Emanuel Bowen, Complete System of Geography, 2 vols. (London, 1747).

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figure 1.2 Detail of Bowen, A New and Accurate Map of China
Spirit of Infallibility Claimed by the Church of Rome, the topic of Harvard Col-
lege’s highly anticipated Dudleian lectures for 1757.14
The cartouches on maps of China no doubt fortified late colonial and early
Federal conceptions. In Bowen’s cartouche, China is depicted as a site of com-
merce (figure 1.2). Two men, whose ethnicity is clearly announced by the
conventions of their stereotypical long mustaches and braided queues, bargain
over commodities. The man at the right, wearing a Chinese conical hat, towers
over three bolts of textiles and gestures toward his partner’s goods, canisters
probably full of tea. Other desirable goods line a shelf at the top of the title
placket: a ceramic herm vase and a lidded tureen. The profile of a Chinese city
defines the background. Perhaps it is Canton (Guangzhou), a major port and
the only site of East-West trade; more likely it is an imagined cityscape, since it
lacks the characteristic depiction of the hongs, riverfront warehouses stocked
with goods and living quarters for foreign traders, which were sometimes
called “factories” in English. The scene is distinctively Chinese, with emphasis
on fanciful architectural forms and a multi-storied pagoda (perhaps a refer-
ence to the famous nine-story pagoda at the port of Whampoa). Reading the
map pulls the viewer into a tension between the real (the detailed topography
of the map with its accuracy vouched for by its title advertising its genesis in
Jesuit science) and a sense of exotic fantasy (as the merchants in the cartouche
14 Edward Wigglesworth, Some Thoughts Upon the Spirit of Infallibility Claimed by the
Church of Rome: Offer’d at the Anniversary of the Dudleian Lecture at Harvard College in
Cambridge, May 11, 1757 (Boston: John Draper, 1757). Begun in 1755, one of the goals of
the lecture series endowed by Paul Dudley in 1750 was “the detecting and convicting and
exposing the idolatry of the Romish church, their tyranny, usurpations, damnable her-
esies, fatal errors, abominable superstitions, and other crying wickedness in their high
places.” Continuing today, the Dudleian lectures have shifted to more ecumenical goals.

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22 Johnston
barter goods while overlooking a Chinese pastoral scene, with cows grazing
outside the distant magical city).
Salem’s Social Library collection also included the most important
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English-language books on China,
including a translation of Confucius’s Morals.15 Confucius was widely read in
English throughout the eighteenth century, as his ideas resonated with the clas-
sical and Deist currents of the period. In the introduction to his 1787 epic poem
The Vision of Columbus, Joel Barlow compared cultures, arguing, “In the most
enlightened periods of antiquity, only a very few of their wisest Philosophers, a
Socrates, a Tully, or a Confucius, ever … described the Deity as a God of purity,
justice and benevolence.”16 Social Library patrons were especially interested
in the wide breadth of knowledge provided by the French Jesuit Jean-Baptiste
Du Halde’s highly illustrated General History of China, a compilation of reports
by Jesuit missionaries that was perhaps the most widely read source on China
in colonial America. Reinforcing the importance of Confucius for the Western
understanding of Chinese culture, the second of Du Halde’s four-volume set
opened with an engraved frontispiece of the philosopher. Elsewhere, the com-
pendium was devoted to the geography, agriculture, and commerce of China,
exploring topics such as silkworm breeding and silk manufacture.17 Collections
of voyage narratives that replicated images from Du Halde circulated widely
among Social Library members.18 So did later works, including Lord George
Staunton’s Embassy to China and John Barrow’s Travels in China, both of which
gave readers a more critical picture of Chinese government and culture after
British attempts to expand commerce with China failed in the 1790s.19
15 Confucius, Morals, 2nd ed. (London: F. Fayram, 1724).

16 Joel Barlow, Vision of Columbus: A Poem, in Nine Books (Hartford, CT: printed by Hudson
and Goodwin, for the author, 1787), 89.
17 J.-B. Du Halde, The General History of China: Containing a Geographical, Historical, Chron-
ological, Political And Physical Description Of The Empire of China, Chinese-Tartary, Corea,
and Thibet; Including an Exact and Particular Account of Their Customs, Manners, Ceremo-
nies, Religion, Arts and Sciences, 3rd ed. (London: J. Watts, 1741).
18 Collections included John Green, A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels (Lon-
don: Thomas Astley, 1746), a four-volume series known as “the Astley Collection” after its
publisher; and the seven-volume A New Collection of Voyages, Discoveries and Travels: Con-
taining Whatever is Worthy of Notice, in Europe, Asia, Africa and America (London: printed
for J. Knox, 1767). These collections summarized or reprinted previously published texts
and engravings.
19 George Leonard Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great
Britain to the Emperor of China (Philadelphia: printed for Robert Campbell, 1799); John
Barrow, Travels in China: Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made
and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-min-yuen,

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Side by side with this global view, the Social Library held a strong collec-
tion of classics. Members regularly checked out features including Aristo-
tle’s Ethics, the Life of Socrates, Dialogues of Plato, Cato’s Letters, Homer’s
Iliad and Odyssey, Kennett’s Antiquities of Rome, and Gibbon’s History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.20 The Social Library collection held both
Arthur Murphy’s The Orphan of China, a popular tragic play performed in
London and New York that was based on Voltaire (who based his play on Du
Halde) and his later play The Grecian Daughter.21 Some members, mostly
the ministers and a few other H arvard graduates, could—and did—read the
ancients in translation, particularly Cicero, Tacitus, and Sallust.
This pattern of seeking global knowledge and ancient wisdom, leavened
by the occasional novel and sermon, also characterized large personal librar-
ies in Salem. The Salem merchant Elias Hasket Derby, whose library reached
nearly nine hundred volumes, owned “a large collection of Voyages and Trav-
els,” including the very popular narratives about Admiral George Anson’s and
Captain James Cook’s voyages around the world, which were sold from his
estate, along with Du Halde’s General History of China, Jedidiah Morse’s Gazet-
teer, fifty-one volumes of the Gentleman’s Magazine, and a collection of works
by British essayists including Addison, Swift, Kames, and Hume. At his farm in
Danvers, Derby kept a 107-volume “Sett of Bells Edition of British Poets.” At his
mansion house, he kept “18 volumes of Antient History.” About a quarter of the
volumes in the Derby Library were literary in character, and the ancient authors
included Cicero, Cornelius Nepos, Seneca, Quintilian, Plutarch, Suetonius,
Horace, Homer, and Virgil. Even Derby’s taste in art reflected appreciation for
both East and West. His 1799 probate inventory recorded that in the North West
Parlor hung “Four Chinese images & 3 British.”22 Although Derby, like most of
the other merchants of his cohort, did not have the opportunity for the college
and on a Subsequent Journey Through the Country from Pekin to Canton (London: T. Cadell
and W. Davies, 1806).
20 These examples are but a few of many: Aristotle, Ethics and Politics, trans. J. Gillies
(London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1804), plus two sixteenth-century Latin editions of Aris-
totle; J. G. Cooper, Life of Socrates (London, 1750); Plato, Works, trans. Floyer Sydenham
and Thomas Taylor (London, 1804); J. Trenchard, ed. Cato’s Letters; or, Essays on Liberty
(London, 1733); Homer, Iliad, trans. W. Cowper (London, 1802); Homer, Odyssey, trans.
W. Cowper (London, 1802); Basil Kennett, Antiquities of Rome (London, 1708); Edward
Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Dublin, 1789).
21 Arthur Murphy, The Orphan of China, 2nd ed. (London, 1759); Arthur Murphy, The Grecian
Daughter (London, 1808). The Grecian Daughter was first performed in 1772.
22 David H. Wallace, “A Report on the Books Owned by Elias Hasket Derby, Sr., of Salem,”
unpublished manuscript for the Salem Maritime National Historic Site of the National
Park Service, 1982. Elias Hasket Derby, “Inventory of Real and Personal of Elias Hasket

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24 Johnston
education that became common in the next generation for men of the social
stature of his sons, he was acutely aware of how his material possessions and
interests marked him as a gentleman.
A wide range of subjects also characterized the Salem personal library of
Reverend William Bentley, who left approximately four thousand volumes at
his death. Given his profession, it is not surprising that his library weighted
heavily to the theological and linguistic. The Harvard-educated minister owned
many books by Greek and Roman authors and read them in both English and
the ancient languages. He was a polymath with deep scientific interests, which
were expressed in his natural history collections. Along with these, Bentley
acquired books related to the seaport in which he served (voyage and travel
narratives, navigation manuals, and maps), many of which were presented to
him by his parishioners. Among the books left at his death were twenty-five
volumes on China and his copy of Barrow’s Travels in China.23
This practice of seeking knowledge and virtue from both the Greco-Roman
ancients and the Chinese had a long tradition in European intellectual his-
tory. For example, the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz wrote
in 1705 that even a cursory knowledge of Chinese culture provided “very con-
siderable enlightenment, and one that is much more useful in my view than
the knowledge of the rites and furniture of the Greeks and Romans to which
so many scholars devote themselves.”24 These ideas transferred to America.
In his enormously popular 1796 American Universal Geography, the New
England minister and geographer Jedidiah Morse characterized the lessons of
Confucius as “equal to the noblest philosophical remains of Greek antiquity,
of which they bear, in several places, a very strong resemblance.”25 Morse
praised Confucian ideas of the “Supreme Deity,” perhaps seeing a corre-
spondence between Chinese spiritual practice and his own strict Calvinism.
Other Federal-period Americans such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas
Paine warmed to Confucianism for its parallel to their own deistic tendencies.
Perhaps this was especially true in Salem, which developed a strong Unitarian
presence over the next few decades under the leadership of Reverend
Derby,” ca. 1799, MSS 37: box 19, folder 1, Derby Family Papers: Estate Papers, Phillips
Library, Peabody Essex Museum.
23 I thank Thomas Knoles of the American Antiquarian Society for providing me with a
compilation of Bentley’s books. Bentley’s will divided his books among the AAS, Allegh-
eny College, and those auctioned for the benefit of his nephew.
24 Quoted in Christopher Johns, China and the Church: Chinoiserie in Global Context (Oak-
land: University of California Press, 2016), 3.
25 Quoted in Aldridge, Dragon and the Eagle, 36.

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Bentley.26 Inspiration from Christian, Chinese, and ancient Greco-Roman

ideas helped develop the concept of the Chinese and Roman empires as mod-
els for the emerging American nation. Esteem for both the Greco-Romans and
the Chinese stemmed from their long-lasting triumph as ancient empires,
providing for Americans differing yet mutually reinforcing models of organi-
zation, intellectual thought, commodity production, commerce, and power.
2 Global Objects
This parallel appreciation of the classical and the Chinese characterized other
aspects of material and visual culture in Federal America. Salem’s East India
Marine Society, formed by sea captains who had rounded either Cape Horn or
the Cape of Good Hope—that is, who had traded outside the Atlantic basin—
formed a museum in 1799 to display the “curiosities” collected on their voyages.27
Some early donations were prized Asian exotica, such as a miniature alabaster
pagoda brought back to Salem in 1801. Like the mariners’ wide-ranging library
collections, the objects they assembled spanned the globe. The museum
exhibited the classical side by side with the Chinese. Reverend Bentley noted
in his diary that Roman antiquities, including “a specimen of Mosaic” and “An
Earthen Patera found in Herculaneum” (both donated by Elias Hasket Derby,
Junior), were on view, along with “several images & paintings of Hindostan,
China & Japan.”28 This juxtaposition of objects representing Western and
Eastern empires for study (and emulation, one might argue) reflected the intel-
lectual atmosphere of the period.
Reverend Bentley kept his own cabinet of curiosities, formed largely of gifts
from his seafaring parishioners. Complementing his deep interest in natural
history, he acquired many shells, preserved Asian birds, and animal horns.
Other gifts were manmade, including a Chinese razor and a “specimen of
Chinese writing” from Captain Henry Elkins and Chinese coins from Captain
26 On Bentley’s theology, see J. Rixey Ruffin, A Paradise of Reason: William Bentley and
Enlightenment Christianity in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
27 On the museum, see Patricia Johnston, “Global Knowledge in the Early Republic: The East
India Marine Society’s ‘Curiosities’,” in A Long and Tumultuous Relationship: East–West
Interchanges in American Art, ed. Cynthia Mills, Amelia Goerlitz, and Lee Glazer (Wash-
ington, DC: Smithsonian Scholars Press, 2011), 68–79; and Daniel Finamore, “Displaying
the Sea and Defining America: Early Exhibitions at the Salem East India Marine Society,”
Journal for Maritime Research (May 2002), https://doi.org/10.1080/21533369.2002.9668319.
28 William Bentley, The Diary of William Bentley, D. D., Pastor of the East Church, Salem, Mas-
sachusetts, 4 vols. (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1962), quotation from August 13, 1801,
2:382.

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26 Johnston
Nathaniel West.29 Yet he also appreciated European artistic traditions and

commissioned Samuel McIntire to carve busts of Governor John Winthrop
and Voltaire for his personal collection.30
The combination of classical and Chinese aesthetics pervaded the design
of Federal-period domestic interiors and possessions of seaport elites, as seen
in examples of textiles, porcelain, and furniture owned by the Derbys and
the Crowninshields, two of Salem’s most prominent merchant families. Both
families traced their early success to colonial coastal and Caribbean trading
and, particularly in the case of patriarch Elias Hasket Derby, to Revolutionary
privateering. In the early national period, Asian trade transformed these fami-
lies’ successful West Indies shipping businesses into global enterprises with
much greater financial risk and reward. The first New England vessel to reach
China was Elias Hasket Derby’s Grand Turk, followed by four more Derby-
vessel voyages to China before 1790. The merchant, however, soon found that
greater fortunes could be made in the India trade and turned his attentions to
Mauritius and the subcontinent.31
3 Silk and Embroidery
Though Derby’s trading fascination with China was brief—only five vessels
were sent there in the late 1780s—its impact on his aesthetics was profound.
The depth of his personal interest in Chinese decorative arts is demonstrated
by one of his waistcoats, now owned by the Salem Maritime National Historic
Site, part of the National Park Service (figure 1.3).
29 Bentley, The Diary of William Bentley, March 30, 1788, 1:90; May 31, 1790, 1:174–75.
30 These are now in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society. Thomas Knoles,
“‘An Equal Taste for Antiquities’: Reverend William Bentley and the American Antiquar-
ian Society,” in New England Collectors and Collections, Dublin Seminar for New England
Folklife, eds. Peter Benes and Jane Montague Benes (Boston: Boston University, 2004),
12–24.
31 For biographical information about Derby, see Dane A. Morrison, “Derby, Elias Hasket
(1739–1799), merchant,” American National Biography Online, last modified February
2000, https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1000407. The most extensive
biography is Richard H. McKey, “Elias Hasket Derby, Merchant of Salem, Massachusetts,
1739–1799” (PhD diss., Clark University, 1961) and two articles based on this dissertation,
“Elias Hasket Derby and the American Revolution,” Essex Institute Historical Collections
97, no. 3 (July 1961): 166–96; and “Elias Hasket Derby and the Founding of the Eastern
Trade,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 98, no. 1 (January 1962): 1–25 and 98, and no. 2
(April 1962): 65–83.

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figure 1.3 Man’s waistcoat, French or Chinese, ca. 1790–95, silk, linen, silver spangles.
Salem Maritime National Historic Site, National Park Service, SAMA 938
The Derby waistcoat is made of possibly Chinese (but more probably French)
silk fabric embroidered with silk thread.32 It was common for eighteenth-
century (and even earlier) merchants to acquire such garments as a “pattern,”
that is, as a kit with the fabric pre-embroidered and ready to be cut into pieces
for sides, pocket flaps, and lapels. This allowed the designers to position the
ornamentation where it would have the most impact on the finished garment:
32 I thank textile experts Lynn Zacek Bassett and Meg Andrews and Emily Murphy, Park
Historian and Public Affairs Officer at the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, National
Park Service, for sharing their thoughts on this fabric and embroidery. Although there are
stylistic indicators of Chinese origin in the leaves and figures, there are also French indi-
cators. Chinese export embroidery before 1800 is very rare.

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28 Johnston
along the bottom edges, the closures, and the neckline. Such kits would be
taken to the merchant’s favorite tailor for custom fitting.
The Derby waistcoat has a secure provenance, descended through the
family until its donation to the National Park Service. Its style of embroidery
matches similar imagery securely dated to the last decade of the eighteenth
century.33 A pattern of chained foliage trims the edges of the garment. Chinese
figural scenes occupy both of the bottom points of the waistcoat. On the left
is a seated male, on the right a female, and both seem to be playing a flute-
like musical instrument—though it is possible the man is smoking a long pipe
(figure 1.4). A large flower hovers over each figure, seemingly doubling as an
umbrella-like form. The floral motifs wind around the border of the rest of
garment, and a floral spray graces each pocket flap. As curator Emily Murphy
has noted, the angled bottoms of the front of the waistcoat and the style of
the embroidery seem right.34 It’s possible that this waistcoat kit was brought
back to Derby senior by one of his captains on the vessels he sent to China;
in that case it would date to just before 1790. However, it is more likely that
it was brought back on a Derby ship from Europe, where his agent acquired it
because his ship’s owner favored such items. Thus, the vest is likely chinoiserie
rather than Chinese. Experts on the silks of the period have tried to tease out
the distinctions between Asian and European silks, but Europeans adopted
the industry so well that it is often impossible to distinguish between them.35
As much as we might imagine the merchant walking around Salem display-
ing Chinese figures on his body to show off his pioneering role in the China
Trade, the style of the waistcoat cannot be dated to the 1790s.
The high pocket flaps and shape of the lapels are more characteristic
of the 1830s and 1840s, and since there is no sign of them being moved, Murphy
hypothesizes that the kit was brought to Derby on one of his ships but never
assembled by his favorite tailor during his lifetime (he died in 1799). The waist-
coat may have been later fitted to and worn by his grandson Elias Hasket
Derby III, who served as a family historian and wrote a lengthy biography of
33 For examples of embroidery and waistcoat styles, see Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes
Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (Williamsburg, VA: The
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). See p. 15 on
waistcoats and pp. 190–95 on the common alterations of waistcoats. See also Amelia Peck
et al., Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800 (New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 2013).
34 Conversation with Emily Murphy, October 9, 2015.
35 For example, Madelyn Shaw, “‘Shipped in Good Order’: Rhode Island’s China Trade Silks,”
in Global Trade and Visual Arts in Federal New England, eds. Patricia Johnston and Caro-
line Frank (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2014).

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figure 1.4 Detail of figure 1.3
his grandfather that did much to preserve the memory of the China Trade in
the mid-nineteenth century.36 It is likely that these Chinese figures were dis-
played at social gatherings in Salem in that later generation, but regardless of
when the waistcoat was sewn into its final form, this practice demonstrates the
incorporation of Chinese motifs into Western forms in early American visual
culture.
36 Conversation with Emily Murphy, October 9, 2015.

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30 Johnston
4 Porcelain
Figural scenes are one way into the question of how the confluence of
Chinese and classical aesthetics worked in Federal-period domestic spaces.
The Derby waistcoat, decorated with tiny Chinese figures, seems at home
with the Derby family porcelain dinner set imported from China. Gracing all of
the items in this large ensemble is the small classical figure of Hope standing
next to an anchor and accompanied by the Latin motto Spero—“I Hope”—
under the image (figure 1.5). Though the account books of Derby’s China
ventures do not specifically note the importation of a set picturing Spero, it
was certainly brought in by one of the five Derby ships that returned from
China by 1790 and is likely to be the porcelain described as “cyphered EHD”
listed on the import records of the Grand Turk.
It was customary for Chinese decorators to monogram porcelain at the point
of sale in Canton. This large dining set, which had 171 pieces, and an accompany-
ing tea set, which had 101 pieces, display the owner’s cipher, an elaborate “EHD,”
figure 1.5 “Spero” plate, made in China, ca. 1786, porcelain. Yale
University Art Gallery, Mabel Brady Garvan Collection
(1948.57d)

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inside an oval form.37 They were likely selected by the Grand Turk’s supercargo,
William Vans, for his ship’s owner, since Derby learned only after the voyage
was underway that the captain had decided to go all the way to China instead
of being satisfied with trading at an intermediate entrepôt.38 Very few Ameri-
can families before the Revolution had the right to display family armorials,
but after separation from Britain, many wealthy Americans designed family
coats of arms to signal their status in the new country. William R. Sargent has
observed that the figure of Hope standing alongside an anchor and above the
Latin motto comprises “perhaps the earliest pseudocrest created specifically
for goods sold to the American market.”39 There is no evidence that Derby used
the motto “I hope” before he acquired the porcelain, and some have speculated
that this armorial was commissioned originally for another buyer—perhaps
the ship Hope from Rhode Island. However, Derby’s agent must have thought the
anchor a particularly appropriate symbol for an American merchant who had
made his fortune through global maritime trading. It also had ancient classical
references; during the early Christian Roman period, it was adopted as a sym-
bol for hope in Christ because its disguised cross shape was embedded in the
ancient symbol of navigation safety.40 The Latin word “spero” combines with
its classical personification and anchor symbol to interlace more complexity
into the image. Beyond its obvious nautical theme, appropriate for the home of
a great maritime merchant, the image references several layers of meaning—
classical, Christian, and contemporary. This porcelain reverses the pattern of
influence embodied by the Derby vest. Rather than a Chinese motif made into
a Western form, the classical motif embellishes Chinese plates.
37 William R. Sargent, Treasures of Chinese Export Ceramics from the Peabody Essex Museum
(New Haven, CT: Peabody Essex Museum, distributed by Yale University Press, 2012), 394.
38 For a reconstruction of the probable acquisition process of the Spero set, see Jessica
Lanier, “The Post-Revolutionary Ceramics Trade in Salem, Massachusetts, 1783–1812”
(master’s thesis, Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and
Culture, 2004), 71–77.
39 Sargent, Treasures of Chinese Export Ceramics, 399. Though the set has Derby’s initials,
some have speculated that the design had been made for others and that possibly when
agents for the Providence, Rhode Island, ship Hope (which was in Canton during the same
1786 trading season) failed to pick it up, it was personalized for Derby. David Sanctuary
Howard and John Ayers, China for the West, 2 vols. (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1978),
2:493.
40 Maurice Hassett, “The Anchor (as Symbol),” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (New York:
Robert Appleton Company, 1907), accessed January 6, 2017, http://www.newadvent.org/
cathen/01462a.htm.

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32 Johnston
Derby’s neoclassical Spero shared cupboard space in the merchant’s Salem

home with more traditional Chinese porcelains. His probate inventory ref-
erences hundreds of pieces of ceramics, specifying, among others, British
“Queen’s ware” and one Chinese “blue and white nankeen sett china.”41 Two
dozen of these late eighteenth-century so-called nankeens were likely owned
by Derby senior and his wife, Elizabeth Crowninshield Derby, and passed
through daughter Elizabeth Derby West’s family line until they were donated
to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. These pieces, in the fashionable Chinese
blue-and-white palette, are decorated with characteristic Celestial Empire
motifs, including the pagoda, footbridge, small boats, costumed figures, and
landscapes (figure 1.6).42 My point here is that within media—and here spe-
cifically in the medium of porcelain that merchants well knew had originated
in China—a range of imagery from the classical to the Chinese was employed.
Sometimes motifs and media of the two cultures were combined, as in the
famous porcelain set commissioned for the Society of the Cincinnati, a
fraternal organization founded in 1783 to preserve the memory of the accom-
plishments of the American Revolution (figure 1.7). This ensemble displays
a thick, ornate blue-and-white Chinese border of butterflies, botanicals, and
honeycombed shapes, called the Fitzhugh pattern (after the British East India
Company official whose order for a similar set in 1780 helped popularize it in
the Anglo-American world). The heavy border surrounds an ethereal classical
vignette on the white ground of the plate’s center. There, a trumpeting winged
figure of Fame dressed in a green gown, rose-colored drape, and crown glides
through the air. Her left hand holds a blue-and-white ribbon, from which hangs
the emblematic badge of the Society: a double-winged eagle with a scene
from the life of Cincinnatus depicted in a circle on its breast.
It is likely that Samuel Shaw, the supercargo of the Empress of China, the first
American ship to reach Canton, brought with him a related watercolor version
of this insignia, designed by Pierre L’Enfant. On his first trip, Shaw must have
ordered the overglazed decoration on this 302-piece dinner and tea set, for it
arrived in Baltimore the next year on the Pallas, the second American ship
returning from China, and was ultimately purchased by George Washington.43
41 The term “nankeen” (a corruption of the city Nanjing/Nanking) usually refers to a sturdy
cotton cloth or the trousers made from it. However, it has a secondary meaning referring
to blue-and-white Chinese porcelain.
42 “Inventory of Real and Personal of Elias Hasket Derby,” ca. 1799, MSS 37: box 19, folder 1,
Derby Family Papers: Estate Papers, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum.
43 The porcelain and underglaze blue patterns were manufactured in Jingdezhen; the other
overglaze and enamels were added at the point of sale in Canton. In the course of his
career, Shaw made four trips to China and served as the first US consul in Canton from

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figure 1.6 Soup plate, made in China, ca. 1750–99, porcelain. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
Gift of Richard Edwards, 1972.467
Washington was, of course, called the American Cincinnatus because—prac-

ticing the republican ideal of simplicity—he returned to cultivating his lands
at the end of the Revolution. In this porcelain set, the motifs represented on
the ceramics demonstrate two distinct styles—classical and Chinese—that
were subjects of both fascination and emulation. With the addition of the
eagle as an American national symbol, the Cincinnati motif incorporated
the two earlier imperial visual traditions into Federal-period visual culture.
1786 to 1794. Lindsay E. Borst, “The Society of Cincinnati Chinese Export Porcelain,” Cin-
cinnati Fourteen 48, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 14–23, http://www.societyofthecincinnati.org/pdf/
reading_lists/sotc_list_ChineseExportPorcelain.pdf.

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34 Johnston
figure 1.7 “Society of the Cincinnati” plate, made in China, ca. 1785, porcelain. Diplomatic
Reception Rooms, U.S. Department of State, Washington D.C.
5 Furniture
The comfortable pairing of Chinese and Western forms was less common
in the furniture of the time, though Chinese motifs sometimes enhanced neo-
classical furniture forms. Salem merchants and their wives were concerned
with making sure their furnishings always kept up with the most fashionable
European offerings. As we know, mid-eighteenth-century European high-style
furnishings, particularly in the rococo style, sometimes incorporated Chinese
forms and motifs. Thomas Chippendale acknowledged his admiration of Asian
aesthetics in the title of his 1754 manual, The Gentleman And Cabinet-Maker’s
Director: Being A Large Collection Of The Most Elegant And Useful Designs Of

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Household Furniture In The Gothic, Chinese And Modern Taste. Chippendale’s

book put architectural studies of classical columns side by side with Chinese
motifs as inspirations for designers. His “modern taste” was a subdued rococo
statement that combined influences. Even his “French chairs” were uphol-
stered in Chinese motifs!44
Thomas Sheraton’s 1793 manual The Cabinet-maker’s and Upholsterer’s
Drawing-book was more widely available in America, and he too promoted the
incorporation of Chinese references into traditional European forms.45 Some
of Sheraton’s Chinese motifs are obvious; for example, the pier table in the
illustration of his “View of the Prince of Wales’s Chinese Drawing Room” is
ornamented with three small Chinese figurines—a seated figure with a para-
sol on a cushion on the lower shelf of the table and male and female caryatids
holding the candle-stands on top of the table (figure 1.8). Flanking the French
doors are tall, rectangular, bamboo-framed wall panels with Chinese figures in
characteristic landscapes.46 Elizabeth Derby West, daughter of the successful
merchant and wife of one of his sea captains, owned armchairs based on those
illustrated in another view of Sheraton’s “Chinese Drawing Room.” She may
have selected the shape of her chairs herself based on these engraved images,
because Thomas Seymour, who made the chairs for her, owned a first edition
of Sheraton’s The Cabinet-maker’s and Upholsterer’s Drawing-book.47
In American furniture, Chinese influence was seen most often in informal
furniture, particularly garden chairs, which were often made of bamboo or
carved to mimic bamboo. Popularized by William Chambers’s 1757 Designs
of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils, Chinese bam-
boo was very inexpensive—settees likely cost less than $10. The light bamboo
44 Thomas Chippendale, The Gentleman And Cabinet-Maker’s Director: Being A Large Collec-
tion Of The Most Elegant And Useful Designs Of Household Furniture In The Gothic, Chinese
And Modern Taste (London: printed for the author, 1754), plates 17, 18, 19.
45 See Montgomery, American Furniture, and Thomas Sheraton, The Cabinet-maker’s and
Upholsterer’s Drawing-book (London: printed by Thomas Bensley, 1793). Despite Mont-
gomery’s claim that Sheraton was widely available, the only documented copy of the
1793 edition in America at the time was that owned by the furniture maker Thomas Sey-
mour. The 1802 edition was far more accessible. See “The cabinet-maker and upholsterer’s
drawing-book, in three parts,” Metropolitan Museum of Art online catalog, http://www
.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/700232.
46 Sheraton, Appendix to The Cabinet-maker’s and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book (London:
printed by Thomas Bensley, 1802), plate 31.
47 Sheraton, Cabinet-maker’s and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book, plate 32. Elizabeth Derby
West’s chairs are held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, accession numbers 23.32 and
23.33. Thomas Seymour emigrated from England and worked in Portland, Maine, and Bos-
ton with his father, John Seymour. Robert D. Mussey, The Furniture Masterworks of John
and Thomas Seymour (Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 2003).

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36 Johnston
figure 1.8 Thomas Sheraton, “The Prince of Wales’ Chinese Drawing Room,” in The Cabinet-
maker’s and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book (London: printed by Thomas Bensley,
1793), plate 31
furniture pieces brought instantly recognizable Chinese references into Euro-

pean and American interiors.48 Perhaps because of the greater expense, more
formal furniture tended to follow classical lines.
Some Chinese furniture integrated Asian influences (both subtle and overt)
into characteristic neoclassical furniture forms. Though the expense of ship-
ping large, heavy objects made furniture a less common export than other
commodities, there was some trade. Some pattern books and Western furni-
ture were sent to China (sometimes as ship cabin furniture) as prototypes for
reproduction that could then be sold to Chinese merchants or European trad-
ers based in Asia.49
A rattan chaise longue, believed to have been imported by the Crownin-
shield merchant family of Salem, demonstrates the practice of using Eastern
48 Carl L. Crossman, Decorative Arts of the China Trade. Paintings, Furnishings and Exotic
Curiosities (Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, Ltd., 1991), 255–56; William
Chambers, Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils (Lon-
don: William Chambers, 1757).
49 Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer, eds., Encounters: The Meeting of Europe and Asia, 1500–
1800 (London: V&A Publications, 2004), 257. The Chippendale book was known in China.
Crossman, Decorative Arts of the China Trade, 230.

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figure 1.9 Chaise longue, made in China, ca. 1805–15, padouk and rattan. Manchester
Historical Museum, MA
materials to create recognizable Western forms, and in this case, with an unmis-
takable Chinese decorative motif (figure 1.9). Thomas Sheraton noted in 1802
that chaise longue forms “have their name from the French, which imports
a long chair.”50 Though Sheraton’s examples were more ornate than this one,
his definition is appropriate. “Their use is to rest or loll upon after dinner,” and
those with a back and sides may “serve for a sofa.”51 Some chaise lounges were
made in America by the early decades of the eighteenth century.52
The overall form of the Crowninshield chaise, dated to circa 1805–15, seems
to be that of strict classical revival, influenced by the Roman excavations at
50 The piece is called a chaise rather than a sofa because its defined directionality for head
and feet suggests the function of resting or lounging. Spellings vary on this furniture form.
Sheraton uses the spelling “Chaise Longus,” with the plural “Chaise Longues.” Thomas
Sheraton, Appendix to The Cabinet-maker’s and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book (London:
printed by Thomas Bensley, 1802), 26. Crossman and some other decorative arts curators
use the French spelling, “chaise longue.” Crossman, Decorative Arts of the China Trade,
247. The most common modern American spelling, chaise lounge, seems to have arisen
in the nineteenth century.
51 Sheraton, Cabinet-maker’s and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book, 26.
52 See examples in the Winterthur collection: 1958.1509, 1958.2223. Nancy E. Richards and
Nancy Goyne Evans, New England Furniture at Winterthur: Queen Anne and Chippendale
Periods (Winterthur, DE: Winterthur Museum, 1999), 188–91.

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38 Johnston
Pompeii and Herculaneum but called a “Grecian couch.” Sheraton himself con-
nected the Greeks and Romans in his 1803 Cabinet Dictionary. The Greeks, he
stated, created “models of sculpture and architecture, much superior to any
other nation.” The Romans, he believed, soon absorbed Greek customs into
their empire and based the form of their klinai, upon which they lounged as
they dined, on Greek forms: “The old Romans sat at meat as we do, till the Gre-
cian luxury and softness had corrupted them; and then they lolled, or reclined
at dinner, after the Grecian manner.”53
Sheraton’s Grecian couch, first published in 1803, made an immediate
impact on Federal-period interiors as it was quickly adopted by elite families.
They were drawn to its clean, elegant, counterbalanced curves and its clear
references to antiquity. The adoption of this form also marks a shift in the use
of classicism in American and European decorative arts from generalized clas-
sical interpretations to more literal incorporations of Greco-Roman forms,
sometimes called late classical, Neoclassical, or Empire style (after Napoleon).
In the Crowninshield chaise, the higher end for resting one’s back is formed
by a gentle serpentine curve with a small rosette at its top. The foot end of
the chaise terminates in a caned bolster-shaped roll. Despite its clear Grecian
form, the side of the bolster facing the viewer makes it apparent this chaise
was made in China: a dragon-headed carving, which appears in the curl of the
arms, replaces the more common terminal rosette. The dragon’s snarling face
is deeply carved into the hard padouk frame, a favorite wood for traditional
Chinese furniture. The density of the wood allows the carver to achieve crisp
details and patterns on the facial features and beard. While the dragon served
as a revered symbol of power, wisdom, and luck in China, to Americans and
Europeans it signified exoticism. The four gently curving legs of the chaise
develop into small ball-and-claw feet at the bottom, an ancient Chinese motif
referring to the dragon clasping a pearl and adapted and popularized in Eng-
land in the early eighteenth century.
At the time rattan would have been immediately seen as Chinese. By the
middle of the seventeenth century, English chairs were being made with Asian
caning and reaching into middle-class as well as aristocratic homes. They
were prized as lighter and less expensive than upholstered chairs, which were
subject to dust and pests.54 Throughout the eighteenth century, chairs with
53 Thomas Sheraton, The Cabinet Dictionary: Containing and Explanation of all the Terms
used in the Cabinet, Chair and Upholstery Branches (London: W. Smith, 1803), 245–46;
plates 49, 50, 73.
54 The Victoria and Albert Museum has examples of seventeenth-century English furni-
ture with Asian caning. See, for example, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O132476/
armchair-unknown/.

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caned seats and backs could be bought in Boston and Salem; an earlier form of
the chaise longue itself, designed as a chair with the (often caned) back tilted
away from a long seat (sometimes called a resting bed or day bed) was also
available.55 From the late seventeenth century on, rattan came into England
and America in multiple states: as canes to be split and woven; as sheets of
caned fabric to be cut and tacked; and as finished furniture with rattan ele-
ments. The Crowninshield chaise seems to belong to the last category—carved
and caned in China.
The chaise is based on a highly fashionable European form, modified to
make its elegant Grecian shape more daring with its thrilling dragonhead.
The rattan-caned padouk chaise longue must have appealed greatly to the
Crowninshield family, since they owned at least three—this one and a twin
set of left/right caned chaises with rosettes rather than dragonheads.56 No
doubt the chaises were pleasant to use in summer, and their lighter materials
55 Richard H. Randall, Jr., American Furniture in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Boston:
Museum of Fine Arts, 1965), 162–65, 228–31.
56 They are in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum and discussed briefly in
Christina H. Nelson, Directly from China: Export Goods for the American Market, 1784–1930
(Salem, MA: Peabody Museum of Salem, 1985), 40; and Crossman, Decorative Arts of
the China Trade, 247–49. Similar couches and daybeds found in Boston and Providence
have rosettes; this dragon head appears to be unique in extant Chinese export sofas and
chaises.

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40 Johnston
allowed easy repositioning. But more importantly, their use and display in the
Federal-period home of a prominent seafaring and merchant family suggested
knowledge of global commodities and markets, successful experience in trade,
and sophisticated taste through a style that combined references to ancient
Roman and Chinese empires.
In Federal-period seaports, elite American merchant families came to adopt

classicism as the style for their personal fashion and domestic interiors. At first
glance, the classical style after the turn of the nineteenth century seems to
have little to do with Chinese forms, unlike the freer, curvilinear rococo chi-
noiserie forms they replaced. But intellectually, as Americans ventured around
the world, those in the merchant class, particularly in seaports, integrated and
absorbed new forms encountered through their new commercial contacts. The
classical and the Chinese styles were joined by, among others, the Egyptian,
the Turkish, and the Indian. Nevertheless, the Romans and the Chinese held
particular interest for Americans because they had been great empires and
were subjects of historical and literary study. Classical and Asian styles also
share aesthetic approaches that made their integration seem seamless: clean
and elegant lines, subtle forms, and geometric shapes. From the eighteenth
century onward, globally influenced objects provided styles and themes that
eventually permeated American visual culture, becoming signs of experience,
social status, and economic success. These international forms helped shape
Americans’ sense of their place in the world, contributing to the nation’s devel-
oping identity as a commercial empire.
Acknowledgements
I thank the many people who have had discussions of Salem’s Asian trade with
me over the years, especially Jessica Lanier and Emily Murphy. I also thank
colleagues who have commented on this chapter as it was in progress: Jennifer
Chuong, Jeannine Falino, and Alan Wallach; and for their work on this volume:
Jennifer Milam and Petra ten-Doesschate Chu. Research for this chapter was
supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art fellowship program at the
Smithsonian American Art Museum and the College of the Holy Cross senior
fellowship program.

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chapter 2
Jefferson’s Interest in China and the Gongs of

Monticello
Jennifer Milam
In March 2016, it was announced on the website of Monticello, Thomas

Jefferson’s plantation estate in Albemarle County, Virginia, that the “Chinese-
inspired” panels forming the railings of the terraces (figure 2.1) would be
replaced with a design closer to a traditional English paling fence.1 An initia-
tive of the Mountain Top Project, which aims to “restore Monticello as Jefferson
knew it,” the decision to remove the reproduction Chinese railings, installed
in the late 1930s, was based on extensive research into Jefferson’s drawings
and notes (figure 2.2), in tandem with rare views of Monticello painted dur-
ing Jefferson’s lifetime.2 Jane Braddick Peticolas’s and Aaron Vail’s watercolor
views, both dated 1825 (Figs. 2.3–2.5), picture railings on the far side of the
South Terrace that are composed of vertical bars and horizontal rails. The rail-
ings are painted different colors by each artist: Peticolas’s are lighter, closer in
color to other white ornamental features of the house, while Vail used a darker
hue. Early drawings and paintings of Monticello are varied in their representa-
tional choices that determine design details. Inconsistencies of color, number
of steps, and the presence and width of cheek walls have rightly led curators
and archaeologists at Monticello to conclude that these are not precise visual
records but instead include attempts on the part of individual artists to resolve
features considered incomplete, temporary, or less than ideal.3 Irregular and in
conflict with the harmonious geometries and symmetry that characterized the
majority of forms employed in the building’s architecture, the partially railed
1 Gardiner Hallock, “Jefferson’s Terrace Railings to be Reconstructed,” Monticello Blog &

Community (blog), March 3, 2016, https://www.monticello.org/site/blog-and-community/
posts/jefferson%E2%80%99s-terrace-railings-be-reconstructed.
2 The Chinese-style railings were part of the restorations carried out by Milton Grigg at Mon-
ticello in the 1930s and 1940s. See John Metz et al., Monticello Department of Archaeology
Technical Report Series, no. 1 (November 2000); and William L. Beiswanger, “The Corner Ter-
races: A Proposal for Investigation and Restoration,” Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Monti-
cello (unpublished manuscript file, 1997).
3 See Sara Bon-Harper, “Monticello’s West Portico Steps: New Archaeological Evidence,” Mon-
ticello Department of Archaeology Technical Report Series, no. 4 (May 2001): 3–5.

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46 Milam
figure 2.1 South Terrace, Monticello, Charlottesville, VA

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Jefferson ’ s Interest in China and the Gongs of Monticello 47
figure 2.2 Thomas Jefferson, “Notes for Railings on the Terraces,” 1824. Massachusetts
Historical Society, Boston
figure 2.3 Jane Braddick Peticolas, View of the West Front of Monticello and Garden, 1825.
Monticello, Charlottesville, VA

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48 Milam
figure 2.5
Aaron Vail, View of the West Front of
Monticello, ca. 1825. Le musée franco-
americain du château de Blérancourt,
France
space of only one terrace appears to have been a feature of Monticello’s design
in need of resolution.
There are enough consistencies across the early representations of the gar-
den facade to support the proposal that railings did exist on one side of the
South Terrace in 1825. Three years earlier, Jefferson had fallen off the North
Terrace and broken his wrist. This must have alerted him to the need for some
preventative measure to be taken for safety reasons; yet it appears that he did
not install the railings on the terrace where he had his accident. He may have
preferred an open aesthetic for the terraces as viewing platforms out across
the gardens and into the landscape. Railings created an inevitable visual inter-
ruption (figure 2.1). The preference for maintaining open vistas is indicated
by the fact that just one side of one terrace was given a railing. Rather than
suggesting that the project was finished partway, it seems more likely that Jef-
ferson took measures to prevent an accident in the most dangerous section,

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where a fall would have caused the greatest injury. Or, perhaps as Jefferson
advanced in age, he preferred the most minimal use of a railing to be used as
a steadying aide along a favorite section of the terrace walk, which extended
from the greenhouse in his personal suite of rooms out towards the south cor-
ner, and where he could take in the industry of Mulberry Row, the experimen-
tal kitchen garden with its pavilion, and the Blue Ridge Mountains beyond in
a single glance. From this position, Jefferson affirmed his role as master of his
domain.
This restoration project raises some important points for consideration in
an interpretation of how Monticello developed as a space. The first is that
Jefferson was continually modifying his designs at Monticello, so much so
that it is difficult to fix the forms of the place “as Jefferson knew it.” Aesthetic
values in this space were compromised in relation to practical necessities. As
a result, ideas that were designed or imagined but never built are as relevant
to understanding Jefferson’s conception of the landscape as those that were
actually constructed. The removal of the Chinese-inspired railings along the
terraces should not divert attention away from the fact that Chinese forms and
features continued to be of interest to Jefferson at each and every major stage
of building at Monticello. While the incorporation of Chinese latticework rail-
ings would have been a decorative feature, the simple paling fence along one
side of one terrace appears more functional and less significant as an idea. The
second lesson is that while the landscapes of Monticello were largely informed
by Jefferson’s knowledge of European garden traditions and architectural
histories, they were adapted to personal needs, his wide-ranging interest in
other cultures, and the local experience of place.4 Although often overlooked,
relating Jefferson’s interest in China to his incorporation of Chinese references
into the spaces of Monticello and Poplar Forest, his second plantation estate
in Bedford County, Virginia, lends more to our understanding of these spaces
than simply acknowledging the design feature as an imported form of Euro-
pean chinoiserie.
While it now appears certain that Chinese railings were never installed on
(or even contemplated for) the terraces of Monticello during Jefferson’s life-
time, Chinese latticework appeared prominently on the upper roof of the
4 Jefferson’s “Indian hall” is an example of how he put the diversity of his cultural interests on
show at Monticello, partly as an attempt to situate Monticello, North America, and the New
World within a wider universal history of mankind. See Joyce Henri Robinson, “An American
Cabinet of Curiosities: Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Indian Hall’ at Monticello,” Winterthur Portfolio
30, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 41–58, and Elizabeth Chew, “Unpacking Jefferson’s Indian Hall,” Discov-
ering Lewis & Clark (July 2009), http://www.lewis-clark.org/article/3086.

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50 Milam
house.5 The rooftop Chinese latticework is visible in both the Peticolas and
the Vail watercolors. Similar Chinese latticework appeared on the rooftop of
Poplar Forest and as railings on the upper-story terraces of James Madison’s
plantation estate in Orange, Virginia.6 Jefferson also incorporated Chinese lat-
ticework into the backs of benches, designed and constructed for use on Mon-
ticello’s terraces (figure 2.6). An even more resonant Chinese reference was the
gong that Jefferson imported from China and installed on the roof of Monti-
cello in a specially designed gong house that combines classical and Chinese
forms (figures 2.7 and 2.8). In the pages that follow, I consider the extent to
which they are features of a cosmopolitan aesthetic that Jefferson developed
in his thinking about the landscapes of his plantation estates and their rela-
tionship to the rest of the world.7
As a man of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson’s interests in garden
design were both a practical and an aesthetic means through which he explored
his ideas about nature, civilization, and his place in history. His gardens were
deeply personal spaces, but they were not private. Monticello, in particular,
was built as a place to receive visitors. As with other aspects of the plantation
home, the gardens were on show as an extension of the owner’s image. Jef-
ferson’s second planation home, Poplar Forest, received relatively few visitors
and was intended as an “occasional retreat.”8 In this regard, it offered more
5 Chinese lattice railings began to appear in colonial architecture after 1750 and became more
common following the Revolution. Chinese latticework was also common in Chippendale
style furniture produced by American craftsmen in the northern colonies during the 1760s
and 1770s. See Hugh Morrison, Early American Architecture: From the First Colonial Settle-
ments to the National Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952; New York: Dover Uni-
versity Press, 1987), 307 and 315. Therese O’Malley has cataloged a number of features in early
American gardens that she notes were inspired by East Asian forms but were not reproduc-
ing authentic examples. See O’Malley, Keywords in American Landscape Design (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2010), 127.
6 Jefferson and Madison shared design ideas and craftsmen. Gaye Wilson and Anna Berkes,
“James Madison” in Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, revised August 29, 2014, https://www
.monticello.org/site/jefferson/james-madison.
7 On Jefferson’s cosmopolitanism, see: Hannah Spahn, “Thomas Jefferson, Cosmopolitanism,
and the Enlightenment,” in A Companion to Thomas Jefferson, ed. Francis D. Cogliano (Mal-
den, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 364–79; Hannah Spahn, Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); and Peter S. Onuf, “Cosmopolitanism and
Nationhood in the Age of Jefferson: Epilogue,” in Cosmopolitanism and Nationhood in the Age
of Jefferson, eds. Peter Nicolaisen and Hannah Spahn (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter,
2014).
8 Thomas Jefferson to Elizabeth House Trist, April 27, 1806, Bixby Collection, Missouri His-
torical Society, St. Louis, MO. Early access transcription available from Founders Online,
National Archives, last modified February 1, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/
Jefferson/99-01-02-3645.

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figure 2.6
Thomas Jefferson, “Benches for
Porticoes and Terraces,” 1801.
The Coolidge Collection of
Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts,
Massachusetts Historical Society,
Boston

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52 Milam
figure 2.7 The Gong House on the roof of Monticello, Charlottesville, VA
figure 2.8
The gong inside the Gong House
on the roof of Monticello,
Charlottesville, VA

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scope for design experimentation and is unique as a garden space. His draw-
ings and writings are filled with notations about plans for the development of
his gardens and plantings at both Monticello and Poplar Forest. These ideas
grew from his knowledge of history and his hopes for the future—of his family,
the nation, and his legacy. Although less is known about James Madison’s ideas
of garden design, the landscapes of Montpelier provide evidence of a similar
engagement with issues of cosmopolitan taste and national identity. Using a
combination of geometric forms and local plantings, Jefferson and Madison
developed what might be termed “trans-Atlantic” responses to the Ameri-
can landscape, which expand upon the cosmopolitan aesthetic of the jardins
anglo-chinois of eighteenth-century Europe.
1 The Trans-Atlantic Landscapes of Monticello, Montpelier, and

Poplar Forest
There is some need to introduce the basic design and history of the garden
spaces at Monticello, Montpelier, and Poplar Forest before returning to the
modest Chinese references within these plantation estates and suggesting how
they operate within the broader context of a cosmopolitan aesthetic emerg-
ing in American garden design during the early nineteenth century, adapted
from design features specific to the jardin anglo-chinois.9 While Monticello is
well known, Montpelier and Poplar Forest are explored far less often, except
as the house museums of the “founding fathers” of the United States. The first
phase of work at Monticello took place between 1768 and 1772, with Jeffer-
son’s earliest ideas for “the park” detailed in his Memorandum Book for 1771.10
His designs at this point were ambitious, with temples, terraces, a grotto, and
cleared ground for a deer park. He proposed that a smaller temple at the center
of the graveyard be Gothic (to reinforce the melancholy of the place), while a
larger temple (two stories in height) might be given a Chinese roof—although
he also considered Greek sources as alternatives. Some of these features appear
9 Judy Bullington, “Cultivating Meaning. The Chinese Manner in Early American Gardens,”
in Global Trade & Visual Arts in Federal New England, eds. Patricia Johnston and Caroline
Frank (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2014), 157–79.
10 An excerpt of Jefferson’s plans in 1771 are reprinted in Edwin Morris Betts, ed., Thomas Jef-
ferson’s Garden Book 1766–1824 (Charlottesville: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., 2012),
25–27. See also William L. Beiswanger, “Jefferson’s Designs for Garden Structures at Mon-
ticello,” in “Proceedings of Thematic Sessions of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the
Society of Architectural Historians,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 35,
no. 4 (1976): 310–12.

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54 Milam
in the later garden design (the graveyard, the spring-fed grotto, and clearings
to attract and display animals), but these were more modest in scale, and the
larger temples remained ideas rather than built forms.
Between 1785 and 1789, Jefferson moved to Paris to serve as Minister to
France (1785–89). It was during these years that he visited a number of gar-
dens on the continent and in England, experiencing firsthand a wide range
of European garden styles.11 A comment made in his “Hints to Americans
Travelling in Europe,” written in 1788, suggests that he found English gardens
to be the most appealing.12 But notes made on his tour of specific estates in
England with John Adams during 1784 indicate that he viewed all of the gar-
dens he visited with a critical eye.13 Inspiration came to Jefferson from a wide
variety of sources, and to see Monticello as derived from an English style of
garden design is to underestimate the expansive range of influences and inter-
ests that he developed in his thinking about the landscape. In turn, to dismiss
his engagement with Chinese features as wholly derived from European chi-
noiserie would be similarly remiss.
The second major phase of building at Monticello began in 1794, with
plans for the gardens set down in the following decade, sometime before
1804. These designs are recorded in Jefferson’s notebooks as “General Ideas for
the Improvement of Monticello.”14 Significantly, these new plans called for a
greater integration of the pleasure grounds and ornamental garden features
11 Jefferson mentioned a variety of gardens in his “Notes on a Tour into the Southern Parts
of France, &c. 3 March–10 June 1787,” The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, eds.
Barbara B. Oberg and J. Jefferson Looney (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
2008–15); and “Notes of a Tour through Holland and the Rhine Valley, 3 March–23 April
1788,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified March 20, 2015, http://founders.
archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-13-02-0003. Originally published in The Papers of
Thomas Jefferson, vol. 13, March–7 October 1788, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1956), 8–36.
12 “Jefferson’s Hints to Americans Travelling in Europe, 19 June 1788,” Founders Online,
National Archives, last modified March 20, 2015, http://founders.archives.gov/docu-
ments/Jefferson/01-13-02-0173. Originally published in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol.
13, March–7 October 1788, ed. Julian P. Boyd. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956),
264–76.
13 “Notes of a Tour of English Gardens, [2–14 April] 1786,” Founders Online, National
Archives, last modified July 12, 2016, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/
01-09-02-0328. Originally published in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 9, 1 November
1785–22 June 1786, ed. Julian P. Boyd. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 369–75.
14 The entries under “General Ideas for the Improvement of Monticello” are undated.
The earliest date in the notebook is 1804. See “Monticello: notebook of improvements,
page 1 of 14, 1804–1807, by Thomas Jefferson,” Thomas Jefferson Papers: An Electronic
Archive (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2003), https://www.masshist.org/
thomasjeffersonpapers/doc?id=arch_N171.1.

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into a vision that would allow for the mountain top to be appreciated as a
whole rather than discrete parts. Jefferson began his improvements by call-
ing for the “houses on the Mulberry walk to be taken away, except the stone
house and a ha! ha! instead of the paling along it for an enclosure.”15 Such a
change would have opened up the designed landscape of Monticello to be per-
ceived as part of the natural landscape of Virginia, appreciated and improved
by Jefferson. Monticello was mostly complete by 1809, although work on
the gardens continued until his death in 1826. As an integrated landscape,
Monticello was composed of the house at the center of the estate with the ter-
races extending off to either side, framing the pleasure grounds, and acting as
viewing platforms out onto the working parts of the plantation and the Blue
Ridge mountains beyond.
During the most advanced stage of planning, around 1804, Jefferson con-
templated building “over each angle of the offices the Chinese pavilion of Kew
garden.”16 If built, China would have been far more visible on the grounds of
Monticello than the modest inclusion of Chinese latticework. As cornerstones
of the architectural elements that linked the house to the landscape, such a ges-
ture to Chinese architecture (promoted by William Chambers, who designed
Kew, as authentic) would have been a significant feature of Monticello’s aes-
thetic. In turn, what eventuated as the Chinese features of the estate—the
Chinese latticework on the roof, the gong, and the gong house—should be
explored as elements of Jefferson’s designs that bring the idea of China into
the experience of Monticello, extending the cosmopolitan inferences of those
references and moving our understanding “beyond chinoiserie.” Moreover,
they set Monticello in dialogue with other houses featuring Chinese lattice-
work, designed by Jefferson or influenced by his taste, as well as with the more
expansive use of Chinese references in the decorative arts of the China Trade.17
Montpelier was initially the home built by James Madison’s father on the
family plantation estate in Orange County, Virginia. The house was substan-
tially altered in 1797, when a Tuscan portico was added, and then extended
further between 1809 and 1812 (figure 2.9). Madison retired to Montpelier in
1817. The gardens surrounding the house as Madison knew it involved a num-
ber of notable features that contributed to a cosmopolitan sensibility: the
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 On the relationship between an international visual culture and the developing sense
of the new nation as a commercial empire, see Patricia Johnston and Caroline Frank,
“Emerging Imperial Aesthetics in Federal New England—An Introduction,” in Global
Trade & Visual Arts in Federal New England, eds. Patricia Johnston and Caroline Frank
(Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2014), 1–23.

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56 Milam
figure 2.9 James Madison’s Montpelier, Orange, VA
icehouse, in the form of a classical temple, along a diagonal allée of trees,

stretching northwest from the north terrace extending off Dolley Madison’s
bedroom; a sizeable ha-ha across the tapis vert and behind the house on the
eastern side; ornamental gardens “laid out on the form of a large horse-shoe”
and following the outline of an open hippodrome;18 and the idealized enslaved
workers’ quarters in the South Yard, arranged symmetrically and situated adja-
cent to the western side of the ornamental gardens.19 These features could
be viewed from the terraces, accessed off rooms on the first floor, which were
18 Mary Estelle Elizabeth Cutts Memoir II, [1849–1856], Cutts Family Collection of Papers of
James and Dolley Madison, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, MRD-S 23538.
19 These features have been pieced together through discussions with researchers and
archaeologists at Montpelier, in tandem with unpublished reports prepared for the
Montpelier Foundation: “The Evolution of the Montpelier Landscape,” prepared by
Rieley & Associates in 2002; C. Allan Brown’s remarkable “Montpelier Cultural Landscape
Study: Visualizing the Plantation of James and Dolley Madison,” prepared in 2012; and
Hilarie M. Hicks, Agricultural References in the Montpelier Research Database, research
report prepared December 2012, updated September 2015, MRD-S 41873. I am grateful to
Matthew Reeves, Elizabeth Chew, and Meg Kennedy for the time that they spent with me
walking the grounds, viewing plans and geographical survey materials, and answering my
questions.

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enclosed by Chinese railings. As with the features of Monticello, there are

elements inspired by European garden design, including features that reach
across time and space (the classical temple and the evocation of a hippodrome
in the garden terracing that refer to the ancient world; the ha-ha, the allée,
and the tapis vert that reference modern garden design in England and France)
at the same time that new features specific to the plantation landscape of
Virginia are incorporated (the model slave quarters in the South Yard and the
incorporation of the vista towards Chicken Mountain into the designed land-
scape projecting from the ornamental gardens). When the latticework is seen
as a Chinese-inspired feature, rather than as a straightforward importation of
European chinoiserie, it signals an aesthetic searching for universal values in
the varied forms of different cultures (European, American, Asian). The dis-
tinction here is an awareness that Chinese latticework developed away from its
pattern-book origins to appear as a motif in American landscapes that referred
to China as a source of inspiration. As such, Chinese latticework can be seen to
represent an American interaction with China, through trade and cultural
exchange, that operates on a different level of interpretation.
Jefferson’s Poplar Forest was property he inherited from his father-in-law in
1773. It was at Poplar Forest that he prepared his Notes on the State of Virginia
in 1785 while recovering from a riding accident. He turned his attention to
building at Poplar Forest from 1806 onwards.20 As with the landscapes of
Montpelier and Monticello, the shape of the gardens during Jefferson’s lifetime
has been determined largely through archaeological investigations, references
to building works in Jefferson’s memorandum books and his Garden Book, and
letters written by Jefferson’s granddaughters, who stayed at Poplar Forest on
several occasions.21 The gardens themselves are still the subject of archeologi-
cal survey and restoration, but the main features of the design are known and
follow the general pattern of a geometric circle around the house, which stands
at the center, with an allée of plantings extending from one side and balanced
on the other by a terrace on top of a suite of offices and terminating at each
end in a great mound.22 These planted and built elements combine references
to nature and civilization, primordial growth and complex architecture. As
20 On the early history of Poplar Forest, see S. Allen Chambers Jr., Poplar Forest & Thomas
Jefferson (Forest, VA: The Corporation for Jefferson’s Poplar Forest, 1993), 1–7.
21 I am grateful to Jack Gary for sharing research files and archaeological reports with me at
Poplar Forest.
22 The most thorough analysis of the garden layout is provided by C. Allan Brown in his
article “Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest: The Mathematics of an Ideal Villa,” Journal of
Garden History 10, no. 2 (1990): 117–39. Subsequent archaeological investigations have
shown that the geometry of Jefferson’s lay out was less precise than Brown has argued.

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58 Milam
figure 2.10 Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest, Bedford, VA
at Monticello, the roof is accentuated with Chinese latticework, which con-

trasts with the pure geometries derived from classical architecture (figure 2.10).
The Chinese railings present an alternative and complementary aesthetic
to the ancient history of European building design. They also signal additional
possibilities for interpreting the breadth of cultural references contained
within the designed landscape of the plantation estate, which expand upon
what I refer to as the aesthetic cosmopolitanism of the jardin anglo-chinois.
2 The Jardin Anglo-Chinois in Late Eighteenth-Century Europe
The term “jardin anglo-chinois” is often interpreted as a nationalistic dis-

avowal of French indebtedness to the new style of English landscape gardens
developed by William Kent and Capability Brown.23 It appeared prominently
23 On the proto-nationalist interpretations of Carmontelle’s remarks, see David Hays, “‘This
is not a jardin anglais.’ Carmontelle, the Jardin de Monceau, and irregular garden design
in late-eighteenth-century France,” in Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France,
eds. Mirka Benes and Dianne Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 294–
326; and Brigitte Weltman-Aron, On Other Grounds. Landscape Gardening and Nation-
alism in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2001), 42 and 56. More generally, John Dixon Hunt has considered the continental

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in the volumes prepared by Georges-Louis Le Rouge on Nouveau jardins à la

mode (1775–90), which associated the jardin anglo-chinois with the designs of
William Chambers at Kew and his related publications on the architecture and
gardens of China, claimed by Chambers as authentic representations of Chi-
nese designs acquired firsthand during his travels to China.24 Le Rouge rep-
resented plans and architectural features of the most fashionable European
gardens, including those in England, with volume five providing a translation
of Chambers’s Designs of Chinese Buildings, and volumes 14–17 dedicated to
gardens and pleasure houses of the Emperor of China. In presenting English,
French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Chinese designs within the monumen-
tal series of prints, Le Rouge’s publication projected the idea that no single
culture could claim exclusive creative rights of the latest design principles
informing the irregular gardens that were ordered by fashionable patrons, cre-
ated by leading artists and architects, and discussed by philosophical writers
throughout Europe during the second half of the eighteenth century. These
irregular gardens, as they have come to be called, were filled with classical
temples, Gothic ruins, Egyptian pyramids, Turkish kiosks, Chinese tea houses,
Dutch windmills, miniature farms, and countless other features of fantasy and
play linked by serpentine paths to be experienced on a circuit walk. Jardins
anglo-chinois were cosmopolitan in orientation and did not belong to or in
any one nation. Most of these gardens were produced through a transnational
collaboration between patrons, artists, architects, and gardeners from differ-
ent countries. As Carmontelle noted within the treatise that advertised his
achievements at the Jardin de Monceau, these types of gardens were of “all
times and places.”25 This was a claim for what might be conceptualized as an
experience of visual cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth-century g arden—a
space in which stylistic differences of classical antiquity and “modern”
Europe, the exotic, the familiar, and the foreign were resolved and harmonized
within the circumscribed delimitations of the created landscape.
Through the act of nomenclature, the stylistic phrase “jardin anglo-chinois”
brought together vastly different cultures. Termed in French, but referencing
response to English designs, Carmontelle, and the “world anthology” at Monceau in The
Picturesque Garden in Europe (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 119–2 and chap. 4,
passim.
24 Georges-Louis Le Rouge, Détail des nouveaux jardins à la mode, ed. Iris Lauterbach
(Nördlingen: Verlag Dr. Alfons UHL, 2009). Le Rouge first published the book in Paris from
1775–90.
25 For more on this phrase in garden literature of the eighteenth century, see Jennifer Milam,
“Cosmopolitan Time in the Jardin de Monceau,” Studies in the History of Gardens and
Designed Landscape 36, no. 4 (2016): 282–96.

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60 Milam
both the English and the Chinese, the jardin anglo-chinois claimed a cosmo-
politan artistic identity, in essence disavowing the ability of any one nation
to claim ownership of the creative origin of its forms. Although not created
by Chambers as a jardin anglo-chinois, Kew was clearly viewed by garden
designers, patrons and theorists as the origin of this type. Well-known French
examples with significant “Chinese” features included Monceau and Bagatelle,
situated on the outskirts of Paris. Further variations on the style were found
throughout Europe, including at Tsarskoye Selo in Russia, where Catherine the
Great ordered the most expansive vision of an imaginary China to be built. In
the eighteenth century, these gardens were celebrated as “modern” because
their design principles were theoretically sourced from nature and appeared
to confirm universal standards of taste that could be found in vastly differ-
ent cultures. Such spaces presented to visitors an experience akin to travel,
in which the cultural achievements of distant civilizations in time and place
could be explored and considered in relation to one another. Indeed, in garden
treatises that address the jardin anglo-chinois, the terms “visitor” and “traveler”
were used interchangeably to describe the anticipated end user of the space.
Those by Chambers and the Abbé de Lille particularly reference the author’s
own familiarity with the gardens of different cultures and foreign places. De
Lille’s Les Jardins (1782) glorifies not only the celebrated gardens of his native
France (Chantilly, Chanteloup, Montreuil, Raincy, Le Desert, and Auteuil,
among others) but also those of Germania, Rome, Batavia, Russia, Liberia,
China, and Turkey—in his own words, “spots where Taste unrivalled reigns.”
Neither Chambers nor de Lille intended the West to imitate the East or for
one national model to dominate. Instead, their interest in the foreign was the
cooperative aesthetic interaction that such models promised when injected
into local landscape contexts.
In the space of the jardin anglo-chinois, inhabitants could transport them-
selves out of the temporal and spatial present into a fictive exploration of
familiar and foreign references within the natural landscape. The blending
of European and non-European elements within a natural space in the jar-
din anglo-chinois provided a means through which the cosmopolitan concept
of “a shared humanity” could be explored within the confines of the garden.
Moreover, by enlisting Nature as the guiding feature of new design principles,
the modern landscape garden of the late eighteenth century claimed a unified,
natural language as superior to that which preceded it. Proponents of the new
design claimed that the jardin anglo-chinois was free from the arbitrariness and
conventions evident in the formal Franco-Dutch designs of the seventeenth
century, which continued to dominate the garden spaces of European courts
and noble houses. In contrast to the abstracted, geometric representation of

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divinely ordained power in the seventeenth-century formal style, the jardin

anglo-chinois celebrated the freedom of disorder found in nature. Moreover,
these irregular gardens were attached to fairly recent land acquisitions, espe-
cially in France, or situated on the outskirts of formal garden spaces, and
thereby signaled as retreats from the pressures of city and court life. Both Mon-
ceau and Bagatelle to the north and west of Paris were parcels of land bought
by princes of blood specifically to build pleasure gardens as destinations in
and of themselves. This principle of removal from, rather than extension of,
place gave rise to an appreciation of visual experiences that provoked new and
alternative perspectives on the world. Walking around the duc de Chartres’s
Monceau, for example, the traveler along the garden paths was rapidly moved
between different times and places—from an ancient pyramid, past ruined
Corinthian pillars, on to a pastoral windmill. Similarly, at the comte d’Artois’s
Bagatelle and Catherine the Great’s Tsarskoye Selo, visitors found Eastern and
Western cultural forms alongside those that were artfully natural (such as the
famed Rocher at Bagatelle and the Big Caprice at Tsarskoye Selo).26 Such eclec-
tic compilations of garden ornaments from different times and places enact a
cosmopolitan experience, defined by an interest in and familiarity with many
parts and peoples of the world.
3 “Beyond Chinoiserie” in Colonial and Early Republican America
Recent publications, symposia, and exhibitions have demonstrated the wide

range of chinoiserie objects and architectural details that circulated in the
material culture of colonial and Early Republican America.27 A range of deco-
rative objects commemorated the experience of exotic travel and the China
trade—one example is a fan that illustrates the factories of Canton and
prominently depicts the American flag with the flags of other trading coun-
tries (figure 2.11). These objects not only pictured a faraway place, they also
26 On the cosmopolitan aspects of landscape design at Tsarskoye Selo, see Jennifer Milam,
“Toying with China: Cosmopolitanism and Chinoiserie in Russian Garden Design and
Building Projects Under Catherine the Great,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25 (2012): 115–38.
27 This topic is taken up in chap. 1, “The China Trade and the Classical Tradition in Fed-
eral America.” See also Global Trade & Visual Arts in Federal New England, eds. Patricia
Johnston and Caroline Frank (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2014),
especially chap. 4–9, which address the visual culture of the China Trade; and Carl L. Cross-
man, The Decorative Arts of the China Trade. Paintings, Furnishings and Exotic Curiosities
(Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collector’s Club, 1991). An earlier study that remains useful
for tracing stylistic features is Clay Lancaster, “Oriental Forms in American Architecture
1800–1870,” The Art Bulletin 29, no. 3 (September 1947): 183–93.

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62 Milam
figure 2.11 Fan with foreign factories at Canton, made in China, 1790–1800. Peabody Essex
Museum, Salem, MA
celebrated the direct trade between the new republic of America and China,
which was only established in 1784. Other chinoiserie and Chinese aspects
of material culture circulated in wallpapers and wall coverings, such as the
imported English wallpaper that is still installed in the Jerimiah Lee Mansion
in Massachusetts or the American-made imitation lacquerware with Chinese
figures, dating from the mid-eighteenth-century, installed in the Vernon House
in Newport, Rhode Island.
Outside in the landscape, at the time of Jefferson, a number of estates
incorporated Chinese latticework and Chinese-inspired temples into their gar-
dens. Two examples include the Moses Gill Estate in Princeton and the Josiah
Quincy House on the outskirts of Boston. As Judy Bullington has argued, the
Chinese latticework that ornamented the fences and balustrade of Quincy not
only served to link visually the spaces of the garden to the house but also rein-
forced a connection with the owner’s position as a merchant in the New World.
The monitor level of the house provided a privileged viewing perspective, from
which Quincy would watch the ships sail in and out of Boston harbor, destined
to carry out trade with Canton.28
Perhaps most exemplary of the reception of minor details as reinforcing
an individual’s biographical connection to China is the China Retreat, built
by Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest (1739–1801). Former ambassador
from Holland to China, van Braam immigrated to America with his family in
28 Bullington, “The Chinese Manner in Early American Gardens,” 158–59.

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the 1780s, where he established himself as a rice planter and merchant with
firsthand knowledge of the Old China Trade. He built his China Retreat on the
Delaware River, seventeen miles from Philadelphia, and it is there, as part of
Philadelphia society in the 1790s, that he prepared an account of his embassy
to China. Van Braam was described by Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, who visited
the house, as “at once a Dutch baron and a Chinese Mandarin” who sought
“to flaunt an Asiatic luxury.” The house itself, according to Niemcewicz, was
“decorated with golden serpents in a Chinese manner,” noting also that “six
tabourets of porcelain were arranged in a circle on the peristyle.”29 Another
account from a traveler’s directory in 1802 refers to the China Retreat as in
the style of “East India dwellings,” although by and large the architecture of the
house appears European in origin.30 And William Russell Birch, who included
it in his Country Seats of the United States (1808), described the remarkable
sight of van Braam in a long boat with “eight Chinese in white, trimming their
oars on the water.”31 Van Braam thus animated his landscape with servants who
provided an even more vivid connection between the landscape, the house,
and the owner’s personal biography. Although published after the death of van
Braam, when the house belonged to the Manigaull family, Birch nevertheless
included in his representation a Chinese figure in front of the house, on his
knees and bending over the ground, as if tending to a plant in the front garden
(figure 2.12). In one sense, these servants, real and imagined, are reminiscent
of those that strolled the Jardin de Monceau dressed in Turkish and Chinese
costumes;32 in another sense, they were physical reminders of an authentic
connection between American landowners and the China Trade.
29 Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Under Their Vine and Fig Tree: Travels through America in 1797–
1799, 1805, with Some Further Account of Life in New Jersey, ed. and trans. Metchie J. E. Budka
(Elizabeth, NJ: Grassman Publishing Company, 1965), 62–63.
30 S. S. Moore and T. W. Jones, The Traveller’s Directory or a Pocket Companion … from Phila-
delphia to New York and from Philadelphia to Washington (Philadelphia, 1802).
31 Quoted in William Russell Birch, The Country Seats of the United States, ed. Emily T. Cooper-
man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 78.
32 Milam, “Cosmopolitan Time.” Another late example in Europe, with coincidental ties to
Revolutionary America, is at Mulang. Following the American Revolution, freed black sol-
diers returned with German mercenaries, in the hope of further employment with the
prince of Kassel. The prince, however, had no war at present requiring his mercenaries,
so he put the newly arrived African-Americans as costumed servants in his jardin anglo-
chinois, which included a number of exotic structures, including a “Chinese” village.

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64 Milam
figure 2.12 William Russell Birch, China Retreat, in Country Seats of the United States, 1808
4 Jefferson’s Interest in China
In the early stages of Jefferson’s thinking about models for features in “the park”
of Monticello, there was a vacillation between Chinese and Western antiquity
as sources with which to connect his conception of garden design.33 The roof
of the two-story temple he imagined in 1771 “may be Chinese, Grecian, or in the
taste of the Lantern of Demosthenes at Athens.” The ancient lineage of these
styles may have made them interchangeable in Jefferson’s mind. Thirty some
years later, in the notebook containing his “General ideas for the improvement
of Monticello,” Jefferson mentions a number of features that recall and extend
his earlier ideas: another call to build Demosthenes’s lantern; pavilions (or
“boxes”) along the lower edge of the gardens styled as “specimens” of Gothic
and Chinese, with two others modeled on classical forms, described as the
33 William L. Beiswanger, “A Vision of Cathay at Monticello,” Cincinnati Antiques Festival

(October 1991): 105–09.

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Pantheon and “cubic architecture.”34 The parity of architectural styles in this

proposal is striking, creating a sequence in which the forms of different cul-
tures and periods would have been juxtaposed and appreciated in comparison
with one another. Jefferson also described “a turning Tuscan temple” and “over
each angle of the offices the Chinese pavilion of Kew garden.”35 While Jeffer-
son was familiar with European examples through his own travels to places
where “Roman taste, genius, and magnificence excite ideas,” he was equally
inspired by the examples that he heard and read about in China.36 Jean-Denis
Attiret’s letter, “A Particular Account of the Emperor of China’s gardens near
Pekin” (1749) would have been particularly appealing in this regard. The French
Jesuit missionary remarked upon how few Westerners had seen the emperor’s
gardens at Yuanming Yuan, with only clockmakers and artists, such as himself,
allowed in. Considering Jefferson’s special interest in clocks and garden design,
the comment may have particularly piqued his interest, as would have Attiret’s
cosmopolitan confession that since he took up residency in China, “my eyes
and taste are grown a little Chinese.”37
Jefferson’s knowledge of Chinese architecture was largely derived from his
study of Chambers’s work, including the structures built at Kew and those that
existed only as illustrations in Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furnitures, Dresses,
Machines, and Utensils (1757). At the time Jefferson first thought of construct-
ing a ting (or Chinese pavilion) at Monticello, which he copied from Chambers
sometime before 1784, critics had already launched an attack on these designs
as architectural fantasy, rejecting Chambers’s claims of authenticity based on
his firsthand knowledge of China gained through travel. In spite of this chal-
lenge to the authority of Chambers, his prints remained the most important
visual source for understanding the features of Chinese architecture as an
alternative to Western forms.
34 “Monticello: notebook of improvements,” 1. “Cubic architecture” is most likely a reference

to the forms of the Maison Carrée at Nîmes.
35 Ibid.
36 “From Thomas Jefferson to Madame de Tessé, 20 March 1787,” Founders Online, National
Archives, last modified March 30, 2017, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/
Jefferson/01-11-02-0229. Originally published in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 11,
1 January–6 August 1787, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955),
226–28.
37 Ideas of Chinese Gardens: Western Accounts, 1300–1860, ed. Bianca Maria Rinaldi (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 102. On Jefferson’s fascination with clocks,
see Silvio A. Bedini, “Thomas Jefferson, Clock Designer,” Proceedings of the American Phil-
osophical Society 108, no. 3 (June 22, 1964): 163–80.

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66 Milam
Jefferson’s interest in China extended beyond aesthetic concerns.38 He was

not simply following fashion although he was also not unique in his taste for
chinoiserie and visual elements that inserted a reference to China in the private
sphere. Like his contemporaries, Jefferson’s fascination with China reflected
both his interest in progressing America’s engagement in the China Trade
and China as a civilization that had an ancient heritage and which existed
apart from European influences. In this regard, his interest in China linked
in with his domestic values and political ideals. He owned at least eighteen
books on China, addressing topics from geography and politics to commerce
and poetry.39 He also would have been aware of Chinese gardens, known not
only through Chambers’s publications but also through Attiret’s account of the
imperial garden of Yuanming Yuan, which was included in Dodsley’s Fugitive
Pieces in Jefferson’s library.40 His letters and notes point to an interest that was
more than curiosity, with comments signaling his perception of China as a sig-
nificant imperial power that did not bow to Europe.41
Jefferson respected China as a culture that had the ability to exist in isola-
tion, even at the same time that he pursued American interests in furthering
the China Trade.42 In this context, Jefferson’s efforts to import two Chinese
gongs for use on the plantation of Monticello take on deeper meaning. Jeffer-
son wrote to Henry Remsen in 1792 to see if a gong could be obtained from a
vessel that was voyaging to the East Indies. He described the object he desired
as a bell “which they call a gong” and is used at the “gates of large houses.” He
wished to obtain a gong for Monticello “to serve as the bell to a clock, which
might be heard all over my farm.”43 Remson replied that a Captain Smith
“tells me that the Gong is used as a bell in China, and that one of its uses is
38 Dave Wang, “Thomas Jefferson’s Incorporating Positive Elements from Chinese Civiliza-
tion,” Virginia Review of Asian Studies 145 (2012): 143–57.
39 Further information about Jefferson’s libraries and a searchable database can be found at
https://www.librarything.com/profile/ThomasJefferson.
40 I am grateful to Edrina Tay at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation for sharing with me the
list she compiled of Jefferson’s books on China (dated November 11, 2015). The books he
owned included Chambers’ s Designs of Chinese Buildings … (1757) and Attiret’s account.
Jefferson’s 1783 catalog includes Chambers’s Dissertation of Oriental Gardening (1772), but
it is not clear whether or not he owned a copy.
41 In a letter dated October 13, 1785, sent by Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp from
Paris, Jefferson noted: “You ask what I think on the expediency of encouraging our states
to be commercial? Were I to indulge my own theory, I should wish them to practise nei-
ther commerce nor navigation, but to stand with respect to Europe precisely on the foot-
ing of China. We should thus avoid wars, and all our citizens would be husbandmen.”
42 Alfred Owen Aldridge, The Dragon and the Eagle. The Presence of China in the American
Enlightenment (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), chap. 6.
43 Ibid.

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to announce the approach of certain mandarins in their visitations thro’ the

streets, being carried before them & beaten on with a bamboo or other stick.”44
Jefferson was successful in obtaining two gongs, which he incorporated
into the soundscape of Monticello. One of these gongs reportedly hung from
a tree and was used to summon the people living and working at Monticello
(enslaved people, free tradesmen, and members of Jefferson’s own family),45
like mandarins of the streets of a Chinese village, as Jefferson had described
their use in his original letter requesting the import.46 The other gong remains
today in its original place on the roof of the house as the sonic feature of the
Great Clock, housed in a structure that combines classical and Chinese forms.
While Jefferson’s aim was undoubtedly functional—to enhance a sense of
order and control over life at Monticello—the reference to China was heard
on a regular basis, raising the memory of its reported use in Chinese villages
and as evidence of America’s engagement with the China Trade. The gong dis-
placed the function normally reserved for its European equivalent, the bell, but
it was not merely an adoption of a Chinese custom. The use of the gong with
the clock was a novel combination, as was its use to call servants and guests to
assemble. Jefferson adapted the gong from his perception of its “traditional”
use (to announce the arrival of the mandarin) to become part of daily life and
routine at Monticello, an audible signal that became enmeshed with the local
environment. Unlike other design elements used in the house or garden, which
might only be seen by certain classes of residents or guests, the sound of the
gong reached every corner of the plantation, measuring and marking time for
all inhabitants regardless of their status. In this way, the sound was a univer-
sal, shared experience, woven into the fabric of everyday life and an enduring
reminder of Jefferson’s engagement with China.
While Chinese pavilions modelled on Kew were not built on the corners
of the terraces, a pavilion was constructed within the wider landscape to
44 “To Thomas Jefferson from Henry Remsen, 19 November 1792,” Founders Online, National
Archives, last modified March 30, 2017, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/
Jefferson/01-24-02-0623. Originally published in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 24,
1 June–31 December 1792, ed. John Catanzariti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990),
640–41.
45 Margaret Bayard Smith, “Recollections of a Visit to Monticello,” Richmond Enquirer, Janu-
ary 18, 1823.
46 “From Thomas Jefferson to Henry Remsen, 13 November 1792,” Founders Online, National
Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-24-02-0591, last updated
March 28, 2016. Originally published in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 24, 1 June–31
December 1792, ed. John Catanzariti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 616–17.

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68 Milam
figure 2.13 Garden pavilion, Monticello, Charlottesville, VA
evoke the temple of a Chinese philosopher in idea, if not in style (figure 2.13).47
Like the first plans that Jefferson made for a two-story temple on one of the ter-
races in “the park,” and subsequent plans for four pavilions or “boxes” in Gothic,
Chinese, and Roman styles to be disposed in the pleasure grounds, Jefferson
imagined the structure as a simple cube with a pyramidal roof surmounted
by Chinese lattice railings. As the building did not survive and no drawings
have been found, the reconstruction is based on archaeological findings and
Jefferson’s notes, which maintained his earlier interests in planting into the
47 “Monticello: garden pavilions and notes on styles of architecture (removed from farm
book), page 3 of 3, circa 1807–1809, by Thomas Jefferson,” Thomas Jefferson Papers: An
Electronic Archive (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2003), http://www.masshist
.org/thomasjeffersonpapers/doc?id=arch_N182.1.

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space of Monticello a mixture of Western and Eastern forms, pure geometries

and irregular patterns. Henry Gilpin, who visited Monticello in 1827, a year
after Jefferson’s death, found the temple to be a ruin. In describing the purpose
of this temple, however, Gilpin noted that it had been “a favourite spot with
[Jefferson] to read and sit,” recalling the contemplative purpose of temples in
Chinese gardens and the grottos and temples of philosophy inserted into the
jardin anglo-chinois.48 Whether or not the Chinese latticework railings around
the top of the reconstructed garden pavilion are an accurate restoration of the
pavilion as built, they prompt an understanding of the landscape of Monti-
cello in relation to a cosmopolitan aesthetic established first in the jardins
anglo-chinois of Europe and extended into the American landscape through
more modest Chinese-inspired and Chinese-imported inclusions.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the staff at Monticello and the International Center for

Jefferson Studies for providing access to the gong house and suggestions
for my research while I was a Peter Nicolaisen International Fellow in residence
at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. Conversations
with Christa Dierksheide and Eleanor Gould were particularly helpful. I am
indebted to Petra ten-Doesschate Chu for her close reading and editing of my
first draft. Research for this chapter was supported by an Australian Research
Council Future Fellowship and a Peter Nicolaisen International Fellowship
from the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
Bibliography
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sophical Society 108, no. 3 (June 22, 1964): 163–80.
Beiswanger, William L. “A Vision of Cathay at Monticello,” Cincinnati Antiques Festival
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Beiswanger, William L. “Jefferson’s Designs for Garden Structures at Monticello.” In
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48 Ralph D. Gray, ed., “A Tour of Virginia in 1827: Letters of Henry D. Gilpin to his Father,”
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 76, no. 4 (1968): 467.

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70 Milam
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35, no. 4 (1976): 310–12.
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Hays, David. “ ‘This is not a jardin anglais.’ Carmontelle, the Jardin de Monceau, and
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29, no. 3 (September 1947): 183–93.
Le Rouge, Georges-Louis. Détail des nouveaux jardins à la mode, ed. Iris Lauterbach.
Nördlingen: Verlag Dr. Alfons UHL, 2009. First published 1775–90 by Le Rouge
(Paris).
Milam, Jennifer. “Cosmopolitan Time in the Jardin de Monceau.” Studies in the History
of Gardens and Designed Landscape 36, no. 4 (2016): 282–96.
Milam, Jennifer. “Toying with China: Cosmopolitanism and Chinoiserie in Russian Gar-
den Design and Building Projects under Catherine the Great.” Eighteenth-Century
Fiction 25 (2012): 115–38.
Moore, S. S., and T. W. Jones. The Traveller’s Directory or a Pocket Companion … from
Philadelphia to New York and from Philadelphia to Washington. Philadelphia, 1802.
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tions, 1987.
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by Metchie J. E. Budka. Elizabeth, NJ: Grassman Publishing Company, 1965.

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sity Press, 2010.
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Cosmopolitanism and Nationhood in the Age of Jefferson, edited by Peter Nicolaisen
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chapter 3
Copying in Reverse: China Trade Paintings on Glass

Maggie M. Cao
In 1802, Philadelphia painter Gilbert Stuart made the unfortunate discovery

that his lucrative business in George Washington portraits—painted replicas of
a 1796 original that he sold to patriotic Americans for $100 a piece (figure 3.1)—
had been undercut by a local China trader. The culprit was John E. Sword, the
captain of a merchant vessel recently returned from Canton, who was also sell-
ing the familiar Washington portraits, though not in the American artist’s hand
(figure 3.2). According to the lawsuit brought against him by Stuart, Sword had
purchased an authenticated portrait the year before and taken it to China for
the purpose of procuring “above one hundred copies … by Chinese artists” to
sell for profit.1
Commodities made in China and consumed in the West (whether authentic
or counterfeit) have become so ubiquitous in recent decades that it may be
tempting to heap all the connotations of today’s “Made in China” moniker onto
Sword’s surreptitiously obtained copies. However, such manufacturing prac-
tices were only in their infancy in 1802, and personal entrepreneurial ventures
like Sword’s never aspired to the scale of industrial production. Indeed, early
American consumers largely viewed Chinese-made goods as markers of exoti-
cism and worldly refinement. A decade earlier, George Washington himself
had procured “a very genteel set” of porcelain from Canton: 302 pieces, each
hand-painted with an emblem signifying a Revolutionary War fraternity (prob-
ably copied from a bookplate or other printed matter).2
1 On the Stuart-Sword case, see E. P. Richardson, “Notes and Documents: China Trade Portraits
of Washington after Stuart,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 94 (January
1970): 95–100; Winnie Wong, “After the Copy: Creativity, Originality and the Labor of Appro-
priation: Dafen Village, Shenzhen, China (1989–2010)” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, 2010), 90–100; Egon Verheyen, “ ‘The most exact representation of the Original,’:
Remarks on the Portraits of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart and Rembrandt Peale,” in
Retaining the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies, and Reproductions Studies, ed. Kathleen
Preciado (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 127–40; and Dorinda Evans, The Genius
of Gilbert Stuart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 86, 148–49.
2 Henry Lee Jr. to George Washington, July 3, 1786, in The Papers of George Washington, Confed-
eration Series, ed. W. W. Abbott, vol. 4, 2 April 1786–31 January 1787 (Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 1995), 147–49.

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Copying in Reverse: China Trade Paintings on Glass 73
figure 3.1 Gilbert Stuart, George Washington, ca. 1803,

oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, Gift of H. O. Havemeyer, 1888
(88.18)
Since copyright protection did not yet extend to images, Chinese copies of
Western artworks were hardly limited to the Washington portrait.3 Stuart may
have judged the practice as unethical (he would eventually win his case on a
contract technicality that halted further circulation of the imported pictures),
but at their site of production on the other side of the globe, the making of
such pictures was much more than a simple case of forgery for profit. As net-
works of capital and material exchange reshaped the maritime globe, what did
Chinese craftsmen—the silent reproducers of artworks like the Washington
portrait—understand about their role in imitating and redistributing the cul-
tural products of the West?
3 Winnie Wong challenges the status of the Chinese paintings of Washington as “copies” and
Stuart’s multiplies as “originals” in “After the Copy,” 90–100.

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74 Cao
figure 3.2
Chinese artist (after Gilbert Stuart),
Portrait of George Washington,
1800–05, reverse painting on glass.
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem
1 The Picture Business in China
Between 1757 and 1842, when Canton (present day Guangzhou), a busy port
located at the mouth of the Pearl River, was the sole port of international trade
in China, the city was a veritable artistic center, boasting an estimated 250,000
people employed in craft professions. While trade in high-volume commodi-
ties (tea, nanking cotton, silk, and, to some extent, porcelain) was handled by
supercargoes in negotiation with government-appointed representatives of the
merchant guild, an informal art market emerged alongside it in the city’s for-
eign quarter. By 1822, some five thousand shops and studios had been erected
in the vicinity of the thirteen foreign factories or exchange buildings. Limited
to this foreign quarter beyond the city’s walls, visiting officers and merchants,
generally high-ranking members of a vessel’s crew, frequented these shops
during the six months of the year when trade was permitted. After the close of
the trading season, they either returned to their home countries or retreated
to the Portuguese outpost of Macao.4
4 On the artisan workshops of Canton and the culture of the city’s foreign quarters, see
H. A. Crosby Forbes, Shopping in China: The Artisan Community in Canton, 1825–1830 (Inter-
national Exhibitions Foundation, 1979); Kee Il Choi Jr., ed., The China Trade: Romance and

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For these European and American clients, Canton’s export art studios
replicated a wide array of foreign artifacts.5 Artisans might paint by hand a
bookplate’s coat of arms onto a set of porcelain dishes or reproduce an entire
suite of hardwood furniture from prototypes. These “privileged ephemera”—
goods purchased by private traders outside the official international trade
system—found their way into European and American homes through both
private networks and curiosity shops in Western port cities.6 Painting in Canton
operated much like other crafts, with large workshops offering a combina-
tion of ready-made goods and custom commissions. Such workshops catered
to Western demands, even though their output was not entirely Western in
subject matter. Even export paintings depicting Chinese life and culture were
executed in Western or hybrid techniques and mediums. As Winnie Wong has
argued, this eighteenth-century practice of painting in the Western manner
marks the beginning of a long tradition in the Pearl River Delta that contin-
ues to this day at sites such as Dafen Village in Shenzhen, now the world’s
largest production center for handmade oil paintings.7 “Trade paintings,” as
Wong calls these works, utilize the very forms of artistic appropriation at the
center of conceptual art practices around replication. This chapter builds on
Wong’s insight that export painting, both historical and present-day, is char-
acterized by artistic entrepreneurship and mobility coupled with rapid image
circulation—conditions that problematize notions of authorship, originality,
and authenticity.8 As painters for hire working at the intersection of cultures,
Reality (Lincoln, MA: DeCordova and Dana Museum and Park, 1979); and Francis Ross Car-
penter, The Old China Trade: Americans in Canton 1784–1843 (New York: Coward, McCann &
Geoghegan, 1976). On the trade system in China and its history, see Paul A. Van Dyke, The
Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast 1700–1845 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Uni-
versity Press, 2005), and W. E. Cheong, The Hong Merchants of Canton: Chinese Merchants in
Sino-Western Trade (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 1997).
5 The most thorough surveys of Chinese export art are Carl L. Crossman, The Decorative Arts
of the China Trade: Paintings, Furnishings and Exotic Curiosities (Woodbridge, UK: Antique
Collectors’ Club, 1991); R. Soame Jenyns, Chinese Art III, rev. ed. (New York: Rizzoli, 1982);
Craig Clunas, ed. Chinese Export Art and Design (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1987);
and David Sanctuary Howard and Richard Ashton, A Tale of Three Cities: Canton, Shanghai &
Hong Kong: Three Centuries of Sino-British Trade in the Decorative Arts (London: Sotheby
& Co, 1997).
6 Anthony Farrington quoted in Kee Il Choi Jr., “Painting and Porcelain: Design Sources for
Hong Bowls,” in A Tale of Three Cities: Canton, Hong Kong and Shanghai: Papers Delivered
to a Symposium Held at Sotheby’s Institute on 25th and 26th January 1997, ed. Caroline Bloch
(London, Sotheby’s Institute, 1997): 38.
7 Winnie Wong, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2014).
8 The term “trade painting” best describes the practice of painting in the Western style as it is
a translation of the Chinese “hanghua,” used colloquially in modern Shenzhen’s painting in-
dustry. The first character, “hang,” means (alternatively) profession, industry, trade, business,

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76 Cao
the artists replicating Stuart’s Washington portrait likely subscribed to nei-

ther Western nor classical Chinese understandings of the copy. Nevertheless,
their work was embedded in what I will suggest is a richly developed theory of
reproduction.
Export painting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a largely
anonymous practice documented by Western consumers, not Chinese pro-
ducers. In Western accounts of Canton’s export art workshops, the language
of mechanization is pervasive. After visiting the studio of the reputed “best
painter at Canton,” a mid-nineteenth-century Frenchman concluded that “the
picture business in China is immense.” Inside the busy workshop, he found a
wall hung full with portraits at various stages of finish in the master’s hand
and a group of twenty youths copying drawings where a “system of division
of labor is faithfully practised.”9 Since the artists’ own accounts of workshop
practices and conditions of patronage are missing from the historical record,
my ambition is not to make definitive claims concerning the social realities
of artisans in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Guangzhou. Rather, I pro-
pose that historically specific theories of reproduction can be found embed-
ded in visual artifacts. I contend that the complexities of export art as a unique
form of craftsmanship are best articulated in a particular medium decidedly
associated with the China Trade: reverse painting on glass. In the hands of
export painters, reverse painting on glass was transformed into a sophisticated
medium for making sense of the copy.
2 The Mechanics of Reproduction
Reverse-painted glass is a type of oil painting done on the back of flat glass
panels and viewed framed from the unpainted side. Its key characteristics are
glossy, crystalline color and an appearance of fluidity bordering on wetness.10
Several factors make this a theoretically rich medium in the export art context
and firm, and in the middle and late Qing period, this same term is used to refer to the
thirteen factories and the guild of merchants who governed them. In this chapter, I will
stick to the term “export art” because, while not as faithful to the Chinese, it more accu-
rately describes the intercultural transactions that are at the center of my argument.
9 “Art in China” (translation from the Paris Artiste), Bulletin of the American Art-Union,
no. 7 (October 1850): 118–19.
10 On the materiality of reverse painting on glass and its history across the globe, see Rudy
Eswarin, ed., Reverse Glass Paintings on Glass: The Ryser Collection (Corning, NY: Corning
Museum of Glass, 1991) and Graham Child, World Mirrors 1650–1900 (London: Sotheby’s
Publications, 1900), 361–386.

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of Canton. First, the transparency of glass made the medium a natural choice
for copying, the stock and trade of Canton’s export artists. In the decades
around 1800, painted glass was commonly used by Chinese artists to depict
non-native subjects, often copied after Western artworks—sometimes paint-
ings like Stuart’s Washington but more often prints. The nineteenth-century
British traveler Charles Toogood Downing recorded seeing in Canton “a great
many prints from Europe … brought hither by the officers of the vessels, who
exchange them for native drawings, or frequently for the copy which is taken
of them.”11 It is no coincidence that the development of glass painting in Can-
ton coincided with the rapid transoceanic circulation of printed images and
other portable artifacts. In such a context of object circulation, it grew into
a medium ideally suited for the purposes of manual replication. Second, the
history of glass painting in China grants it unique potential as an export art.
Early references to the medium date to mid-seventeenth-century Beijing, coin-
cident with the Jesuit introduction of Western technologies and artistic media
to the imperial court.12 But by the 1750s, glass painting had migrated to Canton,
where it grew in tandem with East-West maritime trade. While other export art
mediums were either viewed as particular to Eastern traditions (such as porce-
lain or watercolor and ink drawing) or marked as inferior to Western examples
(such as oil on canvas), glass painting was an exception. An Englishman in 1836
noted that the Chinese are “very famous for their paintings on glass. This is
an art which is almost lost in Europe, but is very successfully practiced in this
country.”13 In the hands of Canton’s artists, glass painting, despite its Western
roots, was perfected to an unprecedented degree far exceeding the European
models on which it was once based. The rapid flowering of glass painting in
China is a surprising curiosity. In early modern Europe, the art form princi-
pally remained a local practice concentrated in glass manufacturing regions,
whereas in Canton it thrived despite geographical and material odds. Not only
was high-quality sheet glass for paintings imported from Europe rather than
locally manufactured, its fragility made it particularly unsuitable for the long
transoceanic journeys it endured.14 In many ways, the very foreignness of oil
paint and glass must have prompted Chinese artisans to engage in intense
innovation and experimentation.
11 C. Toogood Downing, The Fan-Qui in China in 1836–7, 3 vols. (London: H. Colburn, 1838),
2:94.
12 Either artistically skilled missionaries or European painters at court could have initially
trained local artists in oil painting on glass, though little evidence remains of the trans-
mission of artistic knowledge.
13 Downing, Fan-Qui in China, 2:111.
14 On the history of glass technology in China, see Child, World Mirrors, 361–86.

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78 Cao
Despite the overwhelming tendency of Westerners to dismiss Chinese art-

ists as “mere servile imitators” who “exercise no judgment of their own,” glass
painters were keenly aware of copying processes and their theoretical implica-
tions through their experimentation with their medium.15 As a technology of
reproduction, reverse painting on glass, with its unique material conditions,
enabled Chinese painters to engage their foreign viewers in complex visual
games oriented toward the procedures and effects of reproduction.
At first glance, it is easy to see why Westerners perceived glass paintings as
rote, exacting replicas exhibiting what foreigners called “the most wonderful
fidelity.”16 They were most often to-scale renderings of highly complex compo-
sitions executed with a meticulous amount of detail. In one of the few signed
Chinese glass paintings to survive, Madonna and Child with Joseph, the artist
Fatqua painstakingly replicated not just the religious subject but also the pro-
totype picture’s black and red decorative mat, executing both with the same
intensity and exactitude (figure 3.3). Yet, despite their look of simple mimicry,
reverse paintings on glass have a complex relationship to their models. The
Chinese artist who reproduced François Boucher’s Jupiter and Calisto on glass
(figure 3.4), for instance, was many times removed from his “original.” He would
have worked from René Gaillard’s print after Boucher (figure 3.5). In doing so,
he had to actively translate print to painting, line to color, and paper to glass.
As the name reverse painting on glass suggests, this process of translation
involved a series of pictorial inversions. The first of these is left-right reversal,
or the composing of paintings as mirror images of their models. Because the
painter worked on a transparent support, he could naturally begin his copying
mechanically, tracing the print through the glass sheet laid directly over it. Yet,
in order to render the finished painting in the correct orientation, the glass
painter had to turn over the glass to fill in a now-reversed composition free-
hand from sight. (Any guiding lines from the tracing would eventually be erased
from the unpainted side.) A Chinese watercolor documenting the process
shows an artist painting on a horizontal glass surface with an original framed
print hanging vertically before him (figure 3.6). The composition on which he
works is flipped left to right: the foliage on the right of the original print is on
the left in the unfinished copy. This compositional flipping had to be managed
15 John Barrow, Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations and Comparison
(London, 1804). The increase in print copies may have been spurred by the fad for transfer
prints on glass in Europe.
16 Barrow, Travels in China, 327 and Sir George Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Em-
bassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, vol. 3 (London, 1798).

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figure 3.3 Fatqua, Madonna and Child with Joseph, ca. 1820, reverse painting on glass
carefully, especially in the case of text, which was typically preserved in

the glass images copied after inscribed prints.
In its techniques of reversal, the practice of painting on glass shares in the
logic of printmaking, in which the matrix (the plate or block) also generates
reversed images. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western printmakers,
often adept at such skills as mirror writing, had to conceive of and construct
their images in reverse—so the finished artwork was not immediately visible to
the artist during the plate’s production. Like glass painters, they used tricks that
involved various forms of tracing. Yet, despite these shared technical s trategies,
printmaking and reverse-glass painting occupy opposite ends of the spec-
trum of reproducibility. While printmaking is a mechanical process designed

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80 Cao
figure 3.4 Chinese artist, Jupiter and Calisto, ca. 1770, reverse painting on glass
figure 3.5 René Gaillard, after Francois Boucher, Jupiter et Calisto,

engraving published by Buldet in 1760

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figure 3.6
Chinese artist, A Glass Painter,
ca. 1790, watercolor and ink on
paper. Victoria and Albert
Museum, London
to create multiples from an original (Gaillard turning a Boucher painting into

many engravings), reverse painting on glass is a manual process for turning
multiples (often prints) into singulars.17 Indeed, glass paintings tend to bear an
uncanny resemblance to the unseen paintings on which the prints were based.
Although the print source was almost certainly monochrome, the Chinese art-
ist’s Jupiter and Calisto recalls the bright, saturated palette typical of Boucher’s
paintings.18 Chinese art replicas on glass thus constitute a complicated return
to originality. Western travelers buying such artifacts often marveled at the
“skill of the Chinese artisan” in transforming any print into an “exact colorful
and handsome painting directly under glass.”19 So, despite their status as “copy,”
Chinese glass paintings after prints were likely valued for their manual, rather
than mechanical, means of production and, by extension, their singularity.
Glass paintings may best be conceptualized as copies-in-reverse. Their pro-
duction involved not only a physical but also a temporal inversion of its closest
artistic relative, oil on canvas or panel (which the same artists also produced).
Since the image on glass is rendered on what is technically the back of the
support, artists had to start by painting the finest details closest to the surface
before gradually moving toward the background. This means that in Jupiter
17 This is not to say that printmakers were not themselves skilled craftsman engaged in
complex procedures of translation. My distinction is based on the difference between
printing as a mechanical process resulting in a final product that is machine-made and
painting as a manual process resulting in a product that bears the artists mark directly.
18 It is worth noting that this print prototype was likely uncolored, given the 1770 date,
though some prints used as models in China certainly were. I am grateful to David Pullins
for sharing his expertise on eighteenth-century prints after Boucher with me.
19 Barrow, Travels in China, 327. Emphasis mine.

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82 Cao
and Calisto, details like the jeweled crown and highlights on the drapery would
have been the first marks set down on the glass, while the background clouds
and shadowed pool would likely have been the last. Such protocols for work-
ing on glass counteract the very material advantages of oil paint as a medium,
namely its potential for building subtle contours by layering lighter colors
atop darker ones and for revision by overpainting. While a painter on canvas is
able to alter his composition with each successive layer, the painter on glass
is checked by the transparency of his support. Even the subtlest highlight had
to be planned out in advance, thus precluding compositional improvisation
or correction. Glass thus transforms oil paint from a flexible medium into an
obstinate one.
With its system of reversal, glass paintings are most successful if worked
from existing images. Even “original” compositions of Chinese subjects may
have been copied from models, since export art studios were known to execute
the same compositions in a variety of mediums. According to Western textual
accounts and corroborated by visual evidence from Chinese renderings of
such spaces, export art studios were packed full with display samples so that
foreign consumers could select from a repertoire of images when not engaged
in custom commissions. For glass painters, a model image ideally offers a spa-
tial and temporal road map for execution, compensating for the otherwise
counterintuitive process dictated by their medium. Yet paradoxically, rather
than promoting rote replication, the same rigid protocols enforced a distance
between the original and copy. Manual copying requires an artist to constantly
compare her imitation to a referent, looking between the model and the rep-
lica to calibrate each successive mark. This feedback loop is not available to
painters on glass, who had to work on doubly inverted images. Moreover, as
the layers of paint build up, background covering foreground, so too the com-
positional guides (the original tracing made through the glass) are overwrit-
ten and obliterated, resulting in a double erasure. Inherent in glass paintings,
then, is a tension between tracing and painting, mimicry and invention. As a
result, complex pictures like the Jupiter and Calisto tend to break down at the
edges of the work—those final layers added at the later stages of the paint-
ing’s progressive ossification. At the upper and left edge of the glass, the foliage
becomes more and more homogenized compared to elsewhere in the compo-
sition. Other details also tend to dissolve, perhaps those judged as superfluous
by the Chinese painter, who is a formal rather than iconographic reader of the
model print. The group of putti and the eagle identifying the figure on the right
as Jupiter are entirely absent, while the hunting still life, key to the intended
narrative of seduction (in which Jupiter assumes the guise of Diana the Hunt-
ress), melts away into a collection of vague geometric forms. Not surprisingly,

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the Chinese glass paintings most faithful to their models were portraits, the
Western genre that most clearly communicates its point of focus.
3 Mirror Images and Mobile Goods
The glass painters of Canton were not copyists but what I would call practi-
tioners of reproduction. As masters of the technical complexities of their pro-
cess, they were also its most thoughtful critics. In many cases, their paintings
make efforts to showcase the technical reversals that defined their procedures
of copying. In a Chinese-made rosewood cabinet of circa 1800, twinned glass
paintings decorate the cabinet doors, one a mirror image of the other (figure
3.7). The painter’s subject is the Incan Temple of the Sun, a theatrical subject
originally painted in 1800 by the British artist William Orme. The Chinese
painter worked from Orme’s mezzotint, which includes the royal dedication
copied onto two smaller upper panels. The painting on the left cabinet door
replicates the orientation of the mezzotint, while the one opposite it reverses
the original source image. The doubling lends visual symmetry to the furniture
piece but also points to the painter’s own procedures, preserving the marks of
reversal through a deliberate collapsing of replication and reflection.
The same visual play animates a class of glass paintings from the period
painted on actual mirrors. Much like sheet glass, European-made mirrors
were brought to Canton by maritime trade vessels.20 To paint on mirror, artists
scraped off the silvering on the back of the glass in areas where paint would
take its place. The often-whimsical compositions of mirror paintings reveal an
intentional and strategic deployment of that support’s inherent reflectivity. In
a 1780 depiction of Mrs. and Miss Revell in Chinese costume, the artist has
organically incorporated a large section of mirror as the sky of the landscape
surrounding the figures (figure 3.8). The painted trees and Chinese architec-
tural features surround the mirrored space like a sinuous decorative border.
The likeness of the two sitters, the wife and daughter of Henry Revell, super-
cargo of the British East India Company, would not have been taken from life
(as women were forbidden from entering Canton) but from existing paintings,
copied in reverse. Most examples of Chinese mirror paintings are constructed
in this format, with large sections of silvering preserved as the “background” of
a figural work, often of Western or Chinese figures in a landscape. Such com-
positions allow the paintings to continue functioning as decorative mirrors
20 I should note that glass and mirrors were being produced domestically at this time, but
they tended not to be clear or thick enough for painting.

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84 Cao
figure 3.7 Chinese export rosewood cabinet with reverse glass paintings, ca. 1800

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figure 3.8 Chinese artist, Portrait of Mrs. and Miss Revell in a

Chinese Interior, ca. 1780, reverse painting on glass.
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem. AE85763
once hung. This strategy preserves the mirror’s reflectivity in such a way that
painters could give their pictures a degree of witty self-referentiality. Since the
support never ceases to reflect the features of anyone who stands before
the artwork, it constantly stages the literal reversal of its viewers as they see
their own image in the mirrored landscape.
In rarer cases, glass painters manipulated the silvering of their supports
to represent actual mirrors within their compositions. In a genre scene of a
Chinese scholar’s study, a small mirror appears next to the drapery on the right
edge (figure 3.9). A roundel framed in red, it hangs on a shelf next to other dec-
orative objects made of lacquer, porcelain, and paper. Yet unlike these other
objects, which are painted in oil, the mirror is rendered with a small patch of
reserved silvering (silvering that also remains in the area behind the seated
female figure). The round mirror is a tiny detail with great weight. Its reflectiv-
ity of ambient light immediately draws the viewer’s attention to the right edge
of the composition. There, it echoes in color and shape the prominent medal-
lion in the upper arch—a resonance that, notably, would have been planned
meticulously in advance given the technical confines of the medium. Even

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86 Cao
figure 3.9 Chinese artist, Chinese scholar and student in an interior, ca. 1790,
reverse painting on glass. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem. AE86517

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the very smallness of the mirror is calculated, for it is sized such that a viewer
leaning in for a careful look (at a distance of eight or ten inches from the sur-
face) will see just her own eye reflected back. This startling return of the gaze
restages the kind of confrontation a viewer might have with another familiar
portable artifact of the period—the eye miniature.
Fashionable throughout Europe from the late 1780s to about 1830, these
precious watercolor paintings of single eyes on tiny roundels of ivory circu-
lated widely during the height of glass picture production in Canton. These
handheld objects grew out of the much older tradition of portrait miniatures,
bejeweled watercolor likenesses exchanged between intimates to seal familial,
romantic, or other sentimental bonds.21 Though subject to the same patterns of
interpersonal circulation as miniature portraits, paintings of eyes, as Hanneke
Grootenboer has argued, belong more properly to a history of vision than of
portraiture. The painted eye is not so much a representation of a partial face,
she argues, as a representation of the gaze, one that turns the spectator into an
object on view and under watch.22
In the Chinese painting of the interior with mirror, the reflective medal-
lion does precisely this: reproducing the gaze even more explicitly than the
eye miniature it imitates. It aggressively turns the spectator’s vision back on
herself, activating what Marcia Pointon has called the “gazing game” that ani-
mated eighteenth-century sociability.23 The artist’s installation of a mirror to
mimic an eye miniature also speaks to the centrality of such artifacts for the
practices of export painting. The traffic of likenesses—in the form of small,
lightweight paintings designed for travel—far exceeded that of actual persons
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly in the highly
gendered mercantile world. Chinese artists had a deep familiarity with min-
iatures and worked with them on a regular basis, creating replicas on ivory or
copying them into larger portraits or genre compositions. The limitations of
working from miniatures is, in fact, evidenced in many finished export por-
traits, particularly of women. Typically, the most refined brushwork is limited
to the facial features alone, giving them a unique cut-and-paste quality.24 Even
21 On the social function of miniatures, see Marcia Pointon, “ ‘Surrounded with Brilliants’:
Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England,” Art Bulletin 83 (2001): 48–71.
22 Hanneke Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century
Eye Miniatures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
23 Pointon, “ ‘Surrounded with Brilliants,’” 68.
24 Most scholarship on China trade portraiture focuses on attributions of authorship rather
than on their unique formal qualities. See, for instance, Patrick Conner, “The Enigma of
Spoilum and the Origins of China Trade Portraiture,” Antiques 153, no. 3 (March 1998),
418–25.

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88 Cao
portraits painted from life of captains and other high officials share this visual
trait of detailed heads sitting awkwardly atop stock bodies, suggesting that
the emergence of a Canton style of portraiture may have been conditioned
by the procedures involved in translating between mediums.
At their most complex, reverse paintings on glass offer meditations on repli-
cation in the export arts more generally. Their makers not only utilized the por-
table goods trafficking between East and West in their studio practice but also
represented them in finished artworks. Miniature portraits and prints were not
only visual models but themselves pictorial subjects. In a piece commissioned
by the China trader Andreas van Braam Houckgeest, an allegorical figure is
shown surrounded by the mobile artifacts at the root of export art production.
The figure (certainly copied from a European print source) holds in her hands
a gold-rimmed medallion bearing the portrait of van Braam’s wife Catharina
(figure 3.10). While the medallion is significantly larger than an actual minia-
ture, it is styled as such—suspended from a gold chain like the jewelry pieces
into which miniatures were often installed. It thus mimics the very miniature
that the artist must have used to render this portrait onto glass.25 Moreover, the
portrait was deliberately placed below a reflective surface of reserve silvering
that engages the spectator in a parallel practice of picturing himself. Thema-
tized in the image, then, is also the technical means of painting on glass, since
the reversals involved in copying are enacted through the viewer’s recognition
of his reflection.
The painting also includes a monochrome maritime scene below the alle-
gorical figure’s feet. By rendering this image in grisaille onto a forward-facing
architectural feature, the artist maintained the linear, tonal qualities of the
image’s printed source. It reads not as an architectural detail but as a print, just
as the gold-framed medallion reads as a miniature. The effect is not one of an
image copied to another medium but an ink-on-paper engraving presented as
such. Furthermore, its maritime farewell iconography of two women lament-
ing the departure of a sailing vessel frequently appears on export paintings on
glass, since such objects often served as personal mementos to buyers far from
home.
Lastly, the glass painting also features what is likely a Persian carpet and
incense burner, which, when itemized alongside the miniature and the print,
presents a diverse inventory of maritime commodities that connected China
to the rest of the globe. In its own way, the painting is both a pastiche (what
25 For the history of van Braam’s involvement in the China Trade, see Jan van Campen, “Chi-
nese bestellingen van Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest,” Bulletin van het Rijks-
museum 53 (2005): 18–41.

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figure 3.10 Chinese artist, Portrait of Catharina van Braam Houckgeest, ca. 1790, reverse
painting on glass. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
export art is often pejoratively labeled) and a commentary on the procedures

of pastiching required of export painters by their clients.
Records are scarce on the extent of collaboration between Western patrons
like van Braam and Chinese painters working on commissioned pieces. Van
Braam was a Dutch-American merchant with a lifelong involvement with
the Dutch East India Company (voc). He eventually became the director of the

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90 Cao
Dutch factory, or exchange post, in Canton. After joining the Dutch ambas-
sador Isaac Titsingh on a journey to Beijing to visit the imperial capital in 1794
(a site generally off-limits to merchants), he published the official account
of the ambassador’s journey and established his authority as an expert on
the Chinese kingdom. The elaborate multivolume album featured text from
Titsingh’s journal and over two thousand images, including van Braam’s own
drawings and those he commissioned from two Chinese painters in C anton.
While employed by the voc, van Braam avidly collected Chinese goods and con-
ducted a brisk private trade of Chinese exports, which he bought and sold out-
side of the company system. Later in life, when he settled outside Philadelphia,
van Braam built a Chinese-style estate, which included a museum dedicated to
showcasing his album drawings as well as his large collection of Chinese export
artifacts. His glass painting’s meditation on the global circulation of artifacts
would thus have been visually meaningful to foreign audiences encountering
it within a collection of other export wares. More than other China traders
of his time, van Braam would have been particularly knowledgeable of the
workshop model operating within the Canton trade system, which perhaps
propelled him to commission a glass painting so thoughtful about the goods
and processes of reproduction. However, we know that van Braam had little
creative input in the complexity of the painting’s composition, as his piece is
a near-replica of an earlier extant glass painting, likely from the same studio,
which featured a plain, mirrored surface rather than a portrait in the central
medallion.26 The earlier version of the painting was installed in a cabinet door
of a Chinese-made writing desk produced for an unspecified Dutch merchant
or captain. Van Braam’s version was thus a replica many times over, showcasing
not just the objects of maritime circulation but their multiplication through
manual reproduction.
For the Chinese artists who developed painted glass into such a sophisti-
cated medium, both oil paint and sheet glass were unfamiliar materials. Such
novel technologies must have seemed a particularly fitting means for visual-
izing and exploring modern conditions of communication and exchange. As
practitioners of reproduction, glass painters sought to encode the doublings,
reversals, and reflections that defined their work. In the best instances, they
produced artworks that directly engaged with the implications of reproduction
for cultural others. In other words, the artists who copied the infamous George
Washington portrait onto glass many times over were not simply engaged in
26 On van Braam’s collection of Chinese artifacts, see C. H. Carpenter, “The Chinese Collec-
tion of A. E. van Braam Houkegeest,” Magazine Antiques 105 (February 1974), 388–347.

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a rote manual exercise, because their medium itself was anything but simple.
Indeed, the very technical complexities of reverse paintings on glass were also
the source of their intelligence. Export painters refashioned Western artworks
and, in that process, redefined copying as a form of reverse reconstruction
oriented toward originality. More so than the myriad other artifacts that left
Canton for the West, reverse painting on glass revealed and metonymically
enacted the China Trade’s conditions of reproduction.
Bibliography
Barrow, John. Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations and Comparison

(London, 1804).
Carpenter, C. H. “The Chinese Collection of A. E. van Braam Houckegeest.” Magazine
Antiques 105 (February 1974), 338–47.
Carpenter, Francis Ross. The Old China Trade: Americans in Canton 1784–1843 (New
York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1976).
Cheong, W. E. The Hong Merchants of Canton: Chinese Merchants in Sino-Western Trade
(Richmond, UK: Curzon, 1997).
Child, Graham. World Mirrors 1650–1900 (London: Sotheby’s Publications, 1900).
Choi, Kee Il, Jr. “Painting and Porcelain: Design Sources for Hong Bowls.” In A Tale of
Three Cities: Canton, Hong Kong and Shanghai: Papers Delivered to a Symposium
Held at Sotheby’s Institute on 25th and 26th January 1997, edited by Caroline Bloch,
38–68. London, Sotheby’s Institute, 1997.
Choi, Kee Il, Jr. The China Trade: Romance and Reality (Lincoln, MA: DeCordova and
Dana Museum and Park, 1979). Exhibition catalog.
Clunas, Craig, ed. Chinese Export Art and Design. London: Victoria and Albert Museum,
1987.
Conner, Patrick. “The Enigma of Spoilum and the Origins of China Trade Portraiture.”
Antiques 153, no. 3 (March 1998): 418–25.
Crossman, Carl L. The Decorative Arts of the China Trade: Paintings, Furnishings and
Exotic Curiosities. Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1991.
Downing, C. Toogood. The Fan-Qui in China in 1836–7. 3 vols. London: H. Colburn, 1838.
Eswarin, Rudy, ed. Reverse Glass Paintings on Glass: The Ryser Collection. Corning, NY:
Corning Museum, 1991.
Evans, Dorinda. The Genius of Gilbert Stuart. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999.
Forbes, H. A. Crosby. Shopping in China: The Artisan Community in Canton, 1825–1830.
Washington, DC: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1979.

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Grootenboer, Hanneke. Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century

Eye Miniatures. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Howard, David Sanctuary, and Richard Ashton. A Tale of Three Cities: Canton, Shanghai
& Hong Kong: Three Centuries of Sino-British Trade in the Decorative Arts. London:
Sotheby & Co, 1997.
Jenyns, R. Soame. Chinese Art III. Rev. ed. New York: Rizzoli, 1982.
Lee, Henry, Jr. “Henry Lee Jr. to George Washington, July 3, 1786.” In The Papers of George
Washington, Confederation Series, edited by W. W. Abbott. Vol. 4, 2 April 1786–31 Janu-
ary 1787, 147–149. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.
Pointon, Marcia. “ ‘Surrounded with Brilliants’: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-
Century England.” Art Bulletin 83 (2001): 48–71.
Richardson, E. P. “Notes and Documents: China Trade Portraits of Washington after
Stuart.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 94 (January 1970): 95–100.
Staunton, Sir George. An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Brit-
ain to the Emperor of China. Vol. 3. London, 1798.
Van Campen, Jan. “Chinese bestellingen van Andreas Everardus van Braam Houck-
geest.” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 53 (2005): 18–41.
Van Dyke, Paul A. The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast 1700–1845.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005.
Verheyen, Egon. “ ‘The Most Exact Representation of the Original,’: Remarks on the Por-
traits of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart and Rembrandt Peale.” In Retaining
the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies, and Reproductions Studies, edited by Kath-
leen Preciado, 127–140. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1989.
Wong, Winnie. “After the Copy: Creativity, Originality and the Labor of Appropriation:
Dafen Village, Shenzhen, China (1989–2010).” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, 2010.
Wong, Winnie. Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2014.

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chapter 4
Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Art from China, and

Nineteenth-Century French Painting
Kristel Smentek
In December 1838, on the eve of the First Opium War (1839–42), the French art
critic Étienne-Jean Delécluze published “Studio of a Chinese Painter” (“Atelier
d’un peintre chinois”), an article on painting in China.1 That he did so might
surprise historians of European art, for whom Delécluze is best known as a
standard-bearer of nineteenth-century classicism, a stance that may seem
incompatible with a serious interest in Asian art.2 Yet in this and a handful of
other texts, Delécluze emerges as a guarded admirer of Chinese art, one who
not only wrote about it but also actively acquired works on paper from China.
According to the inventory of his estate taken in 1863, “12 boxes containing
Chinese drawings” and a number of woodblock-printed Chinese books were
the only non-European works of visual art he owned.3
Delécluze’s engagements with art from China indicate a more complex
aesthetic position than the defensive classical stance sometimes attributed
to him. They are also suggestive of the ways in which constructions of a
European classical tradition, elaborated over the course of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, were subtly negotiated in relation to images and crafted
1 Étienne-Jean Delécluze, “Atelier d’un peintre chinois,” Revue française 10 (December 1838):
272–85. The text was also issued as an offprint in 1839. Though Delécluze’s publications on
Chinese art were cataloged by his biographer, Robert Baschet, they were not addressed by
him nor, to my knowledge, have they been studied by subsequent art historians. Baschet’s
book, E.-J. Delécluze, témoin de son temp, 1781–1863 (Paris: Boivin, 1942), remains the fullest
account of Delécluze’s career.
2 As Andrew Shelton has summarized, Delécluze is “now generally regarded as the principal
spokesman for the artistic rear guard throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.”
Andrew Carrington Shelton, Ingres and his Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005), 29.
3 His probate inventory, taken on July 20, 1863, listed “douze cartons contenant des dessins
chinois,” “trente sept livres brochés, manuscrits chinois,” and a volume of woodcuts from
China. ET/LVIII/856, ouvrages d’art, nos. 137–39, Archives nationales, Paris. The same docu-
ment records “deux volumes anglais traduits du Chinois” among the books bequeathed to his
nephew, the artist Étienne Adolphe Viollet-le-Duc, brother of the architect, Eugène-Emmanuel
Viollet-le-Duc, who was also Delécluze’s heir.

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94 Smentek
objects from afar. Art from China, historically construed by European art his-
torians and sinologists as utterly different from “Western” art, would seem to
have no place in this conceptualization. Delécluze’s studies of Chinese artistic
traditions suggest otherwise; they are only startling (and have been rendered
largely invisible to historians of art) because of the discipline’s longstanding
construct of China as Europe’s Other.4
What has made it surprising for art historians, myself included, to discover
that a nineteenth-century critic like Delécluze sought out art from China? In
part, it is the product of the art-historical formation of the categories “Chinese
art” and “chinoiserie.” Under the rubric “Chinese art,” a category that emerged
in the nineteenth century, five thousand years of diverse artistic production in
China are cast as a continuous and homogenized totality wholly different from
the Western tradition.5 Chinoiserie, by contrast, generally refers to the Euro-
pean appropriation of Asian materials and motifs, primarily in the decorative
arts. Interpreted as an alternative or direct challenge to European classicism,
it is a phenomenon commonly understood to have reached its apogee in the
eighteenth century.6 Yet the term chinoiserie first came into widespread use
in France in the 1830s, and it took on increasingly pejorative connotations as
France’s imperialist ambitions in Asia intensified.7 Like the assumption of dif-
ference embedded in the concept of Chinese art, the disparaging overtones
of chinoiserie and its conventional association with superficiality and with
4 On Western art history’s othering of Chinese art, see, among others, Richard Vinograd, “Pri-
vate Art and Public Knowledge in Later Chinese Painting,” in Images of Memory: On Remem-
bering and Representation, eds. Susanne Küchler and Walter Melion (Washington, DC: Smith-
sonian Institution Press, 1991), 176–202; Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern
China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 11–18; Jonathan Hay, “Toward a Theory of
the Intercultural,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 35 (Spring 1999): 5–9; and Jonathan Hay,
“Foreword,” Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West, eds. Petra ten-
Doesschate Chu and Ding Ning (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015), viii–ix.
5 Craig Clunas, Art in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 9. See also his Pictures and
Visuality, 11–18.
6 On chinoiserie and classicist aesthetics in the eighteenth century, see David Porter, Ideo-
graphia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2001); and David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2010).
7 The earliest mention I have found of the term is in a text by the inveterate coiner of neolo-
gisms, the utopian socialist Charles Fourier, Sommaire du Traité de l’association domestique-
agricole ou, attraction industrielle (Paris: Bossange, 1823), 1416. By 1834, an Italian columnist
disdainfully remarked on the Chinese taste gripping Paris and on the novel word “chinoise-
rie,” invented to describe it. See “Mode,” L’eco giornale di scienze, lettere, arti, mode e teatri 7
(August 4, 1834): 372. Around the same time, the term began to appear in such literary texts as
Honoré Balzac’s L’Interdiction, first published in 1836, and Théophile Gautier’s orientalizing
poem “Chinoiserie,” published in La Comédie et la mort in 1838.

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Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Art from China, and French Painting 95
knickknacks and bibelots obscures the range of art from China available to
interested eighteenth- and nineteenth-century viewers and the variety of
responses it elicited.
Delécluze is a compelling guide to the complexity of those responses. His
texts on art from China exemplify the deep ambivalence that attended the
Euro-American formation of the category of “Chinese art” and the position-
ing of China as Europe’s Other. At the same time, Delécluze approached the
works from China he discussed as art rather than ethnography.8 His interests in
China’s artistic traditions thus point to interpretations of nineteenth-century
Sino-European encounters that move us beyond chinoiserie to a consideration
of the subtle impact of China’s long history and cultural achievements on con-
structs of Europe’s own artistic heritage.
Delécluze’s work suggests that well into the nineteenth century, China
hovered at the edges of European disputes over the continuing relevance of
Greco-Roman art for contemporary artistic practice. China’s great antiquity
had exercised eighteenth-century European biblical scholars, enlightenment
thinkers, and art theorists alike. Many had rejected China’s long history as
exaggerated, denied its technological achievements, and derided its art. For
thinkers interested in world history and the comparative study of antiquities,
however, China and its cultural productions could not be so easily dismissed,
and eighteenth-century antiquarians struggled to situate China and its art in
their universal histories. For some nineteenth-century writers rallying to the
defense of Classical antiquity and the European artistic traditions consciously
founded upon it, China’s long history and its established traditions of painting
both challenged and validated European claims for artistic exceptionalism.
For Delécluze, Chinese painting (as he understood it) offered a cautionary
tale of artistic stagnation and thus served as a convenient foil to the assumed
superiority of European conventions. His work also demonstrates, however,
how “authentic” art from China could be mobilized to defend the aesthetics of
European classicism and was worthy of attention in its own right.
8 On the classification of Chinese objects in nineteenth-century France, see Ting Chang,
Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Farnham: Ashgate,
2013); and Geneviève Lacambre, “Art or Ethnography: The Histories of some Far-Eastern
Objects from the Louvre, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brest,” in Twenty-First-Century
Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Art: Essays in Honor of Gabriel Weisberg, eds. Petra ten-
Doesschate Chu and Laurinda S. Dixon (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 171–79.

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96 Smentek
1 “Studio of a Chinese Painter”
In 1838, when Delécluze published “Studio of a Chinese Painter,” he had been

the art critic for the daily Journal des débats for almost sixteen years. He had
initially trained as a history painter, entering the studio of Jacques-Louis David
in 1797. There his fellow students included Jean-Dominique Ingres, an artist
whom, like David, Delécluze would champion over the course of his career.
Delécluze publicly exhibited his canvases at the Salon from 1808 until his
final showing in 1814, when his entries included one of his few extant paint-
ings, The Emperor Augustus Rebuking Cornelius Cinna for His Treachery (figure
4.1). Shortly thereafter, he abandoned his artistic ambitions, devoting himself
instead to a career as a novelist, Renaissance historian, and a prolific critic of
theater and art.9 In addition to his reviews for the Journal des débats, Delécluze
contributed longer texts on the visual arts to other journals including L’Artiste,
the Revue des deux mondes, and the Revue française, where his article on
painting in China appeared. He published several book-length studies on art,
including his own treatise on painting, Précis d’un traité de peinture in 1828, and
the text for which he is best known, his biography of David, Louis David, son
école et son temps, in 1855. In 1856 he produced an extended review of the Expo-
sition Universelle of 1855 entitled Les Beaux-arts dans les deux mondes en 1855.
By his own account, Delécluze’s article on Chinese painting was prompted
by his reading of a newly published English eyewitness report on a painting
studio in Canton (present-day Guangzhou) and his recent encounter with
an illustrated seventeenth-century treatise on painting from China. The Eng-
lish text was the surgeon C. Toogood Downing’s travel account The Fan-Qui
in China in 1836–7, printed in London in 1838, and the studio the doctor
described belonged to Lamqua (Guan Qiaochang, 1801–ca. 1860).10 Delécluze
described Lamqua, the nineteenth-century Chinese portraitist most familiar
to us now, as the “most capable painter in Canton.”11 As he emphasized, the
9 For Delécluze’s account of his abandonment of painting, see Journal de Delécluze 1824–
1828, ed. Robert Baschet (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1948), 373–75; and Richard Wrigley, “All
Mixed Up: Étienne-Jean Delécluze and the théâtral in Art and Criticism,” in Art, Theatre
and Opera in Paris, 1750–1850: Exchanges and Tensions, eds. Sarah Hibberd and Richard
Wrigley (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 225.
10 C. Toogood Downing, The Fan-Qui in China in 1836–7, 3 vols. (London: Henry Colburn,
1838). Downing’s description is part of his chapter on painting in China in 2:87–117.
11 “[Le] plus habile peintre chinois de Canton en ce moment,” Delécluze, “Atelier,” 273. On
Lamqua, see Patrick Conner, “Lamqua: Western and Chinese Painter,” Arts of Asia 29, no. 2
(March–April 1999): 46–64, and Carl L. Crossman, The Decorative Arts of the China Trade.
Paintings, Furnishings and Exotic Curiosities (Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collector’s Club,
1991), 72–105. See also Stephen Rachman, “Memento Morbi: Lam Qua’s Paintings, Peter
Parker’s Patients,” Literature and Medicine 23, no. 1 (2004): 134–59.

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figure 4.1 Étienne-Jean Delécluze, The Emperor Augustus Rebuking Cornelius Cinna for
His Treachery, 1814. The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, England
doctor had witnessed Chinese painters at work, and he thus offered rare, cred-
ible insight into their practice. For that reason alone, his work was worthy of
translation into French. Delécluze’s larger goal, however, was to compare
Downing’s observations with the evidence of the treatise on painting pub-
lished in China over a century earlier. In so doing, Delécluze hoped to present
a more accurate account of the practice and the state of painting in China than
Europeans currently held.
Condensing Downing’s thirty-page account into just over five pages,
Delécluze was necessarily selective. He omitted the surgeon’s most derogatory
claims, focusing instead on his more descriptive passages, and he occasionally
took the liberty of elaborating on or refuting Downing’s assertions. Delécluze
translated the entirety of Downing’s report on the layout of Lamqua’s studio.
The ground floor housed the shop, and on the second floor Lamqua’s assis-
tants executed pictures in Chinese modes and materials or copied European
prints in oil or watercolor. The master himself worked in the portrait studio on
the top floor. Delécluze retained Downing’s lengthy descriptions of the works
for sale in the shop, the materials (notably ink and paper) from which they
were made, the methods used in their execution, and the artists’ use of printed

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98 Smentek
European and printed Chinese prototypes. Here Delécluze elaborated by add-

ing a few descriptive sentences based on the treatise he would subsequently
discuss. Delécluze left out most of Downing’s assessments of the “deficiencies”
and the “want of taste” of the painters he witnessed, and he ignored the doc-
tor’s belittling references to “the very defective state of the art of painting in a
country so highly civilized as China” and to the painters themselves as “these
children of Han.”12 He chose not to translate Downing’s passage on the absence
of perspective in the paintings executed by Lamqua’s assistants and instead
concluded his extract by nuancing Downing’s claims. In response to the sur-
geon’s declaration that the greatest and “most repugnant” defect of Chinese
art is the “total ignorance” of shading, Delécluze injected a note of cultural
relativism by adding the phrase “relative to the taste and theory that regulate
this art in Europe.”13
In his article, Delécluze claimed he had been studying examples of painting
from China for some time. Some works were in his own collection and some
in the Bibliothèque Royale.14 Among those in the royal library were albums
Delécluze described as recently acquired from Lamqua’s studio. What kinds
of paintings he actually saw, however, is difficult to determine. By his own
account, the Chinese works he owned included “several Chinese compositions
in which the disposition of the groups of figures and their attitudes would not
dishonor any European artist,” but the description of Chinese drawings in his
probate inventory is too summary to be of help.15 The works he identified as
from Lamqua’s atelier are equally uncertain. Among the items acquired by the
Bibliothèque Royale in the early nineteenth century were albums depicting
the production of tea, porcelain, and lacquer, themes typical of China trade
painting. No works attributed to Lamqua are recorded in the early nineteenth-
century inventories of the library’s print room (where China trade paintings
continue to be housed), though albums attributed to his brother Tinqua (Guan
Lianchang) entered the library in 1849.16
12 Downing, The Fan-Qui, 2:102, 105, 109.

13 Downing, The Fan-Qui, 2:103; “Relativement au goût et aux doctrines qui régissent cet art
en Europe.” Delécluze, “Atelier,” 278.
14 The sole volume of Chinese paintings offered at Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc’s estate
sale is perhaps suggestive of the kinds of paintings Delécluze owned. This was a volume
bound in red silk of Chinese paintings on rice (sic) paper, representing the emperor and
empress and court dignitaries in ceremonial costume. Catalogue des livres composant la
bibliothèque de feu M. E. Viollet-le-Duc (Paris: A. Labitte, 1880), 108, no. 802.
15 “Je possède même plusieurs compositions chinoises dont la disposition des groupes et
l’attitude des figures ne feraient tort à aucun artiste européen,” Delécluze, “Atelier,” 285.
16 My discussion here is based on Anne Gall’s inventory of the Chinese collections in the
Bibliothèque nationale de France’s (hereafter referred to as BnF) print department.

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Delécluze’s excerpt from The Fan-Qui laid the foundation for his discussion
of an illustrated seventeenth-century treatise from China he identified as the
Hoa-Tchouen or “Tradition of the Art of Painting.” From his lengthy description
of its format and contents, the text he consulted can be identified as an early
edition of the Mustard Seed Garden Manual (Jieziyuan Huazhuan or Jieziyuan
Huapu), an identification confirmed by the composite illustration added to
an extract of Delécluze’s article published in the Magasin pittoresque in 1848
(figure 4.2).17 The Mustard Seed Garden Manual was a handbook for the study
of Chinese painting first published in Nanjing in two installments in 1679 and
1701. Delécluze mistakenly believed the book was first printed in 1681, perhaps
because of his translator’s misunderstanding of the dates of the Kangxi emper-
or’s rule. The book was reissued multiple times thereafter in China and Japan,
and it remains in print today.18
The copy of the Mustard Seed Garden Manual Delécluze consulted was in
the “rich Chinese library” of Stanislas Julien, the sinologist whom the critic met
in 1831 and upon whom he relied for his translations.19 From 1831 Julien held
the chair of Chinese language and literature at the Collège de France, a chair
first founded in 1814, and from 1839–63 he was conservateur adjoint of Chinese
manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Royale.20 Soon after their meeting, Delécluze
began to actively promote the sinologist’s work in the Journal de débats, starting
Unlike earlier inventories of the library’s Chinese holdings, it includes provenance infor-
mation: “Inventaire avec indication de provenance des collections d’albums, d’estampes
et de peintures chinoises du Département des Estampes” (typescript, Paris, 1990).
17 “Sur la peinture en Chine. Atelier d’un peintre chinois contemporain. Traité de peinture
composé par un chinois en 1681,” Magasin pittoresque 16 (March 1848): 113–117. The accom-
panying illustration is a composite of images printed in part 1, juan 4 of the Mustard Seed
Garden Manual.
18 The first installment of the Mustard Seed Garden Manual was issued in the eighteenth
year of Kangxi’s reign (1662–1722). On the complicated publication history of the manual,
see A. K’ai-ming Ch’iu, “The Chieh Tzu Yän Hua Chuan (Mustard Seed Garden Painting
Manual): Early Editions in American Collections,” Archives of the Chinese Art Society of
America 5 (1951): 55–69; see also Chun-shu Chang and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang, Crisis
and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century China: Society, Culture, and Modernity in Li
Yü’s World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 123–25nn147–50. For an Eng-
lish translation, see Mai-mai Sze, The Tao of Painting: A Study of the Ritual Disposition of
Chinese Painting with a Translation of the Chieh tzu yüan hua chuan or, Mustard Seed Gar-
den Manual of Painting, 1679–1701, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).
On late Ming painting manuals, see J. P. Park, Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the
Leisure Life in Late Ming China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012).
19 Delécluze, Souvenirs de soixante années (Paris: Michel Levy Frères, 1862), 479–80.
20 As required, Julien sold his library to the Bibliothèque Royale upon taking up his post
there, but I have been unable to identify his copy of the Mustard Seed Garden Manual. It
is likely one of the editions in the BnF’s collection of Chinese books. Albums of paintings

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100 Smentek
figure 4.2 “Sketches Taken from an Old Chinese Treatise on Painting.” Magasin
pittoresque, March 1848

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with a discussion, published in the paper in August 1832, of Julien’s translation

of the Yuan dynasty drama The Circle of Chalk.21 He continued to publicize
Julien’s efforts over the next few decades, encouraging him in particular to
translate the Chinese-language texts on art he encountered.22 Delécluze him-
self translated a short story, “The Water Lily of Ying Lee,” recounted in English
by Downing in The Fan-Qui. Delécluze’s version was serialized in the journal
L’Artiste in 1839 and published independently the same year.23
Julien was one of the few people in Paris who could read Chinese characters,
and his verbal translations of the manual’s texts were critical to Delécluze’s
understanding of it. Delécluze wrote that he was astonished to learn that the
book was a treatise on painting—here was evidence of an established art
theoretical discourse in China—and a visual compendium of conventions of
picture making based on the best practices and models of ancient and modern
times (figures 4.3–4.5). The edition Delécluze consulted consisted of two parts.
The first was comprised of five juan, or fascicles, and corresponds to the part
1 of the Mustard Seed Garden published in 1679. The first juan contained texts
on the general principles of landscape painting and the preparation of colors.
The second focused on models of trees, the third on mountains, the fourth
on people, animals, and buildings, and the fifth reproduced fan and album
leaf landscape compositions by exemplary painters. The second part of the
book, described by Delécluze as consisting of eight cahiers containing models
of trees, plants and fruits, and examples of the selected works of great land-
scape painters, corresponds to the eight juan of parts 2 and 3 of the Mustard
Seed Garden Manual, published in 1701 (though Julien claimed that they, like
the first part, were published in 1681). Delécluze described the dexterity with
which the representations of trees, mountains, and landscapes were executed
in the Chinese treatise. He found the drawing superior to that on porcelain
or in the paintings he had encountered so far, and he admired their exacti-
tude and their economy of line. Though unenthused by the representations
of figures and of animals in the manual, he was particularly intrigued by the
acquired by the library from Julien and now in the print room are listed in Gall, “Inven-
taire,” 92.
21 Delécluze, “L’Histoire du Cercle de Craie,” Journal des débats (August 18, 1832), n.p.
Delécluze would later claim that his encounter with Julien’s text was the catalyst for
his own project to bring a sense of the “philosophy, laws and customs of the Orient,” as
revealed by translations, to the public’s attention. Delécluze, Souvenirs, 479.
22 See, for example, Delécluze’s account of Julien’s translation of Chinese texts on porcelain
production in the Journal des débats, January 10, 1855, n.p.
23 Delécluze, Le lys d’eau de Ying-Li; nouvelle chinoise (Paris: Lacrampe, 1839). It was also pub-
lished in L’Artiste: Journal de la literature et des beaux-arts, 2e série (1839) no. 22:313–16 and
no. 23:331–34.

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102 Smentek
figure 4.3 “Book of Trees.” From Mustard Seed Garden: a Chinese Painter’s Manual.
Brooklyn Museum
depiction of space in the prints. Their spatial consistency visually countered

the claims made by Downing and others that the Chinese did not understand
perspective. For Delécluze, the prints in the Mustard Seed Garden Manual
demonstrated that although painters in China did not apply the science of
perspective, they understood its art and used the principle of diminution to
indicate distance. The closer the figures, buildings, or landscape elements were
to the high horizon line, the smaller they were.
Delécluze compared the techniques used in the Mustard Seed Garden
Manual to what he would later describe as “peinture claire” in Italian art. In
Delécluze’s formulation, “peinture claire,” characterized by outline, mini-
mal shading, and imperfect perspective and exemplified by the best of the
fifteenth-century German and Italian masters, preceded the “peinture modelée”
of Masaccio, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto. Chinese art as exemplified by the

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figure 4.4 “Book of Rocks.” From Mustard Seed Garden: a Chinese Painter’s Manual.
Brooklyn Museum
manual was at the earlier stage of artistic development: “I will go so far as to

say that in our exhibitions at the Louvre we frequently see paintings, which,
when it comes to perspective at least, are no more developed than those of
the Chinese.”24 The absence of shading and cast shadows was the complaint
most frequently made by Europeans about painting from China—Delécluze
himself had inserted the sentence “modeling is entirely unknown to them”
24 “Je ne crains pas même avancer qu’à nos expositions du Louvre on y voit souvent des tab-
leaux qui, sous le rapport de la perspective au moins, ne sont pas plus forts que ceux des
Chinois.” Delécluze, “Atelier,” 282. Elsewhere Delécluze traced a lineage from “peinture
claire,” exemplified by Cimabue, Giotto, van Eyck and Memling, to the “peinture modelée”
of Masaccio, Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, to the “peinture noire” of seventeenth-century
Italian and Spanish painters. Delécluze, Exposition des artistes vivants (Paris: Comon,
1850), 159.

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104 Smentek
figure 4.5 Model landscape composition. From Mustard Seed Garden: a Chinese Painter’s
Manual. Brooklyn Museum
in his translation of Downing’s account—but Delécluze cautioned his read-

ers to recall that Giotto, Fra Angelico, and Holbein (the “Swiss Raphael”) also
depicted their figures without shading or shadows.25 He specifically singled
out Holbein’s portrait of Anne of Cleves in the Louvre as a comparative exam-
ple. Delécluze reminded his readers that ancient paintings found in Naples,
presumably those found in Herculaneum and Pompeii, were conceived and
executed using the same system, one he implied was preferable to subsequent
artistic developments in Europe. Obliquely referencing the recently opened
Musée espagnol in the Louvre, Delécluze argued that there was no reason
25 “Le modelé leur est entièrement inconnue,” Delécluze, “Atelier,” 278; for Delécluze’s dis-
cussion of Holbein, see “Atelier,” 282.

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whatsoever to paint pictures burdened with half-tints and black shadows, pic-
tures he would later disparage as “peinture noire,” as did the Carracci, Zurba-
ran, Ribera, and many others. Given the choice, Delécluze would opt for the
Chinese system, “which seeks to improve” (qui tend à amélioration), over that
of the students of the Carracci (a category which presumably included some
nineteenth-century French Romantics), which “destroys art.”26 Nearly twenty
years later, in 1856, he would pay a similarly backhanded compliment to Chi-
nese conventions in a discussion of nineteenth-century Realist painters and
their antecedents: “if I had to choose between Zurbaran’s monk where only the
nose is illuminated, and a Chinese painting where cast shadows are not even
expressed, I would choose the latter.”27
Delécluze’s comparison between painting from China and that of European
artists like Giotto and Holbein continued analogies made by earlier writers
on art. From the late seventeenth century on, such parallels were frequently
deployed to shore up the view of China and its art as static in contrast to the
dynamism and “progress” of European art. In his Teutsche Academie published
in 1675, Joachim von Sandrart included a passage on painting in China in which
he singled out its archaizing emphasis on contour, absence of shading, and lack
of spatial depth.28 A decade later in France, Charles Perrault expounded the view
that whereas European painting had significantly advanced beyond the work
of fifteenth-century artists, Chinese painters had remained at that stage.29
26 Delécluze, “Atelier,” 282; Baschet, E.-J. Delécluze, 312. Delécluze reviewed the Musée espag-
nol in the Journal des débats, February 24, 1838, n.p.
27 “S’il fallait opter entre le capucin de Zurbaran, dont le nez seul reçoit la lumière, et un tab-
leau chinois, où les ombres portées ne sont pas même exprimées, je choisirais ce dernier.”
Delécluze, Les Beaux-Arts dans les deux mondes en 1855 (Paris: Charpentier, 1856), 103.
Baschet, E.-J Delécluze, 312–13.
28 Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaction, 1997), 123–27. See
also Frederike Wappenschmidt, “Sandrarts ‘indianischer’ Maler Higiemond: Eine authen-
tische Künstlerpersönlichkeit oder ein Synonym für die fremdartige Malerei Asiens?” in
Aus aller Herren Länder: Die Künstler der “Teutschen Academie” von Joachim von Sandrart,
ed. Susanne Meurer, Anna Schreurs-Morét, and Lucia Simonato (Turnhout: Brepols,
2015), 14–29; and Michael Sullivan, “Sandrart on Chinese Painting,” Oriental Art 1, no. 4
(1949): 159–61, where the passage from Sandrart’s text is translated in full.
29 Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sci-
ences, 4 vols. (Paris: Coignard, 1688–97), 1:208–09. 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, eds. Paddy Bullard and Alexis
Tadié (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2016), 160–61. For a recent study of the emergence
of the European construct of China as static, see Anthony Grafton, “The Immobility of
China: Orientalism and Occidentalism in the Enlightenment,” in The Anthropology of
Enlightenment, eds. Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2007), 50–64.

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It not clear whether Perrault or Sandrart actually saw any Asian paintings or
whether they were merely repeating the published claims made about them
by European missionaries in China, but their coupling of Chinese painting to
the Plinian myth of the origin of Western art, in the case of Sandrart, or to the
early history of modern European art, in the case of Perrault, proved durable.30
Echoing commentators like Perrault, Delécluze wrote, “I am not surprised
that the Chinese paint without shadows because all schools, when they first
emerge, adopt this manner. What is difficult to explain is the transmission of
this mode from century to century up to the present day.” He offered no causal
explanation and simply attributed the persistence of this shadowless mode in
China to “biases that are unknown to us, but would be worth studying.”31
In Delécluze’s view, more recent painting from China indicated that Chinese
art had not merely stagnated, it had declined. Comparing the illustrations in
handbooks like the Mustard Seed Garden Manual to what he understood to
be Lamqua’s work, Delécluze declared that art in China had “degenerated”
since 1681.32 The painting manual, based as it was on the work of revered past
masters, demonstrated that before the end of the seventeenth century there
were painters in China who excelled in the imitation of nature. Delécluze
speculated that the direct consultation of nature—a cornerstone of his own
art theoretical pronouncements—accounted for the strength of the work and
the reputation of the painters included in the manual. Yet the very produc-
tion of books of models like the Mustard Seed Garden Manual, combined with
Downing’s recent report of the use of tracings and printed Chinese prototypes
in Lamqua’s studio, led Delécluze to conclude that for the last 150 years, paint-
ing in China had declined from a liberal art into a métier or profession. Artists
in China merely copied. They worked from printed models, selecting, tracing,
and combining motifs as the painters in Lamqua’s workshop continued to do.
And though China’s ouvriers peintres excelled in the application of color, their
drawing, like Lamqua’s, was inferior to that seen in the manual. Lamqua’s own
work was further compromised, in Delécluze’s view, by the introduction of half-
tints and shadows. Ultimately, for Delécluze, Lamqua’s Europeanized work was
30 Stoichita, A Short History, 123; Sullivan, “Sandrart,” 160.

31 “Je ne suis donc point étonné que les Chinois peignent sans exprimer les ombres, puisque
toutes les écoles de peinture, lorsqu’elles naissent dans un pays, adoptent d’abord cette
manière. Mais on a de la peine à s’expliquer la permanence et la transmission de siècle
en siècle, jusqu’à nos jours, de cet état de l’art. Cela tient sans doute à des préjugés qui ne
nous sont point encore connus, mais qu’il serait curieux d’étuder.” Delécluze, “Atelier,” 283.
32 Delécluze, “Atelier,” 284.

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less interesting than the art of painters who chose to work in a Chinese mode,
or, better yet, had never encountered any other.33
What is perhaps most interesting about the article is the speculation with
which Delécluze concluded it. It may be, he argued, that what had happened
in China was analogous to developments in “our occident,” where the art of
painting had reached great heights only to fall again: “We see from the treatise
on painting that in China, as here, one cites, one imitates, one even copies the
old masters.”34 With this comment, Delécluze subtly registered his annoyance
with contemporary French practice, both the rote or routinized procedures
of the practiciens classiques, as well as the nineteenth-century pastiches of
eighteenth-century painting appearing in the Salon exhibitions of the 1830s.35
When a long extract of Delécluze’s article was added to the roster of exoticizing
travel accounts in the Magasin pittoresque in 1848, the paragraph on occidental
decline was omitted.36
2 Constructing “Chinese Art”
In subsequent years, Delécluze periodically and variously mobilized the coun-

ter example of art from China in support of his critiques of contemporary
French painting. In his review of the Salon of 1850, Delécluze deployed the
example of Chinese art to expose Gustave Courbet’s faux naiveté. Commenting
on Courbet’s dark portrait of Hector Berlioz (1850, Musée d’Orsay), he wrote: “If
[Courbet] was really a naïf … he would paint like the Chinese and would not
even depict cast shadows. Instead he exaggerates the obscurity of the painters
of decadence,” the Carracci, Caravaggio and Ribera, whom the critic character-
ized as “disloyal heirs to the great and beautiful traditions they should have
preserved.”37 A few years later, in Les Beaux-arts dans les deux mondes en 1855,
33 Delécluze, “Atelier,” 284.

34 “On voit par le traité publié en 1681 qu’en Chine, comme chez nous, on cite, on imite, on
copie même les anciens grands maîtres.” Delécluze, “Atelier,” 285.
35 On Delécluze’s attitudes to contemporary French art, see Baschet, E.-J. Delécluze. For his
denunciation of practiciens classiques, see David Wakefield, “Stendhal and Delécluze at
the Salon of 1824,” in The Artist and the Writer in France: Essays in Honor of Jean Seznec,
eds. Francis Haskell, Anthony Levi, and Robert Shackleton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 78.
36 “Sur la peinture en Chine,” 113–17. On exoticism in the Magasin pittoresque, see Natalia
Majluf, “ ‘Ce n’est pas le Pérou,’ or the Failure of Authenticity: Marginal Cosmopolitans at
the Universal Exposition of 1855,” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 884.
37 “S’il eût été vraiment naïf … il aurait peint comme les Chinois, même sans exprimer les
ombres portées. Or il exagère l’obscurité des peintures de la decadence!” The critic char-
acterized the Caracci, Caravaggio, and Ribera as “les dépositaires si infidèles des grands

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108 Smentek
his book-length review of the Exposition Universelle, Delécluze remarked

that of all the nations of the world, only China had retained its “immemo-
rial traditions” and refused to emulate European art.38 His invocation of
China—perhaps an indirect reference to the art on view in the privately orga-
nized Musée chinois in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in 1855—was a prelude to
his negative assessment of the “inauthentic” paintings exhibited by modern
Mexican and Peruvian artists at the Exposition Universelle.39 In the same text,
Delécluze returned to the Mustard Seed Garden Manual, an edition of which,
he noted, he had now acquired for himself. The manual, now characterized as
a model book with “recipes” and “rules,” appeared in his critique of contempo-
rary French landscape painters and their propensity to make their canvases a
vehicle for the virtuoso display of personal style rather than the truthful depic-
tion of nature. According to Delécluze, in their hands, immutable nature was
transformed “every twenty years, just like the clothes we wear.” His reference
in this passage to Chinese methods of landscape painting is hard to parse.40
On the one hand, he seems to appreciate the respect for historical masters
evidenced in the manual—if only contemporary French landscapists would
remember the example of Nicolas Poussin—yet he also compares French
painters’ mannered depictions of foliage to the stylized representations of
trees in the Chinese book. That this is not a favorable comparison is conveyed
by Delécluze’s characterization of Chinese artists and viewers as “ces braves
chinois” (those good or simple Chinese), for whom the repetition of approved
artistic conventions is enough.
Delécluze referenced the Mustard Seed Garden Manual again in the first
of two articles on woodcut-illustrated books from China that he published in
the Gazette des beaux-arts in 1862. Discussions of French contemporary art are
noticeably absent in both texts; Delécluze’s focus instead is on the internal
et belles traditions qu’ils auraient dû conserver.” Delécluze, Exposition des artistes vivants,
159. In this same passage, Delécluze outlined his theory of a lineage from “peinture claire,”
which implicitly included the Chinese, via “peinture modelée” to the decadence of “pein-
ture noire.”
38 Delécluze, Les Beaux-Arts, 145.
39 See Maljuf’s discussion of judgments of authentic and inauthentic art in 1855 in her
“ ‘Ce n’est pas le Pérou,’ ” 868–93. On the Musée chinois and the responses of two of the
only critics to review it, Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, see Marie-Hélène
Girard, “La Chine des expositions universelles (1851–1855),” in Idées de la Chine au XIXe
siècle: entre France et Allemagne, ed. Marie Dollé and Geneviève Espagne (Paris: Les Indes
savantes, 2014), 210–20; and Margueritte Murphy, “Becoming Cosmopolitan: Viewing
and Reviewing the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 32
(2010): 31–46.
40 Delécluze, Les Beaux-Arts, 283–85.

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history of Chinese art. In the first, Delécluze examined the Grand Ceremony
Celebrating the Emperor’s Birthday, Premier Compilation, a bound series of
prints in two juan, accompanied by an extensive text, depicting the Kangxi
emperor’s sixtieth-birthday procession in 1713 (figures 4.6 and 4.7). The book
was published in Beijing in 1717, though Delécluze, following Julien, misdated
the birthday to 1722, the year of Kangxi’s death.41 Placed end to end in scroll
form, the 148 double-page woodcuts were based on two immense hand scrolls
totaling almost eighty meters in length, now lost, that recorded the celebrations
along the route of the emperor’s procession from the Garden of Exhilarating
Spring northwest of Beijing to the Forbidden City. Delécluze owned the first
of the 2 juan and thus over half of the series of prints.42 Much of his article
is devoted to highly positive descriptions of the grouping of figures and the
variety and clarity of the composition across the successive images in his copy.
The woodcut he chose to reproduce, for instance, was representative of the
book’s many “small masterpieces of composition and perspective.” To prepare
readers for the experience of the prints, Delécluze prefaced his discussion with
an explanation of the principles, “or biases if you will,” of Chinese art, notably
of their representation of space, which would make it possible to appreciate
the prints. The elevated horizon line preferred by Chinese artists led to admi-
rably clear and unconfused compositions, and once one accepted its validity,
it became obvious that the perspectival rendering of figures and objects—
checked with ruler and compass by Delécluze—was meticulously rendered.
Delécluze framed his study of the Grand Ceremony prints with the question,
“Was there in China, in the distant past, a prematurely terminated development
of serious art?” In partial answer to the question, he positioned the Mustard
Seed Garden Manual, published only shortly before the Grand Ceremony
41 Delécluze, “Fêtes à Pékin,” Gazette des beaux-arts 12 (May 1862): 440–46. For a discussion
of this project, see Evelyn S. Rawski and Jessica Rawson, eds., China: The Three Emper-
ors, 1662–1795 (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005), 391–92. Scans of the full series of
the Grand Ceremony prints are available via the World Digital Library, accessed August 9,
2016, https://www.wdl.org/en/item/294/. The images are in volume 2 (of 4) in the online
reader.
42 The book is the only Chinese work listed by name in Delécluze’s probate inventory, ET/
LVIII/856, ouvrages d’art, no. 139: “un volume chinois intitulé wan cheou ching tien,” or
wanshou shengdian, a term that refers collectively to the text and woodcut illustrations.
Delécluze wrote both articles in the wake of the sack of Yuanming Yuan by Franco-British
forces in 1860. It is likely that although he criticized the plunder—“the conquerors were
little preoccupied by a taste for knowledge or a love of letters and art”—he also profited
from it by acquiring artworks looted from Beijing. “Le goût scientifique et l’amour des
lettres et de l’art ont peu préoccupé les vainqueurs,” Delécluze, “Vases antiques chinois,”
Gazette des beaux-arts 13 (November 1862): 422.

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110 Smentek
figure 4.6 “A Theatrical Performance in the Great Street of Peking.” Gazette des beaux-arts,
May 1862

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figure 4.7 Plate from Grand Ceremony Celebrating the Emperor’s Birthday,
Premier Compilation, 1716. Library of Congress, Washington, DC
prints, as a foil to an earlier, better era of painting in China, exemplified by the

latter series. He could do so because Julien had mistakenly understood “Song
Junye,” one of the collaborators on the Grand Ceremony project, to be an artist
active during the Song dynasty. Thus, Song Junye (ca. 1662–1713), a painter and
high-ranking Qing official who did participate in the production of the Grand
Ceremony before his death, was transformed into “Sum-Nie,” a Song dynasty
artist who allegedly had worked out the initial sketches for the prints at some
point between 960–1279 ce. These early drawings were then “augmented and
perfected” by the correctly identified “Wan Youen Ki” (Wang Yuanqi, 1642–
1715).43 To Delécluze, the quality of the Grand Ceremony prints demonstrated
that the arts in China “once had the beginnings” of what he called a “culture
libérale,” by which he seems to have a meant a period in which painting was
practiced as a liberal art. In contrast to his earlier article on painting in China,
43 After Song Junye’s death in 1713, Wang Yuanqi was directed to supervise the comple-
tion of the painting. Maxwell K. Hearn, “Art Creates History: Wang Hui and the Kangxi
Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour,” in Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang
Hui (1632–1717), ed. Maxwell K. Hearn (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008), 133
and 183n63.

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112 Smentek
Delécluze now characterized the Mustard Seed Garden Manual as for purely
mechanical use by modern professional painters, the worker-artisans whose
productions he blamed for fostering a disdain among Europeans for paintings
and drawings from China. If the manual demonstrated the mercenary art of
the empire’s contemporary ouvriers practiciens (worker-practitioners), it also
allowed Delécluze to posit the decline of Chinese art as an internal develop-
ment, one that occurred prior to the encounter with, and the fatal (because
inauthentic) adoption of, European techniques.44
Further illumination of the issue of China’s truncated artistic development
was promised by another woodblock-printed book, one that was perhaps
also in Delécluze’s possession. Identified by him as Vases antiques chinois, it
was the subject of his second article in the Gazette des beaux-arts in 1862.45
Described by Delécluze as “fort bel,” the publication was the Qinding Xiqing
Gujian (Imperially Ordained Mirror of Antiquities Prepared in the Xiqing Hall),
a forty-juan illustrated book documenting the imperial collection of bronzes.
Delécluze mistakenly believed most were ornamented with cloisonné enamel.
The book had been commissioned by the Qianlong emperor in 1749 and was
printed at the imperial presses in the early 1750s. Delécluze described it as
containing “delicately engraved” representations of “vases of all imaginable
forms, from the most pure found by the Greeks, to the most bizarre, invented
in China.”46 For Delécluze, architecture and the plastic arts had preceded
the development of painting in all nations; this conception made the Xiqing
Gujian especially significant, as its plates documented works made in “the
most ancient epochs of the Chinese empire,” including, as he pointed out, the
“Hia” or Xia (ca. 2100–1600 bce), and the Shang (ca. 1600–1050 bce) dynasties.
Accompanying each plate was an identification of the dynasty during which
each bronze was produced; here was empirical, datable evidence to support
Chinese claims for the great antiquity of their artistic production. As Delécluze
put it, vase design was the most ancient of all the arts practiced in China, and
it was an art at which the Chinese continued to excel. Accordingly, his short
article included five of the over 1500 illustrations in the book (figures 4.8 and
4.9). Delécluze deliberately selected woodcuts depicting forms unknown in
44 Delécluze, “Fêtes,” 440.

45 Delécluze, “Vases antiques chinois,” 416–22. The book was known to other scholars
including Guillaume Pauthier, who consulted a copy sent to Paris in the 1760s and pub-
lished plates from it in his Chine ou Description historique, géographique et littéraire de
ce vaste empire, d’après des documents chinois (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1839). For the
later French reception of the Xiqing Gujian, see Chang, Travel, Collecting, and Museums of
Asian Art, 53–54.
46 Delécluze, “Fêtes,” 446.

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figure 4.8 Illustrations from Étienne-Jean Delécluze,

“Vases antiques chinois,” Gazette des
beaux-arts, November 1862

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114 Smentek
figure 4.9
Illustrations from Étienne-Jean
Delécluze, “Vases antiques chinois,”
Gazette des beaux-arts, November 1862

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Europe and that dated from the Zhou dynasty (ca. 1046–256 bce). He included
a representation of a bronze bell (figure 4.9), which in addition to its stylis-
tic interest, demonstrated that the Chinese were casting metal bells several
centuries before they were introduced to Europe. The plates of the book visual-
ized the “extraordinary variety” of Chinese vase design and the developmental
arguments Delécluze subtly articulated in the text: like the Greeks and the
Etruscans, the Chinese subordinated function to art in their vase designs. Some
of their forms he correlated to the best of Greek art—as he pointed out, the
vase he illustrated in plate 1 of his article even displayed a meander, or “Greek”
motif—and he claimed that the Chinese artists’ “ingenious and original transi-
tions” (presumably from the simplicity of the “Greek” model in plate 1) would
lead one, little by little, to accept even the “most bizarre and complicated (tour-
mentées) forms,” including the “very bizarre” animal form in plate 3, which he
identified as representing the “most sincere expression of the Chinese taste”
(figure 4.8).47 Whether the vases demonstrated a prematurely arrested devel-
opment was a question he left open, relying instead, it seems, on readers to
draw their own conclusions from the visual evidence of the plates. Delécluze’s
own preference for the simplicity of the “Greek” forms was clear.
Delécluze’s engagements with art from China exemplify the ways in which
“China” was mobilized in the service of aesthetic battles at home, just as they
exemplify the historical European construction of the concept of “Chinese art.”
As Craig Clunas has succinctly described the category, the “difference between
China and ‘the Western artistic tradition’ is stressed, while difference within the
field of practice across time and place in China is underplayed.”48 Delécluze’s
work also indicates how the authenticity of Chinese art came to be located in
art produced before the moment of encounter with the alien artistic traditions
of Europe. Until quite recently, the China trade painting Delécluze addressed
in his earlier work (and ignored thereafter), for instance, was generally not the
purview of historians of Chinese art. At the same time, the pictures from China
that Delécluze studied were historical documents of a sophisticated artistic
culture that had flourished for much longer than the European traditions
of painting with which his readers were familiar. China remained the most
ancient civilization known, and it was its antiquity and its long established
artistic practices that help to account for Delécluze’s interest in its art. As
Perrault’s comments cited earlier suggest, the example of China and its achieve-
ments shadowed the longstanding French debate over the relative priority
47 “Delécluze, “Vases antiques chinois,” 418–19. In the captions to the plates published at the
end of the volume on page 756, plate 3 is identified as a “vase chinois grotesque.”
48 The emphasis is Clunas’s; see his Art in China, 9.

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116 Smentek
of the ancients and the moderns from its beginning in the late seventeenth
century. Although Perrault, an outspoken partisan of the moderns, dismissed
the Chinese as readily as he did the ancient Greeks, some among those more
inclined to the authority of antiquity did not, although their responses to
objects from the Chinese imperium varied widely. For Delécluze, like some of
his eighteenth-century French predecessors, art from China represented a tra-
dition that was worthy of serious study because of its great antiquity. In terms
of its form and practice, painting from China could even be seen to be compat-
ible with a European classical aesthetic, an ascetic aesthetic of contour and
subtle modeling exemplified (for Delécluze) by the work of Ingres, and one
for which the artist was memorably described in 1856 as “a Chinese painter
astray, in the nineteenth century, in the ruins of Athens.”49 Delécluze was not
alone in perceiving similarities between Greco-Roman and antique Chinese
vases; the eighteenth-century statesman Henri-Léonard Bertin had articulated
the same view in the 1770s when he was sent a copy of Xiqing Gujian directly
from Beijing.50 Napoleon’s art advisor, Dominique Vivant Denon, seemed to
share it as well. Denon owned numerous Chinese objects, ranging from hand
scrolls to bronzes to the sculpture of the Daoist deity with which he chose to
be depicted (figure 4.10).51 In this staging of his collection, after a portrait prob-
ably dating from ca. 1813, the Chinese figure of Shou Xing on the desk behind
him takes its place among his Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquities.
Studies of art from China were not central to Delécluze’s work. Italian, espe-
cially Florentine, Renaissance painting and contemporary French art were
the primary subjects of his writing, yet the critic repeatedly returned to the
examples of Chinese art he had encountered and collected over the course of his
career. His engagements with art from China, like his ambivalence towards it—
in Delécluze’s accounts the Chinese works he saw were alternately laudable,
bizarre, akin to the Greeks, and degenerating—suggests that the example of
China continued to shadow European thinking on art well into the nineteenth
century. It did so despite its trivialization in chinoiserie and the increasingly
49 “[U]n peintre chinois égaré, au XIXe siècle, dans les ruines d’Athènes.” Théophile Silves-
tre, Histoire des artistes vivants (Paris: E. Blanchard, 1856), 33.
50 Kristel Smentek, “China and Greco-Roman Antiquity: Overture to a Study of the Vase in
Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal18, no. 1 (Spring 2016), http://www.journal18.org/497.
51 On Denon’s Asian collections, see L. J. J. Dubois, Description des objets d’arts qui compo-
sent le cabinet de feu M. le baron V. Denon … Monuments antiques, historiques, modernes,
ouvrages orientaux; etc. (Paris: Hippolyte Tilliard, 1826), 211–94, and Monuments des arts
du dessin chez les peuples 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), 1: section 4.

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figure 4.10 Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse and Honoré Gabriel Camoin, after René Théodore
Berthon, Baron Vivant-Denon in his Cabinet Surrounded by his Collection, before
1825. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

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118 Smentek
derogatory claims made about the Chinese themselves in the wake of European
imperialist expansion, claims to which Delécluze was not immune. Delécluze’s
work also indicates the degree to which the discipline’s institutionalization of
the autonomous categories of European and Chinese art—categories which
he helped to construct—has occluded the diversity of Europe’s vexed, yet sus-
tained, historical encounters with art from China. Even classicism itself, as
it was imagined in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was inter-
preted by some not only against, but also in relation to, the art of China, the
ancient and sophisticated empire half a world away.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Michele Matteini and this volume’s editors for their careful
reading of my text, and to Catherine Girard and Jason Nguyen for their expert
assistance.
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chapter 5
Staging China, Japan, and Siam at the Paris

Universal Exhibition of 1867
Meredith Martin
Between 1867 and 1869, the king of Siam’s consul in Paris, Amédée Gréhan,
published three editions of a book intended to introduce Siam (Thailand) to
European audiences. Along with providing information about Siam’s geog-
raphy, history, religion, government, and commerce, Gréhan described the
kingdom’s participation in the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1867, an event “in
which all nations of the civilized world take part.”1 The book’s second and third
editions included photogravures of the Siamese exhibits by the French artist
Édouard Riou, who had been designated Siam’s official “artiste peintre” for
the occasion.2 A few images depicted rooms for the presentation of Siamese
objects that were housed within the main exhibition building on the Champ
de Mars, where the Siamese display was placed next to those of China and
Japan. In one room, the so-called “Salon Royal,” a portrait of the Siamese King
Mongkut (1804–1868, r. 1851–1868) presided over a simulated altar or throne
in front of which were arranged gold and silver vessels associated with the
Siamese ruling elite (figure 5.1). Gréhan took pains to emphasize how King
Mongkut himself had presided over the choice of objects that were sent to
Paris, in addition to dispatching ambassadors to join the festivities and bring
back a “detailed account of the splendors of France and the Exhibition.”3 In the
appendix to the book, which featured two French newspaper articles on Siam
from 1868, Mongkut’s participation was contrasted favorably to the “singular
defiance of the Chinese government, his neighbor, who would not take part in
the international exhibition.”4
1 Amédée Gréhan, Le Royaume de Siam, 3rd ed. (Paris: Challamel ainé, 1869), 106: “à laquelle
allaient prendre part toutes les nations du monde civilisé.”
2 Rapport sur l’Exposition Universelle de 1867, à Paris. Précis des opérations et le listes des collabo-
rateurs (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1869), 365.
3 Gréhan, Le Royaume de Siam, 106: “un compte détaillé des splendeurs de la France et de
l’Exposition.”
4 Gréhan, Le Royaume de Siam, 122: “le Roi [Mongkut] avait choisi lui-même ces objets,
n’imitant en rien la singulière défiance du gouvernement chinois, son voisin, qui n’a pas
voulu prendre part à l’exhibition internationale.” The article, “Le Royaume de Siam,” by

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Staging China, Japan, and Siam at the Paris Universal Exhibition 123
figure 5.1 Édouard Riou, Salon Royal, from Amédée Gréhan, Le Royaume de Siam,
1869

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124 Martin
Gréhan’s book represents an important but overlooked aspect of universal

exhibitions: the strategic involvement of non-European or non-Western coun-
tries in these events for their own gain. Scholarship on universal exhibitions
has tended to focus on intra-European rivalry or, alternatively, to explore how
France and other Western powers used such occasions to flaunt their impe-
rial and colonial authority over a pre-modern and exoticized Other.5 Although
some accounts have conversely analyzed how universal exhibitions helped
foster an appreciation for non-Western art and culture among European
viewers, they have concentrated more on the impact this encounter had in
Europe—for example, on the development of avant-garde art movements like
Impressionism—and less on its political motivations or bidirectional effects.
Finally, by attending more to colonial displays, few studies have attempted to
compare the attendance of sovereign powers from outside Europe at universal
exhibitions in order to understand how these participants used such gather-
ings to negotiate their status vis-à-vis their European hosts and one another.6
This chapter will examine the organization, display, and reception of exhib-
its from China, Japan, and Siam at the Universal Exhibition of 1867, focusing
on the political subtext of these displays and the multiple actors who were
involved. For Japan and Siam, it was the first time that either country had offi-
cially taken part in a European universal exhibition, and both were eager not
only to attract new international markets for their products but also to control
the narrative surrounding their presentations, especially given the political
crises they were facing. Whereas Japan was embroiled in an internal power dis-
pute that played out at the exhibition, Siam was attempting to delimit France
and Britain’s colonialist activities in Southeast Asia. In the case of China, as
M. L. Jablonski, originally appeared in the Second Empire’s official newspaper, Le Moniteur

universel, on January 17, 1868.
5 The literature on this subject is vast. General studies of universal exhibitions include
John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle, eds., Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs and Expositions
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2008); and Alexander C. T. Geppert, Fleeting Cities: Impe-
rial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). For studies of
French colonial displays, which tend to emphasize North Africa and the Near East, see Zeynep
Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1992); Sylvaine Leprun, Le Théâtre des colonies: Scénogra-
phie, acteurs et discours de l’imaginaire dans les expositions, 1855–1937 (Paris: L’Harmattan,
1986); and Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988). Comparatively little has been written about displays of France’s colonial holdings in
Southeast Asia; one exception is Isabelle Flour, “Orientalism and the Reality Effect: Angkor at
the Universal Expositions, 1867–1937,” Getty Research Journal 6 (2014): 63–82.
6 A recent exception is Alejandra Uslenghi, Latin America at Fin-de-Siècle Universal Exhibi-
tions: Modern Cultures of Visuality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

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Gréhan’s book points out, the Chinese government had declined France’s invi-
tation to participate in the 1867 exhibition, resulting in a committee of French
businessmen, scholars, and military officers deciding to organize their own
China display in the main building and surrounding park. Given this situation
and the fact that France had recently fought against China during the Second
Opium War (1856–60), the Chinese exhibits were treated more negatively in
the European press than those of the Japanese and the Siamese—although
visitors did enjoy the “live exhibits” in the park’s Chinese pavilion.
The 1860s is commonly cited as a transitional decade with regard to the
European reception of Asian art—a time when artworks and other products
from East and Southeast Asia began to flood European markets and enter
European collections but before categorical distinctions among them had
developed on a broad scale. Writing in the Gazette des beaux-arts in 1878, the
critic Ernest Chesneau looked back on the previous decade as one in which
so little was known about “these curiosities coming from the Far East that
one indistinctly confused them under the common name of chinoiseries.”7
The universal exhibition of 1867 was thus a watershed moment for European
audiences to begin moving “beyond chinoiserie” and to consider Asian art and
culture in more culturally specific and politically nuanced ways. My aim is to
explore precisely what this encounter with China, Japan, and Siam at the 1867
exhibition entailed and how it related to larger political, economic and diplo-
matic relationships.
1 The Universal Exhibition of 1867: Organization and Design of the

“Oriental” Section
In 1865, the French Imperial Commission, a group of politicians and econo-

mists selected by Napoléon III (1808–1873, r. 1852–1870) to serve as the chief
organizing body of the fair, sent out invitations to foreign countries to par-
ticipate in an exhibition in two years’ time.8 Most countries accepted the
invitation (China was an exception), and Japan ended up being represented
by three separate entities: the ruling Tokugawa shogunate and the domains
of Satsuma and Hizen, who opposed the shogun’s authority and were hoping
7 Ernest Chesneau, “Exposition Universelle. Le Japon à Paris,” Gazette des beaux-arts 18, 2nd
period (July–December 1878), 386: “ces curiosités venues de l’extrême Orient, que l’on con-
fondait alors indistinctement sous le nom commun de chinoiseries.”
8 For a detailed account of the fair’s organization and rationale, see Volker Barth, “Paris 1867,”
in Findling and Pelle, Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs, 37–44.

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126 Martin
to establish their own diplomatic and commercial contacts in Europe.9 The

Japanese exhibits were much more extensive than those of the Chinese and
Siamese, but they paled in comparison to “France and its Colonies,” which took
up nearly half of the main exhibition building. That building, an enormous
elliptical iron and glass structure designed by French engineer Frédéric Le Play,
comprised a series of concentric rings, each of which was devoted to the dis-
play of a different type of product, encircling a central garden. (The outermost
ring, for example, was called the “Gallery of Machines.”) Beyond this structure
was a fairground-like park dotted with national pavilions whose arrangement
loosely echoed that of the main building. The Chinese, Japanese, and Siamese
pavilions were part of the park’s “Oriental section,” an area appearing in the
lower-right quadrant of one of several souvenir prints made to commemorate
the exhibition (figure 5.2). The pagoda roofs of the Chinese pavilion can be
seen next to other buildings representing the states of Tunisia, Morocco, and
Turkey.
Each foreign participant was required to have a “general commissioner” in
Paris who would serve as the liaison between that country and the Imperial
Commission. The commissioner for most of the countries in the Oriental sec-
tion (including Morocco, Tunisia, and Japan) was Jules de Lesseps, a former
French consul in Tunisia whose brother, Ferdinand, was the founding director
of the Suez Canal Company.10 Jules de Lesseps also served as general commis-
sioner of the China display, although he appointed a “special commissioner,”
the French sinologist and linguist Léon d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, to oversee its
organization. French diplomatic officials tried to designate de Lesseps as the
commissioner for Siam as well, but the king of Siam intervened and named
Amédée Gréhan, his own consul in Paris, to that position.11 De Lesseps was
responsible for hiring Alfred Chapon, a little-known French architect who had
trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, to design nearly all of the exhibits in the
Oriental section of the park and the main building, including those of China,
Siam, and Japan. Chapon probably got the job because he had worked for the
9 David Bromfield, “Japanese Representation at the 1867 Paris International Exhibition

and the European Response to it,” in Japan’s Impact on the World, eds. Alan Rix and Ross
Mouer (Canberra: Japanese Studies Association of Australia, 1984), 136.
10 The list of general commissioners and committee members for the Oriental section is
given in Rapport sur l’Exposition Universelle de 1867, 365. On Jules de Lesseps’s involvement
in the Moroccan and Tunisian pavilions, see Mehrangiz Nikou, “National Architecture
and International Politics: Pavilions of the Near Eastern Nations in the Paris International
Exposition of 1867” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1997).
11 Letter from Gabriel Aubaret (French consul in Bangkok) to Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys
(French minister of foreign affairs), July 25, 1865, 66PO/2/Carton 26, fol. 143, Archives
diplomatiques de Nantes (hereafter ADN).

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figure 5.2 General view of the Exposition Universelle in 1867, taken from the Trocadero Hill,
lithograph, Paris: Ledot aîné, 1867. Musée Carnavalet, Paris
Suez Canal Company, for whom he ended up designing a pavilion promoting

the canal’s construction in the park.12
Not having visited any of the Asian or North African countries he was repre-
senting, Chapon relied on ornamental pattern books and other printed sources
as inspiration for his designs. A dossier of his preparatory drawings, now at
the Bibliothèque nationale de France, reveals some of these sources, including
sketches (or “manga”) by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849),
whose animal and figural motifs he painstakingly traced.13 For the Chinese
pavilion in the park (figure 5.3), Chapon copied a garden building in the Qian-
long emperor’s summer palace of Yuanming Yuan that was illustrated in an
eighteenth-century album of Chinese paintings known as Forty Views of Yuan-
ming Yuan. When French and British forces destroyed and looted Yuanming
12 Nikou, “National Architecture and International Politics,” 233.

13 Chapon’s drawings, as well as press clippings and other documents related to the 1867 exhi-
bition, can be found in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter BnF), Cabinet des
estampes, HA-125-FT 4, HA-126-FT 4, HA-127 (A)-FOL, HA-127-FT 6, and SNR-3-CHAPON.

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128 Martin
figure 5.3 The Chinese Pavilion, published in Le Monde Illustré, 1867
Yuan during the Second Opium War, they brought this album along with many
other precious art objects back to Europe, and one of the French commanders
presented it to the Bibliothèque Impériale.14 A drawing in Chapon’s dossier
reveals his careful scrutiny of this source, but his debt to the album was also
reported in a publication sponsored by the French Commission, which praised
Chapon and the pavilion’s organizer, D’Hervey de Saint-Denys, for “rebuilding
in Paris that which no longer exists in Beijing.”15 Chapon’s desire to recreate a
structure that European soldiers had demolished contributed to an overarch-
ing narrative of conquest that distinguished the Chinese display from those
devoted to Japan and Siam.16
14 Greg M. Thomas, “The Looting of Yuanming and the Translation of Chinese Art in Europe,”
Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 7, no. 2 (Autumn 2008): http://www.19thc-artworld
wide.org/index.php/autumn08/93-the-looting-of-yuanming-and-the-translation-of-
chinese-art-in-europe.
15 Raoul Ferrère, “Le Jardin chinois à l’Exposition,” in L’Exposition universelle de 1867 illus-
trée, ed. François Ducuing, 2 vols. (Paris: Administration, 1868), 1:134: “rétablir à Paris, ce
qui n’existe plus à Pékin.” Ferrère goes on to add that Paris should be grateful to Chapon
for enabling it to “possess a building whose loss China will always mourn” (“posséder un
edifice dont la Chine pleurera toujours la perte”) (135). For Chapon’s drawing see BnF,
Cabinet des estampes, HA-125-FT 4–24.
16 James Hevia describes a similar narrative of conquest with regard to looted Chinese art-
works during the 1860s in “Looting Beijing: 1860, 1900,” in Tokens of Exchange: The Problem

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Elsewhere, however, Chapon was less precise, freely intermingling Asian

and Islamic ornamental motifs to create a more fancifully exotic view of the
East. A series of wall elevations shows his sumptuously colored, ornate designs
for the Oriental section of the main building, which offered a striking contrast
to the sleek iron and glass structure it was housed within—a contrast that can
also be observed in some of the printed views of the exhibition (figures 5.4
and 5.5). Although Chapon did demarcate among the Chinese, Japanese, and
Siamese exhibits in his designs, it is easy to see how the different messages
that their objects were meant to convey could have been lost on viewers. Still,
the foreign countries that employed Chapon appear to have been pleased with
his results. In addition to being presented with a Legion of Honor medal from
Napoléon III for his work on the exhibition, the architect received similar dis-
tinctions from Tunis and Brazil.17
The Paris Universal Exhibition opened on April 1, 1867, and more than ten
million people visited over the course of its seven-month run. Many of these
visitors, however, never made it inside the main building, preferring to indulge
in the carnivalesque atmosphere of the park. There the focus was less on edify-
ing displays and more on cheap entertainment and spectacle, including per-
formances by Japanese acrobats and “Mexican” gauchos, who strode around
the entrance to Mexico’s pavilion (designed as a replica of the pre-Columbian
temple of Xochicalco) selling liquor.18 This state of affairs aggrieved the fair’s
organizers and members of the French press, who complained that the park
not only gave the entire exhibition the “vulgar air of a marketplace” but also
“risked turning it from a serious lesson into a trivial game.”19 On July 27, 1867,
the French newspaper Le Figaro, which up to that point had been devoting a
daily column to the exhibition, announced that it was canceling coverage due
to the fact that the event had “degenerated into an enormous fun fair.”20
of Translation in Global Circulations, ed. Lydia H. Liu (Durham and London: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1999), 192–213.
17 BnF, Cabinet des estampes, HA-127 (A)-FOL.
18 Paul N. Edison, “Conquest Unrequited: French Expeditionary Science in Mexico, 1864–
1867,” French Historical Studies 26, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 490. For an image of these gau-
chos, see Ducuing, L’Exposition universelle de 1867 illustrée, 2:181.
19 Victor Fournel, “Voyage à travers l’Exposition Universelle: notes d’un touriste,” Le Cor-
respondant, April 1867, quoted and translated in Arthur Chandler, “Paris 1867,” in His-
torical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851–1988, eds. John E. Findling and
Kimberly D. Pelle (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 34–35.
20 Volker Barth, “The Micro-history of a world event: intention, perception and imagination
at the Exposition universelle de 1867,” Museum and Society 6, no. 1 (March 2008): 31.

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130 Martin
figure 5.4 Alfred Chapon, wall elevation design for the Chinese, Japanese, and Siamese
exhibits at the 1867 exhibition. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Cabinet des
estampes
figure 5.5 Universal Exhibition—Products from Japan and Siam, in the Gallery of Machines, in
Grand Album de l’Exposition Universelle, 1867

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2 China
The French Imperial Commission took particular pride in the fact that so many
countries from Asia and North Africa were represented at the 1867 exhibition.
As one of the authors of their publication claimed, nothing else gave “more
striking proof of the prestige and ascendancy that France exercises in all points
of the globe.”21 It was all the more galling, therefore, that China refused to par-
ticipate in the exhibition, prompting organizers to stage their own display. In
addition to emphasizing repeatedly the authenticity of the Chinese section of
the park, the commission’s publication invited visitors to “penetrate” (péné-
trer) this “unknown” territory, using language reminiscent of France’s military
operation against China (which it also described).22 Some of the images of the
Chinese pavilion, such as an engraving published in Le Monde Illustré, likewise
evoked a sense of infiltrating a faraway land by isolating the pavilion from
the rest of the exhibition and surrounding it with a dense thicket of tropical
flora that envelops the fairgoers in the foreground (figure 5.3). More than any-
thing else, however, it was the objects on view that conjured memories of this
conflict, since French soldiers had looted many of them during the sacking
of Yuanming Yuan. Their provenance was acknowledged in one of the exhibi-
tion’s catalogs, which listed red lacquer boxes “bearing the mark of the summer
palace” (owned by d’Hervey de Saint-Denys) and items made of porcelain,
jade, and cloisonné enamel lent by Charles de Montauban, the commander
of the French operation during the Second Opium War. Montauban had also
provided “Chinese weapons and flags taken from battle of Palikao,” the victory
that had enabled French forces to overtake Beijing.23 Inside the main building
a copy of the treaty that China had been forced to sign at the end of the war
was on view.24
Aside from these pillaged objects, most of the Chinese items had been pro-
vided by French sinologists, collectors, and merchants like Adolphe Chanton,
an importer of Chinese goods who owned an establishment on Paris’s rue
Vivienne. Chanton likely supplied a lacquer screen covered with gold silk and
bright blue feathers—an item not typically seen in Chinese homes and one
“probably selected for the exhibition because of its gaudy appearance”—that
21 Raoul Ferrère, “Le Japon et Siam,” in Ducuing, L’Exposition universelle de 1867 illustrée,
1:331: “Je ne connais pas de preuve plus saisissante du prestige et de l’ascendant qu’exerce
la France sur tous les points du globe.”
22 Ferrère, “Le Jardin chinois,” 135, 138.
23 Catalogue générale publié par la Commission Impériale (Paris: E. Dentu, 1867), 1:160, 258.
24 Hippolyte Gautier, Les Curiosités de l’Exposition universelle de 1867 (Paris: Ch. Delagrave et
Cie, 1867), 125.

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132 Martin
figure 5.6 Chinese lacquered wood screen with embroidered silk and feather, 1825–65.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
London’s South Kensington museum purchased at the fair (figure 5.6).25 Other
offerings included Chinese manuscripts, woodblock prints, ivories, bronzes,
and wallpaper, in addition to lacquer and porcelain, little of which has been
traced. For the most part, French press accounts of the exhibition denigrated
these Chinese objects as being outdated or manufactured with inferior stan-
dards, particularly when compared to similar items from Japan.26 Although
their authors may have been responding to the blatantly commercial or ad hoc
assembly of the China display, the political bias inherent in these critiques is
worth noting. For instance, one of the lengthiest accounts of the Chinese and
Japanese exhibits, published in the periodical Revue de deux mondes in 1867,
was written by Gustave Duchesne de Bellecourt, a French government official
who had participated in the military expedition to China prior to becoming
France’s first minister plenipotentiary to Japan (from 1859 to 1864). Duchesne
de Bellecourt had a vested interest in promoting the arts and commerce of
25 Chanton is the only Chinese exhibitor listed as showing screens in the imperial commis-
sion’s Catalogue générale, 258.
26 Jennifer Pitman, “China’s Presence at the Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1867,” Stud-
ies in the Decorative Arts 10, no. 1 (Fall–Winter 2002–03): 40.

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Japan over the China display, which he dismissed for its lack of novelty, variety,
and utility—complaining in particular that only Chinese luxury goods were
shown, as opposed to items that could have a practical application in Europe.
He blamed this unfortunate circumstance on the Chinese government, which
was too troubled politically but also too disinterested in world affairs to under-
stand the value of taking part in the exhibition.27
Another commentator, the French journalist Hippolyte Gautier, noted
that the crowds who flocked to the China pavilion (despite the extra admis-
sion price) had little interest in the “curiosities” on display, since “they believe
they’ve seen it all before on the rue Vivienne or the boulevards.”28 Instead,
visitors came to gawk at the live displays of Chinese gardeners tending to trees
and flowers shipped from China for the occasion, as well as two young Chi-
nese girls who had been brought over with the help of the baron de Meritens,
a French customs officer stationed in Taiwan who assisted in organizing the
Chinese exhibit. During the fair these girls resided in a small tea kiosk next to
the Chinese pavilion and spent their days painting fans, playing dominos, or
engaging in other “traditional” Chinese activities, in addition to selling photo-
graphs of themselves to tourists. Gautier admired their ability to withstand the
“attentive crowds” who watched “their every move,” comparing them to French
queens of the ancien régime.29 As Greg Thomas has argued, analogies between
China and pre-Revolutionary France were common in this period, when they
functioned both to locate China in the premodern past and to suggest how its
faded glory reflected well on the Second Empire government, whose army had
raided the summer palace and brought vestiges of this prestigious culture back
to Europe.30
Yet other visitors, even those who wrote for the imperial commission’s
publication, were less transported by the Chinese display. They complained
that its restaurant served steak rather than Chinese birds’ nests and other
exotic delicacies, that its theatrical performances were all European, and that
the entire enterprise was far too commercial, with “a goal of speculation too
27 Gustave Duchesne de Bellecourt, “La Chine et le Japon à l’Exposition universelle,” Revue
des deux mondes 70 (July–August 1867): 710–42.
28 Gautier, Les Curiosités de l’Exposition universelle, 21: “le public n’y trouve pas assez d’inédit,
et, à tort ou à raison, il croit l’avoir déjà aperçu dans les boutiques de la rue de Vivienne et
du boulevard.”
29 Gautier, Les Curiosités de l’Exposition universelle, 21: “ells s’en acquittent à merveille et
jamais reine de l’ancien régime ne sut mieux supporter le feu des regards, ni se trouver
moins gênée en présence d’une foule attentive à ses moindres mouvements.”
30 Thomas, “The Looting of Yuanming Yuan.”

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134 Martin
evident.”31 The publication’s editor, François Ducuing, refused to devote space

to writing about the tea kiosk, apparently regarding it as a superficial distrac-
tion that drew attention away from more pressing global concerns, namely the
“lamentable death of the Emperor Maximilian.”32 Maximilian’s assassination
in Mexico, news of which had reached France on the same day that prizes
were awarded at the exhibition, signaled a disastrous end to Napoléon III’s
campaign to establish an empire there. By invoking this shameful history, one
that was nowhere evident in the contrived Mexico display, Ducuing may have
been implying how the Chinese pavilion, and perhaps even the fair in general,
served as mere bread and circuses rather than symbols of France’s imperial
might.
3 Japan
In contrast to the varied negative reactions to the Chinese exhibit, items from
Japan—among them ukiyo-e prints, silk kimonos, and objects made of lacquer
and porcelain—were almost universally praised for their variety, sophistica-
tion, and technical excellence.33 If China seemed aloof and hopelessly mired
in the distant past, then Japan was innovative, modern, and eagerly oriented
to the West. The display’s success was attributed to the Japanese government,
which had taken an active interest in the exhibition, even sending a delega-
tion of ambassadors led by the shogun’s younger brother to Paris to oversee
the fair.34 In fact, Japan’s interest in such events had begun five years earlier,
when a separate delegation had toured the London International Exhibition
of 1862 and had noted the popularity of its own national pavilion organized
by Rutherford Alcock, Britain’s consul to Japan. This delegation had urged the
Japanese government to get involved in future displays, not only to enhance
Japan’s prestige in Europe but also to make a profit, thereby offsetting trade
imbalances forced on them by the West.35
31 Ferrère, “Le Japon et Siam,” 332: “un but de spéculation trop evident.”
32 François Ducuing, “Le débit de Thé,” in Ducuing, L’Exposition universelle de 1867 illustrée,
1:294.
33 Bromfield, “Japanese Representation.”
34 Angus Lockyer, “The Problem of Sovereignty in an Age of Empire: Representing Japan in
Paris in 1867,” Critical Asian Studies 45, no. 4 (2013): 615–42.
35 Ellen P. Conant, “Refractions of the Rising Sun: Japan’s Participation in International
Exhibitions 1862–1910,” in Japan and Britain: An Aesthetic Dialogue 1850–1930, eds. Tomoko
Sato and Toshio Watanabe (London: Lund Humphries, 1991), 81.

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When the shogun’s ambassadors arrived in Paris, however, they were

informed that Japan was already being represented by Satsuma, whose ruler,
or daimyo, was exhibiting under the name of “King of the Ryuku Islands”—
a direct challenge to the shogun’s authority.36 Both Satsuma and the domain
of Hizen were attempting to proclaim their independence from the Tokugawa
government and market their products to European audiences, most of whom
seem to have been unaware of the politics involved and considered them all to
be part of “Japan.” (Chapon’s design for all three displays in the main building
probably contributed to this conflation.) Still, Satsuma’s desire to appear as a
“modern,” trade-friendly alternative to the feudal Tokugawa regime resulted
in its representative in France, the Belgian-born entrepreneur Charles de
Montblanc, publishing an article in Le Revue Contemporaine claiming that the
Tokugawa government (soon to be toppled by the Meiji Restoration) presented
a major obstacle to Japanese progress.37
The modernity of the Japanese display was thus a contested affair, one that
was shaped by internal power disputes as well as politically strategic efforts to
appeal to European tastes. Knowledge about such tastes was gleaned in part
from traveling and observing international exhibitions, but Japan also had a
long tradition of making export art for European clients that the nineteenth-
century narrative of its supposed isolationism and subsequent “opening up”
by the West has tended to obscure. Satsuma’s primary export product, a type of
earthenware known as Satsuma ware, was well represented at the 1867 exhibi-
tion. The South Kensington museum bought several examples, among them
a small bowl decorated with two carp that, in Japan, symbolized success and
advancement (figure 5.7). Whereas early Satsuma ware pieces were made of
plain, dark clay, during the nineteenth century Japanese potters began elabo-
rately decorating these vessels with colorful enamels and gilt against an ivory
ground in order to appeal to Western consumers. European artists, scholars,
and collectors who encountered these wares and other examples of “tradi-
tional” Japanese art at the world’s fairs of the 1860s and 1870s imagined that
they were “discovering” this art for the first time—an idea perpetuated in some
of the more recent writings on japonisme—not realizing that it was specifi-
cally targeted at them. As Ellen Conant has observed, this calculated targeting
is perhaps one reason why japonisme, as opposed to chinoiserie, became so
popular in nineteenth-century Europe.38
36 Lockyer, “Problem of Sovereignty,” 616.

37 Lockyer, “Problem of Sovereignty,” 632–33.
38 Ellen Conant, “The French Connection: Emile Guimet’s Mission to Japan, A Cultural Con-
text for Japonisme,” in Japan in Transition: Thought and Action in the Meiji Era, 1868–1912,

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136 Martin
figure 5.7 Gensaiken (decorator), Satsuma bowl, 1860–65. Victoria and

Albert Museum, London
Another reason for the rise of japonisme in Paris during the late 1860s and
early 1870s was the enormous political boost that Japanese products received
from the French government. Not long after the end of the Second Opium War,
Napoléon III had turned his attention away from China and toward Japan. The
shift was prompted largely by crises pertaining to France’s famed silk indus-
try, most notably a series of epidemics that had decimated its native silkworm
population.39 Japan came to be viewed as the only country that could res-
cue France from the escalating crisis, and so Napoléon III’s envoy in Japan,
Duchesne de Bellecourt, used his connections to persuade the Japanese gov-
ernment to permit the shipment of a large quantity of Japanese silkworm eggs
to France to be acclimatized.40 Eventually these efforts were successful, and
they were celebrated at the 1867 exhibition in a display devoted to French
agricultural products. Samples of silk, such as a length of kimono fabric deco-
rated with brilliant colors and bold naturalistic designs, were also one of the
highlights of the Japanese display (figure 5.8). Unsurprisingly, in his article on
the Chinese and Japanese exhibits for Revue de deux mondes, Duchesne de
Bellecourt maintained that Japanese silk was far superior to that of China. He
eds. Hilary Conroy, Sandra Davis, and Wayne Patterson (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickin-
son University Press, 1984), 128–30. See also Conant, “Refractions of the Rising Sun,” 90.
39 Junko Thérèse Takeda, “Global Insects: Silkworms, Sericulture, and Statecraft in Napole-
onic France and Tokugawa Japan,” French History 28, no. 2 (2014): 207–25.
40 Takeda, “Global Insects,” 223.

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praised many other Japanese items on view, particularly furnishings and other
“useful” items that could be easily exported to or imitated in Europe.41
4 Siam
Compared to the Chinese and Japanese exhibits, little has been written about
Siam’s participation in the 1867 Paris exhibition, perhaps because its impact
on European art was relatively small. Yet from the Siamese perspective, Siam’s
involvement in international exhibitions was hugely important, both in shap-
ing the self-image of the Siamese royal elite and in conveying that image
abroad.42 Siam’s presence at the 1867 exhibition marked the kingdom’s first
official debut at a European world’s fair, and it came at a critical moment for
the Siamese monarchy and its relations with France. The Siamese display,
which King Mongkut personally supervised, provided an opportunity for Siam
to assert its sovereignty on a global stage, at a time when France and Britain
were colonizing much of Southeast Asia and imposing unequal trade agree-
ments on China and Japan. Moreover, it enabled Siam to present itself as a
modern, civilized nation and an eager trading partner, notably in raw materi-
als—like cotton and tobacco, samples of which won gold medals at the 1867
exhibition—as well as finished goods.43
Siam’s display adeptly communicated these ideas and desires while also
highlighting the country’s most important export “product,” the king himself.
The room referred to in Gréhan’s book as the Salon Royal (figure 5.1) showcased
opulent gold and silver receptacles (among them containers for betel nut) that
were traditionally used in Siamese royal ceremonies, arranged beneath a por-
trait of King Mongkut by French painter Jean-Marius Fouque. A minor Beaux-
Arts-trained artist who worked mainly as a copyist for the French Ministry of
State, Fouque had been named “painter to the king of Siam” in 1864. His por-
traits of Mongkut and his son, King Chulalongkorn (1853–1910; r. 1868–1910),
were based on photographs taken by European and Siamese photographers,
41 Duchesne de Bellecourt, “La Chine et le Japon à l’Exposition universelle,” 722.

42 Maurizio Peleggi, Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Modern
Image (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), chap. 6; Thongchai Winichakul,
“The Quest for ‘Siwilai’: A Geographical Discourse of Civilizational Thinking in the Late
Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Siam,” Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 3 (August
2000): 528–49; and Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a
Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994). These accounts focus on later peri-
ods and touch only briefly on the 1867 exhibition.
43 Siam’s prizes at the 1867 exhibition are listed in Gréhan, Le Royaume de Siam, 111.

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138 Martin
figure 5.8 Japanese silk crepe kimono fabric with resist-dyed decoration, 1860–67. Victoria
and Albert Museum, London

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among them the Scottish photographer John Thomson, whose 1865 portrait
of Mongkut in state costume also served as the model for a photogravure in
Gréhan’s book (figure 5.9).44 In addition to these royal portraits, Fouque cop-
ied a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme depicting an 1861 reception of Siamese
ambassadors at Fontainebleau that was presented to Mongkut as a diplomatic
gift from Napoléon III’s government. Most likely arriving in Siam during the
late 1860s, Fouque’s copy was installed a few years later in the royal throne hall
in Bangkok, where it still resides today.45
At the 1867 exhibition, Fouque’s portrait proclaimed King Mongkut’s sov-
ereign authority while presenting Siam as both appealingly foreign and
reassuringly “Western.” Surrounded by exotic regalia and resembling the Indic
deities that adorn the walls on either side of his portrait, Mongkut’s image sug-
gests an iconic, archaic vision of Siamese royal power that commands respect.
At the same time, it exemplifies Siam’s reorientation toward the “Western
civilizational sphere” during the mid-nineteenth century, which included the
appropriation of Western objects and ceremonial trappings (like the Legion
of Honor medal that Mongkut wears) as well as modes of image making like
photography.46 This twofold signification became, and to some extent still is, a
key aspect of the new Siamese royal identity, designed both to instill national
pride and inhibit foreign intervention by appearing as a civilizational equal to
Western nations. It was expressed in many components of the 1867 exhibition,
including the opening ceremonies, where, according to Le Figaro, two Siamese
noblemen represented their country, “one [dressed] in all the splendor of his
national costume, the other in a black frock coat and a white cravat.”47
Siam’s facility at adopting and imitating Western forms—a skill noted in one
of the newspaper articles on the kingdom appended to Gréhan’s book—could
also be gleaned from several objects at the fair, most notably a lacquer painting
inlaid with mother of pearl that portrayed Jesus Christ, which was shown next
44 A copy of Thomson’s photograph, entitled His Majesty Prabat Somdet Pra parameñdr
Mahá Mongkut, First King of Siam, in State Costume, is in the collection of the Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art in New York, 2005.100.583 (1). For Fouque’s portrait of King Chulalong-
korn, see Apinan Poshyananda, Western-Style Painting and Sculpture in the Thai Royal
Court, 2 vols. (Bangkok: Amarin Printing Group, 1993), 1: plates 75.1, 75.2.
45 Meredith Martin, “History Repeats Itself in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Reception of the Siamese
Ambassadors,” The Art Bulletin 99, no. 1 (March 2017): 99–127.
46 Peleggi, Lords of Things.
47 Le Figaro, April 3, 1867: “l’un dans toute la splendeur de son costume national, l’autre en
frac et en cravat blanche.” Thongchai describes this twofold signification in “The Quest for
‘Siwilai’,” 541, writing that Siam’s self-presentation had to “strike a balance … between the
modern, technologically developing nation, and the ancient kingdom with archaic and
exotic culture.”

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140 Martin
figure 5.9 Édouard Riou, Somdetch Phra Paramendr Maha Mongkut, Suprème Roi de
Siam, from Amédée Gréhan, Le Royaume de Siam, 1869

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to a similar painting representing the Buddha. Gréhan’s book emphasized how

much French and foreign visitors admired these works and their technique,
prompting Mongkut to commission additional images of Christ from his pal-
ace artisans so that they might be “worthy of being placed alongside master-
works in [European] oratories and churches”—a bold advertisement for Siam’s
ability to manufacture Christian export art, possibly rivaling China and Japan.48
At the end of the exhibition, Mongkut presented these religious paintings to
the French empress Eugénie and her son, while offering objects signifying his
sovereignty to Napoléon III. These included a set of Siamese royal barges that
had been docked on the Seine during the fair and a pair of royal elephants that,
after being shown in the Siamese section of the park, were sent to the imperial
Jardin d’acclimatation.49
Siam’s presentation and accompanying publication underscored its owner-
ship of territories in Southeast Asia that the French were threatening to invade.
Among the animals displayed at the exhibition were miniature Laotian horses
that were considered prestige items by the Siamese nobility, three of which
were gifted to Napoléon III. Gréhan’s book included an image of these horses
and indicated that they were from Laos, “a province belonging to the kingdom
of Siam.”50 Although Laos would not become a French protectorate until 1893,
diplomatic missives from the 1860s indicate that French officials in Siam had
already set their sights on it.51 Cambodia, on the other hand, had been declared
a French protectorate in 1863, despite vehement protests from Siamese offi-
cials that it was one of their vassal states. After the French threatened military
action, Siam finally relented, and in July 1867 (during the universal exhibition)
Mongkut’s ambassadors signed a treaty in Paris acknowledging France’s claim
over Cambodia but leaving the province of Siem Reap, where the majestic
ruins of Angkor were located, in Siam’s control.52 Beginning in 1867, the French
government displayed architectural fragments and reconstructions of Angkor
at its universal exhibitions in order to visualize and tout France’s colonial
48 Gréhan, Le Royaume de Siam, 117: “dignes de figurer à côté des oeuvres des maîtres dans les
oratoires et églises.”
49 Gréhan, Le Royaume de Siam, 116–18.
50 Gréhan, Le Royaume de Siam, 118: “province appartenant au royaume de Siam.”
51 See, for example, Drouyn de Lhuys to Aubaret, April 25, 1866, 66PO/2/Carton 1 (a let-
ter concerning the boundaries between Siam and Laos), ADN; and Charles de Montigny
(French consul in Siam) to Count Walewski (French minister of foreign affairs), Septem-
ber 22, 1856, CP Siam, vol. 1, fol. 146 (a letter describing how wood from Laos could have
an “immense consumption” in France), Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, La
Courneuve (hereafter AMAE).
52 For more on the Cambodia conflict, see R. Stanley Thompson, “Siam and France 1863–
1870,” Far Eastern Quarterly 5, no. 1 (November 1945): 28–30.

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142 Martin
empire in Southeast Asia, despite the fact that Angkor technically remained a
Siamese possession until 1907.53 Siam’s ownership may have been glossed over
at the 1867 exhibition, but it was underscored in Gréhan’s book, which featured
an entire chapter devoted to Angkor and its history with Siam. Furthermore,
the second (1868) edition of Gréhan’s book, according to its title page, was
supposed to illustrate a map by the French cartographer Victor Adolphe Malte-
Brun indicating that Angkor was part of Siam, but the map didn’t appear until
a later (1878) edition. Disputes between France and Siam over territories and
boundaries remained a persistent theme in French universal exhibitions up to
1900, when the French government initially tried to place Siam within its colo-
nial section. When the Siamese monarchy balked, its display was relocated.54
Even so, one can imagine the frustration this placement must have caused,
especially given Siam’s long history of carefully monitoring its image at such
international events and of mastering the cultures of visuality, spectacle, and
consumption they entailed.
Siam’s preoccupation with image management extended far beyond the life
of the fair and is exemplified by Gréhan’s book and its photogravures by Riou.
(Siam was, incidentally, the only Asian country to designate an official “artiste
peintre” for the exhibition.) It is also tellingly demonstrated in a series of let-
ters exchanged between Gréhan and the editor of the French newspaper Le
Nouvel Illustré that are now in the archives of the French foreign ministry. They
relate to an article entitled “Le Roi et La Reine de Siam” published in Le Nouvel
Illustré on December 20, 1866, prior to the opening of the exhibition. Its focus
was an engraving based on a photograph of Mongkut and one of his wives that
the Siamese king had presented as a gift to Napoléon III (figure 5.10).
The article poked fun at Mongkut’s European-inspired costume, claiming
that his hat made him resemble that of an invalid from Greenwich hospi-
tal, and that he looked “English” on the top, “French” in the middle (with his
frock coat and cravat), and “Indochinese” on the bottom, with his bare legs
and pointed slippers resting on a small oriental carpet. On the day it was pub-
lished, Gréhan fired off an angry letter to Le Nouvel Illustré’s editor, objecting
to the article’s offensive tone and its use of an “outdated” photograph from
six years earlier.55 Maintaining that the newspaper would never have treated
a European sovereign this way, Gréhan informed the editor that Mongkut was
53 Flour, “Orientalism and the Reality Effect.” The article does not acknowledge the fact that
Angkor remained in Siam’s control until 1907.
54 Thongchai, “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’,” 541.
55 This correspondence, along with relevant newspaper clippings, can be found in AMAE,
69ADP.

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figure 5.10 Le Roi et la Reine de Siam, from Le Nouvel Illustré, December 20, 1866
not only a faithful ally of France but that he also spoke English, read European
newspapers, and was committed to “scientific and cultural progress” in Siam.
Gréhan threatened to get the French government involved if the editor did not
take action, and indeed he did write to the French foreign minister complain-
ing about the offense. Nine days later, the newspaper printed a retraction of
both the article and the engraving, admitting that they were “anachronistic”
and based on inaccurate information. One month later, it followed up with a
highly positive portrayal of Mongkut and Siam, “one of most important Asiatic
states of the far east.” The second article concluded with a discussion of Siam’s
rich natural resources and impressive cultural products, several of which, it
noted, would soon be on view at the fair.
5 Conclusion: Exhibitions in Asia
Nineteenth-century universal exhibitions were not only arenas for France,

Britain, and other European powers to assert their commercial and colonial
dominance. They also provided vital opportunities for sovereign powers from
outside Europe, many of which had been coerced into unequal trade agree-
ments with the West, to compete for European market share and to stake

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144 Martin
important political, cultural, and territorial claims. Japan and Siam took
advantage of this opportunity as early as 1867, and both continued to par-
ticipate regularly in international exhibitions during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, in addition to staging fairs at home. Meiji officials who
assumed control of the Japanese government in 1868 were even more commit-
ted to strengthening commercial and diplomatic ties with the West than their
Bakufu predecessors had been, and they made it official policy to take part in
world’s fairs. Moreover, beginning in 1871, they sponsored national exhibitions
in Kyoto and other parts of Japan that were devoted to improving native craft
industries for domestic and foreign consumption.56 Like its contribution to the
1867 Paris exhibition, Siam’s first national exhibition, held in conjunction with
the centennial of the Chakri dynasty in 1882, aimed first and foremost to cel-
ebrate the king (Mongkut’s son, Chulalongkorn) and to credit him for bringing
Siam into the modern age.57
Although China may not have had a voice in the 1867 exhibition, by the early
1870s its government was making a concerted effort to participate in world’s
fairs. At first, China’s involvement was overseen by the Imperial Maritime
Customs, a Chinese government agency staffed with Westerners. Yet some
Qing reformers viewed this situation as unsatisfactory, maintaining that for-
eigners should not be given the crucial task of fashioning and promoting
China’s image abroad. Upon seeing the China display at the Paris universal
exhibition of 1878, one reformer, Ma Jianzhong, reported that it was an embar-
rassment and “could not even match up to” China’s rival, Japan.58 Eventually
more government agencies got involved, leading to a veritable explosion of
international and national exhibits that one scholar has described as China’s
“exhibitionary complex.”59 The culmination of this complex was the Shanghai
Expo of 2010, which was the largest, most expensive, and best attended of any
world’s fair. The China Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, known as the Oriental
Crown, towered over the other national pavilions, and its bright red color and
innovative design heralded China’s venerable cultural traditions as well as its
modern achievements.60
56 Conant, “Refractions of the Rising Sun,” 82.

57 On these centennial celebrations, see Pirasri Povatong, “Building Siwilai: Transformation
of Architecture and Architectural Practice in Siam during the Reign of Rama V, 1868–1910”
(PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2011), 113–21.
58 Quoted and translated in Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of
the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 220.
59 Gerth, China Made.
60 Astrid Nordin, “Space for the future: Exhibiting China in the world at the Shanghai Expo,”
China Information 26, no. 2 (July 2012): 235–49.

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More countries participated in the Shanghai Expo than any previous world’s
fair, a feat made possible by Chinese government subsidies. Many participants
created websites—the modern-day equivalent of publications like Gréhan’s
Royaume de Siam—outlining the history of their attendance at universal exhi-
bitions. Thailand’s website reads like an updated version of Gréhan’s book,
describing how the kingdom became involved in these international events as
early as 1867, when the “independent nations” of the world received an “impe-
rial invitation” from Napoléon III to “showcase their economic prowess and
progress.”61 China’s history of involvement is told, or rather rewritten, in its
own online promotional materials and in websites devoted to the country’s
many world’s fair enthusiasts, who compete to collect prints, medals, and
other historical memorabilia associated with these events. A site devoted to
the self-described “Number 1 Expo Collector,” Tong Bingxue, proudly traces
China’s participation in world’s fairs beginning with London’s Great Exhibition
of 1851—even though China was represented unofficially, and mostly pejora-
tively, at that event—and includes an engraving of the China pavilion from
1867, without acknowledging the political or military conflicts involved.62 It is
perhaps ironic that China and its citizens have become the chief proponents
of universal exhibitions today, using such mega-events like the Shanghai Expo
to proclaim China as “the benevolent leader of a new harmonious world order”
while engaging in the same politics of nationalism and global capitalism that
have marked such gatherings from the beginning.63
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chapter 6
Victor Hugo and the Romantic Dream of China

The* tourist in Paris who visits the Maison de Victor Hugo1 may be puzzled and
surprised to come across a room with an exuberant chinoiserie decor (figure
6.1). Chinoiserie, of course, is a mode of domestic decoration that we asso-
ciate with the eighteenth-century rococo rather than the nineteenth-century
Romantic movement, for which Hugo was one of the great standard-bearers.
What is even more surprising is that the room was entirely designed, and in part
executed, by Hugo. Indeed, for those who know Hugo primarily as the author
of historical novels set in France’s distant and recent past (The Hunchback of
Notre Dame, Les Misérables), the room may seem an anomaly in style and
medium.
The chinoiserie room in the Maison de Victor Hugo is not original to the
writer’s Paris apartment. Instead, it was designed and in part fabricated by
Hugo in 1863 for the house of his mistress Juliette Drouet (1806–1883) on the
Channel island of Guernsey, where she had followed him into exile in 1855.
After her death, Drouet’s house, Hauteville Fairy, was inherited by her nephew
Louis Koch. Through the efforts of Hugo’s friend Paul Meurice, the founder of
the Maison de Victor Hugo, and with the help of Koch, who became its first
curator, the chinoiserie room was reinstalled in the house museum on the
Place des Vosges in 1903.2
If the presence of a chinoiserie room in a house decorated in the early 1860s
may strike us as belated, that belatedness becomes comprehensible when we
consider chinoiserie as part of the nineteenth-century rococo revival. Hugh
* Several people have helped me in the course of writing this chapter. I am especially grateful
to Martine Contensou, Claire Lecourt, and Marie-Laurence Marco for their kind reception at
the Maison de Victor Hugo and for giving me the most valuable advice and assistance. I thank
Robert Alvin Adler, Jennifer Milam, and Kristel Smentek for their critical reading of various
drafts. And I am indebted to Ruth Iskin for including an abbreviated version of this chapter
as a paper in her 2017 CAA session, which generated valuable audience comments.
1 The house museum located in the hôtel on the Places des Vosges where Victor Hugo (1802–
1885) resided between 1832 and 1848. Hugo rented the second floor of the house.
2 On the early history of the Maison de Victor Hugo, see Arsène Alexandre, La Maison de Victor
Hugo (Paris: Hachette, 1903). For a more critical view, see Elizabeth Emery, Photojournalism
and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (1881–1914): Privacy, Publicity, and Person-
ality (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 175–80 and passim.

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150 Chu
figure 6.1 Victor Hugo, Chinese room designed for Juliette Drouet at Hauteville
Fairy, 1863. Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris
Honour has shown that in the context of this revival, which began in the 1830s,
a new vogue developed, in both England and France, for Chinese and Chinese-
inspired knickknacks, then defined as chinoiseries.3 Honour quotes the French
author and publisher Louis-Eustache Audot, who wrote in 1859, “Chinoiseries
have come back into fashion in the last few years, and grotesque figures (magots)
and porcelain vases (potiches), sold at high prices, have been reintegrated into
the whatnots of little ladies.”4 The rococo revival of the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury led not only to the collecting of Chinese or Chinese-inspired knickknacks
but also to a revival of chinoiserie decorative schemes, complete with silk wall
hangings à la Pillement, woven, according to Honour, “in the faded colours
which eighteenth-century brocades by then had acquired.”5 Honour, like most
3 In accordance with the style of this book, I’ll use the term “chinoiserie,” set in roman type, as
it is currently defined in art history; I’ll use the word “chinoiserie(s),” set in italics, to refer to
its nineteenth-century (French) meaning of bizarre knickknack(s). See Introduction, p. 9.
4 “Les Chinoiseries ont repris faveur dans les dernières années, et les Magots et potiches ache-
tés à grand frais ont été réintegrés sur les étagères des petites maîtresses.” Cited in Hugh
Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 204. Unfortunately,
Honour does not give the source of the quote.
5 Ibid., 205. Jean-Baptiste Pillement (1728–1808) was a painter as well as a designer. He became
especially known for his engravings of chinoiserie subjects, which were known and imitated
throughout Europe.

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Victor Hugo and the Romantic Dream of China 151
authors who have written about the nineteenth-century engagement with

Chinese art, characterized it as an uninspired bourgeois reiteration of rococo
chinoiserie with little direct inspiration of Chinese art.6
In recent years, a number of contemporary scholars have shown that, while
the bourgeois banalization of chinoiserie was certainly a common phenom-
enon in the nineteenth century, Chinese material culture and, for that matter,
eighteenth-century chinoiserie were capable of inspiring new and fresh creative
ideas and efforts. While this argument was first made for Britain,7 I intend to
show, using Hugo as a case study, that in nineteenth-century France, too, there
was more to the engagement with Chinese material culture, whether or not
mediated by eighteenth-century chinoiserie, than insipid imitation and trivi-
alization. This is especially true for the room Hugo designed for Drouet, which,
though at first glance reminiscent of eighteenth-century porcelain rooms in
chinoiserie style, on closer inspection brings something entirely different and
new. Indeed, its wall decor, made up of authentic Chinese elements—reused
in their entirety or fragmentarily and for purposes for which they were never
intended—in combination with elements newly designed by Hugo that repeat
or pervert the Chinese examples, anticipates post-modernism in its emphasis
on reuse, fragmentation, and assemblage. I’ll refer to Hugo’s unusual practice as
“bricolage,” using an anthropological term first coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss.
I will compare the bricolage in Drouet’s Chinese room to that used in Hugo’s
own Guernsey dwelling, Hauteville House. At the same time, I will link it to his
literary practice, for which the term bricolage has already been used. Finally,
basing my argument on the writings of anthropologist Waud Kracke, I’ll con-
nect the specific practice in the room for Drouet to Hugo’s interest in dreams.
Indeed, I’ll describe the bricolage practice in the room as a sort of Traumarbeit,
6 This viewpoint is most strongly held by Michael Sullivan, who in his The Meeting of Eastern
and Western Art, 2nd rev. ed. (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973; Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1989) devotes less than one page (116) to the impact of Chinese
art in nineteenth-century Europe, categorically asserting that after the eighteenth century
“admiration of things Chinese turned to contempt” and that the Chinese-inspired art that
was still produced in the nineteenth century was “decadent” and “garish.”
7 Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye. Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-
Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); Linda Merrill, “Whistler and the
‘Lange Lijzen,’ ” Burlington Magazine 136, no. 1099 (October 1994): 683–90; Greg M. Thom-
as, “Chinoiserie and Intercultural Dialogue at Brighton Pavilion,” in Petra ten-Doesschate
Chu and Ning Ding, eds., Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West
(Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2015), 232–47; Aileen Tsui, “Whistler’s La Princesse du
pays de la porcelaine: Painting Re-Oriented,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 9, no. 2
(Autumn 2010), accessed February 3, 2017, http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn10/
whistlers-la-princesse-du-pays-de-la-porcelaine.

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152 Chu
which seems perfectly suited to the common Romantic vision of China (which
he shared and, indeed, most clearly articulated) as a dream—a phantasmago-
ric world, the very antithesis of the European world of reason and ideas.
I shall begin this chapter with discussing Hugo’s vision of China and
Chinese art within the context of his time; I will then review his collecting
of Chinese material culture, to end with a detailed discussion of his chinoiserie
decors, touching briefly on his “Chinese” rooms in his own Guernsey dwell-
ing, Hauteville House, before zeroing in on the chinoiserie room designed for
Drouet’s Hauteville Fairy.
1 Hugo’s Vision of China and Chinese Art
Threatened by arrest, after calling for armed resistance against Louis Napoléon’s
coup d’état in December 1851, Hugo fled to Brussels and from there, in 1852,
to the island of Jersey. In 1855, he moved from Jersey to Guernsey, where he
remained until the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, the year in which
he returned to Paris.8
Hugo’s early years on Guernsey coincided with the Second Opium War.
Initiated by the British in 1856, the war was joined by the French the follow-
ing year after the murder of a French missionary by the Chinese.9 Four years
later, it culminated in the looting and burning of the Chinese Imperial sum-
mer palace Yuanming Yuan, located a short distance from Peking.10 Hugo must
have learned about the destruction of this “Versailles of China” shortly after
it occurred in October 1860. The event was international news and widely
reported in the media, reaching not only the small island of Guernsey but also,
on the opposite end of the world, the Indian city of Madras (now Chennai),
where a young Irish captain in the British army heard about the sacking of
the summer palace. William Frances Butler (1838–1877),11 whose career com-
bined the military and literature, was by his own account an avid reader. Clearly
8 On Victor Hugo’s life, see among others Graham Robb, Victor Hugo: A Biography, first pa-
perback ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).
9 The literature on the opium wars is vast. For an introduction, see Jonathan D. Spence, The
Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).
10 On this subject, see especially Greg Thomas, “The Looting of Yuangming Yuan and the Trans-
lation of Chinese Art in Europe,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 7, no. 2 (Autumn 2008),
http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn08/93-the-looting-of-yuanming-
and-the-translation-of-chinese-art-in-europe.
11 On Butler, see Sir William Butler, An Autobiography (London: Constable, 1911); and Cheng
Zenghou, “Qui est le capitaine Butler? A propos d’une lettre de Victor Hugo sur le Palais
d’été,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 111, no. 4 (2011): 891–903. As fate would have it,

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familiar with Hugo’s work and apparently interested in his views, he wrote Hugo
a letter sometime in 1861 to ask for his opinion on the destruction of the Chinese
palace. Hugo did not mince words. In a letter dated November 25, 1861, he wrote:
You ask my opinion, Sir, about the China expedition…. Here it is:
There was, in a corner of the world, a wonder of the world; this wonder
was called the Summer Palace. Art has two principles, the Idea, which
produces European art, and the Chimera, which produces oriental art.
The Summer Palace was to chimerical art what the Parthenon is to ideal
art. All that can be begotten of the imagination of an almost extra-human
people was there. It was not a single, unique work like the Parthenon. It
was a kind of enormous model of the chimera, if the chimera can have
a model. Imagine some inexpressible construction, something like a
lunar building, and you will have the Summer Palace. Build a dream with
marble, jade, bronze, and porcelain, frame it with cedar wood, cover it
with precious stones, drape it with silk, make it here a sanctuary, there
a harem, elsewhere a citadel, put gods there, and monsters, varnish it,
enamel it, gild it, paint it, have architects who are poets build the thou-
sand and one dreams of the thousand and one nights, add gardens, ba-
sins, gushing water and foam, swans, ibis, peacocks, suppose in a word a
sort of dazzling cavern of human fantasy with the face of a temple and
palace, such was this building…. If people did not see it they imagined it.
It was a kind of tremendous unknown masterpiece, glimpsed from the
distance in a kind of twilight, like a silhouette of the civilization of Asia
on the horizon of the civilization of Europe.
This wonder has disappeared.
One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the
other burned. Victory can be a thieving woman, or so it seems.12
Butler’s regiment was transferred in the summer of 1866 to Guernsey, where he met Hugo
and, in fact, became friends with him. See Butler, Autobiography, 83–88.
12 “Vous me demandez mon avis, monsieur, sur l’expédition de Chine…. le voici:
“ll y avait, dans un coin du monde, une merveille du monde; cette merveille s’appelait
le Palais d’été. L’art a deux principes, l’Idée qui produit l’art européen, et la Chimère
qui produit l’art oriental. Le Palais d’été était à l’art chimérique ce que le Parthénon
est à l’art idéal. Tout ce que peut enfanter l’imagination d’un peuple presque extra-hu-
main était là. Ce n’était pas, comme le Parthénon, une oeuvre rare et unique; c’était
une sorte d’énorme modèle de la chimère, si la chimère peut avoir un modèle.ˮ
“Imaginez on ne sait quelle construction inexprimable, quelque chose comme un
édifice lunaire, et vous aurez le Palais d’été. Bâtissez un songe avec du marbre, du jade,
du bronze, de la porcelaine, charpentez-le en bois de cèdre, couvrez-le de pierreries,

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154 Chu
If I have quoted the letter almost in its entirety, it is because, probably better
than any nineteenth-century text, it sums up the Romantic view of China and
its art. As Swedish scholar Erik Ringmar has pointed out, Hugo’s description of
the palace has little to do with reality and very much with the poet himself and
with his European contemporaries,13 to whom the destruction of Yuanming
Yuan and the “opening” of China that resulted from the Opium Wars meant the
end of a dream of China that the Romantics had cherished.
Indeed, Hugo’s view of China as the obverse of a Greco-Roman-engendered
Europe14—chimera vs. idea, bizarre vs. rational, chaos vs. rule, fantasy vs.
reality, dream vs. consciousness, etc.—was directly related to the Romantic
interpretation of China as itself a fairyland, a dreamscape. This interpretation
had as much to do with the Romantics’ re-appreciation of eighteenth-century
chinoiserie as with their interest in whatever was available at the time by way
of Chinese material culture.15 Additionally, increasingly important for the
Romantic imagination of China were the new translations of Chinese nov-
els and poetry that were produced by the first French sinologists. Jean-Pierre
Abel-Rémusat (1788–1832), the founder of French sinology, who occupied the
drapez-le de soie, faites-le ici sanctuaire, là harem, là citadelle, mettez-y des dieux,
mettez-y des monstres, vernissez-le, émaillez-le, dorez-le, fardez-le, faites construire
par des architectes qui soient des poètes les mille et un rêves des mille et une nuits,
ajoutez des jardins, des bassins, des jaillissements d’eau et d’écume, des cygnes, des
ibis, des paons, supposez en un mot une sorte d’éblouissante caverne de la fantaisie
humaine ayant une figure de temple et de palais, c’était là ce monument … Si on ne le
voyait pas, on le rêvait. C’était une sorte d’effrayant chef-d’œuvre inconnu entrevu au
loin dans on ne sait quel crépuscule, comme une silhouette de la civilisation d’Asie sur
l’horizon de la civilisation d’Europe.”
“Cette merveille a disparu.”
“Un jour, deux bandits sont entrés dans le Palais d’été. L’un a pillé, l’autre a incen-
dié. La victoire peut être une voleuse, à ce qu’il paraît …” See Oeuvres complètes de
Victor Hugo: Actes et paroles pendant l’exile, 1852–70 (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1880), 267–70. The
English translation is from Victor Hugo, “The sack of the Summer Palace,” The Courier
(November 1985): 15.
13 See Erik Ringmar, Liberal Barbarism: The European Destruction of the Palace of the Em-
peror of China (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 157–59. While I agree with Ringmar
that Hugo’s description of Yuanming Yuan had nothing to do with reality and everything
with the European Romantic imagination of China, I don’t quite agree with his assertion
that Hugo’s letter was prompted by the “exquisite anguish” he felt at picturing in his mind
Yuanming Yuan’s ruins.
14 I am using the terms “China” and “Europe” here in the broadest cultural sense.
15 This would have included antique Chinese porcelains and lacquerware, as well as con-
temporary imports from Canton: porcelain teapots, plates, and cups; paintings on glass;
ivory and soapstone figurines, or lacquer boxes containing various consumer goods, such
as cashmere shawls and tea, etc.

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foundational chair in that field at the Collège de France, translated the novel
Iu-Kiao Li ou les deux cousines (1826) as well three volumes of Chinese tales,
Contes Chinois (1827). His successor Stanislas Julien (1797–1873), in addition to
translating Chinese classics (the works of Mengzi into Latin and of Laozi into
French), translated two plays, Histoire du Cercle de Craie (1832) and Tschao-
chikou-eul, ou l’Orphelin de la Chine (1834), as well as several novels, including
Blanche et Bleue (1834) and Ping-chan-ling-yen, les deux jeune filles lettrées,
roman chinois (1860). Julien’s student and eventual successor Marie-Jean-Léon
d’Hervey de Saint-Denys (1822–1892) produced the first scholarly translation
of Chinese poetry, the Poésies de l’époque des T’ang. Étude sur l’art poétique en
Chine (1862).16
Eighteenth-century chinoiserie, Chinese material culture, and newly trans-
lated classics of Chinese literature together produced a new interest in China
after it had practically disappeared in France during the Revolution and the
Napoleonic period. Hugo was not alone among French mid-nineteenth-century
authors to gain a strong appreciation of China. China appealed to the imagi-
nation of several of his contemporaries, especially Joseph Méry, Théophile
Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, Maxime Du Camp, and the Goncourt brothers.17
To all these authors, China was a fantasyland filled with porcelain pagodas,
fragrant flowers, exotic birds (peacocks and cormorants), and slender women
with slanted eyes, little feet, and carmine nails. This conception of China as a
fantasy, a (day)dream, often triggered by an object like a porcelain vase or a lac-
quer tea caddy, is frequently found in their writings. The young Flaubert waxes
enthusiastically about the fantastic voyages on which tea caddies have taken
him (“Oh! Que les boîtes à thé m’ont fait faire des voyages!”).18 Maxime Du
Camp, in his Mémoires d’un suicide (first published in 1852), describes a dream
of his main character, Jean-Marc, that is triggered by looking at a Chinese
fire screen before he dozes off by the hearth. The dream leads him on a long
boat trip to China, where he encounters mandarins in palanquins carried by
slaves, rich merchants eating swallows’ nests from paper-thin porcelain plates,
strange birds, red and green fish, and, of course, a beautiful girl with long black
braids, little feet, and cinnabar-colored nails, whom he promptly asks to be his
bride. And avid Chinese porcelain collectors Edmond and Jules de Goncourt,
16 See, among others, François Pouillin, ed. Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française
(Paris: Karthala, 2012), passim.
17 On the revival of interest in China among Romantic authors, see William Leonard
Schwartz, The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature, 1800–
1915 (Paris: Champion, 1927), chap. 1.
18 Gustave Flaubert, Oeuvres de jeunesse (Paris: Conard, 1910), 2:241, https://fr.wikisource
.org/wiki/%C5%92uvres_de_jeunesse_(Flaubert).

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156 Chu
in an article in L’Artiste of May 1857 (“Venise la nuit”), wrote, “Talk to me about

China … a paradise of paradoxes! Jade sky, red trees, nankeen rivers, chimeri-
cal creatures, cities of porcelain, ten-story-high pagodas whose bells sing in
the wind! Ah, Monsieur, the extravagant dishes, sauces made from essence of
woodlouse!”19
Hugo himself, as late as 1875 (when for most people the dream of China
had ceased to exist), still wrote about the daydreams that could be triggered
by Chinese objects, though, significantly, the object in question—a Chinese
vase—has fallen on the ground and broken into pieces. Le Pot cassé (1875) rep-
resents not merely the shattering of the daydreams that the vase in the poem
had the power to provoke (“Sa rondeur était de rêves pleines”); it also means
the end of the Romantic dream of China, for the vase, in Hugo’s poem, served
as a synecdoche for all of China, toute la Chine:
Oh heavens! All of China is on the ground in pieces!

This vase, pale and smooth like a reflection in water, [is]
Covered with birds, flowers, fruits and the lies
of that vague ideal that emerges from the blue of dreams …20
2 Collecting China
Le Pot cassé suggests that Hugo’s fascination with China (and that of his con-
temporaries) was triggered in large part by his daily intercourse with the
19 “Parlez-moi de la China … Un paradis de paradoxes! Un ciel de jade, des arbres rouges, des
fleuves nankin, des bestiaux chimériques, des villes de porcelaine, et des pagodes à dix
étages de clochetttes, que le vent sonne. Ah! Monsieur, des nourritures extravagantes, des
sauces à l’essence de cloporte!” Cited in Ting Chang, “Goncourt’s China Cabinet: China
Fantasy and a Nineteenth-Century French Collector,” in Collecting China: The World,
China, and a History of Collecting, ed. Vimalin Rujivacharakul (Newark: University of Del-
aware Press, 2011), 31. I have slightly changed Chang’s translation as I believe “des fleuves
nankin” does not mean the rivers of Nanjing but nankeen rivers, whereby nankeen refers
to a cloth that was manufactured in Nanjing, whose yellow color resembled the colors of
Chinese rivers, especially the Huang He or Yellow River.
20 “Ô ciel ! toute la Chine est par terre en morceaux!
Ce vase pâle et doux comme un reflet des eaux,
Couvert d’oiseaux, de fleurs, de fruits, et des mensonges
De ce vague idéal qui sort du bleu des songes …”
This poem was originally published in L’Art d’être grand-père (Paris: Hetzel, 1877). Its full
text may be found at “Les grands classiques,” Poésie française, accessed April 19, 2018,
http://poesie.webnet.fr/lesgrandsclassiques/poemes/victor_hugo/le_pot_casse.html.
The translation is my own.

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material culture of the country. In the poem, he recounts how he showed the
vase to his grandchildren, pointing out interesting and exotic motifs—yaks,
mandarins, tigers, owls, kings, monsters, and devils.21 Hugo mentions in the
poem that he had bought the vase “on the quais.” In 1875, when he published Le
Pot cassé, he had been collecting Chinese artifacts—porcelains, silks, lacquer-
ware, statuettes, and other objects of various kind—for at least forty years.22
After his move to Guernsey, this collecting effort increased as Hugo began to
integrate the objects he collected into the interiors he designed and actively
helped build in his own house and that of Juliette Drouet. It was the repeated
exposure to and contemplation of these objects that largely informed his views
of China and its culture, perhaps in tandem with his familiarity with some
early translations of Chinese poetry. In his library Hugo had a translation of
Tang dynasty poems by the French sinologist and early dream theorist Hervey
de Saint-Denys, published in 1862.23 He also owned all the translations of Chi-
nese poetry by Judith Gautier, the daughter of his friend Théophile Gautier,
himself an enthusiastic sinophile.24 Though Judith Gautier’s poems were not
published until the late 1860s and 1870s, her father’s lifelong fascination with
Chinese literature may have rubbed off on Hugo well before that time.
According to Paul Eudel (1837–1911), Victor Hugo instilled in the French the
taste for old things (choses anciennes) and launched the fashion for “old furni-
ture, old tapestries, and old bibelots.”25 Eudel did not mean that before Hugo
there were no collectors. He certainly knew that the collecting of antiquities
and antiques had gone on in Europe at least since the Renaissance. What he
meant was that Hugo made collecting popular among a middle-class public
21 It is clear that not all of the motifs Hugo mentions could have been found on a single vase.
The vase in the poem, therefore, is not only a synecdoche for all of China, but also for all
Chinese art.
22 This is confirmed by a passage in one of Hugo’s early poems, published in Voix Intérieures
(1837), which reads:
“Mes laques et mes grès, qu’un vitre défend,
Tous ces hochets de l’homme enviés par l’enfant,
Mes gros chinois ventrus faits comme des concombres,
Mon vieux tableau trouvé sous d’antique décombres,
Je vous livrerai tout, vous toucherez à tout!”.
Cited in Schwartz, The Imaginative Interpretation, 26.
23 See the valuable online inventory of Hugo’s Guernsey library on the website of Groupe
Hugo at the Université de Paris 7 (Jussieu), accessed April 19, 2018, http://groupugo.div
.jussieu.fr/Biblioth%E8que_Hugo/Les_livres_de_Hauteville-House/BE-BI.htm.
24 Gautier, who wrote several Chinese-inspired poems as well as a Chinese tale, “Le Pavillon
sur l’eau” (Musée des familles, September 1846) also “adopted” the Chinese immigrant Tin-
Tun Ling, whom he asked to teach Chinese to his daughters, Judith and Estelle.
25 Paul Eudel, Le Truquage: Les contrefaçons dévoilées (Paris: Dentu, 1854), 305.

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158 Chu
that began to acquire “old things” in order to integrate them into their domes-
tic environment. Whether he was, in effect, the first to do so or not, Hugo was
a passionate collector of knickknacks who loved visiting secondhand stores,
curiosity shops, and auctions. Juliette Drouet, who shared his passion for
antiquing, called him a grand bric-à-brac and mon grand bibeloteur.26
Hugo’s collecting interests were eclectic, especially early in his life. The title
of the catalog of the sale of his possessions in 1852, the year of his exile, suggests
its scope: Summary catalogue of a good set of furniture, objets d’art and curiosities,
ancient carved oak furniture, gilded and lacquered panels of Japan, pendulums
and Boule marquetrie, bronzes, porcelains from Saxony, China, and Japan, old
faience, glass from Venice, terra cottas, marble busts, bronze medallions, paint-
ings, drawings, books, the Voyage en Egypte, old arms, drapes, hangings, carpets
and tapestries, bedding, porcelains, kitchenware, etc.27 Théophile Gautier, in his
Histoire du romantisme, remembered visiting the apartment, in the rue de la
Tour d’Auvergne, where Hugo lived right before his exile.28 Immediately upon
entering the vestibule, which featured “Chinese water urns, Rouen faience, and
Japanese lacquer armoires,” he wrote, the “particular taste of the poet became
obvious, for no one has more firmly imprinted the distinct quality of his fan-
tasy on the places he inhabited.”29
The catalog of Hugo’s sale (described by Gautier as “a thin blue brochure”)
does not appear to have survived, but the poet’s early drawings give an idea
of the kind of objects he may have owned before the sale. A drawing entitled
Tête de cauchemar ou Masque chinois (Nightmarish Head or Chinese Masque;
figure 6.2), probably dating from the 1830s, shows what appears to be a Chinese
exorcist mask. It closely resembles masks that are made to this day in central
China and Tibet, showing three-eyed monstrous heads with gaping hexago-
nal mouths full of sharp, threatening teeth (figure 6.3). The drawing’s title is
26 See, respectively, Juliette Drouet, Lettres à Victor Hugo: 1833–1882, ed. Evelyn Blewer (Paris:
Harpo, 1985), 131; and Victor Hugo, Oeuvres complètes, 18 vols., ed. Jean Massin (Paris: Club
français du livre, 1967–71), 12: 1316.
27 Catalogue sommaire d’un bon mobilier, objets d’art et de curiosité, meubles anciens en bois
de chêne sculpté, bois doré et laque du Japon, pendula et marqueterie de Boule, bronzes,
porcelaines de Saxe, de Chine, du Japon, faïences anciennes, verreries de Venise, terres cuites,
bustes au marbre, médaillons en bronze, tableaux, dessins, livres, Voyage en Egypte, armes
anciennes, rideaux, tentures, tapis et tapisseries, couchers, porcelains, batterie de cuisine,
etc. See Theophile Gautier, Histoire du romantisme (Paris: Charpentier, 1874), 127.
28 This was the apartment where he stayed between 1848 and 1851, after his stint in the apart-
ment at the Place des Vosges or Place royale, as it was called for much of the nineteenth
century.
29 Gautier, Histoire du romantisme, 129.

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figure 6.2 Victor Hugo, Nightmarish Head (Tête de cauchemar) or Chinese Mask
(Masque Chinois), 1830s. Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris
figure 6.3
Tibetan mask for ritual dance, 17th century.
Rubin Museum of Art, New York

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160 Chu
probably not Hugo’s own,30 as he generally did not name his drawings, but
it does evoke the frightening and unsettling quality of the monstrous face it
represents.
Another, quite different, drawing shows a Chinese figurine of a little boy,
dressed in characteristic child’s pajamas (figure 6.4). While the figure was
probably a piece in Hugo’s collection, he has drawn it here against the back-
drop of a fantastic architectural structure composed of stacked onion domes
surmounted by Gothic tracing and turrets, in turn surmounted by what looks
like a ship’s mast.31 The drawing seems a visualization of the phantasmagoric
worlds far away in distance and time that could be triggered by the contempla-
tion of Chinese knickknacks on the artist’s desk.
After his move to Guernsey in 1855, Hugo’s collecting activity resumed.
According to Gustave Larroumet, writing in 1893, the island, which had long
been “a haunt of pirates and smugglers,” abounded in antiques.32 Hugo fre-
quented the local antique and secondhand stores but also went on buying
sprees during his numerous travels to Britain and the continent. In addi-
tion, he had friends and relatives buying objects for him abroad, especially in
Holland and England. Between October 1855 and April 1865, Hugo kept care-
ful notebooks (agendas) in which he recorded everything he acquired.33 Thus,
we have a fair idea of what he bought, from whom, and how much he paid
for it. While initially he appears to have been fascinated by the numerous
old carved oak and leather chests that were available on the island (probably
coming from France as well as England), by the late 1850s and early 1860s, the
notebooks reflect a greater emphasis on Chinese objects. Among the items he
bought at this time were Chinese porcelain teapots, dishes, vases, and head
rests; Chinese boxes and cabinets, many of them probably lacquered; tea cad-
dies made of different materials; portable screens and painted roller blinds;
ink wells, miniature pagodas, statuettes, figurines, “idols,” and (carved?) animal
horns (cornets).
Hugo’s almost obsessive collecting activity of the late 1850s and early 1860s
was no doubt related to the necessity of furnishing two houses he bought in
Guernsey: his family home, named Hauteville House after the street on which
30 The title is used in Henri Cazamayou, ed., Dessins de Victor Hugo: Maison de Victor Hugo
(Paris: Musées de la Ville de Paris, 1985), cat. no. 151.
31 The title of the drawing, Idole chinois devant un temple à pavillons bulbeux, in Dessins de
Victor Hugo, cat. no. 900, is misleading, as the figure is almost certainly not an idol but a
little boy.
32 “un repaire de pirates et de contrebandiers.” Gustave Larroumet, La Maison de Victor
Hugo: Impressions de Guernesey (Paris: Champion, 1893), 28–29.
33 The original agendas are in the BnF; they are transcribed in Oeuvres complètes, vols. 10–12.

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figure 6.4 Chinese Idol before a temple with Bulbous Pavilions (Idole chinoise devant un
temple à pavillons bulbeux), 1830s. Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris

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162 Chu
it was located, and Hauteville Fairy, the nearby house of his mistress, Juliette
Drouet. The decoration of both homes became a major preoccupation of Hugo
in the early 1860s. Designing and even working hand in hand with the skilled
workers he hired for the purpose, he refashioned antique pieces into wall pan-
eling and furniture and crafted new pieces to match them. Hugo was proud of
his accomplishment, writing to Jules Claretie, “When you come to Guernsey,
you’ll see that I have missed my vocation and that I was born to be a decorator.”34
Claretie, who did not see Hauteville House until after Hugo’s death, was deeply
impressed with it. It seemed to him that Victor Hugo was still there, because of
“the extent to which he had fashioned, moulded and cut it in his own image,
according to the fantasy of his caprice and the power of his genius.”35
3 Hauteville House: Gothic and Chinese
Hugo bought Hauteville House on May 16, 1856, and his family moved in by
October. The gradual remodeling of the interior of the house happened in two
phases. The first was finished in 1859. The second continued until 1862. The
house soon became (and continues to be to this day) something of a tourist
attraction and was visited by countless people, many of whom left an account
of their visit. Like his earlier homes in Paris, Hauteville House was for the most
part furnished (in the broadest sense of the word) with antiques combined
in rather eclectic fashion. Two styles, however, clearly dominated: Gothic and
Chinese. On the first floor, where the work started, the Gothic ruled; higher up
(the house had three floors), there was increased emphasis on Chinese style. In
an article written for the Journal des débats in 1885, the critic Henri Houssaye
wrote,
His style comes from the Gothic and the Chinese: the Chinese style is
better reasoned, more balanced, less extravagant; the Gothic less austere,
lovelier, better appropriated to life—the Gothic of an artist who knows
the beauties of the Renaissance and the coquettish graces of the eigh-
teenth century.36
34 “Quand vous viendrez à Guernesey, vous verrez que j’ai manqué ma vocation et que
j’étais né pour être décorateur.” Jules Claretie, Souvenirs intimes (Paris, Librairie Molière,
1902), 72.
35 “tant qu’il l’a façonnée, pétrie, menuisée à son image, selon la fantaisie de son caprice et
la puissance de son genie.” Ibid., 73.
36 “Son style procède du gothique et du chinois: le style chinois mieux raisonné, plus pon-
déré, moins extravagant; le gothique moins austère, plus aimable, mieux approprié à la vie,
le gothique d’un artiste qui connaît les beautés de la Renaissance et les graces coquettes

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While the combination of Chinese and Gothic may sound strange to us

today, in the eighteenth and, continuing, to an extent, in the nineteenth centu-
ries, the two styles were often considered on a par, as both styles were seen as
emphatically unclassical.37 In eighteenth-century architectural manuals, they
were often discussed together, as in William and John Halfpenny, Chinese and
Gothic Architecture Properly Ornamented (1752) and Charles Over, Ornamental
Architecture in the Gothic, Chinese, and Modern Taste (1758), two books special-
izing in designs for garden structures. With their nature-inspired forms and
preference for curved lines, both Gothic and Chinese were considered well
suited to the eighteenth-century picturesque English garden—itself the coun-
terpart of the Italo-French garden with its classical regularity. Yet, as David
Porter has shown, Gothic and Chinese were also thought of as distinct, at least
in Britain, as the first was indigenous and the second foreign, and as Gothic
had masculine overtones while Chinese was clearly gendered as feminine.38
Perhaps the most perceptive description of Hauteville House comes from
Gustave Larroumet, a writer on French literature and art in the third quarter of
the nineteenth century. Like Houssaye, Larroumet, while acknowledging the
overall eclectic aspect of the decor of Hauteville House, immediately recog-
nized the dominance of Gothic and Chinese. He also identified another impor-
tant characteristic of Hugo’s decorating style: his tendency towards “making
new from old” (à faire du neuf avec le vieux).39 Hugo, according to Larroumet,
took apart most of the antiques that he bought to make something new out
of them:
He very rarely left furniture and objects intact. One can count, in
Hauteville House, those he has not transformed. He demolished them
to assemble them anew, constructing fireplaces out of chests, bed
canopies out of altar baldachins, [more] fireplaces out of choir stalls,
chandeliers out of music lecterns, imagining and combining superb
elements into even more beautiful things…. Above all, he baptized and
debaptized. Not always remembering the original destination of all these
objects and, in such cases, not hesitating to make up for them a grandiose
or bizarre, terrifying or amusing story.40
du dix-huitième siècle.” Henri Houssaye, “De Marine-Terrace à Hauteville House,” Journal

des débats, September 18, 1885, 3.
37 On the convergence of the Chinese and the Gothic, see David Porter, The Chinese Taste in
Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 117–22.
38 Porter, Chinese Taste, 57–77 and 115–30.
39 Gustave Larroumet, Maison de Victor Hugo, 43.
40 “Il était très rare qu’il laissât intact les meubles et les objets. On compte, dans Hauteville
House, ceux qu’il n’a pas transformés. Il les démolissait pour les assembler à nouveau,

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164 Chu
Larroumet mentions several specific examples of Hugo’s tinkering, both in

the Gothic-styled part of the house on the first floor, where tables were made
of medieval doors and cabinets out of old wooden chests, and on the second
floor, where the two salons (the salon rouge and the salon bleu) were primarily
Chinese-themed. Here, according to Larroumet, “superb” panels in red lacquer
representing rustic scenes (scènes champêtres), cut, no doubt, from a Chinese
cabinet or screen, were applied to the large doors between the two salons. The
ceilings and walls of both rooms were covered with different kinds of silk, “des
plus belles qui soient en Europe.”41
Larroumet compares Hugo’s creative practice in Hauteville House with the
process the poet followed in his writing, which was likewise based on breaking
down traditional forms and making something new out of them. Hugo, accord-
ing to Larroumet, “never imitated anything, he recreated everything after his
image and individuality.”42 Inspired by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss,
contemporary scholar David Charles has coined the term “bricolage” for this
aspect of Hugo’s writing process.43 Lévi-Strauss, in The Savage Mind (1962),
proposed this term as an analogy for the process of mythical thought, which
works by “selecting the fragments or left-overs of previous cultural formations
and re-deploying them in new combinations.”44 Mythical thought, according
to Lévi-Strauss, is not goal-directed (like that of an engineer) but, one might
say, opportunistic in that it relies on available materials in order to generate
new forms and meanings. Applied to Hugo’s writing process, the term “brico-
lage” suggests (following Charles) that to Hugo, creativity may not necessarily
faisant des cheminées avec des coffres, des ciels de lit avec des baldaquins d’autel, des
cheminées avec des stalles d’église, des lustres avec des lutrins, imaginant et combinant
des choses encore/plus belles avec des éléments superbes…. Surtout il baptisait et il
débaptisait, ne se souvenant pas toujours de la destination primitive de tous ces objects,
et, en pareil cas, n’hésitant pas à leur faire une histoire grandiose ou bizarre, terrifiante ou
amusante.” Larroumet, Maison de Victor Hugo, 29–30.
41 “the most beautiful available in Europe.” Several sources have it that Hugo, despite his
condemnation of the destruction of Yuanming Yuan, did not hesitate to buy from a Brit-
ish officer a large quantity of Chinese silks looted from Yuanming Yuan. See Young-tsu
Wong, A Paradise Lost: The Imperial Garden of Yuanming Yuan (Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 2001), 154. It is possible that the silks in Hauteville House came originally
from the Chinese Palace.
42 “il n’a rien imité, il a tout recréé à son image et à sa marque.” Larroumet, Maison de Victor
Hugo, 44.
43 David Charles, La Pensée technique dans l’œuvre de Victor Hugo: Le Bricolage de l’infini
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997).
44 I am using the words of Christopher Johnson, “Bricoleur and Bricolage: From Metaphor to
Universal Concept,” Paragraph 35, no. 3 (2013), 355–72.

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have meant creating new “things” but reusing and recombining existing ele-
ments to create new forms and new meanings for them.
Following Claretie’s suggestion that Hugo’s practice in creating the decora-
tive ensembles for Hauteville House resembled his writing practice, I suggest
that we apply Charles’s term “bricolage” to the poet’s decorative work as well.
After all, it perfectly fits Lévi-Strauss’s definition of bricolage as “selecting the
fragments or left-overs of previous cultural formations and re-deploying them
in new combinations.” Following Lévi-Strauss’s theory, I further suggest that
Hugo’s bricolage in Hauteville House may be seen as a form of visual mythmak-
ing, a way of mythicizing himself.45 Claretie noted that Hugo had “fashioned,
moulded and cut it [Hauteville House] in his own image, according to the fan-
tasy of his caprice and the power of his genius.”46 Claretie’s remark was the
expression of a widely held view in the nineteenth century of Hauteville House
as a form of self-mythicization, a view that was first articulated by Charles
Baudelaire in 1859. In a letter to Hugo of September 27 of that year, Baudelaire
wrote, “I am told that you live in a tall, poetic building that resembles your
mind” (On me dit que vous habitez une demeure haute poétique, et qui res-
semble à votre esprit).47
4 The Chinoiserie Room for Juliette Drouet
If Hugo used bricolage in Hauteville House as a way to mythicize himself, in

Hauteville Fairy it had a different purpose. Here, I argue, bricolage was used to
create the effect of a dream. The chinoiserie drawing room was the concretiza-
tion of the Romantic dream of China, an escapist fantasy, perfectly suited for
the house of a mistress, where Hugo sought refuge from the daily trials and
tribulations of family and work.
On May 19, 1863, Drouet and Hugo jointly bought a house on 20 Hauteville
Street, a stone’s throw away from Hauteville House, which was at number 38.
A little more than a month after the acquisition of the house (which Hugo
baptized Hauteville-Féerie but which became popularly known by its English
name, Hauteville Fairy), Hugo started on its interior decoration, beginning
45 Cf. Pierre Dhainaut, “La Poésie à demeure: Victor Hugo, André Breton, Ferdinand Cheval,”
in Anne Boissière, Christophe Boulanger, and Savine Fausen, ed., Mythologies et mythes
individuals à partir de l’art brut (Paris: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2014), 37–41.
46 See note 35.
47 Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jacques Crépet. Vol. 11, Correspondance gé-
nérale (Paris, 1947), 347.

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166 Chu
with the Chinese drawing room.48 As early as August, Juliette wrote to him,
“I come back to my admiration for that prodigious room, which is a veritable
Chinese poem.”49
In contrast to Juliette’s first Guernsey House, La Fallue, which Hugo had dec-
orated in Gothic dark oak, the new house was dominated by the Chinese style,
as both the drawing room and the bedroom were “Chinese.” Old black-and-
white photographs exist of both rooms.50 Those of the bedroom, which has not
been preserved, show that the ceiling was covered in Chinese or Chinese-style
silks, from which a Chinese lantern was suspended. Lacquer panels and more
silk hangings are distinguishable on the walls. The photographs of the drawing
room show that it has remained largely intact and that it was reinstalled in the
Maison Victor Hugo approximately as it was in Hauteville Fairy.
Drouet’s drawing room is by far the most intricate and intriguing example
of Hugo’s creative bricolage method. At first glance, the room is vaguely remi-
niscent of eighteenth-century chinoiserie porcelain rooms of the kind found
in Germany and especially, on this small scale, in Holland, where Hugo may
have seen them as a young man.51 The featured wall of the room, presenting
Juliette’s ceramic collection, is centered on a cinnabar-red rococo-inspired
chimneypiece, designed by Hugo (figure 6.5). It is surmounted and surrounded
by an abundant collection of Chinese and European porcelain and ceramic
objects—plates, vases, and figurines—which are displayed within trellises or
on little étagères, which are mounted on variously colored and decorated wall
panels. The arrangement bears some similarity to the etchings after designs for
chimneypieces by the eighteenth-century French designer Daniel Marot, pub-
lished in his Nouvelles Cheminée [sic] faittes en Plusieurs endroits de la Hollande
et autres Provinces.52 As seen in figure 6.6, several of Marot’s chimneypieces are
48 Hugo did all the design work; he was helped in the execution by local Guernsey workers.
49 “je reviens à mon admiration pour cette prodigieuse chambre qui est un véritable poème
chinois.” Letter to Victor Hugo, August 6, 1863. See Hugo, Oeuvres completes, 12: 1316.
50 They are preserved in the Maison de Victor Hugo.
51 In a letter to a Dutch friend, written during a trip to Holland in 1861, Hugo wrote that,
having just crisscrossed Holland to see “everything” (J’ai tout vu), he felt disappointed
because the “old Chinese Holland” (la vieille Hollande chinoise) did not exist anymore.
Instead of the rococo interiors that he may have seen on earlier trips (perhaps in 1851–52,
while he was living in Brussels), he found that the Empire style reigned and that the kind
of curiosities found in the earlier rococo rooms had disappeared: “One curious thing is
that there are no curiosities. Everything is sanded down, remade, anglified, pruned, and
daubed in yellow.” (Une curiosité, c’est qu’il n’y a pas de curiosité. Tout est gratté, refait,
anglaisé, chatré, badigeonné en jaune). See Maxime Lalanne, Chez Victor Hugo par un
passant (Paris: Cadart et Luquet, 1864), 26–27.
52 This folio volume was published in The Hague between 1705 and 1713.

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figure 6.5 Victor Hugo, Chinese room designed for Juliette Drouet, 1863. Wall with
ceramic and porcelain collection. Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris
figure 6.6
Daniel Marot, etched folio from
Nouvelles Cheminée [sic] faittes en
plusieurs endroits de la Hollande et
autres Provinces, 1705–13. Victoria and

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168 Chu
designed for the display of porcelain collections and are surrounded by chinoi-
serie motifs, in a way analogous to Hugo’s wall arrangement in Hauteville Fairy.
But while there is a general similarity to eighteenth-century porcelain rooms
in Holland and Germany, closer inspection shows that Hugo’s room exhibits a
design principle—or, perhaps, rather, a lack thereof53—that makes the room
quite different from rococo chinoiserie rooms. While such rooms were always
designed holistically and following a single design concept, Hugo’s room is a
bricolage of many different elements, some new, others old, some made by
himself or under his supervision, others made far away, cut up and repurposed.
A prime example of this bricolage are the étagères sporting statuettes on
either side the chimney, between the plate displays (figure 6.7). Made of panels
cut out of Chinese or Japanese lacquer cabinets or screens, they are composed
of vertical wall-mounts to which small horizontal shelves are attached with
brackets that are hidden from view by scalloped “overhangs.” While the wall
mounts are made from lacquer panels with a floral decoration, the shelves and
the overhangs are cut out of figurative panels. In the étagère shown in figure
6.7, this is done in such a way that a male figure is cut clear in half so that the
upper part of his body is on the horizontal shelf, while the lower half, show-
ing the hem of his dress and his feet, is on the vertical overhang. Barely rec-
ognizable, dress and feet have been turned into an abstract ornament. Hugo
has found a new purpose and meaning for the figure, but the old one has not
entirely disappeared. Serving as a support for two images of Guanyin, the
figure may be thought of as performing an extreme kowtow, as he is literally
“bending over backwards.”
Many other and quite different examples of bricolage are found elsewhere
in the room. In the wall opposite the “collection” wall, elaborately pierced
wooden panels designed by Hugo “frame” insets made of painted Chinese
bamboo roller blinds (figure 6.8). Hugo’s notebooks present several instances
of the acquisition of such blinds or stores, for example, on May 11, 1862 (9 stores
chinois achetés à M. Marquand pour Mme Drouet à 6 sch.). Perhaps these were
originally bought and even used for the purpose for which they were intended,
then later cut up to serve as wall decorations. In several instances, the painted
figures on the Chinese roller blinds seem to have served as models for the fig-
ures on the panels surrounding them. Thus, the warrior with a sword stand-
ing next to a bronze tripod filled with flowers (figure 6.9) is repeated on the
53 It is interesting that the term that we have applied to Hugo’s interior designs is newly
used today to refer to postmodern interiors that are accessorized with what is on hand,
without any preconceived design concept. See, among others, Dick Hebdige, Subculture:
The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979).

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figure 6.7
Detail of Victor Hugo’s Chinese Room: wall shelf supporting
two Guanyin figures. Maison Victor Hugo, Paris
figure 6.8 Detail of Victor Hugo’s Chinese Room: entrance wall. Maison de Victor Hugo,
Paris

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170 Chu
figure 6.9 Detail of Figure 6.8
figure 6.10 Detail of Figure 6.8

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figure 6.11 Detail of Victor Hugo’s Chinese Room:

red panel with incised and gold-painted
decoration and insert of a Chinese
shawl box lid. Maison de Victor Hugo,
Paris
surrounding paneling, where the pot has been metamorphosed into a mon-
strous mask and the flowers into a framing garland (figure 6.10). Other elements
designed by Hugo seem to have been inspired by motifs on the Chinese por-
celains, the Chinese lacquer cabinet, or the Chinese figurines exhibited in the
room. On one of the short walls, the lid of a square lacquer box, originally used
to hold a cashmere shawl, is set within a panel designed by Hugo (figure 6.11).
Here, we notice that Hugo’s own designs appear to freely follow the lead of
the decorations of the repurposed Chinese element. The floral border and the
butterfly that surround the lacquer box echo motifs that may be found in the
lid itself.
Not all the panels designed by Hugo, however, are related to Chinese objects
within the room. Some seem derived from different sources. Take the often-
reproduced panel showing a fat mandarin seated at the table ready to consume
a fish (figure 6.12). With its Western-style perspective, this drawing appears to
have been inspired by one of the hybrid images painted by Cantonese painters
after Western models (and then, often, reproduced again by Western engravers;

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172 Chu
figure 6.12 Detail of Victor Hugo’s Chinese Room: panel with

mandarin eating fish, inscribed “SHU-ZAN.” Maison
de Victor Hugo, Paris
see figure 6.13). Other motifs may have been inspired by his readings of Chinese
or Chinese-inspired poetry.
In sum, the room for Juliette Drouet is a chef d’oeuvre of Hugo’s bricolage
effort. Physically, the artist has selected and repurposed various materials from
China and combined them with elements of his own creation. Conceptually, it
is based on the memories of a wide variety of images—seen on Chinese por-
celain, lacquerware, and silks; in eighteenth-century chinoiserie rooms that
he may have seen in the past; in illustrated books on China; and, possibly, as
well, on his memory of Chinese or Chinese-inspired texts. In this reliance on
memories of objects seen and texts read, his process of bricolage here invites
a comparison not with mythmaking but with dreaming—a process of image
formation that, as anthropologist Waud Kracke has argued, is also a form of
bricolage, as it depends on the seemingly random selection and combination
of distant and recent memories (Freud’s Tagesreste) for reuse in metaphorical
ways.54 Seeing Hugo’s conceptual bricolage as a sort of dream work (Freud’s
Traumarbeit) brings us back to Hugo’s notion of Chinese art as dreamlike and
54 Waud Kracke, “Myth in Dreams, Thought in Images: An Amazonian Contribution to the
Psychoanalytic Theory of Primary Process,” in Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychologi-
cal Interpretations, ed. Barbara Tedlock (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press,
1992), 38.

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figure 6.13 Canton School, Scholar at his desk, 18th–19th century. Bowers Museum, Santa
Ana, CA

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174 Chu
visionary. Perhaps the room of Juliette Drouet is not merely “Chinese” in form
and iconography but also in a conceptual sense.
It is known that Hugo was fascinated with dreams, and in his Carnets he
recorded several of his own dreams, picking up on many of the seemingly
bizarre characteristics of manifest dream imagery that Freud would later
broadly categorize as condensation or displacement. Examples of condensa-
tion and displacement seem, indeed, to be present in the room. The panel with
the fat mandarin, who is both a Chinese scholar and a French female cook (it
is well-known that the inscription “Shu-Zan” on the panel is a pun on the name
of Hugo’s cook Suzanne), is an example of the first; the Chinese figure who has
been cut in half and turned into an ornamental motif or the metamorphosis of
a vase into a monstrous mask may be seen as examples of second. Moreover,
the frequent reinterpretation of Chinese motifs in Hugo’s own panels may be
compared with Tagesreste, half-forgotten memories recovered in the dream.
If bricolage in Hauteville House had served Hugo to create a myth of himself,
in Hauteville Fairy it served to create une féerie—a fairyland or dreamworld.
It is in this environment that he intended to find respite from the labor of
writing—every day from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m., seated in the mostly ice-cold “look-
out” he had built on top of Hauteville House—as well as from the domestic
rituals, the house guests, the visits from admirers, the correspondence with
readers and publishers, and all the other fuss and bother famous men have to
deal with. Hauteville Fairy’s Chinese decor was suited par excellence to create a
dreamlike mood, which was enhanced by the bricolage effects that reproduced
the very process of dreams.
5 Conclusion
Victor Hugo’s chinoiserie room for Juliette Drouet demonstrates that Chinese
art and material culture, and the eighteenth-century chinoiserie that it had
inspired, were still capable of providing fresh inspiration to nineteenth-
century artists. This belies the long-accepted notion that, in the nineteenth
century, there was nothing but contempt for things Chinese and that the chi-
noiserie that still appeared from time to time was banal and decadent. It is
clear that Hugo and his Romantic contemporaries were as fascinated with
Chinese material culture, as many in the eighteenth century had been and for
some of the same reasons. During the eighteenth century, China, or “Cathay,”
as Hugh Honour preferred to call it, had been “a mysterious and charming
land, [where] poets … [were] the only historians and porcelain painters the
most reliable topographers.” Though that fantasy of China was increasingly

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dismantled in the nineteenth century, when Western incursions, culminat-

ing in the two opium wars, “broke the porcelain vase”—to freely use Hugo’s
metaphor—the knocking down of the fantasy did not prevent its continuation
as a dream, the “last dream of man! The last illusion,” as the Romantic poet
Joseph Méry referred to China in his poem L’Orient.55 Hugo’s Chinese room in
the Maison de Victor Hugo may be seen as a concretization of that dream, both
from the point of view of its imagery and the unusual bricolage process that
was used to create it.
Bibliography
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chapter 7
Chrysanthemums and Cultivated Visions of the

Victorian Garden
Elizabeth Chang
The Victorian love of flowers in all forms and fashions has long been known.
Historians of art, science, and the landscape have all described the nineteenth-
century British engagement with horticulture as a significant moment in the
long history of human affection for cultivated blooms.1 But where did these
flowers come from, and how did these flowers’ circulations, real and imagined,
influence Victorian understandings of their surrounding cultivated world?
Similarities of climate and developing networks of trade meant that many
Victorian flowers came from China, and these Chinese flowers played a key
role in determining what garden flowers could and should look like in both
representation and reality. In the chapter that follows, I propose a mode of
reading Chinese flowers that brings nonfiction gardening texts and popular
fiction together within a broadly shared imaginative vision in order to draw
connections between organic cultivation, visual representation, and the inte-
grative work of fictional narrative.
Nineteenth-century Britons elevated enough to possess a parlor, garden,
and library could draw connections between all three through the cultivated
flower, which stood as represented image, organic specimen, and textual effect
in equal measure for this middle-class audience. To dismiss any point of this
triangle, particularly in the case of the exotic cultivars gaining vast popular-
ity as the nineteenth century progressed, is to miss a key piece of botanical
visual culture and Sino-British aesthetic exchange more broadly. Indeed, there
is hardly a moment in the history of Britain and China that does not relate
to the cultivation of flowering plants in one way or another. This chapter
will focus on one piece of this larger story—the uneven assimilation of the
Chinese chrysanthemum into British visual and literary culture—and in doing
1 A few notable starting points to survey this history: Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Elizabeth Hyde, Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture,
and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005);
and Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720–1800
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

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Chrysanthemums and Cultivated Visions of the Victorian Garden 179
so demonstrate some ways that exotic visual forms found as much expression
in Victorian popular and middle-brow prose as they did in more elite aesthetic
cultural forms.2
I begin the story near its end, at a moment of controversy over the very
appearance of the chrysanthemum flower itself. Writing in the December
1883 issue of William Robinson’s influential periodical The Garden, amateur
gardener Rev. G. H. Engleheart makes the plea that “The Garden will be doing
good work if it will lend its influence towards bringing about a revolution in
Chrysanthemum culture.”3 Modern readers, unfamiliar with “chrysanthemum
culture” as a set of Victorian floral conditions in need of revolution, may pause
at the heated rhetoric employed—Engleheart’s closing line, hearkening to a
day when “a lover of flowers will be able to stand in a Chrysanthemum exhibi-
tion with pleasure, and not disgust,” seems especially strong.4 Yet Engleheart
is clearly drawing from the agitations of a wider audience—with other cor-
respondents demanding that The Garden “prosecute a wholesome crusade
against the atrocities that have been made on our precious last flower of the
year”5 while also overthrowing the fancy flower-grower’s influence as “floral
schoolmaster”6—and the topic continues to be discussed across the gardening
press during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the amassed
discourse critiquing the flower-show chrysanthemum’s unnatural, hyper-
cultivated appearance grows so powerful among practitioners of the newer,
naturalistic gardening style that by century’s end the chrysanthemum can be
offhandedly dismissed as “a leafy stick [meant to] produce, as a terminal deco-
ration, a floral soup plate, of varied shade and pattern.”7 Quoted in the Journal
of the Royal Horticultural Society, Engleheart goes even further when asked to
describe the problems of excessive size in plants: “as an illustration a flower
which offers an object-lesson in the evil of abnormal development, which is of
course an offence against the canons of good taste … the Chrysanthemum.”8
Embedded in the debate over the evils of over-cultivation and the neces-
sity of chrysanthemum reform are several aesthetic crises that may be familiar
2 For a striking study of the interplay between natural forms, in particular orchids, and the
more culturally rarefied priorities of the decadent movement, see Whitney Davis, “Deca-
dence and the Organic Metaphor,” Representations 89, no. 1 (2005): 131–49.
3 G. H. Engleheart, “Chrysanthemum Reform,” The Garden 24 (December 1, 1883): 475.
4 Ibid., 475.
5 A. Waterman, “Chrysanthemum Reform,” The Garden 24 (December 8, 1883): 499.
6 “Notes: Chrysanthemum Reform,” The Garden 25 (February 9, 1884): 100.
7 Edmund Bailie, “A Book of the Rose (review),” Nature Notes: The Selborne Society Magazine 6,
no. 63 (March 1895): 54.
8 E. T. Cook, “The Advantages and Evils of Size in Flowers, Fruits, and Vegetables,” Journal of the
Royal Horticultural Society 28 (1904): 407.

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180 Chang
from other arenas. Cultivated chrysanthemums put pressure on the idea of the
natural as it is represented by garden flowers, even, as the “soup plate” critique
suggests, blurring the line between living and non-living decorations. They par-
ticipate in the world of commerce through specialty exhibitions demanding
ever-bigger blooms, resulting in a logic that, as Engleheart puts it, would have
“the fat woman of the penny show at the fair … take the place of the Venus de
Milo.”9 These exhibitions of gigantic blossoms so disorient the taste of ordinary
fanciers that they cannot even recognize the liberties taken with chrysanthe-
mum cultivation or indeed remember the appeal of the more “natural” style,
to the point where a printed intervention may be necessary to remind readers
of the absurdity of exhibition-bred specimens. “I should like to see an engrav-
ing in The Garden of such a plant in all its lanky hideousness, and by its side a
figure of such another, naturally and gracefully grown, and covered with flow-
ers,” writes a “Chrysanthemum Reform” respondent, continuing, “Imagine an
Oak tree trained to a single leading shoot 60 feet high in order to produce one
gigantic acorn at the top; it would hardly be a more preposterous object!”10 As
the illustration from one of the many promotional volumes published by spe-
cialty chrysanthemum growers shows, (figure 7.1), a key persuasive feature of
these flowers was their immense, near-human height and size.
Ongoing aesthetic anxieties over authenticity, reproducibility, artificiality,
verbal and visual distinctions, and market value are clearly well represented
in the pages of this debate over chrysanthemum culture. But one concern
usually linked with this constellation of anxieties is rerouted in the discus-
sion of the chrysanthemum’s potential reforms: the influence of Chinese and
Japanese horticultural practice, and Asian aesthetics more generally, on the
development of the chrysanthemum’s modern British form. The discussion
in The Garden frequently pauses to appreciate Japanese chrysanthemums—
writing that “in Japan the art of the gardener seems to be guided in the direc-
tion of producing a Chrysanthemum of feathery form and delicacy, long
slender petals rising in exquisite fringe … in development of size and graceful
form beyond anything dreamt of in the Temple Gardens”—and goes so far as
to insist that the viewing of such flowers “would open the eyes of the aver-
age [British] cultivator who delights in globular flowers, stiff, solid, lumpy in
outline, and altogether repellant rather than attractive to tasteful and artistic
people.”11
9 Engleheart, “Chrysanthemum Reform.”

10 “Chrysanthemum Reform,” (December 8, 1883).
11 “Notes: Chrysanthemum Reform.”

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figure 7.1 Illustration in Wells’ Book on the Culture of the Chrysanthemum for Exhibition,
Decoration, Cut Flower, and Market, 1910
As illustrations from gardening manuals and botanical periodicals of the era

suggest, there was a visible difference between the two forms of the chrysan-
themums: take, for example, the pompom form represented in watercolor in
an 1867 illustration from The Floral Magazine and a photograph of a feathery
Japanese type taken from a later (1907) volume devoted especially to chry-
santhemums (figures 7.2 and 7.3). Present in these two illustrations is a rich
history of popular depictions of exotic floral forms made available to a wide
reading audience through the expansion of the gardening press from the mid-
Victorian era onwards, led especially by prolific author-gardener John Loudon.12
Without discounting the immense significance of botanical illustrations like
these within the literature of the Victorian garden, I want to suggest that such
images of exotic flowers, isolated and marked out by the strict boundary of
the frame and the page, only make one part of a generally more complex and
12 On the history of Loudon’s writing, see Sarah Dewis, The Loudons and the Gardening Press:
A Victorian Cultural Industry (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); and Ray Desmond, “Loudon and
Nineteenth-Century Horticultural Journalism,” in John Claudius Loudon and the Early
Nineteenth Century in Great Britain, ed. Elisabeth MacDougall (Washington, DC: Dumbar-
ton Oaks, 1980), 77–98.

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182 Chang
figure 7.2 J. Andrews, “Pompon Chrysanthemums,” in The Floral Magazine: Comprising

Figures and Descriptions of Popular Garden Flowers, 1867

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figure 7.3 “W. Luxford,” in Percy S. Follwell, The Book of

Chrysanthemum, 1907
interpenetrative Victorian floral imaginary. The chrysanthemum makes a

useful contribution to our explanation of this visual history because both
versions, the pompom and the “Japanese,” are understood to be Asian variet-
ies. Thus, the entire discussion of the place of the chrysanthemum in British
gardens in fiction and nonfiction alike was at its heart an exploration of the envi-
ronmental exotic and its penetration of the gardens and fictions of the British
middle class.
This caused some realignments of conventional rhetoric. Defenders of the
British style—which was, by popular acknowledgment, a less-developed ver-
sion of the Chinese style—were the ones laying claim to the power of artifice.
One respondent argues in favor of gigantic showy blooms by claiming:

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184 Chang
Nature is much too tricky for us to follow, and consequently of late years
we have been aiming to make Nature subservient to Art, and who shall
say we have not succeeded? It is skill and perseverance that have brought
the Chrysanthemum to its present excellence, and are we to give up these
achievements to the tender mercies of wild Nature?13
Meanwhile, opposing correspondents supported the looser, feathery Japanese

form, which had been granted a “natural” status despite being a more recent
importation than the Chinese style. Left behind nearly entirely in this con-
versation were the original varieties of European wild chrysanthemums (most
notably ox-eye daisies), usually dismissed as weeds and rarely even termed
“chrysanthemums” in general discussion.14
Environmental historian Philip Pauly has argued that the chrysanthemum
formed a “significant challenge to Europeans’ views about their culture”15
because it forced British and Continental gardeners to “achieve a new level of
appreciation of naturalistic artifice.”16 This was, he claims, neither a dismissal
of Japanese gardens as pockets of natural beauty untouched by human hands
nor a perverse appreciation of Chinese plants as grotesquely appealing through
artifice and deformity. Instead, the chrysanthemum’s importation marked an
unmistakable turning point in the ongoing transculturation of global gardens
and other managed environments. As Pauly puts it, “horticulture is a fruit-
ful way to integrate cultural and natural history…. [T]he plants that form the
seemingly fixed backdrops for our lives and that we interpret as natural are the
products of historically identifiable, and often quite recent, ventures.”17 When
we follow the transplantation of the chrysanthemum across the nineteenth
century, from China and Japan to Britain and from garden to page, we find one
way to draw together questions of environmental history, aesthetic exchange,
verbal and visual exoticism, and the interconnection of visual and literary cul-
ture in the Victorian era.
This chapter draws together Pauly’s interest in the significant landscapes
produced when cultural and natural history intersect—spaces often known as
13 “Chrysanthemum Reform,” The Garden 25 (January 12, 1884): 17.

14 For some contemporary overviews of the flower’s history, see Percy S. Follwell, The Book
of the Chrysanthemum (London: J. Lane, 1907); and Frederick William Burbidge, The Chry-
santhemum: Its History, Culture, Classification, and Nomenclature (London: “The Garden”
Office, 1884).
15 Philip J. Pauly, “Mums as the Measure of Men: Horticulture and Culture,” Raritan 27, no. 3
(2008): 12.
16 Ibid., 18.
17 Ibid., 25.

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“second nature”—with attention to the consequences beyond the organic and

into the visual and textual that these intersections provide.18 The Victorian era
was a period endlessly interested in such places of overlap, also described by
the nineteenth-century American periodical Garden and Forest as “that part
of the landscape which is necessarily not wild—the landscape of our daily
lives—the humanized scenery of the earth.”19 Flowers like the chrysanthemum,
whose very existence as independent vegetation was sometimes challenged,
made a notable piece of this nineteenth-century “humanized scenery,” both
in the way they actually looked while in and out of bloom and in the way that
authors and artists drew and pictured their appearance in the landscape—
and, by extension, drew and pictured their own environment more generally.
Therefore, the importation, circulation, cultivation, and hybridization of chry-
santhemums from China and, later, Japan are processes of signal importance
not only to the field of garden history but a wider range of literary and cultural
studies. As the chrysanthemum becomes an ever more familiar piece of the
British landscape and British visual imagination, it offers literary critics and
scholars of visual history a lens to jointly view the linked visual presence of
exotic flowers in novels, periodicals, material objects, and cultivated gardens.
Rather than separating out these sites as divergent visual effects, I argue that
they worked together to reinforce a shared visual rhetoric of the exotic aesthet-
ics central to the British domestic imaginary. This is distinctively not one that
is set off from other visual and material culture of the era but rather one that is
at once notably exotic and constantly familiar.
Telling the story of the chrysanthemum’s entrance as a Chinese and later
Japanese flower into the British horticultural scene as well as its dispersal
throughout Victorian literature, therefore, gives one history of a floral assimila-
tion of Asian aesthetics that came to have larger consequences for aesthetics,
domestic culture, and literature as well as British relations to both the natural
world and to other nations of the world. In this chapter I will first describe
aspects of the chrysanthemum’s aesthetic assimilation to the British organic
landscape and then consider one of its appearances in British fiction in order
to investigate the persistent vigor of its exotic figural and visual presence. It is
my contention throughout that the chrysanthemum’s transplantations, from
China to Britain and from garden to page, exist in a continuum that describes
not only British horticultural history but the conceptual framework by which
ordinary Britons made imaginary and real accommodations for exotic objects
18 On “second nature,” see, as an introduction, A. J. Lustig, “Cultivating Knowledge in Nine-
teenth-Century English Gardens,” Science in Context 13, no. 2 (June 2000): 155–81.
19 “The Beautiful in the Surroundings of Life,” Garden and Forest 5 (November 9, 1892): 529.

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186 Chang
in their lives. Significantly, the chrysanthemum retained its exotic status long
after its integration into British culture was assured. I propose this was in part
because the chrysanthemum filled an important lacuna—allowing a kind of
middle-brow visual exotic connecting Britons to China to gain shape and defi-
nition in the garden as it had in the china cabinet. Without discounting the
significant influence of the chrysanthemum on the elite world of fin-de-siècle
aestheticism, I want to identify a few significant moments in mainstream chry-
santhemum history that illustrate the function of garden flowers as “cultivated
fictions” in the Victorian era, and the evidence such moments provide for a per-
sistent visual exotic evident in middle-brow Victorian novels and periodicals.
Thus, I consider the integration of Chinese and Japanese cultivated garden
flowers into the English garden to signal a very different kind of relationship
with the so-called Asian exotic than previous theoretical frameworks have
chosen to address.20 The presence of these plants in British literature and
visual culture is both constant and also notable, highlighting the paradoxi-
cal ways that relations between people and plants were at once everyday and
exotic. In what follows I attend to the ways that chrysanthemums, like other
flowers imported from Asia during the Victorian era, remained forever on the
cusp between exoticism and assimilation in British culture. The result of this
prolonged indeterminacy, I suggest, had consequences not only for the ways
that we reconstruct Victorian garden history or study Victorian gardening peri-
odicals. It also affects the way we understand the figurative force of flowers
and other plant life in that most canonical form of British literature, the realist
novel. Attending to the appearance of these floral forms within the space of the
British novel, I suggest, both supplements and extends the contentions by liter-
ary critics like Gillen D’Arcy Wood and Nancy Armstrong about the relations
between nineteenth-century British literature and visual culture.21 Flowers,
both present and malleable in the Victorian visual imagination, implicitly
shaped the representations of British novels in ways I will explore further in
the final section of the chapter. My broad contention, however, is that the chry-
santhemum debate shows us that things associated with China and Japan did
not always conform with expected divisions between artifice and naturalism.
Furthermore, stories of the assimilation and integration of these Chinese and
Japanese things worked differently when played out across the broad scale of
landscape and popular literature rather than the narrow confines of aesthetic
20 See Elizabeth Chang, “Chinese Flowers and the Idea of Cultivation in Early-Nineteenth-
Century British Word and Image,” European Romantic Review 27, no. 1 (2016): 9–24.
21 See Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860
(New York: Palgrave, 2001); and Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The
Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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drawing rooms. And, further still, these assimilations are relevant to scholars
both of literary culture and of visual studies.
This is also, of course, a matter of historical concern. The debate over chry-
santhemum culture tracks closely with geopolitical relations between Britain
and Asia in the nineteenth century. The introduction of the chrysanthemum
into England from China as a cultivated garden flower is dated to the 1790s,
the same decade in which Lord Macartney was engaged in his mission to the
court of the Qianlong emperor. Curtis’s Botanical Magazine was by 1795 pre-
senting its readers with an illustration of the “highly valuable”22 acquisition
of the ornamental chrysanthemum and describing, via G. E. Rumphius’s Her-
barium Amboinense (1741), Chinese social customs anchored in rituals of chry-
santhemum display (figure 7.4). From the start, a key measure of the chrysan-
themum’s appeal was the flower’s late bloom and ability to brighten dreary fall
winter landscapes. A 1827 Quarterly Journal author (likely the Chinese plant
enthusiast Joseph Sabine)23 described a show of Chinese chrysanthemums:
“The brilliant colours of these plants, and the facility with which they are
cultivated, will soon make them so common, that our cottagers’ gardens will
become as gay in the months of November and December, as the Chinese Rose
has made them during all the spring and summer.”24 Increasing the variety
and amount of the importations of these Asian botanicals was for this reason
already labeled a priority. As the author continues, the chrysanthemums are
seen as “objects … which add universally to the comforts and luxuries of the
country, and which may, therefore, be justly termed of national importance,”
making their successful propagation in turn a matter of utmost importance for
the society.25
These remarks, which situate plant collecting on a level with other priori-
ties of imperial commodity trade, would seem to align with the theories of
ecological imperialism advanced most notably by the work of Alfred Crosby.26
22 William Curtis, “Chrysanthemum Indicum. Indian Chrysanthemum,” The Botanical Mag-
azine; or Flower-Garden Displayed 9 (1795): 327.
23 See also Joseph Sabine, “Account and Description of Five New Chinese Chrysanthemums;
with Some Observations on the Treatment of All the Kinds at Present Cultivated in
England and on Other Circumstances Relating to the Varieties Generally,” Transactions of
the Horticultural Society of London 5 (1824): 412–28; and Joseph Sabine, “Further Account of
Chinese Chrysanthemums; with Descriptions of Several New Varieties,” Transactions
of the Horticultural Society of London 5 (1824): 149–61, among other publications.
24 “Proceedings of the Horticultural Society,” Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature and Art
22, no. 44 (1827): 327.
25 Ibid.
26 See Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For other approaches to the question of
British Empire and the environmental history, see Lucile Brockway, Science and Colonial

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188 Chang
figure 7.4 “Chrysanthemum Indicum. Indian Chrysanthemum,” in The

Botanical Magazine; or Flower-Garden Displayed, 1795

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More recent responses to the influential premise that the expansion of the
British empire imposed a unilateral realignment of colonial landscapes and
biospheres has come from a variety of directions. Fa-ti Fan and Erik Mueggler,
among others, have detailed the contributions of Chinese knowledge workers,
whose assistance to British botanists has often gone unacknowledged.27 Other
scholars, including Eric Pawson, Haripriya Rangan, Judith Carney, Tim Denham,
and James Beattie, have challenged the histories of plant collection and intro-
duction by studying the pathways of exchange within Asia and around the
southern hemisphere in addition to the spectrum of routes proceeding directly
from British trading ports.28 For many of these scholars, however, questions
of plant exchange and dissemination are particularly rooted in the cash crops
at the heart of economic agriculture.29 As such, histories of plant exchange
tracing capital investments, migrant laborers, and resource management have
not always coincided with histories of material and aesthetic influence taking
visual and material culture as their primary focus.
I argue, however, that such histories demand closer integration and that to
outline the “national importance” of the chrysanthemum’s importation is as
much to reconstruct the priorities of the Victorian visual imaginations as it is
to trace the economic parameters of botanical exchange. Visual representa-
tions of chrysanthemums and other imported exotics of course abounded in
Victorian material culture, in ways that other globally cultivated plants like
rubber trees did not, but their proliferating depictions did not erase the details
of their origins. The chrysanthemum was not solely a trade commodity nor
Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979);
John MacKenzie, Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1990); and Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island
Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995).
27 See Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Erik Mueggler, The Paper Road: Archive
and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2011).
28 See Eric Pawson, “Plants, Mobilities and Landscapes: Environmental Histories of Botani-
cal Exchange,” Geography Compass 2, no. 5 (September 1, 2008): 1464–77; Haripriya Ran-
gan, Judith Carney, and Tim Denham, “Environmental History of Botanical Exchanges in
the Indian Ocean World,” Environment and History 18, no. 3 (August 1, 2012): 311–42; and
James Beattie, “Imperial Landscapes of Health: Place, Plants and People between India
and Australia, 1800s–1900s,” Health and History 14, no. 1 (2012): 100–20.
29 See, for example, James Beattie, Edward Melillo, and Emily O’Gorman, “Rethinking the
British Empire through Eco-Cultural Networks: Materialist-Cultural Environmental
History, Relational Connections and Agency,” Environment and History 20, no. 4 (2014):
561–75.

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190 Chang
a botanical example nor a Chinese novelty—it was all of these, and also it
was always an object (unlike the rubber tree again) defined overwhelmingly
by its visual appearance rather than its use value. Writings of many kinds—
gardening periodicals, travel narratives, poems, novels, and more—relied on
a mutually maintained understanding of the vision of the chrysanthemum
to effect their associative and figurative work. While lavishly colored illustra-
tions like an 1815 example from James Ridgeway’s periodical of exotic flowers,
The Botanic Register, documented the chrysanthemum as an organic speci-
men, the appearance of the chrysanthemum on decorative objects like an
early n ineteenth-century toy watering pot from the Spode factory fancifully
expanded its material presence (figures 7.5 and 7.6). Indeed, the use of the
distinctively Asian specimens of chrysanthemum and peach blossom on a
delicate piece whose form playfully, if uselessly, gestures toward the cultivation
of such exotic botanicals suggests the already deep penetration of the Chinese
garden into British aesthetics.
As a result, the chrysanthemum’s formal distinctions as both a cultivated
specimen and pictorial image—its flirtations with debates over artificiality,
inutility, reproducibility, and more—continued to mark it out as distinctly
exotic even after its physical assimilation to the British climate was complete.
Supporting and maintaining this distinction were the proliferation of chrysan-
themum representations in both Chinese and British decorative art that gave
source and supplement to the living cultivars. Henry Phillips’ Flora Historica
(1824) lauds both the Asiatic origins of the chrysanthemum and at the same
time the export goods that display these origins without clear differentiation.
Of the Chinese, Philips writes,
These singular people have ever been celebrated for their love of flori-
culture, and it is said that they cultivate as many as fifty varieties of this
species of Chrysanthemum, many of which we see pictured in the rep-
resentations of their saloons and trellised virandas [sic]; and, as they are
usually painted as growing in ornamental vases, we naturally conclude
that the Chinese hold this flower in high estimation. And it is also cul-
tivated with no less care through the whole empire of Japan; and the
beauty of these flowers are frequently displayed on the lackered [sic]
ware, for which they are so eminent.30
30 Henry Phillips, Flora Historica: Or, The Three Seasons of the British Parterre Historically
and Botanically Treated; with Observations on Planting, to Secure a Regular Succession of
Flowers, from the Commencement of Spring to the End of Autumn. To Which Are Added, the

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figure 7.5 “Chrysanthemum Indicum” in The Botanical Register, 1815

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192 Chang
figure 7.6 Spode Ceramic Works, toy watering pot and cover, early 19th century. Victoria and
Like other early nineteenth-century accounts of imported flowers, details of

cultivation and appreciation are frequently mediated through artistic and
material representation, with paintings of the plant paradoxically confirming
its existence as a real flower. In this way the flowers enter British imaginations
as representations before they appear as organic specimens, creating a rela-
tionship between aesthetic object, cultivated flower, and mutually maintained
mental category that made the primary contact between Britons and the ter-
ritory of Asia. The interjection of the idea of the flower before the widespread
arrival of the flower itself elevates the status of the chrysanthemum beyond an
ordinary plant and highlights the cross-traffic between organic cultivation and
material reproduction. This calls into question the means by which organic
representation can take place for the ordinary reader and viewer, because a
flower’s everyday value (aesthetic and otherwise) is held to reside as much in
its imagined as its actual use. Chrysanthemums become a kind of cultivated
fiction, embedding diachronic narratives within a surface synchrony. One
flower tells us of many flowers that have grown and will grow again, across
Most Approved Methods of Cultivating Bulbous and Other Plants, as Practised by the Most
Celebrated Florists of England, Holland, and France (London: E. Lloyd, 1824), 430.

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generations of plants cultivated in domestic gardens and reproduced across

printed and designed surfaces around the house and across the country yet
persistently located in a foundational foreign representation.
Imported flowers like the chrysanthemum thus proclaim an unending pro-
cess of introduction and assimilation even after they are as well established as
any native plant. Philips, echoing the Quarterly Journal, notes the chrysanthe-
mum’s extensive distribution across Britain, writing: “Like the roses of China,
the Chrysanthemums soon escaped from the confinement of the conservato-
ries of the curious, and as rapidly spread themselves over every part of the
island, filling the casements of the cottagers and the parterres of the opulent
with their autumnal beauties.”31 For both the Chinese rose and the Chinese
chrysanthemum, these cultivated flowers (which may or may not be directly
imported from China) carried forward chinoiserie’s elements of artifice, inutil-
ity, and frivolity (while at the same time taking on the contradictory qualities
of rootedness, commonness, and reiterability) as they made new inroads into
British lived experience. As Setsu Tachibana and Charles Watkins have shown,
this process of “botanical transculturation” usually has several stages: first, a
celebration of the plant’s exoticism, next, a phase of “cultural assimilation”
in which “plants are not physically changed or modified, but they have been
grown long enough to demonstrate that they are well adapted to live in the
open air, and propagate well enough to become common plants in Britain,”
and finally, the physical hybridization that crosses exotic and native varieties
to erase species difference.32 Yet while the chrysanthemum may easily escape
from the confinement of the conservatory and confirm itself as reliably hardy
in the British climate, it does not so easily abandon its status as an exotic speci-
men culturally distinct from other garden examples, and so it lingers between
Tachibana and Watkins’s first and second stages for most of the nineteenth
century. As I will consider further in the final section of this chapter, this pro-
longed and paradoxical condition of “hardy exoticism” is especially evident
through the operations of fictional narrative. Chrysanthemums maintain both
a significance and a notability that other British flowers, particularly those of
domestic origin, are not always equally awarded.
In the remainder of this chapter, I would like to point out one moment when
the chrysanthemum is transplanted directly into a Victorian novel and use
this transplantation to draw attention to the phenomena of exotically named
plants in fictional gardens. The rich descriptive landscape of the realist novel
31 Ibid., 432.

32 Setsu Tachibana and Charles Watkins, “Botanical Transculturation: Japanese and British
Knowledge and Understanding of Aucuba japonica and Larix leptolepis 1700–1920,” Envi-
ronment & History 16, no. 1 (February 2010): 67.

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194 Chang
has been closely studied by a distinguished range of critics, but their focus has
far more often concentrated on either the novel’s uncultivated landscape or
its material artifacts.33 Less studied have been the many instances in which
plants—particularly plants identified by name—make entrance into the nov-
el’s environment for reasons both atmospheric and functional. But doing so
is important, I think, because attending to these novel plants is one way to
think more closely about the complexities of environmental modernity in all
its global implications. Plants most likely to be named in novels are also most
likely to be imported hardy exotics, whose garden presence is already expected
but not yet unnoticed. Historians of science and of the garden are well aware
of the incredibly complexity of the “aesthetic, textual, artistic, and physical
exchange” taking place between botanists, gardeners, scientists, fanciers, col-
lectors, and artists in this time period.34 Literary critics can contribute by also
explaining plants as layered and dynamic figural and visual interventions into
the fabric of Victorian fiction, contributing a new perspective on the domestic
and exotic design and decoration that props up the novel’s plot and characters.
This is to do something different than assess the field of Victorian nonfic-
tion writing about plants. Certainly no consideration of nineteenth-century
British gardens could be complete without also discussing the vigorous print
culture that supported and surrounded Victorian gardeners, including a huge
variety of horticultural periodicals, gardening manuals, and advice books
aimed at all variety of subclasses of human society, keepsake volumes on the
“languages of flowers,” annuals, travel narratives, horticultural poetry, scientific
catalogs, botanical pattern books, and much more. If we also add in the other
kinds of materials that might reference or depict cultivated plant life—from
porcelain to textiles to wallpaper to carpets—we find an overwhelming num-
ber of ways that Britons were finding themselves educated in the everyday tex-
tual and visual presence of the many forms of “second nature” and also being
taught, again and again, of its endless newness. In these two examples from
comparatively inexpensive evocations of costlier foreign forms, William Mor-
ris’s block-printed chrysanthemum wallpaper and a transfer-printed Brown-
Westhead, Moore & Co. plate both demonstrate the transplantation of the
chrysanthemum figure into the British domestic vernacular (figures 7.7 and
7.8). It is a transplantation that carries with it—especially in the case of the
33 To take just two of many examples: Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National
Representation: Britain, 1815–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Elaine
Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2010).
34 Tachibana and Watkins, “Botanical Transculturation,” 49.

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figure 7.7 William Morris, “Chrysanthemum” wallpaper, 1877. Victoria and Albert Museum,
London
blue-and-white plate—a knowing evocation of its own elite material ancestor.

The Japanese-inspired fans depicted on the blue-and-white plate, themselves
depicting images of generically Asian scenes, demonstrate the layered refer-
entiality inherited from more valuable forms of Chinese export porcelain and
now commonplace to even purchasers of this cheaper, domestically produced

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196 Chang
figure 7.8 Brown-Westhead, Moore & Co., plate, ca. 1875–85. Victoria and Albert Museum,
London
china. Further, the asymmetrical and layered presentation of the chrysanthe-

mum, so distinct from the enframed presentation of the cultivated specimen
apparent in illustrations from botanical periodicals, denotes the viewers’ adapt-
ability to the multiple visual epistemological priorities the flower proposed.
The chrysanthemum could float in the background as an element originating
behind the picture plane of the fans, as on the blue-and-white plate; it could
intermingle with a more indistinct general leafiness, as on Morris’s wallpaper;
it could stand distinctly central, as in the botanical illustrations shown in fig-
ures 7.2–7.4; or, as I will discuss in the final portion of the chapter, it could exist
in all of these ways in a fictional text. Literature made possible in new ways the
chrysanthemum’s epistemological shiftiness from background to foreground
of denotative representation, but such shiftings could not have occurred if not

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for the rich archive of visual memories of the chrysanthemum mutually main-
tained by a range of classes and kinds of British viewing subjects.
Thus, to explain what it means for the chrysanthemum to make itself
known in Victorian texts is to do more than note its collusion with the very
widespread distribution of named exotic flowers throughout the literature of
the period. It also requires further investigation into the narrative claims and
narrative agency of the chrysanthemum or other notable flower. This, then,
helps us think about questions and concerns that arise when novel plants—
that is, new specimens and specimens from newly opened territories like the
interior of China conceived of as visual objects—and plants in novels—the
often unremarked-upon background that fills out the natural world of the Vic-
torian novel in its realist and semi-realist incarnations, taken as the textual
filler of setting—are read together, across the usually well-guarded boundaries
of genre and medium. When we do this cross-reading, we find exotic blooms
in a central place in the formation of a native British sensibility of the organic
aesthetic—an aesthetic that thereby embeds an artificial and visual exoticism
at the heart of its domestic resonance. Named novel plants operate in tandem
with other kinds of verbal and visual texts in the mutual maintenance of a sec-
ond nature that centrally encodes Chinese and other non-British flowers in a
new global environment where the native and natural no longer coincide and
where reading requires new kinds of visual aesthetic attentions.
I will use the appearances of the chrysanthemum in one novel by
H. Rider Haggard as the singular example of this, though we can find such
exotic flowers in a much greater variety of texts. Chrysanthemums are
remarked upon for their visual and botanical characteristics in novels of the
era as distinct as Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (1897). As the generic and stylistic dif-
ferences between those two works make clear, discussion of named flowers
is not reserved to any particular category of Victorian fiction, even though
critical consideration of plants in novels has been centered most often around
Victorian adventure fiction and its imperially and environmentally rapacious
ambitions. Indeed, Haggard, though known for his African adventures, does
not even include chrysanthemums in his adventure novel most engaged with
flowers, Allan and the Holy Flower (1915), which involves Allan Quatermain’s
quest to discover a rare orchid in Africa.
Rather, it seems clear that chrysanthemums could only be understood as for-
eign when taken in a domestic context, unlike, for example, the orchid, which
denoted exotic nature globally as well as locally. Therefore, it is Haggard’s novel
of rural English intrigue, Colonel Quaritch V. C.: A Tale of Country Life (1888),
where a chrysanthemum has narrative as well as descriptive purpose. This

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198 Chang
largely overlooked novel, published within a few years of Haggard’s early suc-
cesses King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887), considers in an unexpect-
edly complex way the exigencies of the English cultivated landscape—both in
its plot, which concerns the fate of an ancestral property, and in its characters,
who are flower-fanciers, timber-harvesters, farmers, hunters, and other man-
ner of admirers of the second nature that surrounds them. Amid a text filled
with mentions of many kinds of plants and flowers in descriptive passages, it
is notable that Haggard uses the chrysanthemum as a narrative device on two
key occasions.
In the first instance, Edward Cossey, a wealthy banker with the power to
relieve the cash crisis of the local squire—a power he will deploy only if he is
granted a promise of marriage by the squire’s daughter in return—walks out
with the daughter and marriage-object, Ida de la Molle, to discuss in private
the bargain they will strike to exchange mortgage deeds for marriage vows.
Edward Cossey, who had a curious weakness for flowers, asked her if she
would show him her chrysanthemums, of which she was very proud.
She consented readily enough. They crossed the lawn, and passing
through some shrubbery reached the greenhouse, which was placed at
the end of the Castle itself. Here for some minutes they looked at the
flowers, just now bursting into bloom.35
Within this same conversation, which does not go particularly well, we see that
Ida attempts to hide her discomfort through flower management, “affecting
to busy herself in removing some dried leaves from a chrysanthemum plant”
while Edward can in fact see “her shoulders shake and a big tear fall like a
raindrop on the pavement….”36 Here, attention to flowers is both cultivated
and naturalized, an escape from the social awkwardness of a conversation
about finances within a larger group and a screen from the despair of her fate
to relieve her father’s financial pressures by selling herself in marriage. That
the chrysanthemums are “just now” bursting into bloom, of course, reminds of
the key place that the chrysanthemum plays in the temporality of the garden,
beginning to bloom only after other flowers have died back. It also speaks, of
course, to Ida’s status as a maturing woman still trapped in an endless daugh-
terly devotion to her father and unable to secure her own preferred mate,
in the manner that Amy King has illustrated in her study of the “botanical
35 Henry Rider Haggard, Colonel Quaritch, V. C.: A Tale of Country Life (London: Longmans,
Green, 1911), 81.
36 Ibid., 83.

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vernacular” as it articulates the Victorian marriage plot.37 Edward Cossey, with

his “curious weakness” for flowers, is feminized as well, and yet for both, the
resonant effects of the flower’s associations are achieved through metonymy
rather than other kinds of more explicit or rigid figural associations. Chrysan-
themums paradoxically denote narrative misdirection and sleight of hand by
being explicitly called into named visual existence in the first place.
This is somewhat clearer in the next (and more striking) appearance of
chrysanthemums in the novel. The villainous Edward Crossey appears in the
garden of his ex-mistress and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Quest, while the titu-
lar Colonel Quaritch, an honorable man clearly meant to be the right husband
to poor Ida, is also visiting. Quaritch has just finished snipe-hunting and has
brought along his new hammerless gun. Again, at a crucial moment, someone
is distracted by a novel chrysanthemum:
Edward Cossey slowly sauntered towards them. When he was about

nine paces off he too halted, and stooping a little, looked abstractedly at
a white Japanese chrysanthemum which was still in bloom. Mrs. Quest
turned, as the Colonel thought, to put the gun back against a wall. The
next thing he was aware of was a large explosion, following by an excla-
mation or rather a cry from Mrs. Quest … he glanced towards the place
where Edward Cossey stood, and saw that his face was streaming with
blood and that his right arm hung helpless by his side.38
The long unraveling of the forced marriage plot into a more satisfactory
distribution of riches and affianced partners which follows this moment
of chrysanthemum appreciation would take precedence in a conventional
narrative summary. And clearly, the startling development of the accidental
shooting arrests readerly attention most strongly at this moment. Nevertheless,
the presence of the chrysanthemum and its degree of bloom also tells us
something about the assumed mood and temporal setting of the novel, just as the
fact that not one but two characters in this novel are growing chrysanthemums
in their gardens suggests the plausible (or implausible) omnipresence of the
plant. The notability of the chrysanthemums—notable enough at least, to
distract a man from his possible imminent death by shooting—suggests to us
the way that these flowers have not been entirely normalized in any direction,
organic, geographic, or aesthetic. That is, while they are still foreign enough
37 See Amy M. King, Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
38 Haggard, Colonel Quaritch, 222.

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200 Chang
to require an adjective denoting their distant origin, at the same time, they
are not so foreign that they require special narrative attention beyond this
adjective, which is alone apparently enough to conjure up the arresting image
of the flower. Yet significantly they are not flower-like enough to be known
simply as a generic flower—they must be named and singled out from the
rest of the garden. Their form’s novelty persists despite the assimilating power
of horticulture, in a way that is both subtle and relentlessly reinforcing of a
changing domestic nature.
Such insistently persistent novelty was not especially to the liking to a lover
of old rural England like Haggard—despite the fact that he himself is the
namesake for a chrysanthemum variety possessed of “very fine guard florets
of a pinkish white”39—and by his Gardener’s Year (1905) he is complaining of
the tedious novelty of such flowers (even though he has just boasted of his
own gardener’s prizewinning efforts in their cultivation) in terms very familiar
from the chrysanthemum controversy with which this chapter began. Haggard
writes:
I confess at once that I am not a Chrysanthemum enthusiast, except

where the outdoor varieties are concerned. Notwithstanding their many
hues, shapes, and kinds, there is a sameness about them that bores me,
nor do I admire the huge blooms which most gardeners think it necessary
to produce, as to my eye they look heavy and unnatural. I suppose that
if anyone could grow a Chrysanthemum with a flower as large as a red
Cabbage, he might make a fortune; but I would not give him a shilling for
cutting. Such is my personal, and possibly misguided, taste.40
The questions of taste, nature, and artificiality with which this chapter began
here return, as readers of Haggard’s agricultural treatise and his novel are
equally asked to consider the qualities and forms of flowers that may attract a
British eye. If Haggard the country gentleman is put off by the financial ben-
efits of the chrysanthemum, Haggard the author understands the inexorable
allure of the flower to engulf a character into the kind of abstraction that would
prevent his awareness of nearby snipe guns. Edward Crossey’s absorptive gaze
into the specific blossom of the Japanese chrysanthemum connects him to
a flower deeply embedded in contemporary debates over nature and culture
and, less explicitly, in the overlapping influences of Chinese and Japanese aes-
thetics in the evocation of a domestic exotic. In so doing, it also grants the
39 “Anemone-Flowered Chrysanthemums,” Gardening Illustrated 18 (October 17, 1897): 459.

40 Henry Rider Haggard, A Gardener’s Year (London: Longmans, Green, 1905), 355–56.

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chrysanthemum itself epistemological heft through the reinforcements of nar-

rative fiction. If the chrysanthemum can direct the course of narrative, even
in minor ways, the flower must be understood to participate in the setting’s
“reality effect” as more than surface patterning. Metonymically connecting
to an imagined Asian aesthetic while also making a defining contribution to
the domestic garden, chrysanthemums join with other flowers in rerouting
figurative language through transnational pathways. In so doing, they demon-
strate the ways that a flower can cut across class lines—“Our favourite flower is
everywhere at home; even the cottage wall or porch may possess a little of the
beauty it reflects from the conservatories of the rich, since of all flowers this
one seems most amenable to the cultural care of rich and poor alike,”41 writes
F. W. Burbridge—even as it betokens an exotic Asian aesthetic. The chrysan-
themum’s curtailed integration into Victorian landscape and literature thus
gives one version of the ways that Chinese objects could move beyond chi-
noiserie and into the deeply felt lived visual experience of nineteenth-century
Britons.
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chapter 8
The Musée d’Ennery and the Shifting Reception of

Nineteenth-Century French Chinoiseries
Elizabeth Emery*
On pagoda-roofed shelves that rise from the carpet into the air, this
is the menagerie of fantasy. White, green, black, blue, and multi-
colored chimeras, all the delirious creatures of an opium dream …
What a striking idea for a woman!1
—Jules de Goncourt, Journal, 1859
…
Among all these objects there are certainly some with considerable
historical or artistic value. But what a lot of bazaar trinkets! Next to
lovely japonaiseries and chinoiseries, what a lot of japoninneries!2
—Reporter from Le Matin, 1905
∵
Little-known today, the Musée d’Ennery was the first French house museum
built by a woman and bequeathed to the French state as a free public institu-
tion of Asian art. Near the Bois de Boulogne (59 Avenue Foch), it contains some
nine thousand artistic representations of fantastical creatures (primarily from
* Research for this chapter was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the French are mine.
1 “Sur des étagères, qui commencent au tapis et font monter en l’air leurs toits de pagodes,
c’est la ménagerie de la fantaisie. Monstres blancs, verts, noirs, bleus, multicolores,
toutes les chimères d’un rêve d’opium […] Quelle singulière idée pour une femme!”
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal: mémoires de la vie littéraire, ed. Robert Ricatte,
3 vols. (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989), December 29, 1859, I: 509.
2 “Parmi tous ces objets, il en est incontestablement dont la valeur historique ou artistique est
considérable. Mais que d’articles de bazar! À côté de belles japonaiseries ou chinoiseries que
de japoniaiseries!” Le Matin, July 6, 1905.

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The Musée d ’ Ennery and the Reception of French Chinoiseries 205
China and Japan), lovingly organized in specially commissioned “Chinese-

Japanese-style” vitrines that piqued the curiosity of writer and art collector
Jules de Goncourt in the epigraph above.3 Although long thought to be the
collection of successful playwright Adolphe d’Ennery, whose name it bears,
the museum was, in fact, the work of his wife, Clémence (1823–1898), known
to friends by the lower-class nickname Gisette.4 Clémence became “Madame
d’Ennery” only in 1881 after the death of her first husband, Charles Desgranges,
from whom she had been estranged since shortly after their 1841 marriage.5
Reputed as a wild and witty hostess, she served as Adolphe’s consort and erst-
while collaborator for more than fifty years, mixing with the best-known actors,
writers, and journalists of the day.6 Among them were Jules and Edmond de
Goncourt, who admired and praised her “collection of Chinese monsters,”
which numbered 150 by the time Jules visited it in 1859.7 The brothers’ praise
is noteworthy given the disdain with which they chronicled the collecting and
decorating practices of so many of their contemporaries, including Adolphe
d’Ennery.8 Indeed, Jules’s enthusiasm for the fantastical and “unwomanly”
collection encountered in Clémence’s remarkable apartment at 14 rue de
l’Échiquier in 1859 stands in marked contrast to the dismissive representa-
tion of her collection—“What a lot of bazaar trinkets!”—by a reporter from Le
Matin nearly fifty years later, when she had transformed her private lodgings
into a public museum.
This chapter uses such contradictory responses to the Musée d’Ennery over
a fifty-year period (1859–1909) to explore shifting French attitudes to chinoi-
series. Why would a private display evoked by the Goncourt brothers in 1859 as
3 D’Ennery commissioned vitrines from Gabriel Viardot, who regularly won medals for his
“mobilier genre chinois-japonais” at world’s fairs beginning in 1867.
4 Née Joséphine Clémence Lecarpentier. D’Ennery himself was not of noble birth; Jewish, he
was born “Adolphe Philippe” and took his mother’s maiden name (Dennery) as a pseudonym.
The authorization to use the name d’Ennery legally was authorized by imperial decree in
1860.
5 She did not follow Charles-François-Xavier Desgranges, whom she had married in 1841, to
Africa, where he worked in administrative capacities in Senegal and Algeria. The Goncourt
Journal is the best source of information about Clémence’s effervescent personality and open
relationships (especially for the period from 1859–1866; their relationship waned after Jules’s
death in 1870).
6 She collaborated on the 1845 vaudeville comedy Noémie with Adolphe under the pseudonym
« Clément » and the 1847 five-act drama La Duchesse de Marsan under her own name (« Mme
Desgranges »); the press regularly reported on her attendance at rehearsals in later years.
7 Goncourt, Journal, December 29, 1859, I: 506–11.
8 They regularly condemn d’Ennery’s “horrible” furniture and ostentatious home of a “stock
market millionaire” (“un millionnaire de la rue du Sentier”). Goncourt, Journal, March 11,
1860, I: 541.

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206 Emery
a “collection of Chinese monsters” and as “the most unusual sitting room in the
world” be considered by 1905 as a compendium of exotic, commercial junk?
In the first section I will provide an overview of the museum, its founder, and
her collecting practices; the second section evokes her activities with regard
to the collecting practices of contemporaries interested in Chinese art and arti-
facts; and the third and final section examines shifting attitudes toward Asian
art that caused reporters in the first decade of the twentieth century to trans-
form d’Ennery, recognized by the Goncourts as an avant-garde collector in the
1850s, into a little old lady trying to trick the state into preserving a vanity col-
lection of department store knickknacks. The mixed reception of the Musée
d’Ennery stems from a number of factors related to its founder’s gender, social
class, the nature and provenance of the small objects she collected, and her
curatorial choices.
1 Clémence d’Ennery and Her Museum of Monsters
After receiving a flirtatious invitation to come up some night to “see [Gisette’s]

monsters,” Jules de Goncourt was flabbergasted to find that this was not simple
sexual innuendo. He describes in remarkable detail the “delirious creatures of
an opium dream” he found in her apartment:
In bronze, jade, porcelain, wood, rock crystal, tonkin, and kaolin, this is
a world of animals seemingly taken from the rib of a plesiosaurus and a
dragon, antediluvian animals and mythical animals, something hybrid
like the world of beasts discovered by Buffon or told by Herodotus, like
fetuses of lions and of female camels that resemble hippopotamuses or
heraldic beasts, etc.9
His prose captures the profusion of objects on display, their colors, shapes,
forms, and exotic materials used to make them, as well as their mythological
and fantastical origins. He also emphasizes their small and portable nature:
9 “Monstres blancs, verts, noirs, bleus, multicolores, toutes les chimères d’un rêve d’opium:
bronzes, jades, porcelaines, bois, cristal de roche, le tonkin et le kaolin, un peuple d’ani-
maux qui semble tiré de la côte d’un plésiosaure et d’un dragon, des animaux antédi-
luviens et des animaux de la fable, quelque chose d’hybride qui tient du monde de bêtes
retrouvé par Buffon et du monde de bêtes conté par Hérodote, quelque chose comme des
foetus de lion, de chamelles qui auraient un regard d’hippopotame, des bêtes héraldiques,
etc.” Goncourt, Journal, 29 December 1859, I: 509.

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They are everywhere, even black and gold ones at the bottom of a box, like
those little portable temples of Indian gods. Fat white toads with white
lips and an opening in their backs for flowers mark the corners of a table.
On a little horn-shaped vase and a porcelain one, animals resembling
leeches and caterpillars and Batavian insects climb and swim in turn. The
candelabras are supported by monsters, and two monsters carry on their
chimerical backs two clocks telling the time and the weather.10
Although Jules visited Clémence’s collection in its embryonic form (150 objects
displayed in two rooms of a small apartment), his description of her “collec-
tion of Chinese monsters” could apply to the museum today; they reveal the
remarkable consistency of her collecting habits over fifty years. Although
the museum has grown to encompass some nine thousand objects (6,296
bequeathed by d’Ennery, a subsequent one thousand donated by friends by the
museum’s opening in 1908, and the rest incorporated from bequests after 1908),
figures 8.1 and 8.2 reveal the extent to which the monster theme dominates in
masks and figures of humans, animals, and mythological creatures made out
of ivory, wood, and ceramic.11
10 Ibid. “Il y en a jusqu’à de noirs et dorés au fond d’une boîte, comme ces petits temples
portatifs des dieux de l’Inde. Des gros crapauds blancs à lippes blanches, le dos ouvert
pour des fleurs, font les angles d’une table. Un cornet et des potiches, où rampent et
nagent tour à tour des animaux qui tiennent de la sangsue et de la chenille et des insectes
de batavia. Les candélabres sont soutenus par des monstres, et deux monstres portent
l’heure et le temps de deux pendules sur leurs dos chimériques.”
11 For details about the collection, its provenance, and its evolution see the only comprehen-
sive study of the museum and its collections, a thesis by Lucie Prost and Chantal Valluy
entitled Adolphe d’Ennery, Collectionneur, 1811–1899 (Paris: Diplôme de l’Ecole du Louvre,
1975). I discuss d’Ennery’s collecting practices with regard to those of her contemporaries
in Reframing Japonisme: Women and the Asian Art Market in Nineteenth-Century France
(1853–1914), a book forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic Publishing. A monograph
about the museum by curator Hélène Bayou has been advertised as forthcoming since
2012. In the meanwhile, documents related to the museum are preserved in Archives
nationales dossier F21; the d’Ennery testaments can be more easily consulted in La Revue
des grands procès contemporains 18 (1900): 5–100. A master’s thesis focused on Clémence
d’Ennery’s social circles was completed after the current essay went into production
(Camille Deprespré, “Le Musée de Clémence d’Ennery revisité,” École du Louvre, 2016).
While this work is helpful in casting doubt on the commonly held notion that d’Ennery
was an actress, it should be consulted with caution as it relies heavily on non-scholarly
secondary sources and does not always appropriately credit Prost and Valluy’s pioneering
research. It also reduces the Goncourt brothers’ collaboration to the work of Edmond
alone and incorrectly attributes the construction of the home now housing the museum
to Adolphe. In fact, the wedding contract of 10 September 1881 clearly credits Clémence
for building the house and documents the substantial portfolio of property and stock

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208 Emery
figure 8.1 Musée d’Ennery, view of gallery 4 before the 1996–2012 renovation. Musée
Guimet, Paris
Little is known about the origins of d’Ennery’s collection, though a handwrit-

ten inventory she kept from 1890 until her death in 1898 suggests a small family
collection of lacquer chests and porcelain that sparked her interest as of about
1842, consistent with the story she told reporters of having collected since she
was a “young girl.”12 She explained her fondness for “monsters” by playing on
assets that permitted its construction. Minutes du notaire Gabriel Le Villain, MC/ET/
XXVI/1383, Archives nationales, Paris.
12 Prost and Valluy analyze the five inventory ledgers left by d’Ennery, begun in October 1890
as she planned the transformation of her private collection into a public museum; the
ledgers themselves, as well as numerous other preparatory notebooks, can be consulted
in the Musée d’Ennery archives at the Musée Guimet. In this handwritten document, the
6,296 objects are listed in groups of “thousands” across five notebooks but without indi-
cation of purchase date, other than what can be interpreted from the color ink and the
dates placed at the beginning of each “thousand” objects (i.e., the “seventh thousand” was
entered in September 1897, shortly before her death) or through marginal notes referring
to the timing of gifts.

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figure 8.2 Musée d’Ennery, room 5. Musée Guimet, Paris
the French word chimère, which means both “chimera” and “fantasy”: “Since
I no longer have any illusions, I collect fantasies (chimères).”13
When the museum opened its door to the public in 1908, displaying 7,269
objects grouped in ninety-nine vitrines, its first curator, Émile Deshayes,
described eight categories: statuettes representing people and “true and myth-
ological” animals; netsukes; dolls and display cases of diverse items (including
vases, incense burners, paper presses, and snuffboxes); large animal statues;
sculpted and gilded wooden panels; masks; mother-of-pearl incrusted furni-
ture; and a collection of stands and pedestals (figures 8.1 and 8.2).14 Lucie Prost
and Chantal Valluy have cross-referenced Deshayes’s curatorial notes with
d’Ennery’s inventory in order to provide a better sense of the volume of each cat-
egory: fantastical beasts (1,317) and netsukes (2,448) dominate, although there
are other items, such as people (759), Japanese masks (41), Japanese dolls (46),
realistic animals (499), display cases (99), and objects they classify as “diverse”
(575).15 Today, curators consider the most important elements of the collec-
tion to be the Japanese netsukes, decorative ceramics (including stoneware
13 “Comme je n’ai plus d’illusions […] je collectionne les chimères!” “Bloc-Notes Parisien,” Le
Gaulois (May 28, 1908).
14 Émile Deshayes, Petit guide illustré du Musée d’Ennery (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1908), 15–16.
15 Prost and Valluy, Adolphe d’Ennery, 190.

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210 Emery
and porcelain from the Yuan to Qing dynasties), groups of real and fantasti-
cal beasts, sixteenth-century Japanese lacquered chests and lacquered wooden
sculptures from the Ming period, Buddhist sculptures, and objects related
to writing (“seals, rhinoceros horns, sculpted bamboo, rocks”).16 Figures 8.1–8.4
document the kinds of small sculptured items d’Ennery preferred.
The d’Ennerys did not travel to the Far East; the 6,296 items Clémence
inventoried by her death in 1898 had been acquired primarily in Paris from
antique dealers such as Siegfried Bing, Adolphe Worch, Florine Langweil, and
Tadamasa Hayashi, but also from more mass-market shops such as La Porte
Chinoise and Le Bon Marché. D’Ennery occasionally purchased entire lots
arrived from China or Japan or commissioned Bing, Langweil, and friends to
purchase items for her.17 She frequented some eighty-five Parisian merchants
over fifty years, and Prost and Valluy have identified those as the same purvey-
ors patronized—and in similar percentages—by other Parisian japonistes such
as the Goncourts and Philippe Burty.18 They conclude that she likely acquired
1,850 objects between 1859 and 1884 (the majority after the Franco-Prussian
war), one thousand between 1884 and 1890, and 3,296 between November 10,
1890, and her death in 1898.19 Only 182 were identified as gifts made during
her lifetime, and among those, only one fairly inexpensive chimera (worth one
hundred francs) from Adolphe d’Ennery, which Prost and Valluy interpret as a
reflection of his lack of participation.20 In short, Clémence acquired more than
half of her collection between 1890 and her death in 1898 in order to expand the
holdings of what she now intended as a public museum.
The Musée d’Ennery was initially constructed as a private residence on the
fashionable Avenue du Bois de Boulogne (now Avenue Foch) in 1875, designed
to house Clémence’s entire collection, which had previously been dispersed
among residences shared with Adolphe in Paris, Antibes, and Villers-sur-Mer.21
After conceiving the idea of willing the house itself as a public museum, in
1894 (rather than bequeathing items to the Musée Guimet), she followed
the advice of the Ministère des Beaux-Arts and added more display space.
16 Musée Guimet, “Musée d’Ennery,” press release, accessed August 14, 2016, http://www.
guimet.fr/images/musee-guimet/pdf/ddp_ennery.pdf.
17 Prost and Valluy classify the number and types of objects they have been able to identify
as having been purchased at each shop and with what frequency.
18 Prost and Valluy, Adolphe d’Ennery, 151–62.
19 Ibid, 128–131.
20 Ibid, 165.
21 Adolphe was the most commercially successful playwright of his time. After 1865 they
lived together, and several of the properties (the house on the Cap d’Antibes and on the
Avenue du Bois de Boulogne) were owned in her name. The 1881 marriage contract estab-
lishes Clémence’s independent wealth.

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figure 8.3
Blue-and-white vase, Ming dynasty, first
half of the 17th century. Musée Guimet,
Paris
figure 8.4
Sculpted jade finger citron (or hand
of Buddha). China, Qing dynasty,
18th century. Musée Guimet, Paris.

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212 Emery
figure 8.5 Musée d’Ennery from the exterior
figure 8.6
Floorplan of the Musée d’Ennery from
Petit guide illustré au Musée d’Ennery, 1908.

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Reporters recognized Madame d’Ennery as the museum’s founder, praised her

generosity and foresight to include an endowment for the museum’s upkeep,
and described the tremendous public service this free museum of “Asian
mythology” would represent.22 Unfortunately, however, the Musée d’Ennery
would not open to the public until 1908, ten years after her death, because of a
protracted legal battle instigated by Adolphe’s estranged illegitimate daughter,
who disputed the bequest. Coveting a property near the Bois de Boulogne, she
called into question the value of the collection by suggesting that the thou-
sands of small objects were worthless commercial junk.23 I will discuss this
legal battle at greater length in the third section of this chapter, but it provides
a first explanation for newspaper references in 1905 to “bazaar trinkets,” as did
the increased association of the museum with Adolphe, long caricatured along
anti-Semitic lines because of the remarkable commercial success of his theat-
rical productions. In order to understand the dramatic shift in perspective that
occurred over the nearly fifty years separating the two epigraphs with which I
began this chapter, it is important to trace the historical connotations of terms
such as japonaiseries, chinoiseries, and japoniaiseries.
2 Nineteenth-Century French Chinoiseries
The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French passion for Chinese objects

and French art inspired by them would come to be known in the twentieth
century as chinoiserie and would continue to thrive in France well into the
nineteenth century. However, the term was often conflated with chinoiseries,
an increasingly derogatory term for small objects from China, and japonai-
series, coined in the wake of trade treaties in 1858 between the French and Jap-
anese governments to refer to a similar category of small collectible Japanese
objects.24 In the case of both chinoiseries and japonaiseries, Asian art served
22 An anonymous June 16, 1894 article in L’Intransigeant identifies the bequest as Madame
d’Ennery’s, notes the Ministry’s approval of renovations for creating the “magnificent
rooms” and their special lighting, and applauds the “generous endowment” set aside for
the museum’s maintenance and security. A similarly positive article appeared in a June 15,
1894, issue of La Lanterne.
23 A summary of the first set of legal proceedings, which presented the collection as Adol-
phe d’Ennery’s, was published in La Revue des grands procès contemporains 18, 5–100.
Clémence predeceased Adolphe, who was suffering from dementia after a stroke, by a few
months. His estranged daughter produced a new will in her favor.
24 For a definition of these terms, see the introduction to this volume. Akane Kawakami
provides a succinct summary of the development of the term japonaiserie in Travellers’
Visions: French Literary Encounters with Japan, 1881–2004 (Liverpool: Liverpool University

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214 Emery
as a springboard for the Western aesthetic experimentation now known as

japonisme, well studied with regard to figures such as the Goncourt brothers,
Robert de Montesquiou, Stéphane Mallarmé, James McNeill Whistler, and the
French Impressionists.25
By the 1880s, increased exchange between France and Asia had led to
better cultural understanding and new emphasis on history, ethnography,
and economics.26 As a result, the terms chinoiserie and japonaiserie became
increasingly pejorative. When the journalist for Le Matin speculates about
the Musée d’Ennery in the 1905 epigraph to this article, for example, he adds
an “i” ( japoniaiseries) to incorporate the word “niais” (silly), thus undercut-
ting the proposed museum’s value, a point he stresses by mentioning “trash”
(déchets) and suggesting that the objects are more “worthy of a department
store than the Louvre.”27 Such rhetoric may seem innocent, but this particu-
lar reporter went to great lengths to disparage the museum and especially its
female founder, stressing her age and non-elite social status by referring to her
as “old lady Gisette.”
The reporter’s efforts to discredit d’Ennery’s bequest on the basis of her gen-
der and the small exotic objects she collected stem from a longstanding French
tradition of associating chinoiseries with women, as is evident in Larousse’s
1869 definition of the term (figure 8.7): the acquisition of “small objects from
Press, 2005). Oliver Impey traces the progressive mixing of chinoiseries, japonaiseries, and
European art inspired by them in Chinoiserie: The Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art
and Decoration (New York: Scribner’s, 1977). In keeping with this volume’s style choices,
I will refer to twentieth-century concepts with roman letters (chinoiserie, japonisme) and
to the nineteenth-century terms with italics (chinoiseries, japonaiseries).
25 The bibliography on French japonisme in the arts is enormous. Standout general works
include Le Japonisme (Paris: Éditions de la réunion des musées nationaux, 1988); Sieg-
fried Wichmann, Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on Western Art in the 19th and 20th
Centuries (New York: Harmony Books, 1980); and Jan Hokenson, Japan, France, and East-
West Aesthetics: French Literature, 1867–2000 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 2004).
26 See, for example, Kawakami 2005 and Ting Chang, Travel, Collecting, and Museums of
Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). Although modernist art
critics have long suggested that this more “serious” interest in Chinese art replaced whim-
sical appreciation of chinoiseries, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu has convincingly argued that
the two tendencies coexisted, “reinforc[ing] and enlarg[ing] an existing and vibrant inter-
est in Far Eastern art and artifacts.” “Chinoiserie and Japonism,” The Orient Expressed:
Japan’s Influence on Western Art, 1854–1918, ed. Gabriel Weisberg (Jackson: Mississippi
Museum of Art; Seattle: in association with the University of Washington Press, 2011),
95–105.
27 “Plus digne d’un grand magasin que du Louvre.”

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figure 8.7
Pierre Larousse, excerpt from
definition of “Chinoiserie,” Grand
dictionnaire universel du XIXe
siècle, 1869.
China or made in the Chinese style”28 is linked to women, the domestic inte-
rior, extravagance, and an excess of fanciful details. His first example of the
word’s usage in French comes from Balzac: “My wife ruined me with porcelain
vases, with CHINOISERIES,” and the next two are pejorative, stressing “bad
taste” and “extravagance.”29 In the nineteenth century, the salons and bed-
rooms of well-to-do European women overflowed with Chinese screens and
ceramics, Japanese netsukes, fans, dolls, and silk embroideries. When Adolphe
d’Ennery described his wife’s museum as “Chinese” in an 1895 letter to Prime
Minister Raymond Poincaré, he inscribed it into this female context, while
linking it to the well-known “Chinese museum” created by Empress Eugénie,
28 “Petits objets venus de Chine ou fabriqués dans le goût chinois,” Grand dictionnaire uni-
versel du XIXe siècle (Paris: Larousse, 1877), 4:139.
29 Ibid. Interestingly, the entry’s author takes issue with “smallness” as a criterion for chinoi-
serie, arguing that the definition should also apply to the larger or monumental objects.

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216 Emery
opened to the public in 1881 (see chapter 5).30 Installed in a wing of the Palace
of Fontainebleau from 1861 to 1863, Eugénie’s museum comprised about three
hundred pieces from the looting of Yuanming Yuan (1860) and other colonial
incursions and from diplomatic gifts and purchases in Paris.31
Many nineteenth-century paintings, such as Alfred Stevens’s A Duchess
(1866; the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA), Édouard Manet’s Nana
(1877; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg), and James Tissot’s three paintings
on the theme of Jeunes femmes regardant des objets japonais (1869; Cincinnati
Art Museum and private collections), visually reinforce the presence of chi-
noiseries as essentially feminine. They address more overtly than Larousse the
sensuality also associated with the Far East. In such paintings women’s inti-
mate spaces open up to viewers.32 Curious body language often echoes the
stereotypes Stacey Sloboda has analyzed with regard to eighteenth-century
British women, whose seemingly insatiable appetite for filling their homes
with “china” and other Asian artifacts was interpreted as an extension of their
fragility and sexual voracity.33
Such eroticism figured heavily in Jules de Goncourt’s expectations regard-
ing d’Ennery’s “collection of Chinese monsters” in 1859: “I enter a sitting room
with doors curtained in red silk, red furniture, everything radiating light: can-
delabras, the chandelier, innumerable candles throw off their flames, their
soft light.”34 He records Clémence as presenting her collection in terms of her
seductive personality: “I believe a woman should feel entirely comfortable,
have a decor that frames her.” “Especially in the bedroom,” he adds. Slightly
taken aback, she clarifies that this is not her bedroom and shows him the
30 D’Ennery to Poincaré, June 26, 1895, fol. 3, Papiers Poincaré, NAF 16000, BnF.
31 Greg Thomas describes the “translation” of Chinese articles into French noble cul-
ture in “The Looting of Yuanming Yuan and the Translation of Chinese Art in Europe,”
Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 7, no. 2 (Autumn 2008), http://www.19thc-artworld
wide.org/index.php/autumn08/93-the-looting-of-yuanming-and-the-translation-of-
chinese-art-in-europe. Colombe Samoyault-Verlet evokes the museum’s layout and lim-
ited public access, even after 1881, in Le Musée chinois de l’impératrice Eugénie (Paris:
Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1994). Alison McQueen analyzes the cultural importance
of the Fontainebleau displays in Empress Eugénie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture
in the Nineteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
32 For discussions of the eroticism of Tissot’s japoniste paintings, see Christopher Wood,
Tissot (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988); and Katharine Lochman, ed., Seductive
Surfaces: The Art of James Tissot (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
33 Stacey Sloboda, Chinoiserie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 13–17,
108–115.
34 “J’entre dans un salon aux portières de soie rouge, aux meubles rouges, resplendissant de
lumières: les candélabres, le lustre, trente-six bougies jettent leurs flammes, leur doux
éclair.” Journal, December 29, 1859, 1: 509.

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bedroom, which she has not yet finished decorating.35 Jules’s confusion is
understandable. The “warm” colors she chose—red, orange, and yellow—were
those favored by artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edgar Degas
in their paintings of Paris brothels; the fantastic objects she collected further
played into the associations between Asia and eroticism, from the Japanese
pillow books the Goncourts enjoyed to paintings by japonistes such as Tissot
and Manet.36 In 1859, Clémence clearly sought to seduce her visitors with an
unusual decor that reflected her eccentric reputation.37
And yet, her display went beyond a decorative ensemble. Goncourt initially
equated the red silk and bright lights to a seductive encounter, but he later
noted that d’Ennery had cleverly calculated color and light to make the white,
black, and golden “monsters” dazzle within this space, which he describes in
the same Journal entry as “one of the most unusual sitting rooms in the world.”38
Despite her claim of using decor as a frame for her personality, she has not
passively surrounded herself with accessories intended to express her iden-
tity, where the objects blend into the background. Instead, d’Ennery actively
organized, displayed, and discussed the items she collected, pulling particular
specimens off shelves to engage visitors such as Goncourt or Jules Verne, who
noted in an 1873 letter to his editor, P. -J. Hetzel, that the d’Ennerys lived in “a
real museum.”39
Furthermore, the “monsters” she collected were neither “womanly” nor
particularly seductive. They were more often favored by bachelors, as in
J.-K. Huysmans’s 1881 En Ménage. In this novel, the two women who visit
protagonist André Jayant both recoil at the hideous chimera on his mantel,
commenting on its terrifying nature as does Goncourt while visiting Clémence:
“there is enough here to repulse a regiment.”40 Visitors to the Musée d’Ennery
35 Ibid. “Je trouve qu’une femme doit avoir toutes ses aises, un intérieur qui l’encadre.” Jules
interrupts her: “Surtout dans sa chambre à coucher.” The Goncourt Journal repeatedly
underlines her sexual availability.
36 See Ricard Bru, Erotic Japonisme: The Influence of Japanese Sexual Imagery on Western Art
(Leiden: Hotei Publishing, 2014).
37 Jules is fascinated by her intelligence and scared by her daring and promiscuity. He records
his friends’ warnings against getting involved with Clémence, “who has slept with every-
one,” in a December 30, 1859 Journal entry. For more about single and divorced women’s
tendency to express their personalities by bucking bourgeois home decorating trends see
Leora Auslander, “The Gendering of Consumer Practices in Nineteenth-Century France,”
in The Sex of Things, ed. Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996), 99–101.
38 “Un des plus singuliers salons du monde.”
39 Verne to Hetzel, November 24, 1873, in Correspondance inédite de Jules Verne et de Pierre-
Jules Hetzel, vol. 1, 1863–1886, ed. Olivier Dumas, et al. (Geneva: Slatkine, 1999), 219.
40 J.-K. Huysmans, En Ménage (Paris: Stock, 1881), 236, 354. “Il y a ici de quoi faire avorter un
régiment,” Journal, December 29, 1859, 1: 509. The Goncourts would later (1868) purchase

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218 Emery
would similarly call her monsters “terrifying,” like a “fossilized army,” or liken
them to Madame Tussaud’s “Museum of Horrors.”41 Nevertheless, Clémence
would collect chimères until the end of her life, and she would retain the same
“warm” color scheme thirty-five years later when moving the collection to new
galleries (visible in figures 8.1 and 8.2.)42
Given the negative reception of the museum in the early years of the twen-
tieth century, we are fortunate to preserve Jules de Goncourt’s dumbfounded
1859 reaction to Clémence’s collection because it suggests just how far ahead
she was of the mainstream French vogue for what has now come to be known
as japonisme. The Goncourt brothers, who incessantly criticized other collec-
tors’ poor taste, their tendency to buy fakes, and their inability to display things
attractively, admired Clémence’s acumen. Renowned misogynists, they never-
theless praised her choice of “monsters” as “striking for a woman,” described
the objects as of a high quality (“superb!”), wide-ranging, thematically coher-
ent, and displayed systematically on shelves (étagères) with intent to impress.
These are likely the same qualities that appealed to Georges Clemenceau, who
surrounded himself with small works of Asian art in his own home (now the
Musée Clemenceau at 8 rue Benjamin Franklin in Paris) and led him to encour-
age d’Ennery to donate her collection to the state.43
D’Ennery’s transformation of private residence into a public museum was,
in fact, at the cutting edge of a contemporary French trend inspired by earlier
models such as Sir John Soane’s museum in London (approved by an Act of
Parliament in 1833) and Alexandre du Sommerard’s Musée de Cluny in Paris
(opened to the public in 1834 and acquired as a national museum in 1843 after
his death). D’Ennery’s contemporaries Edouard André, Nélie Jacquemart, and
Henri Cernuschi were also converting their homes into museums in the last
decades of the nineteenth century.44 The attraction of using houses to show-
a hugely expensive bronze “monster,” which Edmond would praise as “terrifyingly alive”
in La Maison d’un artiste. See Christopher Reed’s analysis of the symbolic importance of
this purchase in Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 76–93.
41 “C’est effrayant tous ces monstres, on dirait un cauchemar figé!” “Bloc-Notes Parisien,” Le
Gaulois, May 28, 1908. On the “musée des Horreurs,” see Jules Claretie, “La Vie à Paris,”
Le Temps, July 14, 1905.
42 Her correspondence with the Ministre des Beaux-Arts shows that lighting was one of her
main concerns: large windows and electric lights.
43 See Matthieu Séguéla, “Le Japonisme de Georges Clemenceau,” Ebisu 27 (2001): 7–44, and
Clemenceau ou la tentation du Japon (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2014).
44 The mansion housing the Musée Jacquemart-André was begun by collector Édouard
André from 1868 to 1875 and reconceived after his marriage to painter Nélie Jacquemart
to include her collection and artworks acquired together. Willed to the French state in

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case East Asian art stemmed from the tenuous status of “Asian art” in France
at this time.45 None of the major Parisian art institutions recognized Chinese,
Japanese, or Korean art as worthy of display; collectors thus sought to establish
alternate venues to validate their acquisitions in the eyes of the public.46 Art
dealer Siegfried Bing, for example, complained in the pages of the first issue
(1888) of Le Japon artistique (Artistic Japan) that unless museums began dis-
playing Japanese art, the public would know only the “superficial” commercial
objects featured in “bazaar” windows.47 Industrialist Émile Guimet felt like-
wise; in 1889 he opened a Paris museum of Asian art previously situated in Lyon
(1879). Louvre employee Gaston Migeon worked tirelessly to persuade his col-
leagues to open an Islamic and Far Eastern art section; he campaigned to have
friends bequeath Japanese and Chinese objects in order to prove to the museum
establishment that Asian objects had historical and aesthetic significance.48
The late nineteenth-century French associations of chinoiseries with
women, sensuality, shopping, and home decoration that we have explored
above explain in part why Guimet, Cernuschi, and Bing worked so hard to
convince the art historical establishment of the “artistic” value (the title of Le
Japon artistique speaks volumes) of objects from Asia. Guimet and Cernus-
chi traveled to the East, returning with crates of artifacts (often large statues
and bronzes taken from archeological digs, in contradistinction to the small
commercial objects associated with chinoiseries), which they shared with
others through publications and exhibitions stressing the artifacts’ former
social or religious context. Ethnography allowed them to validate their col-
lections and their acumen by steering Asian imports away from “superficial”
1884, the museum opened to the public in 1913. Cernuschi left his hôtel particulier, built
in 1873 as a repository for his collection, to the city of Paris upon his death in 1896. It
opened in 1898.
45 The Western concept of “Chinese art” dates from this period, as Craig Clunas has noted in
Art in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). In the introduction (1–13), he deftly
evokes the problems engendered by fluctuating definitions of national art over time.
46 Prost and Valluy note the difficulties Guimet and Cernuschi faced in getting the establish-
ment to accept their collections (61).
47 “Il reste à entreprendre encore l’initiation de la grande masse du public aux beautés
intimes d’un art qui l’a surtout frappé jusqu’à ce jour par ces qualités superficielles. —Et,
de fait, comment saurait-il en être autrement? Nos grands musées d’État, où se trouvent
accumulées les merveilles de tous les styles, de toutes les époques et de chaque pays—à
l’exclusion d’un seul—ont dédaigneusement refusé d’ouvrir leurs portes à ce dernier
venu. C’est dans la vitrine des bazars que l’objet du Japon trouve un refuge, sous sa forme
la moins relevée.” Le Japon artistique 1 (1888): 2.
48 Raymond Koechlin, Gaston Migeon et le Louvre (Paris: Imprimerie Général Lahure, 1931), 5.

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220 Emery
female “bazaar” stereotypes and “rebuffing,” as Christopher Reed has put it,
“associations of japonisme with femininity.”49
Yet they still struggled to convince museum administrators of the artis-
tic value of their collections. A “NOTE” penned by Guimet in June 1913 and
conserved in the museum’s archives confirms the perceived divide separating
ethnography and commerce from art:
I don’t understand why people ask whether my Museum is scientific or

artistic.
Museums are educational works.
Non-scientific Art Museums are not Museums.
They are shops the public can visit….
The Musée Guimet is a philosophical Museum as demonstrated by
the most beautiful specimens of religious Art from the Orient and
Antiquity.
It is by definition artistic.50
Guimet had garnered public support for his museum by emphasizing the eth-
nographic nature of the religious objects he collected, but such success came
at the expense of aesthetic considerations.
The status of Asian “art” would be no clearer in 1939 when Florine Langweil,
a dealer of Chinese art frequented by both Guimet and d’Ennery, found that
the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar would be dismantling the “Salle Langweil”
she had endowed in 1923, sending the Chinese paintings and ceramics to the
Museum of Natural History.51 She responded furiously, insisting that her gifts
were not “ethnographic rubbish” but art, which is why she had bequeathed
them to an art museum:
49 “Bachelor Quarters: Japonisme in Paris,” in Oriental Interiors, ed. John Potvin (London:
Bloomsbury, 2015): 111–26. Such emphasis on the production of knowledge and on
authentication conforms to the shift toward expertise that Auslander has identified as
a particularly male attribute in nineteenth-century French collecting. “The Gendering of
Consumer Practices in Nineteenth-Century France,” 85–87.
50 “Je ne comprends pas pourquoi on veut savoir si mon Musée est scientifique ou artistique.
Les Musées sont des oeuvres d’enseignement. Les Musées d’Art qui ne sont pas scienti-
fiques ne sont pas des Musées. Ce sont des magasins que le public peut visiter. […] Le
Musée Guimet est un Musée philosophique démontré par les plus beaux spécimens de
l’Art religieux de l’Orient et de l’Antiquité. Il est forcément artistique. Paris le 25 juin 1913.”
Dossier Musée Guimet, folder “Guimet,” Archives of the Musée Guimet.
51 For more on Langweil’s contributions as dealer and collector, see Elizabeth Emery, “La
Maison Langweil and Women’s Participation in Fin-de-siècle Parisian Exchange of Asian
Art.” L’Esprit Créateur (Fall 2016), 61–75.

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It is not acceptable to mix antique objets d’art from China and Japan with
ethnographic rubbish! further, it is the Salle Langweil and I do not imag-
ine you will take out anything at all!! these are objets d’art of the highest
order! and I repeat that I made this bequest to the Société Schoengauer
itself and not to natural history.52
By 1939 Chinese art was clearly recognized based on the ethnographic terms
established by Guimet and Cernuschi, but its aesthetic qualities, championed
by Langweil, were still a subject of debate. Today, scholars such as Craig Clunas
recognize such struggles as natural and historically inevitable, since the cat-
egory of “art” is itself “a site of conflicting interpretations, fissured on class
and gender lines, among others, and the right to define something as ‘art’ is
typically seen as an important attribute of those dominant in society at a given
moment.”53
The Musée d’Ennery took form in the midst of this struggle to persuade the
French establishment that Chinese artifacts were, in fact, “art.” Clémence ini-
tially (1892) planned to leave her collection to the state by installing one or several
“Salles d’Ennery” at the recently opened (1889) Musée Guimet or by splitting
acquisitions between the Louvre and the Musée Guimet, ideas enthusiastically
reported by the press.54 She was encouraged by Guimet and Clemenceau, who
offered to serve as her executor, later donating his own collection of Japanese
kogos to the Musée d’Ennery.55 By June 1894, however, d’Ennery had decided
not to break up the collection and instead to remodel her house in collabora-
tion with the Ministère des Beaux-Arts in order to transform it into a museum
whose upkeep she would support with a generous endowment. The timing of
52 Je n’admets pas qu’on confonde les objets d’arts anciens de la Chine et du Japon avec
la pacotille ethnographique! du reste c’est la Salle Langweil et je ne suppose pas qu’on
enlève quoi que ce soit!! ce sont des objets d’art de tout premier ordre! et je répète que j’ai
fait ce don à la Société Schöengauer seule et non à l’histoire naturelle.” Letter of June 3,
1939, kindly shared by the Musée Unterlinden.
53 “China in Britain: The Imperial Collection,” in Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material
Culture and the Museum, ed. Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (London: Routledge, 1998), 43.
54 An anonymous article in La Lanterne of June 15, 1894, for example, notes that Madame
d’Ennery has been collecting for fifty years and emphasizes the novelty of sharing these
“treasures” with the public. This reporter confirms the Ministry’s visits to assess the col-
lection as of 1893 and the state’s recent acceptance of this “royal” and “magnificent gift.”
It also notes d’Ennery’s careful supervision of the construction of the rooms and their
lighting as well as the “important endowment” set aside for the museum’s maintenance
and security.
55 After his death, Clemenceau’s son reclaimed the collection and sold it to a private collec-
tor. The kogos now belong to the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal.

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222 Emery
her bequest (1892–93), and particularly her stipulation that admission be free,
suggests that she sought to participate in educating the French public about
the historical and aesthetic significance of Asian objects, as Guimet, Gonse,
and Cernuschi were doing.
3 The Shifting Fortunes of the Musée d’Ennery
Although Clémence d’Ennery had begun her collection of Chinese and

Japanese objects in the 1840s, well before most of those later considered
japonistes, her gender, lack of professional training, and marginal social situa-
tion precluded her from consideration as a serious collector in the early 1900s.56
Futhermore, while visitors such as Goncourt and Verne had privately recorded
the fact that d’Ennery had created a “collection” and constituted a “real
museum,” those who learned of the collection only in the 1890s and did not
know of her longstanding relationships with figures such as Goncourt, Guimet,
and Clemenceau simply assumed that she was like other women of this time
who decorated their homes with Asian goods from department stores. They
applied the terms chinoiseries and japonaiseries, with their intendent connota-
tions of gender, sexuality, and decoration, to her project, an impression likely
fostered by the increased intensity of her acquisitions from 1891 to 1898, when
cheap Asian collectibles flooded the marketplace, seeped into home decorat-
ing manuals for bourgeois women, and diluted her collection.57
In the 1850s Jules de Goncourt had been dazzled by the originality of
d’Ennery’s artistic installation and the atmosphere created by the warm
colors of her exhibition space. As the century progressed, however, such sub-
jective aesthetic spaces did not fit what Leora Auslander has identified as an
increased male “preoccupation with the authentication, acquisition, organiza-
tion, and classification of goods.”58 As a result, art critics such as Marius Vachon
described the as-yet-unopened Musée d’Ennery as “fanciful” and ethereal, in
contrast to the more educational and “monumental” displays of Guimet and
Cernuschi:
56 Anne Martin-Fugier describes the Sunday salon she held from 1878 to 1898 in Les salons
de la IIIe République (Paris: Perrin, 2003) and Félix Duquesnel evokes Adolphe’s associates
in Souvenirs littéraires (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1922), 225–39.
57 Jennifer Criss has studied the marked presence of Asian collectibles in the French
feminine press of the end of the century and their association with female domesticity.
“Japonisme and beyond in the art of Marie Bracquemond, Mary Cassatt, and Berthe Mor-
isot, 1867–1895” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2007).
58 “The Gendering of Consumer Practices in Nineteenth-Century France,” 86–87.

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While the founder of the Musée Guimet particularly sought out works
related to Oriental religions, and Cernuschi was fascinated by monumen-
tal bronzes … she collected fantastic and fanciful zoological specimens….
her choices were … inspired by a search for the most shimmering, most
flavorful, and least known colors. Her ideal as a collector was to delight
the eye and the spirit.59
Vachon’s 1899 emphasis on emotional response was nonetheless intended as

a compliment; he found d’Ennery’s focus on colors and forms a refreshing and
“lively” complement to the sober “masculine” displays of their contemporaries
(figure 8.6). Her museum, he promised readers, would be like “no other”; it
was so “free from formality and pretension” that he hoped the Ministère des
Beaux-Arts would not “impose” its administrative “traditions” on the Musée
d’Ennery.60
Vachon’s effusive article reveals the extent to which, by 1899, “exuberant”
yet “delicate” focus on color and theme signified “feminine,” particularly when
compared to the grandeur and sobriety of “masculine” displays:
Without wishing to insult the male collecting clan, only a woman—and

to a degree inaccessible to men—could so charmingly have created [this
museum], with delicacy, imagination, a taste for passion, audacity, perse-
verance, and much disposable income.61
Raymond Koechlin makes the same point with respect to another woman,
“Madame Pierre Girod” (née Suzanne Poirson), who did not “claim to collect,
59 “La haute fantaisie dans l’art chinois et dans l’art japonais. Pendant que le fondateur
du musée Guimet recherchait spécialement les oeuvres qui se rapportent aux religions
orientales; que M. Cernuschi se passionnait pour le bronze monumental [….] elle collec-
tionnait les pièces de zoologie fantastique et fantaisiste […] Une préoccupation […] de
l’orginalité exubérante dans les formes l’a guidée pour ses choix, qu’inspirait également la
recherche des couleurs, les plus chatoyantes, les plus savoureuses et les moins connues.
Son idéal d’amateur était ainsi la joie des yeux et la joie de l’esprit.” “La Vie artistique,” Petit
Journal, March 13, 1899.
60 Ibid. “Le musée d’Ennery ne sera pas comme les autres. Son caractère exempt de solen-
nité et de prétention, sa physionomie souriante, spirituelle et pittoresque, toute féminine
en un mot, son cadre, et son milieu exigent que le régime nouveau sous lequel il va être
désormais placé ait le moins possible des traditions, des habitudes de l’administration
officielle.”
61 Ibid. “Sans vouloir médire du clan masculin de la collection, une femme seule était capa-
ble de le réaliser de cette façon charmante; il y fallait—ce que ne peuvent avoir au même
degré les hommes—de la délicatesse, de l’imagination, du goût de la passion, de la har-
diesse, de la persévérance et beaucoup d’argent mignon.”

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224 Emery
figure 8.8 The “Colossal” Megoura Buddha of the Musée

Cernuschi. Postcard, ca. 1880. Private collection
but who fashioned a kind of Chinese decor for her life, composed of lovingly
chosen pretty objects.” He juxtaposes such “feminine” decorative choices to
the more masculine “bare room” in which Michel Calmann displayed Chinese
ceramics.62 Jules Claretie, who admitted to not yet having seen the d’Ennerys’
collection, went even further, negatively comparing the “senile” d’Ennerys’ love
62 Koechlin juxtaposes Calmann and his preference for a “chambre nue” to “Mme Pierre
Girod, récemment disparue, ne prétendait pas collectionner, mais elle avait fait à sa vie
une sorte de décor chinois auquel semblaient vraiment destinés de toute éternité les jolis
objets amoureusement choisis.” Souvenirs, 77–78.

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of their “fake Japan and theatrical chinoiseries” to a “real museum,” the Musée
Cernuschi, whose founder had risked his life to “snatch away” (arracher) the
“gigantic” statues and “resplendent” bronzes now on display.63
Such discourse pitting “real” museums of monumental objects against “fan-
ciful” displays of small “curiosities” nearly led to the expatriation of Empress
Eugénie’s “Chinese Museum” after the fall of the Second Empire. The com-
mission charged with determining the objects to be restituted to the exiled
empress deemed the Asian objects at Fontainebleau mere “curiosities,” stating
that her domestic display did not resemble a “real museum.”64 The ques-
tion of what a “real museum” of Asian art should be has haunted the Musée
d’Ennery since its inception, not only because of its installation in the private
residence of a socially marginalized woman with theatrical connections, but
also because of the nature of the objects she collected and the spectacular
nature of her display, in which scientific or ethnographic values were replaced
by personal aesthetics. In the Musée d’Ennery, artifacts were unapologetically
divested of whatever ethnographic function they may originally have had; they
became “my monsters,” showcased in a highly personal artistic installation
that responded to Western fantasies of an erotic and fantastical Orient. Such
unselfconscious cultural appropriation causes unease today and perpetuates
the museum’s status as a difficult-to-visit annex of the better-known Musée
Guimet. The Musée d’Ennery can accommodate only fifteen visitors at a time;
free one-hour guided tours take place on Saturdays at 11:30 a.m. by advance
reservation.65
The “imaginary,” “fantastical,” and feminine reputation of the Musée
d’Ennery persists in marketing materials such as the museum’s website, which
63 “Voilà un vrai musée, digne de nous”; “son Japon de pacotille, ses chinoiseries du faubourg
du Temple [theater district] et sa collection de bibelots sans valeur.” Claretie, “La Vie à
Paris.”
64 Marius Vachon described the legal wrangling over the restitution of the objects in “La
Question des musée chinois et de Pierrefonds,” La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité 8
(February 22, 1877): 72–73. The commission reported “qu’ils offraient un assemblage de
curiosités qui n’avait pas le caractère d’un véritable musée et qu’en conséquence ils ne
constituaient pas un monument de l’art (!!)” (73).
65 “Informations pratiques,” Musée national des arts asiatiques—Guimet, accessed Septem-
ber 2015, http://www.guimet.fr/fr/musee-dennery/informations-pratiques. At its inaugu-
ration in 1908 the museum was closed in August but otherwise open every day but Monday.
Access has changed over time, but the museum remains free, a stipulation of d’Ennery’s
bequest. Testament du 29 juin 1894: “un musée accessible gratuitement au public.” See the
copy of this testament included in the “Legs d’Ennery” folder (U8.Ennery) of Archives des
musées nationaux/Musées nationaux parisiens (series U-Ennery), Archives nationales,
Paris.

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226 Emery
describes it as “a unique place, a veritable cabinet of art and curiosities from

the Far East,” as do haunting films like Jérôme Prieur’s documentary, “Le Petit
Musée de Clémence d’Ennery.”66 Installations like d’Ennery’s, which “delighted
both eye and the spirit,” had not always been gendered “male” or “female,”
however. One has only to think of the “Chinese rooms” Victor Hugo created
for Hauteville House and Hauteville Fairy during his exile in Guernsey from
1863 to 1864 (see chapter 6) by combining real pieces of Chinese ceramics with
fanciful visual puns evoking stereotypical Chinese motifs. Scholars qualify
such creations as the “third body of his work,” rather than as the result of his
“feminine” sentiment.67 Furthermore, the shift toward authentication and
classification noted by Auslander was not universally appreciated, even among
men. Edmond de Goncourt, for example, reviled public museums as “hospi-
tals” or “morgues” because of their tendency to present works as scientific
specimens laid out for dissection.68 He chose to auction his collection rather
than “bury” cherished objects in a museum where bored people would stream
by without seeing them.69 Upon visiting Cernuschi’s new home (and future
museum) in 1875, Edmond recorded his disapproval of the “cold and impos-
ing milieu” with “white walls” imitating displays at the Louvre; he thought the
magnificent objects seemed “unhappy” here, as if “transported by an evil genie
to a palace imagined by the grandiose bourgeois taste of a shareholder.” He
suggests Cernuschi should have created a “hospitable and agreeable lodging”
for these living objects.70
66 “Un lieu unique, véritable cabinet d’art et de curiosités de l’Extrême-Orient.” “Informa-
tions pratiques, ” Musée national des arts asiatiques—Guimet. See also Jérôme Prieur, Le
Petit Musée de Clémence d’Ennery (Crescendo Films, 2013).
67 “Hugo … Ses Décors,” Maisons Victor Hugo, accessed August 14, 2016, http://maisonsvictor
hugo.paris.fr/fr/musee-collections/collections/hugo-ses-decors.
68 Kenneth Hudson traces many such debates between private and public display in A Social
History of Museums (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975). Goncourt chroni-
cled his own curatorial choices in his 1881 La Maison d’un artiste. On Goncourt’s refusal of
the “sterility” of the collector in favor of the creativity of the curator, see Dominique Pety,
Les Goncourt et la Collection (Geneva: Droz, 2003), 120–21, 142.
69 “Pour les objets que j’ai possédés, je ne veux pas après moi de l’enterrement dans un
musée, dans cet endroit où passent des gens ennuyés de regarder ce qu’ils ont sous les
yeux. Je veux que chacun de mes objets apporte à un acquéreur, à un être bien personnel,
la petite joie que j’ai eue en l’achetant.” Goncourt, Journal, 3: 27, April 3, 1887.
70 “J’ai déjeuné ce matin chez Cernuschi. Le riche collectionneur a donné à sa collection
le milieu à la fois imposant et froid d’un Louvre; il n’a pas su lui donner le milieu hos-
pitalier et plaisant d’une habitation, d’un petit coin de patrie retrouvée. Au milieu de
ces murailles blanches, sur le ton de brique en honneur dans nos musées, ces objets de
l’Extrême-Orient semblent malheureux: on dirait qu’un mauvais génie les a transpor-
tés dans un palais imaginé par le goût à la fois grandiose et bourgeois d’un actionnaire

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In his own displays Edmond sought to foster what Pamela Warner has called
a “vibrational aesthetic,” a rich sensorial experience that allowed him to com-
mune with the objects surrounding him.71 The d’Ennerys did not remain close
with Edmond after Jules’s death in 1870, but Clémence seems to have shared the
brothers’ belief in the importance of artistic installations; her letters and testa-
ment insist on exhibiting the objects “in the most favorable conditions,” and
newspaper reports emphasize the care with which she designed and orches-
trated the construction of her future museum’s new galleries and lighting.72
Like Edmond, she preferred to create a “hospitable home” for the works she
had so lovingly collected, creating an environment that would encourage visi-
tors to circulate, examine, and perhaps even handle the thousands of small
objects distributed among ninety-nine vitrines (See figures 8.1 and 8.2).73
Such personal aesthetic responses to Asian art were, as we have seen,
increasingly marginalized by what was now an art historical establishment
that valued more impersonal displays governed by classifications based on his-
tory, geography, or economics.74 Japoniste Louis Gonse, for example, dismissed
Edmond’s part-catalog, part literary memoir, La Maison d’un artiste, as a work
of fantasy written by an art world outsider.75 Edmond, for his part, complained
du siècle.” July 1, 1875, Journal, 2:651. He is equally unimpressed by his first visit to the
Musée Guimet, which he evokes in terms of a conversation about suitcases, historical
figures, economics, and religion (July 6, 1891). I have found no record in the Journal of his
response to the project for the Musée d’Ennery, though he likely would have made snide
comments about the pretension of creating such a museum.
71 Pamela Warner, “Framing, Symmetry, and Contrast in Edmond de Goncourt’s Aesthetic
Interior.” Studies in the Decorative Arts 15 (Spring–Summer 2008): 49, 57, 59.
72 “Les objets de la collection devront être présentés dans les conditions les plus favora-
bles à leur exposition et devront être conservés dans l’organisation où ils se trouveront
au moment de mon décès.” La Revue des grands procès contemporains. An anonymous
June 15, 1894, article in La Lanterne describes Clémence’s active role in the renovations.
73 A series of poignant letters from d’Ennery to Deshayes (January 1892 to August 1893)
reveal, for example, the time and effort she put into affixing labels so that they wouldn’t
show until lifted. She also asked him for advice about numbering objects so as to recon-
cile them with her chronological list of acquisitions in view of creating a catalog. See the
1892 correspondence file in the Musée Guimet archives.
74 With the education reforms of Jules Ferry, for example, the museum was reconceived, as
Nancy Green has put it, as “an important accessory to civic education, thanks to its rigor-
ous methods of historical classification and the pedagogy of class field trips.” “The Immi-
gration History Museum,” in The French Republic: History, Values, Debates, ed. Edward
Berenson, Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2001), 242–51.
75 The personal nature of Goncourt’s narrative puzzled Gonse, who described him as an art
world outsider (“un indépendant, un fantaisiste, un oseur”). See Emery, Photojournalism
and the Writer House Museum (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 26–29.

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228 Emery
about Gonse’s “pretention” and “seriousness,” which took all the joy from the
aesthetic contemplation of Japanese art.76
4 Beyond Chinoiserie
The ethnographic, economic, and pedagogical arguments used at this time

to legitimize collections such as those of Guimet and Cernuschi were criti-
cal to convincing the French public that there was more to Chinese objects
than chinoiseries. Nonetheless, the reception of d’Ennery’s museum in 1908,
Guimet’s 1913 note to self, and Langweil’s 1939 correspondence with the Musée
Unterlinden suggest that the perceived rift between “science” and “art” led, as
Guimet put it, to the belief that displays (and museums) must focus on one
or the other. There is much to be said about the ways in which certain kinds
of Chinese objects have fallen on one side of this divide or the other, but
the rift carries particular implications for women collectors of Asian art. At the
turn of the century, wealthy female collectors of European Old Masters were
recognized for their acumen (one thinks of Nélie André, co-founder of the
Jacquemart-André house museum opened in 1913), but the objects amassed
by collectors of non-established (and less expensive) genres such as Asian art
were presumed to be cheap and decorative trinkets. Japonaiseries had taken
on more “serious” artistic cachet thanks to the French institutionalization of
ukiyo-e prints inspired by japoniste artists, but chinoiseries continued to carry
the pleasurable and whimsical decorative and feminine attributes associated
with the objects contained in Empress Eugénie’s Chinese Museum and the
Musée d’Ennery. Clemence created, as Marius Vachon noted, a “museum like
no other” by choosing to remain an “outsider” and a “fantasist.” She embraced
an alternative display aesthetic in her own home to counter what Goncourt
termed the “inhospitable” “medical” display environment of other venues ded-
icated to Asian art.
Memory of the Musée d’Ennery as what Vachon had termed an intimate
and “unpretentious” alternative to large institutions such as the Louvre might
have persisted had it not been for the ten-year legal battle that transformed the
bequest in the public eye. Because ownership of prime real estate was at issue,
the trial hinged on the quality of the collection, with lawyers exploiting the
76 “Qui ne veut de l’art japonais que l’art sérieux, grave, concentré, et qui est plein de mépris
pour le joli, la grâce de cet art,” Journal, 3, October 29, 1888.

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figure 8.9 Musée d’Ennery, room 3 and view into gallery 4 (before the renovation). Musée
Guimet, Paris.

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230 Emery
stereotypes we have examined.77 “Real” museums were said to contain large

paintings and statues (as in the Louvre, the Musée Guimet, and the Musée
Cernuschi) and to be divorced from living spaces.78 Reporters echoed these
legal arguments, proclaiming the future Musée d’Ennery “insignificant,” por-
traying Clémence as someone who “knew nothing,” assembling objects “for her
own pleasure [… and that] the word collection might aptly be replaced by the
word ‘clutter,’ ” an impression furthered by the seeming vanity of preserving
the arrangement of the objects exactly as she had left them.79 Other reporters
came to the museum’s defense, but the seed of doubt had been planted.80
Ten years later d’Ennery’s generous goal of encouraging appreciation for
Asian art through a free public museum had been forgotten, as had her agency
in designing the exhibition space and in classifying the items in her homes.
Reporters in 1908 described the museum as the work of curator Émile Deshayes:
Where there was no organization other than that provided by the lively
instinct of a woman of taste, with no desire other than to treat herself to
a spectacle of caressing charm, M. Deshayes used his powerful erudition
77 A June 16, 1894, article about the museum published in L’Intransigeant summarizes
the status of the legal proceedings. In order to make his case that the senile Adolphe
d’Ennery had, in fact, wished to leave the house to his daughter, her lawyer based his case
on denigrating Clémence as a petty, jealous, and uneducated woman who had created the
museum as a vanity project financed by her henpecked husband.
78 Clunas notes the problematic and gendered discourse associated with “Chinese art,”
“which has its primary locus in the context of domestic consumption, since it is against,
or by contrast with, what is done in the home that so much of what happens in the insti-
tutional context of museums and of the academy is defined.” “China in Britain: The Impe-
rial Collection,” 43.
79 This stipulation, recorded in her husband’s will, has had the unintended consequence of
diminishing modern evaluations of her taste. At other institutions curators have removed
works and have added others, thus cementing their founders’ reputation as “connois-
seurs.” At the Musée Guimet, for example, the original collection spent a great deal of
time in storage as the museum grew. See Chang, Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian
Art, 163.
80 Of particular interest is Bernard Guinaudeau’s August 6, 1899, article in L’Aurore, which
refutes point by point the negative arguments made in an article signed “Fontenelles”
from Le Figaro of June 29, 1899. Fontenelles claimed that the collection was “des acces-
soires de cotillon” and that “Mme d’Ennery ne s’y connaissait guère.” Léon Roger-Milès
quoted similar hearsay (“formée sans choix par une femme peu versée dans l’étude des
objets, qu’elle réunissait pour son seul agrément […] le mot collection même pourrait
être justement remplacé par le mot ‘encombrement’ ”) and countered such statements in
a August 10, 1899, article for L’Éclair.

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to classify it and thanks to him we know how many admirable and rare
pieces are contained in the museum.81
Pitting women’s “instinct” and “desire” against men’s “erudition” and “classifi-
cation” had the effect of erasing d’Ennery’s accomplishments. It was she who
collected objects over several decades, she who decided to create the museum
as an alternative to other kinds of displays, she who left ledgers describing and
indicating the economic value of her acquisitions.82 She had selected Deshayes
as curator because of the complementary information his expertise as former
curator of the Musée Guimet would bring to her “vibrant” aesthetic displays,
but the same “serious” status caused him to write her out of the museum’s his-
tory. The first catalog presents the museum as “bequeathed by Mr. d’Ennery,”
a tendency repeated into the 1970s, when Prost and Valluy titled their thesis
about the museum Adolphe d’Ennery, Collectionneur, 1811–1899.83 Even though
Adolphe’s testament stipulated that the display should remain as she left it,
Deshayes modified the museum’s layout to open up the space, added handwrit-
ten labels to display cases, and allowed new gifts to be added to the collection.
Other items disappeared.84
Today, the museum, its tour guides, and the press continue to publicize
the “fantastic” and residential nature of d’Ennery’s museum (“La boutique
fantasque de l’avenue du Bois de Boulogne”),85 thus eliding the fact that she
specifically transformed her home into a museum that would serve as an
alternative to the Louvre and the Musée Guimet. Rather than label the Musée
81 “Là où il n’y avait dans l’arrangement que le sens éveillé d’une femme de goût, sans autre
désir que d’offrir à son propre regard un spectacle qui lui fût d’un charme caressant,
M. Deshayes a mis l’ordre par où s’affirme sa puissante érudition et grâce à lui nous savons
combien de pièces admirables et rares contient ce musée.” Roger-Milès (in his otherwise
complimentary article for L’Éclair).
82 Prost and Valluy have compared d’Ennery’s collection to that of the Goncourt brothers
and Philippe Burty and have concluded that d’Ennery’s estimates were accurate. They
were also consistent with the evaluation made by Hayashi, Migeon, and Gonse for the
Ministère des Beaux-Arts in 1902 in conjunction with the lawsuit (162).
83 Petit Guide Illustré au Musée d’Ennery (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1908).
84 Prost and Valluy compare d’Ennery’s layout, in which specific groups of objects were
spread throughout the living spaces of the house (203), to Deshayes’ organization into
stand-alone galleries (210). They also note that two valuable Chinese elephants worth five
thousand francs each in 1898 were no longer in the collection in 1975 (166). A theft of
thirty-five netzukes in 1977 exposed the fact that there were no photographs of individual
items. Michèle Pirazzoli (curator) to the Ministère de la Culture, April 4, 1977, Archives
des musées nationaux/Musées nationaux parisiens, Musée d’Ennery: Series U.23 Ennery
(sous-séries 3HH à 19HH), Archives nationales, Paris.
85 Title of an article by Jean-Paul Desroches for L’Objet d’art 9 (July–August 1998): 44–55.

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232 Emery
d’Ennery as a “feminine fantasy,” “a fantastical boutique,” or a “cabinet of curi-

osity,” it might be more productive to consider it an artistic creation akin to
the installations Edmond de Goncourt carefully documented in photographs
and the narrative of his Maison d’un artiste. D’Ennery’s museum was intended
to appeal to the senses, to create an intimate aesthetic that would encourage
visitors to discover objects for themselves.
Clémence Desgranges, who began collecting in the 1840s, lived through the
formative period of French museum building, a time of transition from the pri-
vate and often aristocratic traditions emblematized by Empress Eugénie’s Musée
chinois, to the more historically and pedagogically inclined public museums
of the Third Republic. The Musée d’Ennery owes a great deal to the sensorial
appeal of Romantic-era chinoiseries prevalent when she began collecting,
but dismissing the Musée d’Ennery as “Orientalist,” a “cabinet of curiosity,” a
“bazaar,” or an exotic theatrical set denies d’Ennery the active role she played
in the French aesthetic validation of art from China and Japan.
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Papiers Poincaré. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
Pety, Dominique. Les Goncourt et la Collection. Geneva: Droz, 2003.
Prost, Lucie, and Chantal Valluy. Adolphe d’Ennery, Collectionneur, 1811–1899. Paris: Di-
plôme de l’Ecole du Louvre, 1975.
Reed, Christopher. “Bachelor Quarters: Japonisme in Paris.” In Oriental Interiors, edited
by John Potvin, 111–126. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Reed, Christopher. Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
Samoyault-Verlet, Colombe. Le Musée chinois de l’impératrice Eugénie. Paris: Réunion
des musées nationaux, 1994. Exhibition catalog.
Séguéla, Matthieu. “Clemenceau ou la tentation du Japon. Paris: CNRS, 2014.
Séguéla, Matthieu. “Le Japonisme de Georges Clemenceau.” Ebisu 27 (2001): 7–44.
Sloboda, Stacey. Chinoiserie. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.
Thomas, Greg. “The Looting of Yuanming Yuan and the Translation of Chinese Art
in Europe.” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 7, no. 2 (Autumn 2008). http://
www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn08/93-the-looting-of-yuanming-
and-the-translation-of-chinese-art-in-europe.
Warner, Pamela. “Framing, Symmetry, and Contrast in Edmond de Goncourt’s Aesthetic
Interior.” Studies in the Decorative Arts 15 (Spring–Summer 2008): 36–64.
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Wood, Christopher. Tissot. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988.

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chapter 9
Fashion, Chinoiserie, and the Transnational:

Material Translations between China, Japan and
Britain
Sarah Cheang
Object Examination 1
Museum catalog description, April 2014:
Object history note: Robe. Imperial yellow silk, brocaded with dragons
amidst clouds above tempestuous waves and lined with blue silk. Said to
have been taken at the Summer Palace, Pekin.1
Notes from physical examination of object in storage, April 17, 2014:2

Nineteenth-century dressing gown (?) with eighteenth-century sack-back
construction. Fancy dress (?)
In 1881, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) purchased a women’s garment
that has the appearance of a Chinese dragon robe in size, motif, materials, and
length (figure 9.1). The arms, however, are tighter, and there is a Western-style
collar and a belt. Gored panels provide additional volume from the waist, and
turning the garment over reveals an intriguing sack-back structure (figures 9.2
and 9.3). The acquisition file noted that the robe had been “taken at the Summer
Palace, Pekin,” while a 1903 revision to the object description by Chinese art
expert Stephen Wootton Bushell simultaneously lessened and expanded upon
this narrative of provenance, writing that the garment suggests “a robe found
upon a divan in the Summer Palace of Yuan-ming-yuan during the expedition
1 “Robe,” V&A Search the Collections, accessed March 12, 2014, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/
item/O486036/robe-unknown/. Following discussion of this object as part of this research
project (see note 2), the publicly accessible catalog entry was amended to reduce the claim
that this garment came from the Summer Palace.
2 In April 2014, I examined this garment with an interdisciplinary group of curators and aca-
demics as part of a series of workshops held by the AHRC network project “Fashion and
Translation: Britain, Japan, China, Korea.” Thanks are due to Anna Jackson, Helen Persson,
Toshio Watanabe, Clare Pajaczkowska, Elizabeth Kramer, Yunah Lee, Jungtaek Lee, and Liu
Yu for this inspirational object-focused discussion on transnational Chinese fashion.

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236 Cheang
figure 9.1 Robe (front), ca. 1880. Victorian and Albert Museum, London, 12–1881

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Fashion, Chinoiserie, and the Transnational 237
figure 9.2 Robe (back, detail), ca. 1880. Victorian and Albert Museum, London, 12–1881

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238 Cheang
figure 9.3 Robe (side showing gore), ca. 1880. Victorian and Albert Museum, London, 12-1881

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of 1860.”3 This 1903 addition subsequently became part of the Museum’s online
catalog description for this object.
Cultural appropriation, defined as taking and using aspects from another
culture without acknowledgment or permission, occurs frequently and is essen-
tially problematic where there are power differences.4 Charges of exploitation
are often leveled at fashion designers and fashion consumers for subjecting
the less wealthy, the dispossessed, and the non-Western to a process of exoti-
cization that masquerades as admiration but perpetuates power imbalances
through a failure to credit and adequately recompense originating cultures or
respect their values. The attempt to relate this particular robe to Yuanming
Yuan—the Summer Palace that was sacked by Anglo-French forces in 1860 and
attained mythical status as a source of Chinese objects in the West—certainly
springs from a desire to fix this robe to a moment of Victorian military tri-
umph in China. However, the form of the robe makes this story of acquisition
uncertain and even raises doubts about the centrality of China to this particular
example of fashion.
This chapter looks closely at the stories of transnational exchange contained
in collections of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century dress, suggesting
new ways of approaching the interactions between chinoiserie and japonisme.
At the end of the nineteenth century, in the context of both japonisme and
eighteenth-century revival styles, British chinoiserie fashions incorporated
certain key elements of Chinese clothing construction, such as wide sleeves
and side closure. In the early twentieth century, a range of Chinese motifs
grew in popularity in European fashion. Indeed, entire Chinese garments were
adapted to suit Western aesthetic purposes in both dress and interior design.
The material and cultural translations that occurred between Britain, China,
and Japan in the creation of these fashions invoke many questions related to
modernity and nationhood. Sites of the artistic and the fanciful, chinoiserie
garments between the 1880s and the 1910s were poised between interiority and
exteriority and conflated the Japanese and the Chinese to create new forms
of European modernity through exoticism, historicism, and women’s bodies.
During this same period, Japanese merchants produced hybridized Chinese-
Japanese garments for the Euro-American market that served both Japanese
and European agendas. As Mei Mei Rado observes, “the [Japanese-made
3 Museum Register 81, Science and Art Department, 314 to 473; 1 to 101, 1880–1881, MA/30/155,
V&A Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
4 Susan Kaiser, Fashion and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 2012), 48.

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240 Cheang
Chinese] robes’ hybridity functioned as a flexible site for constructing mean-

ings and identities pertinent to both ends of the cultures that they crossed.”5
The V&A Chinese robe discussed here will be used to provide multiple
starting points for a discussion of the way in which late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century chinoiserie fashions constitute a fluid space of transna-
tional and historical exchanges. Looking at fashion in that way and paying
closer attention to the in-between and the inconclusive offer the potential
for dress histories to become situated more firmly in the context of global
flows. In this light, it is somewhat fitting that in the museum’s public catalog,
this garment is assigned a URL ending in the words “robe-unknown.” Indeed,
many objects become problematic within a cataloging system that is designed
to give prominence to named artists/designers/makers, to the disadvantage
of pre-nineteenth century, non-Western, or non-elite clothing cultures.6 The
words “robe-unknown” do, however, offer a valuable invitation to engage
with an intellectual space of not knowing, in which to consider the interac-
tions between chinoiserie and japonisme in art and design history.7 As Julie
F. Codell argues that transcultural and transnational objects offer a challenge
to the social order through their inherent fluidity, instability, and interactivity,
yet result from encounters between cultures that are nevertheless grounded in
time and space.8 This chapter, while stopping short of a full object analysis, is
punctuated by juxtapositions between museum catalog entries and reflections
from my notebook as I examined the V&A robe. These taxonomic and mate-
rial encounters are intended as disruptive interludes that continually bring us
back to the garment, while signaling the opportunities that the cultural field of
fashion affords to think very explicitly about systems of duality at play in the
making of chinoiserie at the end of the Qing period.
5 Mei Mei Rado, “The Hybrid Orient: Japonisme and Nationalism of the Takashimaya Manda-
rin Robes,” Fashion Theory 19, no. 5 (2015): 3–4.
6 Since the writing of this chapter, and just as this book is going to press, discussions are taking
place within the Museum to alter the way in which the V&A cataloging system works, remov-
ing the word “unknown” from the URL online entries of objects such as those in the Asian
collections. This proposed revision to the cataloging underlines the relevance of the issues
discussed here for curators as well as for art and design historians seeking a more satisfactory
approach to histories of global flow.
7 Though the concept of greater knowledge through an awareness of that which is not known
has many articulations and applications (often drawn from Freudian psychoanalysis), the
root of my inspiration remains the oft-quoted maxim of philosopher Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe: “It is only when a man knows little, that he knows anything at all. With knowledge
grows doubt.” The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders, 2nd rev.
ed. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1908), 97.
8 Codell, Julie F., ed. Transculturation in British Art, 1770–1930 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 4–9.

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1 Transnational Fashion and Chinoiserie
Social systems of style and style change involve material and conceptual
innovations in which the exotic is often used to generate a sense of newness.
Chinoiserie fashion constitutes an emotional and material investment in the
foreign that appears to conflict with the key social function of dress as one
of the foremost ways to express and experience cultural belonging. Dress is a
symbolic and complex affair in which duality and contested identities abound.
Fashion change is a social dynamic that materializes the tensions between
individuality and group identity, personal agency and social prescription.9
Dress fashions also engage men, women, and children in embodied practices
of art and design that are powerfully linked to morality and desire. Shifting and
multiple discourses of gender, rank, ethnicity, individuality, and social belong-
ing are exhibited and played with in both spectacular and subtle ways. Fashion
also tends to be insecurely attached to geographical place because it is pre-
dominantly a temporal dynamic that connotes modernity while playing with
time and space in the pursuit of novelty and social distinction.10 The social
dynamic of fashion enables people to occupy a space between the tangible
“proofs” of essentialized ethnic and gendered identities and more consciously
adopted acts of rebellion, self-assertion, and projected personality. In a sense,
fashion makes conscious the performative aspects of the self.11
Dress fashions also provide a form of mediation between past and pres-
ent that produces a powerful sense of a person’s place within constructions
of modernity.12 Concepts of fashion are formed in dialectical relationship to
ideas of the old and the unchanging. Everyday practices of fashion, however,
do not exist in universal opposition to ethnic or traditional dress, which have
9 Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion (New York: Routledge, 1993); Diana Crane, Fashion
and its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2000); Joanne Finkelstein, The Fashioned Self (Philadelphia: Temple Univer-
sity Press, 1991); Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social
Theory, 2nd rev. ed. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015).
10 Sarah Cheang, “To the Ends of the Earth: Fashion and Ethnicity in the Vogue Fashion
Shoot,” in Fashion Media: Past and Present, ed. Djurdja Bartlett, Shaun Cole, and Agnès
Rocamora (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 34–45.
11 For a wide-ranging exploration of the tensions between ethnic identity, fashion practices,
and the production of self, see Carol Tulloch, The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the Afri-
can Diaspora (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).
12 Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity & Deathliness (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003); Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, rev.
ed. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016).

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242 Cheang
their own cycles of change and specific areas of application.13 Moreover, the
objects of fashion—primarily textile garments—frequently traverse cultural
boundaries, undergoing physical and/or conceptual alteration as part of their
cross-cultural assimilation, during which their cultural belonging can be called
into question. Chinoiserie is explicitly a field of the culturally in-between, con-
sisting of objects in translation. Considering chinoiserie garments of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century as neither Chinese objects in West-
ern spaces nor Western fantasies of Chinese culture opens the way to a more
nuanced understanding of how these garments came into being. The tension
between individual innovation, group dynamics, and capitalism that under-
lies fashion change can also be more usefully engaged with when the multiple
actors involved in the creation of transnational fashion are addressed rather
than skipped over as inconvenient complications or unresolvable contradic-
tions within the identification of a garment.
2 Chinese Robes and Western Gowns in the Making
Museum online catalog description, April 2014:
Physical Description: Robe of yellow satin brocaded in tapestry fashion
with threads of coloured silks and gold. The five-clawed dragons are dis-
played coiled round or holding clasped in their claws, flaming jewels,
with a background of scrolled clouds enclosing flying bats as symbols of
happiness and the eight Buddhist emblems of good fortune (pa ehi-
hsiang). The broad striped border below culminating in crested waves,
sewn with precious objects, and beating upon rocks, and the other acces-
sories are modelled on the usual pattern. The sleeves are unusually small
and the waist is strung with a cord of yellow silk ending in the front in
small tassels “for indoor wear, suggesting a robe found upon a divan
in the summer palace of Yuan-ming-yuan during the expedition of 1860.”
It is lined with dark blue silk, padded with a layer of cotton-wool.14
13 Joanne B. Eicher and Barbara Sumberg, “World Fashion, Ethnic, and National Dress,” in
Dress and Ethnicity: Change Across Space and Time, eds. Joanne B. Eicher and Barbara
Sumberg (Oxford: Berg, 1995), 295–305.
14 “Robe,” V&A Search the Collections. The quotation marks placed around the phrase “for
indoor wear … 1860” are rather anomalous, as the entire physical description at 2014 was a
direct quotation of Bushell’s 1903 revision of the object description, not merely this small
phrase. This indicates an increased level of skepticism about the provenance of the gar-
ment since 1903, though not sufficiently to remove the phrase entirely until after 2014.

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Notes from physical examination of object in storage, April 17, 2014:

Garment shows fading and wear consistent with exposure to light and dirt
after the addition of the western collar. Was this ever a dragon robe?
The “robe-unknown” at the V&A has the appearance of what is commonly

called a Chinese dragon robe—but one that has been converted into a Western
dressing gown by the addition of a turned-over collar and cord belt. Dragon
robes in their various styles ( jifu, longpao, and chaopao) were a prominent com-
ponent of festive, ritual, official, unofficial, formal, semi-formal, and informal
imperial dress, worn within a codified clothing system of Chinese adminis-
tration during the Ming and Qing dynasties.15 Dragon robes can be identified
by their bands of stripes representing water topped with foaming waves and
mountains, while dragons, clouds, and auspicious and power symbols are dis-
tributed across the remainder of the clothing’s surfaces (figure 9.4). As part
of the highly regulated systems of Qing official dress, especially enforced from
the 1760s onwards, these full-length garments with horse-hoof cuffs were worn
by the imperial household, nobles, and local government officials going about
their business (such as collecting taxes).16
The brocaded satin of the robe considered in this chapter is undoubtedly
Chinese in origin; however, misalignment between the decorative pattern and
the bottom hem and side seams suggest that though the garment was created
from yardage intended for a Chinese robe, it was never made up in China (fig-
ure 9.5). Embroidered decoration for clothing was (and still is) applied to the
cloth before cutting, so that the embroidery traces the outlines of a garment
that has yet to come into being. The Qing Imperial Household Department
managed workshops and storehouses for the production and provision of the
dress for the imperial court, stockpiling decorated robe yardage ready for tai-
loring when it was required.17 The way in which the cloth in this instance has
been very inexactly tailored around the striped hem to increase the length and
width of the garment is an indicator that the yardage cannot have been tailored
for the Chinese court, where extremely exacting standards were exercised.
15 Judith Rutherford, “Court Robes,” in Celestial Silks: Chinese Religious and Court Textiles,
ed. Judith Rutherford and Jackie Menzies (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2004),
59; Ming Wilson, “What is an ‘Imperial’ Robe,” in Imperial Chinese Robes: From the Forbid-
den City, ed. Ming Wilson (London: V&A Publications, 2010), 113–17.
16 Verity Wilson, Chinese Dress (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1986), 12–24.
17 Christie’s, The Imperial Wardrobe: Fine Chinese Costume and Textiles from the Linda Wrig-
glesworth Collection, Wednesday 19 March 2008 (New York: Christie’s, 2008), 85; Yan Yong,
“Production Processes and Imperial Textile Manufactories,” in Ming Wilson, Imperial Chi-
nese Robes, 99–111; Verity Wilson, Chinese Textiles (London: V&A Publications, 2005), 78.

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244 Cheang
figure 9.4 Imperial dragon robe, made in China, 1780–1850. Victoria and Albert Museum,
London, T.199–1948

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It is, therefore, highly unlikely that this particular robe was ever “found on a
divan in the summer palace” as the donor perhaps wished to suggest, unless
the uncut cloth had been looted from the palace stores and left for discovery in
another part of the palace.18 This is a possibility, as accounts of the looting of
the Yuanming Yuan in 1860 record chaotic scenes, during which bolts of cloth
were even used by soldiers as tents, and the contents of the palace were gener-
ally ransacked before the buildings were destroyed by fire.19
It is possible, then, that the yardage was taken from the imperial stores
in 1860 and traded to an eager Western market. Alternatively, it may have
been sold off by the Imperial Household Department during the 1860s or
1870s if it was no longer required, out of fashion or substandard. Uncut and
unused embroidered or brocaded facings, bands, and yardage for clothing
and uncut embroidered textiles for accessories such as fans and purses are
often found in Western collections and so must have been fairly readily avail-
able to dealers or even produced specifically for export.20 Their advantages in
the context of nineteenth-century trade, in addition to ease of packing and
storage in comparison to made-up items, was that they could directly supply
Western uses of embroideries as appliquéd decoration on textile items around
the home.
The alteration of Chinese garments for Western uses can be read as out-and-
out imperialistic appropriation; indeed, this has been my own view in the case
of many examples from the early twentieth century.21 It is also useful, however,
to place such adaptations within a far wider context of material transforma-
tion and transcultural interaction in order to more fully comprehend the ways
in which Chinese textiles as objects have traveled and been absorbed into local
cultures beyond a bilateral East/West, Orient/Occident framework. As a codi-
fication of imperial authority, complex and multiple imperial relationships
within East Asia were forged through the gifting of textiles bearing dragons
across the Qing period. Uncut yardage was used for diplomatic gifts along-
side completed robes but was subsequently tailored to serve local uses. For
18 The “divan in the summer palace” referred to in the museum acquisition records could
possibly be a reference to a Chinese platform bed but also hints at nineteenth-century
Western interiors, both psychic and material, in which Chinese robes had uses both on
and off the body within the home. See Sarah Cheang, “Chinese Robes in Western Interi-
ors: Transitionality and Transformation,” in Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of
Modern Identity, eds. Alla Myzelev and John Potvin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 125–45.
19 James L. Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China
(Durham: Duke University Press), 78.
20 Christie’s, The Imperial Wardrobe, 85–97; Verity Wilson, Chinese Textiles, 78–80.
21 Cheang, “Chinese Robes,” 125–45.

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246 Cheang
e xample, Tibetan men’s robes (chubas) for use by high-ranking lamas or digni-
taries were created from dragon robe yardage as well as from adapted Chinese
robes.22 Uncut yardage is, after all, a suspended stage in the production pro-
cess; it was allowed to circulate, imago-like, spawning new garments.
Within Western transnational fashion cultures, the similarity between our
V&A garment and the banyan must also be considered. “Banyan” is a Gujarati
word that was adopted into English to denote a particular form of loose and
informal attire worn by both European men and women in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. A comfortable garment that was worn by men in the
privacy of the home and sometimes at the office, it was a product of the cul-
tural interactions of both the Dutch and English East India Companies in Asia.23
Though typically adapted from the Japanese kimono in shape, men’s ban-
yans could also be more fitted and coat-like, with an incorporated waistcoat.
Usually made from silks and chintzes, the late example of figure 9.6, tailored
in Italy in the early nineteenth century, follows the shape of the Chinese
robe from which is it adapted and has a separate waistcoat created from off-
cuts from the Chinese original. That men in the long eighteenth century chose
to be portrayed in their banyans is testament to their respectability as items
of sophisticated masculinity, but this was not the case by the second half of
the nineteenth century. In the wake of the Opium Wars, Chinese masculinity
began to acquire negative associations, and this had an effect on the practical
and symbolic uses of Chinese dragon robes in late Victorian Europe.24 In the
painting The Rightful Heir (exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874) by George
Smith, the villain of the painting is dressed in a Chinese dragon robe tied with
a belt around the waist as a dressing gown; the “undress” of the ensemble is
completed by bare feet in slippers.25
The wearing of Chinese garments by European women in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century followed a different path and needs to be under-
stood in the context of a continuum that existed between interior decoration
22 Jackie Menzies, “Buddhist Textiles,” in Celestial Silks: Chinese Religious and Court Textiles,
ed. Judith Rutherford and Jackie Menzies (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2004),
36–37, 43; Christie’s, The Imperial Wardrobe, 70–71.
23 Moira Thunder, “Object in Focus: Man’s Banyan,” Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity
and Innovation in Europe: 1500–1800, accessed December 20, 2016, http://www.fashioning
theearlymodern.ac.uk/object-in-focus/mans-banyan/.
24 Colin Mackerras, Western Images of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
25 Verity Wilson contrasts this figure with the notion of the dignified mandarin in “Studio
and Soirée: Chinese Textiles in Europe and America, 1850 to the present,” in Unpacking
Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, eds. Ruth B. Phillips and
Christopher B. Steiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 231.

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figure 9.6 Banyan and waistcoat tailored from a Chinese dragon robe, made in Italy, 1800–10.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, T77.1, 2–2009

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248 Cheang
figure 9.7
Liberty evening cape made from a Chinese skirt, from Liberty & Co.,
“Liberty” Yule-Tide Gifts (London: Liberty, 1898), 56
and Western fashion involving multiple material translations. From the 1910s,
Euro-American portraits and paintings began to show women in public spaces
in Chinese robes worn as loose evening coats over dresses, while from the 1920s
there is photographic evidence that Chinese robes began to be worn outside
the home as fashion items with little or no adaption.26 However, before 1910,
it is safe to say that, unless worn as fancy dress, Chinese robes were not con-
sidered wearable as they were. For example, in 1894 Liberty & Co. advertised
“Mandarin vestments” that had been “adapted for furniture purposes,” and it
was not unusual for department stores to sell pieces of Chinese embroidery
mounted under glass in tea trays and fire screens.27
In 1898 Liberty offered evening capes made from “mandarin robes,” although
these were in fact made from Han Chinese women’s skirts (figure 9.7).28 A
dynamic metamorphosis was occurring in the latter case, involving physical
transformations in fabric and location: a movement on the body from legs to
torso in which the waist of the skirt was gathered in to fit the neck; a collar was
also added. In a double translation from Chinese woman to British woman via
an imaginary Chinese mandarin, the Chinese woman who might once have
been the owner of the skirt was erased in favor of the cultural overtones that
could be achieved by referencing the exotic male authority of a Chinese court-
26 Sarah Cheang, “Selling China: Class, Gender and Orientalism,” Journal of Design History
20, no. 1 (2007): 7–9.
27 Liberty & Co., Descriptive Details of the Collection of Ancient and Modern, Eastern and
Western Art Embroideries, Exhibited by Messrs. Liberty, April, 1894 (London: Liberty, 1894),
23; Debenham and Freebody, Chinese Embroideries: A Unique Collection of Rare Mandarin
or Court Robes, Sleeves, Etc., Worn by the Manchu Aristocracy During Empire Period, Lama
Robes Worn by Tibetan Abbots in Ceremonial Observances, Etc., Etc., Collected in Western
China (London: Debenham, 1915), 19.
28 Liberty & Co., “Liberty” Yule-Tide Gifts (London: Liberty, 1898), 56.

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appointed mandarin and his notional display of rank through luxurious and
highly decorated dress. In the same catalog of Yuletide gifts, a page catego-
rized as “eastern embroideries” shows a Japanese kimono for tea gowns and
fancy dress, blotting books surmounted by Chinese rank badges, a cushion
made from Chinese sleeve bands, and a “Chinese mandarin’s robe” in “the
original shape … suitable for fancy dress” or “in smaller adapted sizes for Tea-
gowns and evening wear.” The kimono was presented on the body and worn
by non-Japanese women who both mimicked Japaneseness and naturalized
Japanese dress into the British wardrobe. By contrast, the Chinese robe was
shown unworn, preserving a hollow body space for both a prospective wearer
and an absent imagined mandarin—and for the possibility that the robe could
be cut up or reshaped. In a very real sense, Chinese robes in Western fashion
are material metaphors for cut-up cultures that frequently defy description.
3 A European Chinese Japanese Gown—Categories and Confusions
Museum online catalog description, April 2014:
Materials and techniques: Brocaded satin, cotton-wool29
Notes from physical examination of object in storage, April 17, 2014:

Cotton-wool padding=England?
The term “robe” enjoys a useful ambivalence within this chapter, as it describes
a Western dressing gown with claims to imperial Chinese ancestry. Garments
such as the V&A robe, physically adapted from one cultural context to suit
another, often resist a straightforward narrative of design, use, and nomencla-
ture. Such objects cannot be straightforwardly positioned within taxonomic
systems of geography and chronology, not to mention the culturally specific
social structures of gender in cases where clothing shapes and motifs created
for men are worn within a new cultural context by women. As with period
rooms, dress presents something of an issue for museums when, in addition
to repairs, alterations have been made to them to keep up with changing fash-
ions as well as changing bodies and changing owners.30 And such alterations
29 “Robe,” V&A Search the Collections.

30 To take just two of the myriad of good examples in the museum stores: a French women’s
robe and petticoat, probably made as a sack-back in the late eighteenth century, and
subsequently converted to a robe à la Piedmontèse, with evidence of two speculative

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250 Cheang
appened not only in the cross-cultural context. In the mid-nineteenth century,

h
the Chinese court itself created contemporary garments from eighteenth-
century Qianlong-style embroidered yardage held in its stores.31 Clearly, the
material flexibility of cloth objects does not lend itself to the ordering of col-
lections, where meaningful arrangements of things are made in physical space
via the display case and in abstract space via classification systems that enable
the archive to be used, managed, and narrated.32 While European gowns made
from Chinese silk are usually categorized as European fashion, it could be
proposed that our garment’s positioning within the Chinese collections has
contributed to a history of catalog descriptions that curiously make no men-
tion of the robe’s sack-back construction; it is made to vanish.
Postcolonial and postmodern studies have drawn attention to mutability
and a dynamic of both agency and erasure for the culturally hybrid. Interstitial
fluidity in material culture, in literature, in art, and even in sexual relations—
and related lacunae in the historical record—have been championed by
feminist and subaltern studies as a cultural location for the marginalized and
oppressed to speak back. From the physical and linguistic dismantling of Bibles
in India, to the visual and metaphorical translations of global icons such as
Hokusai’s The Great Wave, hybrid things play an important role as a multidirec-
tional means of cultural transmission.33 The exploration of concepts such as
transculturation, creolization, and the cosmopolitan have enabled recognition
and celebration of the “problem” of the hybrid by providing a means of speak-
ing about our globally intertwined world.34 This is a discussion that needs to
go beyond the West and its Others, engaging both center and periphery as sites
of transformation and hybridization and attending to the power structures
moments of transformation in the nineteenth century before acquisition and in the

twentieth century for museum display (V&A T.725–1913); and an English mid-eighteenth-
century sack-back altered for fancy dress in the late nineteenth century (V&A T.120–1972).
31 See, for example, an empress’s festive robe, Palace Museum, Beijing, GU43496. Ming Wil-
son, ed., Imperial Chinese Robes from the Forbidden City (London: V&A Publications, 2010),
46–47.
32 Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations 4, no. 1 (1988): 73–102; Thom-
as Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso,
1993).
33 Homi Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” Critical Enquiry (1985), reprinted in Locations
of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 93–101; Christine M. E. Guth, Hokusai’s Great Wave:
Biography of a Global Icon (Honolulu: Hawai‘i Press, 2015).
34 Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Durham: Duke University Press,
1995); Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Rout-
ledge, 1996).

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between and within societies.35 Here, material evidence can provide a key to
territories beyond the dominant narratives within which objects are framed.
By disengaging from China, and even chinoiserie, in favor of broader and more
rhizomic Euro-American and East Asian interactions and allowing the inter-
stitial and hybrid to remain unfixed and unstable, a fuller exploration may be
achieved of the development and transmission of styles in chinoiserie fashion.
A further strand of thinking relevant here is the concept of “working
through” and psychological erasure for the historian. Writing on historiog-
raphy and immense personal and public trauma such as the Holocaust, Saul
Friedländer has argued forcefully for the impossibility of a fully knowable
historical moment until its essential absences have also been grasped and—
crucially—allowed to remain. Where there is emotional and intellectual
conflict, certain silences occur that become part of the historical record as it is
laid down and as it is worked on. To “work through” these necessary absences
“entails, for the historian, the imperative of rendering as truthful an account
as documents and testimonials will allow, without giving in to the tempta-
tion of closure. Closure in this case would represent an obvious avoidance of
what remains indeterminate, elusive and opaque.”36 The psychological dis-
avowal and erasure of cultural elements that threaten to undermine a sense
of white male well-being, both personal and public, within Western imperial
contexts has been noted by Anne McClintock as a locus of gender and race
power relations.37 While an emphasis on the transnational certainly risks los-
ing the analytical thrust of imperial narratives in favor of a more distributed,
hybrid, and lateral set of relations, it is precisely through paying attention to
the indeterminate as an empty space within the historical record produced
by colonialism—a blank area filled with intention—that a fuller history can
be realized.
It has been useful thus far to place our garment within a history of Sino-
Western relations and European adaptations of non-European garments.
Yet our Chinese robe also has many features in common with the women’s
quilted silk dressing gowns embroidered with Japanese motifs that were made
in Japan specifically for European and American markets during the 1870s
35 Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagina-
tion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 221; Sarah Teasley, Giorgio Riello, and Glenn
Adamson, “Introduction: Towards Global Design History,” in Global Design History, eds.
Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello, and Sarah Teasley (London: Routledge, 2011), 1–10.
36 Saul Friedländer, “Trauma, Transference and ‘Working Through’ in Writing the History of
the ‘Shoah,’ ” History and Memory 4, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1992): 52.
37 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest
(New York: Routledge, 1995).

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252 Cheang
and 1880s. Meiji economic policy encouraged the production of Japanese silk
products that were more profitable than raw silk exports. When Yokohama
silk merchant Shiino Shobey was sent to the Vienna exhibition of 1873 in pur-
suit of possible markets, he is said to have conceived of a silk dressing gown
that followed European fashion in terms of cut but used Japanese materials
and Japanese bird and flower motifs, carefully modified in color and design to
match Western tastes.38 These garments occupied a middle ground in price,
fashion, and daring between everyday Western clothing and the kimono of
European artistic, bohemian, and theatrical life, and they offered a way to
engage with japonisme as fashion rather than as aesthetic statement. This lat-
ter distinction is underlined in the appearance of Yokohama dressing gowns
in a separate space from kimonos in the catalogs of Liberty & Co., at a time
when fashion—commercial, feminine, ephemeral, modern, and bourgeois—
sat awkwardly with the artistic elitism of the Liberty brand.39
The Yokohama robes of the late 1870s onwards exploited Japanese manufac-
turing and mercantile capacities to produce quilted silk dressing gowns figured
with oriental embroidery. The full length, sleeve shape, turned-over collars, and
tasseled cord belts correspond exactly with our V&A robe. The use of silk with
Japanese embroidery indicates a similar aesthetic field and creates a relation to
the earlier banyan that ties this late Victorian dressing gown to an established
European tradition for loose and comfortable private robes with pan-Asian
associations (figure 9.8). At the same time, the Yokohama robes were clearly
constructed with an eye to fashion and modernity in their use of the latest
color trend, Perkins Purple (a strong color resulting from new chemical dyes),
and the addition of extra features at the back, such as bustle-like overskirts.40
The sack-back pleating, however, is a feature of the V&A robe that sets it apart
38 Akiko Fukai, Japonisme in Fashion Tokyo (Kyoto: Kyoto Costume Institute, 1996), 19–20.
On the manufacturing of kimonos to Western tastes, see Akiko Savas, “Dilute to Taste:
Kimonos for the British Market at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” International
Journal of Fashion Studies 4, no. 2 (2017): 157–82.
39 In 1884, when a costume department was opened, there were concerns that Liberty’s ar-
tistic status would be compromised. The costume department therefore carefully stayed
away from the vagaries of fashion and placed emphasis on the artistic and the historic.
In the early 1900s, when Aesthetic dress was not so popular, a “novelties of the season”
section was created that kept more fashionable Edwardian clothes in the sidelines. Alison
Adburgham, Liberty’s: A Biography of a Shop (London: Allen, 1975), 51, 87–88; Geoffrey
Squire, “E. W. Godwin and the House of Liberty,” Costume 34 (2000): 81–99.
40 See for example, “Yokohama” dressing gowns: ca. 1880, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
1970.83a, b; Shiino Shobey Silk Store dressing gown ca. 1875, Kyoto Costume Institute,
2013-23-0001AB and 2009.300.125a, b.

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figure 9.8 Dressing gowns, made in Japan, ca. 1880. The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, Gift of Katherine Babcock Cavalli, 1970.83a, b
from Chinese robes, banyans, and the Yokohama dressing gowns but ties it to a
related category of clothing—the tea gown.
Chiefly from the 1870s until the 1910s, tea gowns were worn in the boudoir,
initially in the late afternoon, when receiving guests. As men could be pres-
ent, the tea gown offered a compromise between respectable daytime dress
codes and the definite state of undress that a dressing gown implies. By the

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254 Cheang
later 1880s they had developed into highly fanciful styles, as hosting in one’s
personal space had encouraged an investment in artistic individuality through
archaism and the exotic.41 Like the dressing gown and the banyan, tea gowns
were sometimes made from non-Western textiles—for example, recycled
Indian shawl cloth as Kashmir shawls fell out of mainstream Western fashion,
using interiority (both psychological and physical) and exotic and luxurious
materials to bridge the gap between everyday Western settings and fancy dress
(figure 9.9).
The four box pleats at the center-back of the V&A robe and the use of two
gored panels to produce a fuller skirt created space for a wider silhouette and
additional volume at the back, at a time when the fashionable shape had
shifted from bell-shaped crinoline to rear-projecting bustle. As bustles were
at their maximum size in the 1880s, this feels like a practical adaptation to the
otherwise banyan-shaped dressing gown. Sack-back-style pleating (fixed at
the nape and waist, integrated with the skirt pleating, or entirely separated
from the bodice, waist, and skirt so that it hung loose from the nape like a
train) also became a regular feature of the tea gown, in which references to
both medieval and eighteenth-century dress were common.
The Yokohama merchants also created explicitly hybrid silk gowns for this
market that combined the voluminous shoulders of late Victorian gigot (leg-of-
mutton) sleeves with a sack back, long, pointed medieval sleeve ends, Japanese
embroidery, and an incorporated panel that gives the effect of a chiffon crepe
under-dress complete with smocking (figure 9.10 and 9.11). Other typical exam-
ples of the 1890s had a less medieval look but used a fuller gigot sleeve and
placed more emphasis on the front and back of the garment as a surface for
large and dramatic embroidery motifs.42 These Yokohama tea gowns contin-
ued to be produced in close association with Western firms such as Liberty and
completed a fin-de-siècle feedback loop between Japanese and art nouveau
design. While complex layering effects produced a more “floaty” indoor effect,
hidden quilted linings for warmth and boning in the bodice suggests that some
of the Yokohama robes might have been intended to be worn without corsets,
an intermediary level of comfort between dress and undress during that inter-
mediary period between afternoon tea and evening dinner.
Thus, it would appear that the V&A robe sits comfortably alongside later
nineteenth century “artistic” tea gowns and Yokohama dressing gowns, its satin
brocade tailored into a robe to be worn at home in Europe in the context of
41 Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 189–91, 200–01.
42 Tea gown, 1898–1901, Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 2009.300.558; Dressing gown, 1893–97, Kyoto Costume Institute, 2001-07-0002-AB.

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figure 9.9 Tea gown, made in United States, ca. 1891. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York, Purchase, Irene Lewisohn and Alice L. Crowley Bequests, 1985 (1985.39.3)
Japanese-made Western garments and Western-made Chinese garments. The

V&A robe is, it should be noted, padded with a layer of cotton wool, where a
gown made in China or Japan might be expected to use a stuffing of unspun
silk wadding, guarding mixed origins within its own layers.
While the evidence of most dress collections points towards a date of 1880s
to 1905 for tea gowns with sack-back constructions, the acquisition of the robe

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256 Cheang
figure 9.10
Tea gown (back), made in Japan, ca. 1890. Gallery of
Costume, Platt Hall, Manchester Art Gallery, 2013.36
figure 9.11
Tea gown (front), made in Japan, ca. 1890. Gallery of
Costume, Platt Hall, Manchester Art Gallery, 2013.36
by the V&A in 1881 give us a definite date before which the garment must have
been created and points towards our robe as inhabiting a moment of cross-
over—a “missing link” with all the attendant conceptual problems—between
1870s quilted dressing gowns and the more fanciful tea gowns that followed. It
would, however, be a mistake to say that our robe anticipates the next move
of the Yokohama merchants; rather, it signals the pitfalls of assigning defini-
tive dates and places to fashionable styles where so many business interests,
mediating images, and sewing hands are involved. The temporal aspects of fash-
ionable style change further confound a fixed reference point for chinoiserie.
Fashion’s frequent reliance on innovation through historicism has prompted
metaphors such as the labyrinth, the telescope, and the leap to comprehend
the doubling back and past/present collisions that occur when newness is her-
alded by historical return.43 When the recycling of past styles was mingled with
43 Evans, Fashion at the Edge, 7–63.

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East Asian materials and motifs, these leaps into the past and the relevance of
the historical imaginary to self-conscious acts of modernity were interlinked
with Western perceptions of Asia as stagnant, unchanging, and temporally
“behind.” Fashion’s crumpling and twisting effect on time and space created
a socially sanctioned place of in-between where the transnational resided in
plain sight and yet somehow out of mind.
Out of this third space, a third garment—the Chinese coat—emerges,
about which there is no agreement on function and for which an absolute date
is problematic. In 1903, the British journal Ladies’ Field showed a suggested gar-
ment for women to make at home (figure 9.12). The design was called Chinese
Dressing Jacket and featured short kimono sleeves extended by lacy under-
sleeves that gathered at the wrist to preserve modesty, making this a British
home-sewing equivalent of the Yokohama tea gown brought together under
the title of “China” rather than “Japan.” The text that accompanied the image
explained that a Chinese coat was as good as a Japanese kimono for comfort
but much harder to obtain; their simple construction, however, was said to be
easy for readers to duplicate themselves.
Around 1903, many kinds of overgarments with roomy armholes and capa-
cious sleeves were being dubbed Chinese (figure 9.13). The term “Chinese coat”
began to be applied to a range of clothing worn outside the home, such as light
evening coats, theater coats, opera coats, and dressing and tea gowns, regard-
less of their place of origin and materials. An overall Chinese look in terms
of cut was sometimes all that sufficed. Mei Mei Rado has noted that some of
these robes have been cataloged as theater coats but that their thin materi-
als and pale colors makes it more likely that they were worn as tea gowns.44
Certainly, no visual evidence has yet been found to suggest that these Chinese
coats were worn in public outside the home before the 1910s as fashion (as
opposed to fancy dress). It is also the case, however, that more fitted versions
of the tea gown could be worn outside as a coat by the 1890s, and a range of
outdoor jackets, wraps, and mantles with “Chinese” sleeves and motifs were
in use from around 1900. Thus, is seems likely that the term “Chinese coat” in
fact covers a range of garments from delicate silken dressing jackets to ornate
evening coats. These should be envisaged in a continuum, with some garments
allowed to remain very ambiguously positioned between the personal and the
public, wherein may well have lain their exotic attraction and their modernity.
The presence of Japanese dealers at crucial sites for the development of
European modern art and design, such as late nineteenth-century Paris, and
those dealers’ willingness to supply anything for the Chinese trend, from tomb
44 Rado, “The Hybrid Orient,” 14.

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258 Cheang
figure 9.12 “Chinese” dressing jacket, from Beryl, “Wrinkles: Concerning Chinese Coats,”
Ladies’ Field (November 14, 1903): 390

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figure 9.13 “Chinese” evening wrap, from “Evening Wraps

that Can be Made at Home,” Ladies’ Field (April
18, 1903): 243

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260 Cheang
wares to Pekingese dogs, meant that Japanese conduits for Chinese things were
already well established. This, coupled with the now well-established capacity
of Japanese manufacturers to supply silk embroidered goods carefully attuned
to Western markets, saw the Japanese store of Takashimaya creating and sell-
ing Japanese-made Chinese coats from ca. 1909 to 1916; these appeared in their
export catalogs from at least 1911 (figures 9.14 and 9.15).45
These coats were not exact copies of Chinese robes; they were designed
to respond to that extra-dialogic area for East Asian forms of clothing in the
West that made direct reference to Chinese robes with their capacious sleeves,
embroidery, and frog fastenings. Examples of the Japanese Chinese coats at
the Kyoto Costume Institute include touches of “authenticity” in their use of
Chinese metal buttons, while a cream-on-cream color palette was designed
to appeal to Edwardian tastes.46 As Paris designers and amateur dressmak-
ers alike were making European clothing that incorporated a Chinese look,
Japanese firms were now creating something that sat between European chi-
noiserie and the Chinese originals, both symbolically and materially. The seam
placement reveals the use of kimono cloth widths. The embroidered edges are
an abstraction that gives the effect of the border trimming of Chinese robes
without attempting to copy them precisely, and the embroidery is Japanese in
aesthetic and technique.47
This was clearly yet another moment of material instability in fashion
between the Japanese, the Chinese and the European, raising important meth-
odological questions for scholars of fashion. First, a quantitative analysis of
transnational trends is hard to conduct where cultural classifications are so
porous. For example, Hae Jeon Kim and Marilyn R. Delong have argued that
of the Chinese, Japanese and Sino-Japanese garments shown in European and
American fashion journals from 1900 onwards, Japanese fashions outweighed
Chinese fashions until around 1915, when Chinese styles began to predominate.48
The sophistication of the criteria that were used to classify garments as either
Chinese or Japanese is, however, a crucial issue in assessing the validity of these
findings, pointing toward the need for both methodological transparency and
an acute awareness of how Western fashion practices involved a fluidity of
45 Rado, “The Hybrid Orient,” 4–15; Fukai, Japonism in Fashion, 98–99.
46 Evening coat (theater coat), Kyoto Costume Institute, 1994–00; Evening coat (theater
coat), Kyoto Costume Institute, 1980-26-0007.
47 Rado, “The Hybrid Orient,” 3–4.
48 Hae Jeon Kim and Marilyn R. Delong, “Sino-Japanism in Western Women’s Fashionable
Dress in Harper’s Bazaar, 1890–1927,” Clothing and Textile Research Journal 11, no. 1 (1992):
24–30.

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figure 9.14 “Chinese” evening coat (back), made in Japan, 1900–10. Royal Albert Memorial
Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter City Council, 132/1969

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262 Cheang
figure 9.15 Detail of front of robe in figure 9.13

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materials, methods, and motifs and a multilayered mediation of Chinese styles

by both Japanese business and European fashion practices.
Second, the application of the words “Chinese” or “Japanese” to garments
worn in the West was not made at random; it had purpose, distinguishing two
very separate cultures that may have had overlapping characteristics in their
clothing (such as loose sleeves, large armholes, looseness around the body, lav-
ish decoration, and the use of silks) but which were understood to be coming
from two very different societies. While the mixing of Chinese and Japanese
ceramics, textiles, lacquer, and furniture did occur regularly within European
evocations of China or Japan as joint storehouses of the quaint and the deco-
rative, the difference between China and Japan as nations was never in doubt.
British political, military, and missionary engagements with late Qing China
spanned the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion, and the Boxer Uprising,
ensuring a high public awareness of China as a kingdom of emperors and man-
darins whose imperial splendor now spilled out across the globe in a story of
decline and extinction. Meiji Japan, on the other hand, was asserting its power
and identity as a modern state through selective westernization, imperial
ambitions over Korea, and war with Russia with an Anglo-Japanese alliance.
The apprehension of transnational garments as both and neither Japanese/
Chinese, regardless of their actual appearance or origin, was part and parcel of
the fluidity of field of fashion rather than any lack of interest in the differences
between the two.
It is an understanding of this fluidity, and a willingness to defer closure
by resisting any single categorization, that leads to a more satisfactory and
usable approach to the contradictions of chinoiserie garments. For example,
although the Takashimaya Chinese coats were not Chinese, they were not
fakes either; they were a fashion version of the Chinese robe, just as the V&A
robe constructed from dragon robe yardage was not a fake dragon robe and the
Yokohama dressing gowns were not fake Euro-American dressing gowns. And
just as the V&A robe invites a reading of British imperialism through narratives
of mid-Victorian conquest in China, so the Takashimaya coats can be inter-
preted as an expression of Japanese modernity and dominance in Asia through
the ability to “incorporate China and represent the Orient” in the context of
Japanese nationalism and imperialism.49 Nevertheless, the key component
here is the way that Japan, Britain, and China and were utterly interarticulated.
Dress plays a primary role in cultural differentiation, and fashion sells dis-
tinct racial identities as exotic newness, yet the materials and the trading and
production networks of fashion are frequently intensely transnational. In
49 Rado, “The Hybrid Orient,” 26.

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264 Cheang
the case of the Chinese coat, British women were engaging with European
Chineseness through Japanese spectacles. In the case of the V&A European-
Chinese-Japanese robe, the Chineseness of the fabric may have been almost
accidental, a Chinese textile that happened to share similar dimensions, mate-
rials, and lavishness with the Japanese-made European dressing gowns and tea
gowns. However, as Japanese interpretations of Western fashion, Yokohama
robes were neither template nor copy.
In this complex process of cultural assimilation and material translation,
many challenges are posed to any historian or museum curator whose job
is to identify and categorize according to nations and regions. Certain signs
become important, almost talismanic, in the taxonomic game. A label sewn
into a garment, such as “Liberty” or “Takashimaya,” or a note on acquisition
accompanying the object is fetishized as the decisive factor in geographically
and culturally pinning down an object that might more usefully be thought of
as always in motion. A story about the Summer Palace may propel an object
towards “China” when, within fashion cultures, its primary identification may
lie elsewhere.
How can we best hold both chinoiserie and japonisme in the mind simul-
taneously when dealing with such clothing cultures? Examining the V&A’s
“robe-unknown” should prompt a reassessment of the meaning of “Chinese
robe” and the goods that appeared under that title in catalogs of both Liberty
and Takashimaya. Dualities and contradictions need to be laid out side by side
rather than obscured by aesthetic and knowledge systems or resolved in order
to reach a definite conclusion. In this regard, a closer attention to materials,
trading networks, and the cultural dynamics of fashion and the transnational
as between styles, periods, and geographies becomes an intervention into
the writing of histories of chinoiserie, the better to understand the continual
movement and layering of cultures that occurred within late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century chinoiserie fashions.
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chapter 10
From Shanghai to Brussels: the Tushanwan

Orphanage Workshops and the Carved Ornaments
of the Chinese Pavilion at Laeken Park
William Ma
Slightly elevated above its verdant, forested setting, a large structure with
delicate upturned eaves and glittering gilded ornament breaks the monotony
of the often overcast sky in the northern suburbs of Brussels. Known as the
Chinese Pavilion (figure 10.1), it is located in the royal park of Laeken and is
part of a group of buildings in Chinese and Japanese styles that include, in
addition to the Chinese Pavilion, an octagonal Chinese “musical” gazebo and,
across a busy thoroughfare, the Avenue van Praet, a Japanese pagoda.
The buildings were commissioned in the first decade of the twentieth cen-
tury by King Leopold II of Belgium (1835–1909), who did not live to see their
completion. Not only were they an expression of Leopold’s expansionist ambi-
tion in East Asia, they were a standing testament to the diversity of East Asian
styles that coexisted in Western Europe in the nineteenth and early twenti-
eth century, partly a result of the various European colonial presences in Asia.
Indeed, with varying degrees of separation from their original sources, styles in
the Laeken buildings overlapped and became difficult to distinguish from one
another. For example, on the Chinese Pavilion, one could point out or at least
give names to japonisme, rococo revival, chinoiserie, art nouveau, and tradi-
tional Chinese architecture from Jiangnan; yet to simply refer to the building
as a constructed fantasy—an “Oriental Dream,” as one contemporary scholar
has called it—is an oversimplification that brushes over the subtle differences
that existed between the styles and the rhetoric they carried.1
The complexity of the ornamental program only allows me to focus on the
most extensive and most visible aspect of the Chinese Pavilion: the carved
and gilded wooden panels that cover much of the exterior of the building.
Designed and carved at a French Jesuit Orphanage workshop in Shanghai
1 For example, in the title of the only book devoted to the building, Chantal Kozyreff, The
Oriental Dream: Leopold II’s Japanese Tower and Chinese Pavilion at Laeken (Antwerp: Merca-
torfonds, 2001).

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From Shanghai to Brussels 269
figure 10.1 Postcard (with a stamp dated to 1911) showing the Chinese Pavilion and the
octagonal kiosk. Author’s collection
named Tushanwan (T’ou-sè-wè),2 most of the external woodwork—the dragon

columns, the large golden dragon medallions, the balustrades, the decora-
tive friezes, and the entirety of the octagonal gazebo in front of the Chinese
Pavilion—were direct manifestations of the transmission of Chinese aesthetic
ideas to Belgium during the first decade of the twentieth century.
For much of the nineteenth century, the removal of Chinese objects to
the West had been orchestrated, sometimes forcefully, by representatives of
Western imperial powers such as France and Great Britain. No doubt the most
notorious episodes in this process were the retaliatory lootings in the after-
math of military operations such as the Second Opium War (1856–60) and the
Boxer Uprising (1899–1901).3 By the early twentieth century, the marks of vio-
lence found on these Chinese objects were part of their allure. They are—as
the art historian Gregory Levine puts it in his discussion of the contemporane-
ous practice of another radical transference of East Asian art objects (Buddha
heads) to France during the same time period—forcibly “driven into the
2 “Tushanwan” is the standard pinyin transliteration in Mandarin, and “T’ou-sè-wè” is the

French transliteration of the same name in Shanghainese. Directly translated as “the Bay of
Dirt Mount,” it refers to its origin as a mount of river mud from the dredging of nearby creeks.
3 For more on the looting of Chinese artworks and their transport to Europe, see James L. Hevia,
English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2003).

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270 Ma
domain of the western visual and aesthetic tradition.”4 Since aesthetic prefer-
ence for “broken bodies” formed the basis of much of European art history and
Western museum collections—Egyptian monuments, Greek and Roman stat-
ues, or Cubism, for example—the fragmentedness of East Asian antiquities,
argues Levine, was part of their appeal to Euro-American viewers during the
late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.5 The West’s obsession with the
collecting and exhibiting of fragments could be extended to the general impe-
rialist attitude they had for China as a broken system and a decaying nation
that, when it had been whole in the past, had been magnificent.
The Chinese Pavilion (and similar projects) could be seen as an attempt by
the Tushanwan workshop and the Jesuits in China to reconstitute the whole
once again by remaking and piecing together the architectural and vernacular
past of China both literally and metaphorically. In this chapter, I will follow
the development of the external facade of the Chinese Pavilion, first as derived
from vernacular architectural decorative elements commonly found in the
Lower Yangtze region; then as part of a large study on Chinese superstition
printed at the Tushanwan printing workshop; and finally to their integration
and use as authentic Chinese elements on the facade for King Leopold II’s
Chinese Pavilion outside of Brussels. In each of the steps, I give voice to the
different parties involved in this transnational project and note the political,
religious, and economic rhetoric associated with the use of the various East
Asian ornamental styles at a particular place and moment in time.
1 Tushanwan Carving Workshop
The importance of the exterior facade of the Chinese Pavilion is demonstrated

by its primary position on the original work order list for this particular project
found in the Archives of the Royal Palace in Brussels.6 Since its completion, the
Chinese Pavilion has come to be known by its external architectural features:
the gilded ornaments and upturning eaves, traits readily reproducible in the
4 Gregory Levine, “Malraux’s Buddha Heads,” in Blackwell Companion to Asian Art, eds. Debo-
rah Hutton and Rebecca Brown (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), 644.
5 But it is possible that this perception might have originated much earlier. For example, the
famed eighteenth-century English architect William Chambers (1723–1796) suggests that
ruin and decay are themes common in Chinese garden design in his Dissertation on Oriental
Gardening (1772). For a recent discussion, see Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Ab-
sence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 17.
6 The list was found in the Archives of the Royal Palace, reproduced in Kozyreff, Oriental
Dream, 115.

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color-tinted photographs and postcards of the time (figure 10.1). Though

Tushanwan was not explicitly acknowledged on the work order list, its role as
the source and manufacturer of the external facades is critical to the under-
standing of the overall ornamental program.
One of the most important consequences of European imperialist incur-
sions into Qing China during the nineteenth century was the revival of the
Catholic missions. Led by Jesuit missionaries, Catholicism was first introduced
to China on a small scale during the late sixteenth century by pioneering fig-
ures such as Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). His primary base of operations was the
tiny peninsula of Macao, which was leased to the Portuguese, on whose ships
the Jesuit missionaries traveled to Asia. A painting academy, first established
in Japan in 1583 under the direction of Giovanni Niccolò (1563–1626), was relo-
cated to Macao after the Tokugawa expulsion and persecution during the first
decades of the seventeenth century.7 The output of the academy was mainly
religious works in the European Baroque mode, serving the small Catholic
community in Asia and beyond. This was the predecessor to the Jesuit work-
shops at Tushanwan.
After a brief period of missionary success at the end of the Ming dynasty,
the Jesuit missionary presence in China gradually diminished during the early
Qing dynasty due to enemies in China and back home at the Vatican; the latter
eventually succeeded in the suppression of the order in 1781.8 But after the res-
toration of the Society of Jesus in 1814, missionary activity in China resumed.
The signing of the Treaty of Whampoa (Huangpu) in 1844 between Qing China
and France following the aftermath of the First Opium War (1839–42) stipu-
lated the legalization of proselytization of Christianity in China, thus allowing
for a new wave of Jesuit missionaries to return.
One of the missions that came to China on the heel of the treaty was led by
the French Jesuit Claude Gotteland (1803–1856) at the invitation of Christians
of Jiangnan, the region surrounding Shanghai. The group eventually settled on
land donated by the family of the prominent Ming-dynasty Catholic convert
and statesman Xu Guangqi (1562–1633) in a locality of Shanghai called Xujiahui
(“property of the Xu clan at the junction of two rivers”).9 Unlike Jesuit missions
in China in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, the new generation
of missionaries targeted ordinary Chinese people in the countryside and the
7 Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (To-
ronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 65–81.
8 Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions, 82–111.
9 Xujiahui is also known as Zikawei, the French transcription of Shanghainese pronunciation
of the place.

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272 Ma
cities instead of the literati elites and members of the imperial court. This
included many refugees and parentless children who had moved to the relative
safety of Shanghai in the 1850s and 1860s to escape famines, natural disasters,
and warfare in the Jiangnan region.
Under the influence of his friend Charles-Auguste-Marie-Joseph de Forbin-
Janson, Bishop of Nancy, who had founded the Holy Childhood Association
(L’Oeuvre de la Sainte Enfance) in 1843, Gotteland and other missionaries at
Xujiahui envisioned a religious and charitable community that would eventu-
ally come to include an orphanage.10 Their vision was realized in 1864 with the
founding of an orphanage at Tushanwan, which consolidated several nearby
hospices for abandoned children. The funding mainly came from two sources:
the Holy Childhood Association and the Society for the Propagation of the
Faith (Propagation de la Foi), both founded in France decades earlier with
the goal of financially supporting the Catholic missions.
Of the two organizations, the Holy Childhood Association was created with
the explicit purpose of saving unbaptized children in China.11 It represented
a traditional model of missionary work in the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury (as demonstrated recently by historians such as Henrietta Harrison and
Michelle King), in which Catholic missionaries concentrated their efforts only
on saving the souls of unbaptized Chinese children without helping them
physically; hundreds of sick and dying children were collected and baptized,
with or without their or their parents’ consent.12
Catholic communities like Xujiahui and associated charitable organizations
like Tushanwan slowly moved away from the previous model of salvation to
include ways to ensure the future survival and livelihood of the orphans. These
new missionary communities created schools, workshops, and employment,
and at Xujiahui the community even matched young orphaned men and
women and provided the new couples with residences. The curriculum
and pedagogy of the missionary schools was European, but the content was a
combination of Chinese and European material.13 The goal was to mold these
10 Joseph de La Servière, Histoire de la Mission du Kiangnan. Jésuites de la province de France

(Paris) 1840–1899, vol. 1 (Zi-ka-wei, pres Chang-hai: Impr. de l’Orphélinat de Tóu-sè-wè), 59.
11 Several recent works have been published on the Holy Childhood Association. See chap. 5
in Michelle T. King, Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century
China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); Henrietta Harrison, “A Penny for the
Little Chinese: The French Holy Childhood Association in China, 1843–1951,” American
Historical Review 113, no. 1 (2008): 72–92; and D. E. Mungello, Drowning Girls in China: Fe-
male Infanticide in China since 1650 (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2008).
12 Harrison, “A Penny for the Little Chinese,” 76 and 81.
13 Zhang Wei 張偉 and Zhang Xiaoyi 張曉依, Tushanwan: zhongguo jindai wenming de
yaolan 土山灣：中國近代文明的搖籃 [Tushanwan: The cradle to contemporary civi-
lization in China] (Taipei: Xiuwei zixun keji, 2012), 123.

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Chinese boys into new modern Christian men, fully adapted to live in the
hybridized and semi-colonial, modern city of Shanghai.
At the Tushanwan orphanage, orphaned boys and girls under the age of
seven were taken to the Holy Mother Courtyard (Shengmu yuan) to be nursed
by nuns and local Christian women. Between the ages of seven and ten, the
boys were taken out of the Holy Mother Courtyard and placed in a curriculum
that taught them the catechism and to read and to write in Chinese and in
European languages.14 Between ten to twelve years of age, they were assigned
to one of the several Tushanwan workshops that prepared the boys for their
entry into adulthood in a rapidly modernizing urban center like Shanghai by
teaching them vocational skills such as woodcarving, printing, painting, metal
casting, shoemaking, and stained glass making. Each workshop was supervised
by a European Jesuit father assisted by native Chinese helpers, who were often
graduates of the workshops. The labor of the apprentices was compensated
by the sales of the objects and by subsidies from Catholic charities such as the
Holy Childhood Association.
The woodcarving workshop, which is the subject of this chapter, was divided
into different types of specialized work like carving small details or joining large
parts together. Training was done mostly by copying, often directly replicating
as accurately as possible a carved model placed before a young art worker (fig-
ure 10.2). When the commission from King Leopold II arrived only a few years
into the new century, the workshop was under the direction of the German
Jesuit Aloysius Beck (1854–1931). Born in Bavaria in 1854, he was thirty-eight
years old when he came to China as a Jesuit missionary in 1892.15 Having stud-
ied with the animal and battle painter Abraham Cooper at the Royal Academy
in London, he brought with him the vigor of his academic painting training
and the aesthetic appreciations from his native Munich, a region historically
known for woodcarving. With this background, he succeeded in substantially
expanding the operation of the woodcarving workshop within a few years.16 In
addition to making retables, altars, and other religious objects, the workshop
14 The girls stayed until around the age of thirteen, after which they could enter a workshop
that taught them to sew and embroider. See Gao Bei 高蓓, “Tushanwan gueryuan meishu
gongchang yanjiu 土山灣孤兒院美術工場研究 [A study on the Tushanwan orphan-
age arts workshops]” (PhD diss., Zhongyang meishu xueyuan 中央美術學院 [Central
Academy of Fine Arts], 2009), 39.
15 Pius L. Moore, S. J., “Coadjutor Brothers on the Foreign Missions,” in The Woodstock Let-
ters: A Record of Current Events and Historical Notes Connected with the Colleges and Mis-
sions of the Society of Jesus 74 (1945): 111.
16 Adolphe Vasseur, S. J., Mélanges sur la Chine, par le P. Vasseur, vol. 1: Lettres illustrées sur
une école chinoise de Saint-Luc, auxiliaire de la Propagation de la foi (Paris: Société gé-
nérale de la librairie Catholique, 1884), 27; Obituary of Brother A. Beck, The North-China
Herald and Supreme Court & Consular Gazette, October 13, 1931.

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274 Ma
figure 10.2 A Tushanwan art worker carving a statue of a dog. Still from the documentary
film Ageless China (1947)
made European-style furniture, the surfaces of which were laden with Chinese
ornaments (figure 10.3).
2 Constructing Authentic Chinese Objects
Unlike the religious items produced at the woodcarving workshop, the secu-
lar products were decorated with Chinese ornaments to satiate European
consumers’ desire for exotic styles from East Asia. To compete with the Japa-
nese and to create their own market, the Tushanwan woodcarving workshop
focused on furniture with Chinese ornaments and participated in several inter-
national expositions at the turn of the century, including the 1900 Universal
Exposition in Paris and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in
San Francisco; in the latter, products from the woodcarving workshop filled
their own designated exhibition space in the Palace of Education.17
17 For more on the participation of the Tushanwan woodcarving workshop at the Panama-
Pacific International Exposition, see my article “The Tushanwan Pagoda Models,” in A

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figure 10.3 Brother Aloysius Beck and Chinese orphaned art workers posing with a
finished chest, ca. 1929
To promote Tushanwan products, Beck and his advocates emphasized the

empirical nature the woodcarving workshop’s works. Writing to Beck, the
San Francisco-based Jesuit Dennis Kavanagh (1877–1939), who organized a
Tushanwan exhibition, characterizes a collection of eighty-four pagoda mod-
els, made by Tushanwan for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, as
such:
You viewed the collection not merely from the standpoint of labor, and
of the material used, not even from the artistic point view, which made
them objects of exceptionally rare beauty; but your ideas were centered
on their scientific and historical qualities. They were little gems of mi-
croscopic carving and of attractive embellishments, but they were much
more. In the booklet written by me on the subject I endeavored to em-
phasize this scientific value of your collection …18
Collection of China’s Pagodas: 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, ed. Mee-Seen

Loong (New York: Mee-Seen Loong Fine Art LLC, 2011).
18 “Ten Months at the Exposition,” Dennis J. Kavanagh, S. J., to Aloysius Beck, S. J., China Mis-
sion Vertical File 1310, Zikawei Orphanage, “Ten Months at Exposition,” 1915, Box 29 T–Z,

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276 Ma
Stripped of their original context and simply transcribed by the orphaned

art workers, modern and uncontested value markers such as “scientific”
and “historical” were deployed to describe these woodcarvings made by the
Chinese art workers to give them a veneer of unadulterated objectivity.
Beck and Kavanagh were confident about the authentic Chinese styles
found in the woodcarvings of Tushanwan because they knew the art his-
torical origin. One source came from Beck’s collection of antique sculptures
and building fragments, which provided inspiration and models for the
creation of new works in wood. The antiques included examples of wood-
carvings that Beck had gathered around the Jiangnan region. Though the
originals were destroyed in a fire at the workshop in 1919, one can speculate that
they were traditional architectural parts and ornaments in wood from nearby
temples and mansions.19 In many ways, Beck was in the right place at the
right time to amass his collection of antique carvings. The same disasters that
created so many abandoned Chinese children—the famine and flooding of
1849–50, the back-and-forth, all-out conflicts between the Taiping rebels and
the Qing government in the early 1860s, and the general sense of instability
that permeated China throughout the second half of the nineteenth century—
had reduced many magnificent temples and splendid residences in Jiangnan
to ruin.20 As their former inhabitants relocated to other parts of China or to
urban centers like Shanghai, these structures were often disassembled by the
locals to be used as firewood or sold in pieces to the growing number of for-
eigners in the region as souvenirs.
Throughout the twentieth century, additional historical forces—the fall
of the Qing dynasty (1911), the Japanese invasion and occupation of Shanghai
(late 1930s and early 1940s), the campaign to smash the Four Olds dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), and general urban redevelopments
California Jesuit Archives, Santa Clara University, 34–35. This particular sentiment was
echoed in contemporary reports of the Tushanwan exhibition. For example, see Elizabeth
Young, “Mysterious Pagodas of the Chinese Begin to Take on Meaning in Scientists’ Eyes,”
San Francisco Chronicle, October 10, 1915.
19 On a cold winter night in December of 1919, two hungry orphans were cooking a stolen
chicken when they were startled by a Jesuit brother making the nightly inspection. In
their panic they accidently knocked over the lamp they were using for fuel, which re-
sulted in the destructive fire that consumed much of the woodcarving workshop and
Beck’s antique collection. See reports of the fire, “Xujiahui tianzhutang gongchang beifen
[Xujiahui Catholic workshops went up in flames],” Shenbao [Shanghai news] (Decem-
ber 18, 1919) and also “Shanwan gongyi chang huojing xuzhi [The continuing story of the
fire at Shanwan craft workshops],” Yishizhu ribao [The lord who benefits the world daily]
9, no. 1 (1920).
20 Augustin M. Colombel, S. J., Histoire de la mission de Kiang-nan (Shanghai: Imprimerie
de la Mission catholique à l’orphelinat de T’ou-sè-wè, 1899), 3:301.

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(1990s–present)—further reduced these ornately decorated vernacular build-

ings to fragments.21 One survivor, a mansion located in the heart of Shanghai,
hidden in the fast-disappearing linong alleyways and now designated as a his-
torical landmark, can provide a glimpse of the original context and function
of the architectural parts from Beck’s collection appropriated for the facade of
the Chinese Pavilion in Brussels. The Pavilion of Hidden Books (Shuyinlou),
unlike many historical landmarks in China today, has not undergone major
reconstructions in the twentieth century.22 The former residence of the
Qianlong period official Shen Chu (1735–1799), the structure was once a multi-
storied mansion with a lavish Jiangnan-style garden in the back.23 The garden
originally had a pond, and an ornate pavilion stood in the middle. Though
more than half of the roof has since collapsed, remnants of the wooden frame,
including the carved horizontal beams, still stand (figure 10.4). In a particular
scene that stretches across the length of one of the beams, two servants with lit
lanterns are leading the way for a bearded official to the building on the right.
He stops and turns to a small boy with two fingers of one hand raised; he holds
a ruyi scepter with the other, suggesting his supernatural identity. The scene is
bookended by two buildings, each with receding rooftops toward the center,
invoking a theatrical stage on which the original narrative would have been
enacted from a popular play or opera.
A compositional strategy similar to the one in the above fragment of the
Pavilion of Hidden Books is found in the narrative panels of the Brussels
Chinese Pavilion, made at Tushanwan. One example is the panel depicting the
battle between the Three Heroes and Lü Bu (Sanying dazhan Lü Bu) from
the popular novel and opera the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, depicted
on the lintel above the front entrance of the Brussels pavilion (figure 10.5).24
The figures, set against a vermillion background, are highlighted by gilding; the
21 For stories on the last-minute rescue of many of these structures, see Chen Zhihua’s pref-
ace in He Xiaodao, Jiangnan Ming Qing jianzhu mudiao 江南明清建築木雕 [Ming and
Qing dynasty carving from the Jiangnan region], vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2012),
6–11.
22 It did suffer through many periods of neglect. After 1949, it was converted to a factory and
was often a target for the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76).
23 Shen Chu (1735–1799) was the Assistant Editor of Qianlong’s Siku quanshu Bureau. See
Guo Junlun 郭俊綸, “Shanghai Shuyinlou zhuandiao 上海書隱樓磚雕 [The brick carv-
ings of the pavilion of hidden books in Shanghai],” Gujian yuanlin jishu 古建園林技術
[The technique of building ancient gardens] 1 (1988): 57. Guo is the current owner of the
residence and still lives in Shuyinlou.
24 Lü Bu is probably the second figure on the left. The three heroes are Guan Yu, Zhang
Fei, and Liu Bei. Guan Yu, identified by his long, flowing beard, is likely the figure on the
extreme left. Liu Bei was said to have pulled out his sword to help his sworn brothers and
then rushed out of the walled city. This suggests that the figure fighting Lü Bu is Zhang Fei.

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278 Ma
figure 10.4 A horizontal beam from Shuyinlou, Shanghai, 18th century
figure 10.5 “The Battle between the Three Heroes and Lü Bu.” Lintel above the front
entrance to Chinese Pavilion, Brussels
same color scheme would originally have been seen on the now faded beam of
the Pavilion of Hidden Books as well.25 The main focus, the combat between
25 Archival photographs taken during the 1985 restoration of the Museums of the Far East:
Chinese Pavilion-Japanese Tower–Museum of Japanese Art in Brussels suggest that the
gilding was reapplied. See photographs from the folder “Pavillon Chinois: Identification
des Frises Sculptées à Shanghai” in the archives of the Museums of the Far East, Brussels.

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the four protagonists on horseback, takes place in the center of the compo-
sition and is framed by a fortress to the right and the mountains to the left.
Sunburst pine clusters break up the upper register of the panel, as they do in
the eighteenth-century example in Shanghai. It is clear that the Jesuit fathers
and their orphaned art workers were looking at and copying examples of
Jiangnan architecture.
Another source of the imagery carved by the orphans in the woodcarving
workshop were book illustrations published and printed at the Tushanwan
printing workshop. One of these was a multivolume study of Chinese super-
stitions written by the French Jesuit Henri Doré (1859–1931), Recherches sur
les superstitions en Chine. Still widely referenced today, the first volume was
printed and published in 1911 at the Tushanwan Printing Workshop.26 Travel-
ing for over twenty years in Jiangsu and Anhui provinces, Doré had “visited
cities and hamlets, temples and monasteries, questioning the [local Chinese]
people about their Gods and Goddesses, their local divinities and deified Wor-
thies.” His goal was understand “the countless superstitions which swayed the
social and family life of the people.”27 He wrote the study in order to increase
Europeans’ understanding of the Chinese people’s “mentality and beliefs” and
in so doing to “help his fellow Missionaries in the field” with the “knowledge
of what the people believe and worship … [so that] they will offend less native
prejudice and promote better the great work of implanting Christian truth
in the land.”28 This was done “scientifically” to systematically organize and
objectively present these Chinese religious beliefs and practices to a general
European public.29
Doré’s book typifies another common goal shared by members of the Xujia-
hui community: the pursuit of empirical knowledge in China. Xujiahui boasted
one of the earliest meteorological observatories in East Asia and one of the
most comprehensive collections of Asian flora and fauna specimens at their
26 Henri Doré, S. J., Recherches sur les Superstitions en Chine (Chang-hai: Imprimerie de la
Mission catholique à l’orphelinat de T’ou-sé-wé, 1911–?). There are at least eighteen vol-
umes, and they continued to be published as late as 1938. The work was quickly translated
into English, first by M. Kennelly, S. J., starting in 1914, and later by D. J. Finn, S. J. See Henry
Doré, S. J., Researches into Chinese Superstitions, trans. M. Kennelly, S. J., vol. 1 (Shanghai:
T’usewei Printing Press, 1914).
27 Doré, Researches into Chinese Superstitions, 1. As evident in the footnotes and bibliogra-
phy, in addition to his fieldwork, Doré relied at times quite heavily on studies done by
other Westerners such as Jan Jakob Maria de Groot and Justus Doolittle and extensively
on published Chinese sources. he illustrations were taken from albums in the Xujiahui
Library, many of which were obtained directly by Doré himself from Chinese individuals.
28 Doré, Researches into Chinese Superstitions, 3.
29 Doré, Researches into Chinese Superstitions, 4.

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280 Ma
natural history museum. A frequent collaborator on scientific and sinologi-

cal projects with institutions such as the Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai,
Xujiahui published numerous volumes of studies by Western scholars, which
were printed by the Tushanwan printing workshop. Although these secular
activities could be seen as part of the larger colonial enterprise of knowledge
production, they also reflected the Jesuits’ broader goals of accessing divine
knowledge through objectivity and curiosity, practices that had been part of
the Jesuit missionary training since the beginning of the order.30
For Tushanwan workshops, Doré’s provided a reliable source for Chinese ver-
nacular visual culture, as its contents were collected directly from native Chinese
informants. Reappropriated by the different workshops in the production of
secular works, the Recherches became a reference book from which figures,
ornaments, themes, and motifs could be freely drawn and reused. Miniature
versions of the Eight Immortals could be seen atop cabinet finials, and the sol-
emn disciples of the Buddha became part of the stained glass windows on a
display cupboard. Strategically this was consistent with the larger mission of
the Church to demythologize native systems of belief or remake them as their
own and in the process neutralize the power of these non-Christian images.
Constantly aware of accusations of idolatry, the Catholic Church was careful
to distinguish their own image tradition from those of non-Christian cultures.
By isolating pagan idols from their larger context and thus reducing them to
fragmented and discrete forms, their sacred powers could be emptied, leaving
behind only harmless, smiling faces and gaudy multicolored surfaces.
The quality of superficiality was a popular perception and critique of
Chinese ornaments. Writing in The Grammar of Ornament (1856), the British
design theorist Owen Jones derides the designs of “all Eastern nations” as the
products of the “addition of grotesque or unmeaning ornaments, built up upon
the surface,”31 Unstated was the implicit conclusion that the superficiality and
irrationality of Chinese art reflected the mentality of the Chinese people.
Through their products, the Tushanwan workshops restated the surface-
oriented decorative strategy that came to be expected by their European
customers but reinvested these ornaments with meanings and significations
based on their original context. Thus a degree of “authenticity” was constructed
by the combination of visual data, physical objects, and anthropological infor-
mation collected by the Jesuits at Xujiahui as part of their missionary efforts, a
30 For more on Jesuit education, see John W. O’Malley, S. J., “How the First Jesuits Became
Involved in Education,” in The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum: 400th Anniversary Perspectives, ed.
Vincent J. Duminuco, S. J. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000).
31 Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London: Quaritch, 1910), 86.

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practice with many antecedents in their missionary histories in China.32 The

information was authentic for European consumers and for the Jesuit directors
because they were gathered firsthand through objective and scientific means
according to contemporary European criteria of modernity, but the efforts
to highlight these qualities ironically moved the ornaments away from their
original sources by further separating and decontextualizing them from native
beliefs and practices.
Finally, the value of “authenticity” as Chinese objects also derived from their
makers, the Chinese orphans and their identity as art workers. The quality of
the handmade was visually verifiable in the photographs found in catalogs and
magazines that circulated globally, where finished woodworks or furniture
would be photographed with their small Chinese orphaned makers, often rest-
ing their hands on the finished works—the same hands that carved ornaments
and jointed different components together (figure 10.3).
As “authentic” Chinese products made by Chinese hands, these were also
genuine handcrafted objects made by a community of pious artisans. As
a part of the Catholic charity organization in East Asia, the ultimate goal of
Tushanwan and its workshops was spiritual salvation. Individualistic or per-
sonal expression was supposedly suppressed in the community that served
God; values typically treasured by nineteenth-century European artists like
creativity, expressivity, and innovation were downplayed. The decorative
and utilitarian aspects of the arts were elevated in the context of medieval
revivalism propagated by the French Catholic Church in the late nineteenth
century. Though the anticlerical Republicans in France saw their Gothic past
as a moment of crowning artistic achievement, French Catholics reimagined
Gothic France as a time of simple Christian morality and spirituality, which
could be renewed through neo-Gothic style and replicated through the practice
of copying at the Tushanwan workshops.33 Just as the nostalgic remembrance
of the past contributed to the sense of late nineteenth-century nationalism
in France, these ornaments and the values they represented imbued Chinese
orphans with their own sense of the nationhood and modernity as they mature
into adulthood.
32 There have been many studies on the connection between Jesuit missionary activities
and their sinological and scientific activities in China, especially for the pioneers from
the first generation during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. For one example, see
David E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Ho-
nolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989).
33 See Elizabeth Emery, Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French
Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); and Elizabeth Emery and Rich-
ard Utz, eds. Medievalism: Key Critical Terms (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 104.

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Explaining to his French patrons (at the Society for the Propagation of the
Faith and the Holy Childhood Association) in 1884, the former director of
the Tushanwan painting workshop Adolphe Vasseur (1828–1899) referred to the
“lines, style, and processes” of native Chinese decorative artworks as being “not
too different from what art was in Europe during the time of the thirteenth-
century miniatures.” He envisioned the creation of a “special iconography that
would benefit all the missions in the Far East” by reshaping and reappropriat-
ing Chinese decorative elements to fit a program of revived medievalism in
the missions.34 As late as 1947, American Jesuit visitors to Tushanwan contin-
ued to rehearse this line of equivalence by praising the orphaned art worker
who “devotes his talents to the honor and glory of God … in the best spirit of
Catholic medieval Europe.”35
Art of the Middle Ages was considered naive, godly, and pure, and these same
qualities were infused into the artworks created at Tushanwan by the hands of
the orphaned Christian Chinese art workers accurately reproducing originals.36
Vasseur and other Jesuit directors envisioned a community of pious art work-
ers creating works not for individual gain or for personal fame—artworks were
rarely signed—but for the greater glory of God. Divinely inspired and work-
ing in the mode of anonymous medieval artisans, these diligent art workers
would draw inspiration from their own native tradition to create a new artistic
language that would more appropriately address the new Catholic converts in
China and elsewhere in East Asia who, presumably, shared the same cultural
affinities.
In her discussion of the nineteenth-century English designer William Morris
and his idealization of preindustrial craft, the scholar Winnie Wong notes
that Romantic artisanal movements like Morris’s were always characterized
as “ ‘revived’ and never invented.”37 This was a direct challenge to the famous
phrase coined by the historian Eric Hobsbawm, “the invention of tradition.”38
Whereas Hobsbawm challenges the existence and legitimacy of perceived “tra-
ditions” used in the service of nationalism, Wong puts the emphasis on the
purposeful reappropriation of the past in the service of the present. Just as
34 Vasseur, Mélanges sur la Chine, 6.

35 This was spoken by the narrator in the newly discovered documentary Ageless China
(1947), 16mm/m4v film, 25 min. The film is housed in the Fr. Francis A. Rouleau, S. J., Ar-
chives, Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, University of San Francisco.
36 Vasseur, Mélanges sur la Chine, 5.
37 Winnie Wong, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2013), 164.
38 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1983), 1.

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the longing for the Gothic past in the nineteenth century helped European
Catholics to imagine a pure communal past, the revival of the China’s own
past through the reconstitution of architectural fragments, vernacular motifs,
and folk stories helped the young Chinese orphans to “remember” their own
nation’s lost golden age.
3 King Leopold II’s Chinese Pavilion
It has been said that King Leopold II commissioned the Chinese Pavilion after
witnessing the models made by Tushanwan orphans at the 1900 Universal
Exposition in Paris. There is little evidence to support that encounter.39 In
fact, archival documents have shown that it was unclear whether Leopold
knew Chinese orphans had taken part in the making of the Chinese Pavilion,
since the official construction inventory only listed Beck as the contractor
and J. J. Chollot as the French firm that represented him. The Belgian consul-
general Daniel Siffert served as the liaison.40
What Leopold did see at the Exposition was the Panorama of the World Tour
(Panorama du Tour du Monde). Created by the French architect Alexander
Marcel (1860–1928) and the painter Louis Dumoulin (1860–1924), the tour was
a reference to the popular Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days
(1873), in that visitors could achieve the same feat as the novel’s protagonist
(but in just over an hour). The abbreviated experience consisted of the physi-
cal experience of walking through the structure, where visitors would encoun-
ter dizzying panoramas painted by Dumoulin showcasing the landscape and
lives of different people in Europe and Asia. On the exterior of the elliptical
building, Marcel created a montage of architectural fragments, drawing and
appropriating the styles of three Asian nations: Japan, China, and India. The
commercially successful display of the Tour, in the words of the scholar Roger
Benjamin, “took the entire world of mankind, in one imperializing sweep, as
its field of representation.”41
Apparently, Leopold was so taken with Marcel’s panorama building that
he commissioned the architect to build a series of structures in the garden
of his Laeken palace. These included the three buildings mentioned at the
39 This claim was often repeated by scholars in China. For example, see Zhang and Zhang,
Tushanwan, 68.
40 Kozyreff, Oriental Dream, 65–66.
41 Roger Benjamin, “Colonial Panaromania,” in Empires of Vision: A Reader, ed. Martin Jay
and Sumathi Ramaswamy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 120–22.

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284 Ma
beginning of this chapter. To create the Japanese Tower, Marcel salvaged parts
from the Tour and commissioned others. The only complete section he took
was the entrance to the annex building adjacent to the Tower, which was made
by Japanese artisans for the Exposition and had the legitimacy of the native
hand.42 In contrast, much of the design for the Chinese Pavilion seems to have
been a new design by Marcel and was not simply lifted from the Panorama
building.43 In any case, by 1903, Marcel’s design for the Chinese Pavilion was
largely settled. Blueprints for the building from that year demonstrate the criti-
cal role that the Tushanwan ornamental elements would play in transforming
the Chinese Pavilion into something beyond a mere chinoiserie fantasy.
Though the design of the Chinese Pavilion could hardly be considered
authentic, in comparison to Marcel’s earlier attempt at designing a building in
an East Asian style, the Sino-Japanese hybrid La Pagode (1897) on the Rue de
Babylone in Paris, it seems closer to historical Chinese examples.44 The two-
storied structure is a rarity in northern China, but it is typically found in the
Jiangnan region south of the Yangtze River. In fact, the Chinese Pavilion seems
to be making specific references to vernacular architecture in Shanghai, such
as the Huxinting Teahouse. Commonly featured on postcards sent home by
foreign visitors (figure 10.6), some of which Marcel might have seen or even
owned, the frequently visited destination in the Old City of Shanghai shares
many unique architectural traits with the Chinese Pavilion: the golden finials,
the exaggerated upturned curves on the eaves, and the long rows of consecu-
tive windows on the upper level. The last feature was necessary for optimal air
circulation in the hot and humid Jiangnan summers but rather impractical for
the cool Belgian climate (which explains why the windows were always closed
at the Chinese Pavilion). Also typical for the vernacular regional architecture
of the lower Yangtze River were the whitewashed walls with black-tile-topped
stepped gables, with three or five (rarely seven) steps. The Chinese Pavilion
also features the stepped gable construction in two places: on the front and
back of the building (a third may be seen on the annex garage behind the
main building). The one in the front, a modified gable with three steps, short-
long-short, is part of the ornate facade that welcomes visitors. Constructed of
reddish-orange bricks with a round window in the center, these gables seem
42 The Japanese pagoda was built by the firm of Frans Claes in Saint-Trond. Kozyreff, Orien-
tal Dream, 44.
43 Archival evidence recovered by Kozyreff suggests that Leopold did purchase wood from
the Chinese building that was part of the Panorama building, but the extent and the
structural importance of those fragments remain unclear. See Kozyreff, Oriental Dream,
165n8.
44 Kozyreff, Oriental Dream, 44.

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figure 10.6 Undated postcard of Shanghai Public Tea Gardens, 1890–1900. Author’s
collection

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286 Ma
to make explicit reference to local Flemish domestic architecture. Yet the

number of steps (seven) and the miniature slanted tiled roofs atop each step
point to a Jiangnan architectural model rather than a local one, raising inter-
esting questions about Marcel’s sources for the Pavilion. Did Marcel create his
design for the Chinese Pavilion based on visual materials (such as postcards,
photographs, and books about Chinese architecture circulating in Europe)
or through long-distance collaboration with Beck and others at Tushanwan
in Shanghai? Though written evidence is lacking, photographs in an album
made by Beck (see below) of models of the Chinese Pavilion and the octagonal
gazebo dating back to the early twentieth century suggest the possibility of a
transnational joint project.
4 Reading the Ornaments
To truly understand the external ornamental program of the Chinese Pavilion,

one must have a basic knowledge of vernacular Chinese architecture. To begin,
each element of the building is detachable and can be easily transported. This
particular characteristic is not only a practical response to the demand of such
a monumental commission being imported from China but also corresponded
to the nature of traditional Chinese architecture, which Beck and his orphaned
workers at Tushanwan replicated so well. Modular construction, according to
Lothar Ledderose, was integral to traditional modes of production in China,
including furniture and architecture.45 Historically in China the artisans who
made furniture in wood were the same who built architectural structures
because, despite the difference in scale, both trades used similar types of join-
ery, frames, and materials. The woodcarving workshop excelled in furniture
making, and its students simply adapted their skills and labors to the monu-
mental task of the Chinese Pavilion.
The workshop setting lent itself well to modular production, as different
tasks could be broken down in discreet assignments; it was also flexible enough
to accommodate changes made in the production process. Photographs of the
woodcarving workshop from the period during which the Chinese Pavilion
was produced suggest that between two to three art workers were in charge of
each unit, such as the square dragon medallion, the reticulated banister, the
narrative panel, or the dragon pillar. These would eventually be packed and
45 See chap. 5 in Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in
Chinese Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

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shipped to Brussels, where they would be assembled on-site under the direc-
tion of Alexandre Marcel.
For Aloysius Beck and others at Xujiahui, the merit of the work resided not
only in the manual labor that Chinese hands had in the carving, drilling, sand-
ing, and painting of each ornament but also in the collective knowledge of the
Jesuits at Xujiahui of Chinese history, popular stories, symbols, and motifs of
vernacular Jiangnan architecture. Indeed, to make sure that the ornamental
carvings for the Chinese Pavilion would not be seen as meaningless chinoiseries,
Beck created a richly illustrated album, a guide to the exterior ornamental pro-
gram. A watercolor portrait of Leopold II graced the frontispiece, for whom the
album was dedicated.
In the album, each individual figure, scene, and motif from the exterior
program of the Chinese Pavilion is identified (figure 10.7). Photographs of the
finished ornamental units accompanied by their young creators are included
alongside handwritten annotations. These are framed by hand-painted decora-
tive borders in traditional Chinese style, similar to the ones found in the pages of
scrapbooks found in various Jesuit archives and made by and for members
of the orphanage. Both the photographs of the orphaned Chinese boys and the
sense of amateurish intimacy generated by the hand-decorated album were
designed for Catholic patrons like King Leopold II in the hope of financial or
material support.
The handwritten annotations, most likely by Beck himself, are in cur-
sive French; proper names are given in both French and Chinese characters.
This was common practice within the sinological community of scholars in
Shanghai, who sought to objectively present evidence for future validation and
confirmation of the research presented.46 Yet in the context of this album, the
Chinese characters, unintelligible to King Leopold II, served to authenticate
the information that followed. To the best of my knowledge, the album or its
printed copies were never sent to Leopold. The copy at the Zikawei Library in
Shanghai includes a typed letter written by “J. L.” on July 21, 1941, explaining
that “circumstances prevented” the presentation of the album to Leopold.47
The interior of the Chinese Pavilion, however, is decorated in a rococo-
revival chinoiserie style, artistically and nostalgically harking back to the
heyday of the ancien régime. The conscious evocation of that style was in
46 See, for example, Gabriel Palâtre, S. J., L’infanticide et l’oeuvre de la Sainte-Enfance en Chine
(Shanghai: Mission Catholique, l’Orphelinat de T’ou-sè-wè, 1878).
47 My search in Shanghai and Belgium failed to locate additional copies of the album, and
the album was unknown to the archivist and curators familiar with the Chinese Pavilion.
This includes Chantal Kozyreff, author of the only book on the subject.

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288 Ma
figure 10.7 A page from Beck’s album to King Leopold II, ca. 1910

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line with the implicit political objective of King Leopold II’s commission of
the Chinese Pavilion—namely to model himself in the tradition of the great
eighteenth-century European monarchs and their imagined Chinese archi-
tectural escapades, whether it was Frederick the Great’s Chinesisches Haus
(finished in 1764) at Sanssouci Park in Potsdam or Catherine the Great’s
Chinese Village (finished in 1818) at Tsarskoye Selo. Inside the Chinese Pavilion,
Boucherian Chinese porcelain figurines (called les pagodes in France) nod, while
twisting gilded vines and polychrome foliage meander upward toward the
curved ceiling to cumulate in an elegant fruiting chandelier (figure 10.8).
The splendid interior is a reminder of its original intended function as a
Chinese-themed restaurant catering to elite clients, a fact reinforced by the
addition of the garage annex that was to shelter the latest status symbol of high
society at the turn of the century: the automobile.48
The rococo-inspired interior forms a striking contrast with the decorative
program on the exterior. Tushanwan ornamentations on the exterior of the
Chinese Pavilion are generally presented as highly readable, mostly confined,
and contained within individual frames that entice viewers to linger and read
the enclosed contents.49 Often set against a flattened vermilion background, the
gilding highlights the drama and tensions contained within the monoscenic
narrative. On the other hand, in the designs made by French or Belgian compa-
nies, the relationship between the content and the surrounding frames often
becomes illegible, as glazed colors and floral ornaments overlap and extend
beyond the confines of the border (figure 10.9).50 Some of the European designs
were clearly inspired by the export metalwork and the types of glazes found
on tea wares from the Edo and Meiji periods in Japan.51 Others highlighted
the technical superiority of their own modern glazes by imitating the look of
48 See Kozyreff, Oriental Dream, 55. All of the surviving blueprints by Marcel were labeled
“Restaurant Chinois.”
49 The last restoration effort took place in the mid-1980s. By looking at the related files and
photographs at the archives of the Museums of the Far East: Chinese Pavilion–Japanese
Tower–Museum of Japanese Art, I had a chance to closely examine the woodcarvings,
since the building was closed for restoration when I visited in the fall of 2014. For ar-
chitectural renderings made during the restoration in the 1980s, see Marie-Hélène Cor-
biau, Trente années de photogrammétrie architecturale au ministère des travaux publics
1955–1985 (Brussels: Ministère des Travaux Publics, Service de topographie et photogram-
métrie, 1988).
50 A complete list of the companies involved in the construction of the Chinese Pavilion is
found in Kozyreff, Oriental Dream, 115–17.
51 For more, see Hannah Sigur, “Clay and Glaze: The Journey to Modern,” in The Influence of
Japanese Art on Design (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2008), 172–205.

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figure 10.8 Undated postcard showing interior of the Chinese Pavilion, Brussels. Author’s
collection

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figure 10.9 Section of lower facade, Chinese Pavilion, Brussels
oxidized bronze; the resulting effect of ceramic trompe l’oeil only enhanced
the lighthearted, playful tone of the building.
The ornaments from Shanghai, by contrast, were perhaps more serious and
certainly more coherent. Traditional Jiangnan garden design elements
and symbols—the ice-crackle lattice, the grape vine (as a sign of fertility), the
swastika (as a shorthand for the Chinese character wan, or “ten thousand”),
the character for longevity (shou), peony flowers, etc.—were simplified and
spatially separated for maximal legibility in relation to other Chinese elements
(figure 10.10). The rudimentary perspective and the prevalent figures in outlines
in these flattened compositions had previously been cited as shortcomings of
Chinese art, but in the context of the Gothic revival at Tushanwan, they were
redeemed as a virtue, a sign of artistic purity and innocence in works done by
young Chinese labors reformed by Christianity.
For King Leopold II, the most significant feature of the external ornamenta-
tions was not the fact that they were made by Catholic orphans or that he was
supporting and propagating the Catholic faith in Asia. The fact that, despite
the cost, both Marcel and Leopold were willing to wait for the external archi-
tectural parts for both the Japanese Tower and the Chinese Pavilion to be

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292 Ma
figure 10.10 Detail of Chinese Pavilion, Brussels
made in and shipped from Japan and China, respectively, spoke volumes about
the importance they attached to the authenticity of style and the origin of the
materials. To Leopold, the Chinese Pavilion (and to a lesser extent the Japa-
nese Pagoda), while harking back to the last golden age of European monarchy
in the eighteenth century, was also a public statement regarding his commit-
ments to expand Belgium’s sphere of influence in Asia. To make this statement
it was important to recreate and physically translate a piece of authentic East
Asia to Laeken within the perimeter of his royal gaze.

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5 Conclusion
King Leopold II died before the completion of the Chinese Pavilion sometime
in the spring of 1910.52 The wish to turn the building into a Chinese restau-
rant never came to fruition, and its status remained in bureaucratic limbo for
years. Whenever it was opened, the Chinese Pavilion was a popular tourist des-
tination, known well beyond the confines of Brussels through postcards and
photographs (figure 10.1). After World War II, the state-owned building became
the repository of export Chinese and Japanese porcelains, eventually evolv-
ing into its current status (along with the Japanese Pagoda) as the Museums
of the Far East (Musées d’Extrême-Orient), part of the Royal Museums of Art
and History.53 The museum’s collection is mainly comprised of polychrome
porcelains made after the sixteenth century, such as famille rose and famille
verte—fitting objects, as they had originally inspired the craze for China that
had inspired chinoiserie more than 150 years earlier.
The Chinese Pavilion has been closed to visitors since 2013, when structural
problems in the buildings made it unsafe for caretakers as well as visitors.
While the building is being restored, casual park visitors can still admire the
Pavilion’s gilded exterior, allowing them to experience an “authentic” version
of Chinese architecture from Jiangnan—as filtered through the empirical
lens of a Jesuit missionary, the replicating hands of Chinese orphans, a French
architect’s understanding of Chinese architecture, and a king’s desire for
expanding his country’s sphere of influence.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks go to Jennifer Milam and Petra ten-Doesschate Chu for the
incredible conference they organized and for reading and making crucial com-
ments on the draft of this chapter. I also want to thank current curator Nathalie
Vandeperre and former curator Chantal Kozyreff at the Museums of the Far
East for their help during my research visit in 2014. Lastly, I thank Mark Mir
(Ricci Institute, University of San Francisco), Daniel Peterson (California Jesuit
Archives, Santa Clara University), and Zhang Xiaoyi (Office of Non-Tangible
Material Culture Legacy Preservation of Xujiahui District in Shanghai) for
helping me to secure the rights to several of the photographs.


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294 Ma
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Conclusion
The ten chapters in this volume demonstrate that the dismissive view of
nineteenth-century artistic relations between China and the West that has
dominated art-historical discourse at least since World War II has finally
reached a tipping point. Written for the most part by a new generation of
scholars, these chapters demonstrate in different ways that the nineteenth
century was not a period when the “admiration of things Chinese turned to
contempt,”1 but, on the contrary, a time when knowledge about and under-
standing of China by Europeans and Americans—and vice versa, Chinese
acquaintance with Western culture—deepened and widened substantially in
comparison to the previous century.
This is not to say that in the eighteenth century there had not been seri-
ous efforts towards mutual understanding, including the reciprocal study of
language, mathematics, science, engineering, philosophy, religion, music, and
art. But these efforts were restricted to a small number of scholars and did not
percolate to a broad public. Both chinoiserie and its counterpart européen-
erie were based on a superficial and selective knowledge of the Other obtained
from a small number of books and from the visual information provided
in the West by imported lacquerware, porcelains, and silks and in China by
black-and-white prints, sent to the country in large numbers to be copied on
porcelain teapots and plates. Perhaps it was precisely this fragmentary knowl-
edge that caused China and the West to see one another as fairylands. The
fantastic interpretations of China in chinoiserie and the equally imaginative
views of the West in européenerie show how artists used imagination where
information failed, until the fantasies became more convincing and, in most
instances, more attractive than the reality.2
While the Western fantasy of China did not disappear in the nineteenth
century, the chapters in this volume show that many of the artistic contacts
between China and the West went, as the title suggests, “beyond” chinoise-
rie. For example, the sound of the (authentic) Chinese gong that regulated
life at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello provoked a series of associations that
1 See introduction, note 7.

2 For a concise bibliography of both movements, see “Bibliography,” Qing Encounters: Artistic
Exchanges between China and the West, accessed April 20, 2018, https://qingencounters
.weebly.com/bibliography.html.

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298 Chu and Milam
was entirely different from that of the (European-made) bells hung from the
chinoiserie pagodas found on European eighteenth-century country estates.
While the tinkling of the latter called to mind a generic fantasy of China as a
place with porcelain pagodas, well-fed mandarins, and languid beauties, the
sonorous clangs of the former, as Jennifer Milam points out, evoked a distant
but real China, in reach of American steamships and those who ventured on
board. A hundred years later, the Chinese pavilion in the Royal Park in Laeken,
Brussels, discussed by William Ma, offers another example of “beyond chinoi-
serie.” Here, a Western-built chinoiserie structure is decorated with wooden
panels carved by Chinese orphans taught and supervised by European mis-
sionaries, who actively collected local Chinese carvings to serve as prototypes
for the young Chinese men in their care.
Nineteenth-century politicians like Thomas Jefferson (chapter 2), artists like
Jean-Etienne Delécluze (chapter 4), writers like Victor Hugo (chapter 6), and
collectors like Madame d’Ennery (chapter 8) had a much greater awareness of
China’s geography, of its political structure and philosophical underpinnings,
of the daily life of its inhabitants, and, indeed, of Chinese art history than we
give them credit for today. This was due, in large part, to the contemporary
media, such as newspapers and popular magazines, which, especially after
the First Opium War (1839–42), increasingly focused on China. In addition, as
Meredith Martin demonstrates in her chapter about the Universal Exposition
of 1867 (chapter 5), international exhibitions in the major capitals of Europe
and America exposed Westerners to a variety of Chinese artifacts and material
culture. Martin, Sarah Cheang, and Elizabeth Chang also point out that “the
East” was not a formless concept to nineteenth-century Europeans; they were
well aware of the peculiarities of, and differences between, such cultures as
Chinese, Japanese, and Siamese. To the media and the international exhibi-
tions, we might add ethnographic museums and some museums focused on
Chinese art, such as the Musée chinois of Empress Eugénie in Fontainebleau,3
as well as special exhibitions, such as the one organized by Nathan Dunn
referred to in the introduction. At the same time, the Chinese had numerous
contacts with the West. Maggie M. Cao and William Ma single out two impor-
tant contact zones, commerce and Christian missions, but there were others as
well. Disregarding zones of conflict (military, political), academia provided a
limited contact zone; in addition, there were numerous individual encounters
3 On this museum, see Alison McQueen, “Empress Eugénie and the Musée Chinois,” in
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Laurinda S. Dixon, eds., Twenty-First-Century Perspectives
on Nineteenth-Century Art: Essays in Honor of Gabriel P. Weisberg (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 2008), 153–61.

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Conclusion 299
between Chinese and Western travelers, who brought such Western objects as
binoculars and cameras, which had a great impact on Chinese ways of seeing.4
Michael Sullivan linked what he saw as the moribund Western interest in
China to the upsurge of interest in Japanese art and culture, sparked by the
forceful opening of Japan to foreign trade in 1853.5 In reality, the fascina-
tion with Japanese art that followed this event did not replace the interest in
Chinese art and material culture but may have helped to revive it. It is true that
the flood of Japanese imports that followed the end of Japan’s self-imposed
blockade created a decades-long fascination with Japanese artifacts, which
had an impact not only on European decorative arts but also on fine arts after
the Western discovery of the Japanese color woodblock print.6 But it is also
important to realize that the interest in Chinese art and material culture—
especially Chinese porcelains—continued undiminished, if it did not increase.
Publications like Owen Jones’s Examples of Chinese Ornament (1867) or Albert
Jacquemart’s writings on Chinese porcelains, often beautifully illustrated
by his son Jules, not only kept the interest in Chinese decorative art alive
but enhanced it by more profound study.7 Even at the height of japonisme,
an artist swept up in that movement like James McNeill Whistler avidly col-
lected Chinese porcelains and incorporated them into paintings that engaged
with Chinese art and culture in a serious way.8
If anything, this book demonstrates the complexity of the meeting of
Chinese and Western art in the nineteenth century, when contacts between the
two cultures simultaneously intensified and became more diffuse (through
the intermingling of contacts with other cultures) and when the old fantasies
of chinoiserie and européenerie, though proven false, still had a strong hold
on the collective imagination. Much work awaits to be done, both in China
and the West, before a full picture of this complexity is obtained. The chapters
in this book suggest some of the directions in which this work may go.
4 A book on this subject by Kristina Kleutghen, Lens onto the World: Optical Devices, Art, Sci-
ence, and Society in China, is forthcoming with University of Washington Press.
5 Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989).
6 Of course, as Kristel Smentek points out in chap. 4, Chinese woodblock prints had long been
known in the West but their lack of perspective, in the broadest sense of the term (linear,
atmospheric, shading) made them difficult to appreciate for Western viewers.
7 Jacquemart, whose best-known publication is a world history of ceramics (Histoire de la
céramique: étude descriptive et raisonné) introduced the categorization of Chinese porcelains
into familles (rose, verte, etc.) that is still used today.
8 On this topic, see, for example, Aileen Tsui, “Whistler’s La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine:
Painting Re-Oriented.” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 9, no. 2 (Autumn 2010), http://
www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn10/whistlers-la-princesse-du-pays-de-la-porcelaine.

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Abstracts
Introduction
Chapter 1: The China Trade and the Classical Tradition in Federal America
Abstract: Dramatic shifts in national identity and international relations character-

ized the Federal period in the new United States of America. Immediately after the
Revolution, unencumbered by British colonial navigation laws, American ships
embarked for China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other destinations. Viewing
themselves as citizens of a rising imperial state, Americans imported vast quantities
of luxury goods and arts, especially porcelain, silks, lacquerware, painting, sculpture,
furniture, wallpaper, and textiles. This trade made Asian visual arts and other materi-
als less expensive and more available to all Americans, particularly in the port cities of
New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, and Salem.
A substantial body of scholarship has established that the Early Republic (or
Federal period, ca. 1783–1820) was the crucial period for the development of American
national identity. Because of the emergence of this trade, it was also a foundational
period for the emergence of American international identity. As new materials, forms,
imagery, and aesthetics arrived, they were absorbed into American visual culture—
not as marginal, but as integral to a dominant Neoclassicism.
In the American context, scholarship on Neoclassicism typically describes a style
that employed Roman Republican motifs to build nationalism in the new country. By
going beyond chinoiserie, we may begin to see the Neoclassical aesthetic as incorporat-
ing global references and ambitions. Chinese and other Asian motifs and aesthetic
approaches became more than a fascination with exoticism, now experienced first-
hand by American traders after the Revolution. The visual forms held ideological
resonances. Rome and China were great empires—models of power, hegemonic
culture, and long-distance commerce for the new American state. By incorporating
Chinese and other Asian motifs and aesthetic principles, Neoclassicism expressed the
integral place of the new country in worldwide commercial enterprises.
This chapter approaches these issues by examining decorative arts in one seaport:
Salem, Massachusetts. Examples of textiles, porcelain, and furniture owned by the
prominent Derby and Crowninshield merchant families demonstrate the comfort-
able pairing of forms and motifs drawn from both classical and Asian visual traditions.
Both Neoclassical and Asian styles share aesthetic approaches that facilitated their
integrations: clean and elegant lines, subtle forms, and geometric shapes. The objects
that these wealthy families chose to display in their homes demonstrate that Federal-
period Americans blended Roman and Greek Neoclassicism with Asian aesthetics in

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their homes, dress, and decorative styles. Globally influenced styles and themes even-
tually permeated American visual culture, becoming signs of experience, social status,
and economic success. These international forms help shaped Americans’ sense of
their place in the world, contributing to the nation’s developing identity as a com-
mercial empire.
Chapter 2: Jefferson’s Interest in China and the Gongs of Monticello
Abstract: In 1800, Thomas Jefferson revived his earlier wish to build a Chinese pavil-
ion at Monticello. Jefferson’s knowledge of Chinese architecture was largely derived
through his study of William Chambers’s work, including the structures built at Kew
and those that existed only as illustrations in Designs for Chinese Buildings. At the time,
Jefferson first thought of constructing a ting at Monticello, copied from Chambers,
sometime before 1784, critics had already launched an attack on these designs as archi-
tectural fantasy, rejecting the architect’s claims of authenticity based on his firsthand
knowledge of China gained through travel. In spite of this challenge to the authority
of Chambers, his prints remained the most important source for understanding the
features of Chinese architecture as an alternative to Western forms.
This chapter explores Jefferson’s interest in China, which extended beyond aesthetic
concerns to link with his domestic values and political ideals. He owned at least eigh-
teen books on China, addressing topics from geography and politics to commerce and
poetry. Chinese gardens were also of interest, known not only through Chambers but
also through Attiret’s account of the imperial garden of Yuanming Yuan in Dodsley’s
Fugitive Pieces, included in Jefferson’s library. His letters point to an interest that was
more than curiosity, with comments that signal his perception of China as a significant
imperial power that did not bow to England. Jefferson respected China as a culture that
had the ability to exist in isolation, even at the same time that he pursued American
interests in furthering the China Trade. In this context, I consider Jefferson’s efforts
made to import Chinese gongs for use on the plantation of Monticello. One of these
gongs remains on the roof of the house today as the sonic feature of the Great Clock,
housed in a structure that combines classical and chinoiserie forms. While Jefferson’s
aim was undoubtedly functional—to enhance a sense of order and control over life at
Monticello—the reference to China was heard on a regular basis, raising the memory
of its reported use in Chinese villages even as it presented evidence of America’s global
commercial engagement through the China Trade.
Chapter 3: Copying in Reverse: China Trade Paintings on Glass
Abstract: In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European and
American merchants and seamen frequently returned from China with reverse paint-
ings on glass by Chinese artisans of Canton, then China’s sole port of foreign trade.

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Abstracts 303
These framed decorative objects were made by painting in oil on the back of sheet
glass or mirrors, such that once reversed, the image under glass appears to have a wet,
crystalline quality. Though the medium has origins in European folk art, it was in the
export-art workshops of Canton that glass paintings became a specialized and highly
developed practice, despite its seeming unfitness for long-distance travel. Canton’s
artisans produced glass paintings in a range of subjects, but this chapter focuses on
one popular type: painted copies of foreign prints brought to China for replication.
These objects showcase the technical process of making glass paintings from models,
of “copying in reverse.” Not only did artists have to temporally invert the steps of can-
vas painting (working backwards from the finest details closest to the surface of the
glass to the background), they also had to compose their paintings as mirror images
of the models on which they were based. The makers of glass paintings regularly
sought to preserve the marks of these reversals through the collapsing of reproduction
and reflection, either by referencing the idea of mirroring or by incorporating actual
mirrors—surfaces that already represent through inversion. This chapter argues that
glass painting’s ability to encode the doublings, reversals, and reflections of its mak-
ing allowed the medium to serve as a sophisticated means by which Chinese artisans
and their Western patrons made sense of the replication and imitation at work in the
China Trade more broadly.
Chapter 4: Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Art from China, and Nineteenth-Century French

Painting
Abstract: In 1838, on the eve of the First Opium War, the art critic Étienne-Jean
Delécluze (1781–1863) published a little-known article on Chinese painting. Though
most familiar today as the artist Jacques-Louis David’s biographer and as the upholder
of a European classicist aesthetic, in this text Delécluze emerges as an admirer of
Chinese art. Delécluze’s appreciative (though not unambivalent) analysis suggests
a more complex aesthetic position than the rigidly conservative stance sometimes
attributed to him. It is also indicative of the ways in which the construction of a clas-
sical tradition of European art, particularly from the later eighteenth century forward,
was subtly negotiated in relation to images and crafted objects from afar.
Delécluze opens his article with an account of the Chinese painter Lamqua’s stu-
dio in Quangzhou (Canton). He then continues with his own assessment of an early
edition of the illustrated Jieziyuan Huazhuan (also known as Jieziyuan Huapu), or
Mustard Seed Garden Manual, first published in Nanjing in 1679. His engagement with
the book testifies not only to the breadth of Chinese material available to interested
nineteenth-century French viewers but also to the mobilization of Chinese art in the
service of aesthetic battles in Paris. Delécluze concludes by proclaiming his preference
for Chinese art over the work of the Carracci and their nineteenth-century followers,
whom he characterizes as “the destroyers of art.” In making such a claim, he points to

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continuities between himself and late eighteenth-century commentators who simi-

larly held up the virtues of Chinese art to the perceived vices of contemporary French
painting. At the same time, Delécluze’s article signals a broader shift from a relative
openness towards Chinese art to a more widespread critical belittling of it, a shift that
coincides with the escalation of political tensions between China and Europe and
the coining of the term “chinoiserie.” This term first came into use in France precisely
around the time Délecluze’s text was published, and its pejorative cast has, I suggest,
tended to occlude how encounters with Chinese painting hovered at the edges of late
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European definitions of European art.
Chapter 5: Staging China, Japan, and Siam at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867
Abstract: The Empress Eugénie’s Musée chinois at Fontainebleau, created in 1863,

comprises a decorative mélange of art objects from China, Siam, Indochina, and Japan
that appear to be arranged without regard for context, chronology, or culture. Alison
McQueen has interpreted the Musée chinois as a “generalized symbol of Asian nations
subjugated by the French empire,” one whose overarching discourse of European
imperial domination was echoed in the universal exhibitions held in Paris and London
around the same time. At these exhibitions, as scholars have shown, cultural products
and raw materials from East and Southeast Asia were likewise grouped together for
Western aesthetic delectation and consumption, perhaps most evocatively in Alfred
Chapon’s generically “exotic” design for the display of Siamese, Chinese, and Japanese
goods at Paris’s 1867 Exposition Universelle.
However, as this chapter will argue, the presentation and reception of East and
Southeast Asian art objects at the 1867 exhibition was far more culturally specific
and politically nuanced than has been assumed. By focusing on how art objects and
materials from China, Japan, and Siam were “staged” and interpreted differently at
this event, I show how European viewers mobilized these objects to tell multiple and
sometimes conflicting stories about empire, history, culture, and commerce in both
Asia and France. At the same time, I will explore how ruling elites from different parts
of Asia, most notably the king of Siam, actively participated in European exhibitions
for strategic purposes of their own.
Chapter 6: Victor Hugo and the Romantic Dream of China
Abstract: When Victor Hugo was exiled to Guernsey, he was followed by his mistress
Juliette Drouet. While he resided in Hauteville House, she lived in nearby Hauteville
Fairy. For the latter residence, Victor Hugo designed, between 1863 and 1864, a
“Chinese” dining room inspired by eighteenth-century chinoiserie decorations. The
room, now in the Maison Victor Hugo in Paris, demonstrates that, though much
Romantic revival chinoiserie was little more than insipid imitation and trivialization

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Abstracts 305
of Chinese and eighteenth-century chinoiserie models, the Romantic interest in

China did allow for new and original artistic contributions. Indeed, the wall decor of
Drouet’s room, made up of authentic Chinese elements, reused in their entirety or
fragmentarily and in combination with elements newly designed by Hugo that repeat
or pervert the Chinese examples, is different from anything produced in the eighteenth
century and anticipates postmodern “bricolage” in its emphasis on reuse, fragmenta-
tion, and assemblage. Speculating as to the artistic purpose of Hugo’s bricolage, the
author draws a connection between the Romantic vision of China as a dream and
the psycho-analytical view of dreaming as a process of bricolage.
Chapter 7: Chrysanthemum Reform and Cultivated Visions of the Victorian Garden
Abstract: This chapter builds from the series of letters appearing through 1883 and 1884
in William Robinson’s influential periodical The Garden calling for “chrysanthemum
reform”; termed by one letter writer a “revolution” in the improvement of the public
taste, the conversation around the proper and “natural” style of the chrysanthemum
also became an encounter between British and Asian floricultural styles in the pages of
middlebrow writings and the gardens of middle-class homes. Though the disapproval
of a showy and artificial flower type might seem familiar, perhaps less expected are the
objects of the discontent: British flower fanciers are chided for trying to make “the fat
woman at the penny show” take the place of the “Venus de Milo” with their gigantic
chrysanthemum specimens, while Japanese examples are praised as offering the “high-
est natural perfection,” a perfect blend of nature and culture.
This debate illustrates on a small scale two important and overlapping conditions
apparent by century’s end in the world of the Victorian garden—a world that by the
end of the nineteenth century touched nearly every corner of the globe. First, we
see that vigorous attention to the aesthetics of organic form was not only happen-
ing within the elite European cosmopolitans of the decadent movement. While study
of the literary and artistic fin de siècle has appropriated chrysanthemum culture as a
potent symbol of Asia’s alien exoticism, it is equally salient to say that debates over the
chrysanthemum’s varying degrees of “formlessness” shaped a more domestic, intimate,
and personal integration of exotic aesthetics into British homes and bookshelves. And
second, we see an important interplay between, on the one hand, the long-standing
place of the chrysanthemum in written and pictured chinoiseries of the first half
of the nineteenth century, and, on the other, the strong late-century connection
between the chrysanthemum and varieties of japonisme—up to and including the
flower’s synecdochal relationship with Japanese imperial power. Though connoisseur-
ship in the chinoiserie and japonisme traditions has been comparatively well studied by
literature scholars, less attention has been brought to the many textual representations
of this Anglo-Asian aesthetic interchange at the more popular and middlebrow level.
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306 Abstracts
imagined Chinese and Japanese aesthetics in the garden space of the ordinary Briton
and follow the paradoxically familiar exoticism that emerged as a result.
Chapter 8: The Musée d’Ennery and the Shifting Reception of Nineteenth-Century French
Chinoiseries
Abstract: Women were largely excluded from the networks of professional activities
that came to distinguish “collectors” in late nineteenth-century France. Although they
actively acquired Chinese gems, porcelain, and bronzes, these objects tended to be
displayed in the private glass vitrines of their home, thus reinforcing the link between
“chinoiseries” and the allegedly passive social role played by women. Contemporary
associations between women, Asian artifacts, and interior decoration run through
memoirs such as the Goncourt Journal and are echoed in the many Impressionist
paintings equating Japanese and Chinese objects with domestic female settings,
among them Manet’s Nana, Stevens’s The Duchess, and Tissot’s Jeunes femmes regar-
dant des objets japonais.
This chapter seeks to reappraise the agency of nineteenth-century French women as
collectors by focusing on the activities of two women. Clémence d’Ennery bequeathed
her private collection of seven thousand small Asian artifacts, displayed in vitrines
throughout the rooms of her house, as the Musée d’Ennery, a gift to the French state.
Although she was good friends with some of the major players in the japoniste move-
ment (Goncourt, Clemenceau, and Guimet, to name a few), her gender precluded her
from membership in the networks of dinners, travels, and expositions they organized.
Even those women who were active in such professional networks, like art dealer
Florine Langweil, renowned for evaluating and promoting Chinese art, were lauded
by contemporaries for their decorative skills but not for their collecting acumen. The
chapter will evoke some of the problems inherent in attempting to assess the cultural
contributions of women like d’Ennery and Langweil, whose achievements were dis-
counted by contemporaries and thus largely absent from official records, a crucial fact
that shaped their posthumous legacies even when their unsung achievements resulted
in museum collections that bear their names.
Chapter 9: Fashion, Chinoiserie, and the Transnational: Material Translations between

China, Japan and Britain
Abstract: Fashion is a social dynamic like no other. The interactions that occur between
the visual and the material position the circulation of fashion as a uniquely symbolic
and yet everyday affair. Dress fashions engage men, women, and children with highly
embodied practices of art and design that are powerfully linked to morality and desire.
Gender, rank, ethnicity, individuality, and social belonging are materialized in the
most spectacular and subtle ways. Fashions in dress, however, are insecurely attached

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Abstracts 307
to geographical place, for fashion is a predominantly temporal dynamic that aspires to

a cosmopolitan modernity while playing with time and space in the pursuit of novelty
and social distinction.
At the end of the nineteenth century, in the context of both japonisme and
eighteenth-century revival styles, chinoiserie clothing fashions appeared for European
women. These fashions used Chinese clothing construction (such as the wide sleeve
and side closure) and Chinese motifs, but entire Chinese garments were also adapted
to suit Western aesthetics and worn as Western fashion. This chapter focuses on the
material and culture translations between Britain, China, and Japan that occurred
in “Chinese” fashions from the 1880s to 1912 using three examples: a British tea gown
made from a Chinese dragon robe yardage; Chinese skirts and robes adapted to create
European dresses, capes, and accessories; and Japanese-made tea gowns and “Chinese”
coats. Chinoiserie garments were sites of the artistic and the fanciful, poised between
an interiority and exteriority that conflated the Japanese and the Chinese to create
European modernity through exoticism and women’s bodies. This chapter looks more
closely at this story of transnational exchange through the dress collections of muse-
ums in Britain, the United States, and Japan and suggests new ways of approaching the
interactions between chinoiserie and japonisme by foregrounding the materiality of
transnational modernity.
Chapter 10: From Shanghai to Brussels: the Tushanwan Orphanage Workshops and the
Carved Ornaments of the Chinese Pavilion at Laeken Park
Abstract: In this chapter I use as a case study the Chinese Pavilion, built during the
first years of the twentieth century on the outskirt of Brussels. Commissioned by King
Leopold II, the building was part of an Orientalist ensemble that revealed his taste
and possible future colonial ambitions. Though inspired by the Tour de Monde from
the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris, most of the exterior ornamental program was
carved and gilded at Tushanwan by Chinese orphans under the guidance of European
Jesuit priests in Shanghai. These “authentic” Chinese ornaments were lifted, collected,
and reappropriated from vernacular Jiangnan architecture as part of the Jesuits’ larger
project of producing and reterritorializing sinological knowledge, both in the service
of a native Catholic Church and to create a Chinese national identity.
In fact, I trace the origin of this project to the influence of various nineteenth-
century nationalistically driven aesthetic reform movements in Europe as reinterpreted
by the Jesuits at Tushanwan. Beyond the claim of authenticity, these distinctive Chinese
architectural ornaments were attempts made by the Jesuits to demand European view-
ers to see them beyond their surfaces and forms and instead focus on their context and
content. Yet as they were affixed to the exterior of the Chinese Pavilion, itself a monu-
ment to the fantasy of the Orient through art nouveau and japonisme, new avenues
and new modes of visual dialogues were made possible.

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Index
Page numbers in italic refer to figures. Thus, 292f10.10 refers to figure 10.10 on page 292 and
236–38ff9.1–9.3 refers to figures 9.1 through 9.3 on pages 236–38.
Abel-Rémusa, Jean-Pierre 154–55 and the bricolage of elements in the wall

André, Edouard, as co-founder of the decor of Drouet’s room 12, 151, 172
Jacquemart-André house museum 218, and Canton’s export art studios 75–76
218–19n44 and Chinese characters in the hand-
appropriation decorated album prepared for King
imperialistic appropriation 245 Leopold 287
and power differences 239–42, 245, 251 and Chinese gongs imported by Jefferson
and purposeful reappropriation of the for Monticello 66–67, 297–98
past in the service of the present and Chinese latticework in early
280, 282–83 American gardens 50n5
unselfconscious cultural appropriation in and elements added to Japanese Chinese
the Musée d’Ennery 222–23 coats for Western export 259
See also bricolage; copying and imitation; and European construction of the
transnational exchange concept of “Chinese art” 115
architectural ornamentation and the Jesuits goal of investing products
Jiangnan garden design elements in the of the Tushanwan workshop with a
Chinese Pavilion at Laeken Park 291, degree of authenticity 279–80
292f10.10 and masculinity 219–20n49, 222, 226
superficiality associated with Chinese and the presentation of servants dressed
ornaments 280 in Turkish and Chinese costumes 63
woodcarvings from vernacular buildings and Tushanwan ornamental
in the Jiangnan area 276, 291, elements 268–70, 275–76, 280–83
292f10.10 and vernacular architectural decorative
See also Chambers, William; Chinese elements in the Chinese pavilion in
latticework; Monticello; Sheraton, Laeken 13, 270, 276, 291–93
Thomas
Armstrong, Nancy 186 Bagatelle of the 4th Marquess of Hertford
Attiret, Jean-Denis 65, 66, 66n40 1n1
Audot, Louis-Eustache 150 Bagatelle of the Comte d’Artois 60, 61
Auslander, Leora 219–20n49, 222, 226 bǎinián guóchǐ (the century of
authenticity and authentication humiliation) 2
and anxieties over authenticity, See also East-West relations in the
reproducibility, and artificiality nineteenth century; Opium Wars
in debates over chrysanthemum banyans
culture 180 English adaptation of a Gujarati word
and architecture and gardens claimed as 245
authentic Chinese designs by William and transnational recycling of materials
Chambers 55, 59, 60, 65 253
and “authentic” art from China mobilized and the V&A European-Chinese-Japanese
to defend the aesthetics of European robe 247f9.6, 264
classicism 95 Baudelaire, Charles 165

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Index 309
Beattie, James 189 the Goncourts’s hugely expensive bronze

Beck, Aloysius “monster” 217–18n40
background in painting and woodcarving imperial collection documented in the
273 Qinding Xiqing Gujian (Imperially
collection of antique sculptures and Ordained Mirror of Antiquities
building fragments of 276, 276n19 Prepared in the Xiqing Hall) 112,
and the Tushanwan woodcarving 112n45, 116
workshop 273–74, 275f10.3 the look of oxidized bronzes imitated in
Benjamin, Roger 283 European designs for the Chinese
Bentley, Rev. William Pavilion at Laeken Park 289
library of 24 nineteenth-century collecting of 4, 132,
Unitarian church in Salem lead by 158, 219
24–25 Peter Perring Thoms’s book on bronze
Bing, Siegfried 210, 219 vessels of the Shang Dynasty 4, 5f0.2
Birch, William Russell, illustration of China Bullington, Judy 62
Retreat built by Van Braam 63, 64f2.12 Burbidge, Frederick William 201
Boucher, François Bushell, Stephen Wootton 235, 239, 242n14
Jupiter and Calisto engraving by René Butler, Sir William Francis 152–54,
Gaillard 78, 79, 80f3.5, 81 152–53n11
Jupiter and Calisto reproduced on glass
78, 80f3.4, 81–82 Catherine the Great
Bowen, Emanuel 19–21, 20f1.1, 21f1.2 Chinese Village at Tsarskoye Selo 289
Boxer Uprising, lootings in the aftermath of jardin anglo-chinois at Tsarskoye Selo
269 60, 61
bricolage Catholicism and the Catholic Church
adaptation of the term coined by Claude anti-Catholic sentiment of Salem’s Social
Lévi-Straus to Victor Hugo’s writing Library 19, 20–21
and decorative work 151, 164–65 Fatqua, Madonna and Child with Joseph
psychoanalytical view of dreaming as a 78, 79f3.3
process of 151–52, 165, 172, 174–75 Holy Childhood Association (L’Oeuvre de
term used by Waud Kracke 151 la Sainte Enfance) 272, 273, 282
the wall decor of Juliette Drouet’s See also Jesuit missionary presence in
Chinese room 12, 151, 166, China; Tushanwan (French Jesuit
167ff6.6–6.6, 168 Orphanage workshop in Shanghai);
See also appropriation Xujiahui Catholic Community
British East India Company 32, 83, 246 ceramics and porcelain
bronzes Albert Jacquemart’s writings on 299,
bronze tripod depicted in the entrance 299n7
wall panel of Hugo’s chinoiserie “blue and white nankeen sett china” 32,
room 168, 169f6.8, 170ff6.9–6.10, 171 33f1.6
Cernuschi’s collection of 4, 223–24, classical motifs on Chinese plates
225f8.8 exported to Salem 30–32, 30f1.5
Chinese bronze vessels compared with collection of the Musées
Greek vases 4, 116 d’Extrême-Orient 293
and Delécluze’s 1862 article “Vases eighteenth-century chinoiserie porcelain
antiques chinois” 112, 113f4.8, 114f4.9, rooms in Germany and Holland 166,
115 166n51, 168

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310 Index
ceramics and porcelain (cont.) and depictions of China as a site of

and European in interest Chinese commerce in cartouches of maps of
material culture 154n15 China 20–21, 21f1.2
Goncourt brothers on Chinese and direct trade between America and
porcelain 155–56, 156n19 China established in 1784 62
James McNeil Whistler’s interest in 1, fan depicting American flag with the flags
299 of other trading countries 61–62,
Juliette Drouet’s collection featured in her 62f2.11
Chinese room 150f6.1, 166, 167f6.5 and latticework of Chinese
motifs in Hugo’s chinoiserie room inspiration 57, 62
inspired by Chinese porcelains 171, recent publications, symposia, and
1716.11 exhibitions on 61n27, 61
porcelain set commissioned for the and Van Braam Houckgeest’s China
Society of the Cincinnati 32–33, Retreat 62–63, 64f2.12
34f1.7 See also Chinese latticework;
transfer-printed Brown-Westhead, Chippendale, Thomas; classical and
Moore & Co. plate 194–96, 196f7.8 Chinese aesthetics blended in
willow pattern plates 1–2 domestic interiors and possessions;
Cernuschi, Henri Crowninshield family; Derby, Elias
collection of Chinese bronzes 4 Hasket; Jefferson, Thomas; Madison,
conversion of his home into a James; Monticello; Salem; wallpaper
museum 218, 218–19n44, 230 Chinese latticework
and ethnographic terms used to recognize in colonial architecture after 1750
Chinese art 4, 221 50n5
Chambers, William on Josiah Quincy House 62
architecture and gardens claimed as at Monticello 45, 49–50, 55, 58f2.10,
authentic Chinese designs 55, 59, 60, 68–69
65 and Monticello’s benches 50, 51f2.6
on ruin and decay as themes common in at Montpelier 56f2.9, 57
Chinese garden design 270n5 as a motif in American landscapes that
Chapon, Alfred referred to China 57
distinctions received from foreign at Poplar Forest 50, 57, 58, 58f2.10
countries for the design of his Chinese Pavilion at Laeken Park
exhibits 129 Alexander Marcel’s design for it 284–86,
garden building from Yuanming Yuan 289n48
recreated at the Exposition Universelle and the “authenticity” of its production
in Paris (1867) 127–29, 128n15 and style 276, 280–81
wall elevation design for the Chinese, current status as part of the Museums of
Japanese, and Siamese exhibits at the the Far East (Musées
1867 exhibition 126–27, 129, 130f5.4 d’Extrême-Orient) 293
Charles, David 151, 164–65 external architectural features 269f10.1,
Chesneau, Ernest 125 270–71
China Trade and colonial and Early panel depicting the battle between the
Republican America Three Heroes and Lü Bu 277–79,
Chinese gongs imported by Jefferson for 278f10.5
Monticello 66–67, 297–98 rococo-inspired interior 289, 290f10.8
and the cosmopolitan aesthetic of jardins and the royal park commissioned by King
anglo-chinois 53, 69 Leopold II of Belgium 268, 269f10.1

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Index 311
Chinnery, George 7, 8f0.4 and the transplantation of the

chinoiserie as a pre-twentieth-century term chrysanthemum figure into the British
Charles Fourier’s use of it 8, 94n7 domestic vernacular 194–96, 195f7.7,
for creative products marked by fantasy, 196f7.8
playfulness, and bizarrerie 8–9, chrysanthemums
9n20, 150 blending of imagined Chinese and
Émile Littré’s definition of 8 Japanese aesthetics in the gardens
Larousse’s definition of 8, 214–15, 215f8.7 space of the British middle class
women, sensuality, home decoration, 180–81, 183–86, 197, 200–201
and superficiality associated with it and the British visual imagination
94–95, 214, 216, 219, 219, 222, 280 178–80, 183–86, 189–90, 192, 201
chinoiserie as term for a trend in Western “Chrysanthemum Indicum” in The
art most visible in the architecture and Botanical Magazine 187, 191f7.5
decorative arts of the eighteenth century evils of over-cultivation and the
and cross-cultural assimilation 241–42 necessity of chrysanthemum
and the cultural assimilation of reform 179–80
chrysanthemums into Victorian and the integration of Chinese and
landscape and literature 193, 201 Japanese cultivated garden flowers
double meaning in France until after into the English garden 180–81,
World War II 9, 213–14n24, 214, 183–86, 192–93
214n26 used as a narrative device in Haggard’s
eighteenth-century chinoiserie porcelain Colonel Quaritch V. C.: A Tale of
rooms in Germany and Holland 9, Country Life 198–200
166, 166n51, 168 Claretie, Jules
exclusive use in the twentieth century for on Hugo’s Hauteville House as a form of
an artistic trend only and not used for self-mythicization 162, 165
a trinket 9 on the Musée d’Ennery 224
Grove Dictionary of Art definition of 1 classical and Chinese aesthetics blended in
mid-nineteenth-century moving “beyond domestic interiors and possessions
chinoiserie” 125 16–17, 25–26, 40
mid-nineteenth-century revival of classical motifs on Chinese plates
chinoiserie decorative schemes 2, 30–32, 30f1.5
149–51, 154–55, 174–75 Crowninshield family chaises 36–40,
See also Maison de Victor Hugo— 37f1.9, 39n56, 39f1.10
chinoiserie room Clemenceau, Georges 221, 221n55, 222
Chippendale, Thomas 34–35 Cliveden “Pagoda” for the 1867 Exposition
chrysanthemum illustrations Universelle in Paris 1, 1n1
on a Spode Ceramic Works toy watering clothing and textiles
pot 192f7.6 American-made silk dressing gown 254,
asymmetrical and layered presentation 255f9.9
on a Brown-Westhead, Moore & Co. Chinese garments worn by European
plate 194–96, 196f7.8 women in the late nineteenth and
“Chrysanthemum” wallpaper by William early twentieth centuries 246, 248,
Morris 194–96, 195f7.7 252–53
in gardening manuals and botanical Chinese robes in Western fashion as
periodicals from the mid-Victorian material metaphors for cut-up
era 181, 182f7.2, 183f7.3, 187, 188f7.4, cultures 245, 248
191f7.5 France’s silk industry 136–37

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312 Index
clothing and textiles (cont.) and classical and Deist currents 22, 24

imperial dragon robe made in China copying and imitation
243, 244f9.4 Chinese dressing jackets made at home
Japanese-made silk dressing gowns 253, by English women 257, 258f9.12, 259,
253f9.8, 255 259f9.13
Japanese-made silk tea and forgery for profit 73–76
gown 256ff9.10–9.11 by Jean-Marius Fouque 137, 139
Liberty evening cape made from a Jiangnan architecture copied by the
Chinese skirt 248, 248f9.7 Tushanwan woodcarving
pre-embroidered fabric for construction workshop 276–79, 278ff10.4-10.5
into garments 27n32, 27–29, 243–46 mirror images 83–84, 87–88
“robe” as a term 250 replicas of Gilbert Stuart’s George
symbolic uses of Chinese dragon Washington portraits 72–73, 74f3.2,
robes 246, 248 76, 77
Takashimaya Japanese-made Chinese Siam’s appropriation of Western objects
coats 260, 261f9.14, 262f9.15, 263 and ceremonial trappings 139
Tibetan men’s robes (chubas) 245 and Takashimaya Japanese-made Chinese
and the turn-of-the-century interaction coats 260, 261f9.14, 262f9.15, 263–64
between chinoiserie and and the tension between mimicry and
japonisme 239–40, 255, 263–65 invention inherent in reverse glass
V&A European-Chinese-Japanese paintings 76, 78–79, 81–83, 88–91
robe 247, 247f9.6, 249–50, 264 and the V&A European-Chinese-Japanese
V&A robe claimed to have been found in robe 247f9.6, 248, 250, 264
the Summer Palace 235, 235n1, See also appropriation; authenticity and
236–38ff9.1–9.3, 239–40, 242–43n14, authentication; Western pictorial
242–45, 244f9.5, 252–54, 264 strategies (perspective, shading)
See also banyans; Derby waistcoat; Crosby, Alfred W. 187–88
kimonos; Liberty & Co.; Yokohama Crowninshield family
robes chaises that blend Roman and Greek
Clunas, Craig Neoclassicism with Asian
on the European construction of the aesthetics 36–40, 37f1.9, 39n56, 39f1.10
concept of “Chinese Art” 115, 219n45, colonial coastal and Caribbean trading
221 by 26
on gendered discourse associated with Curtis, William, “Chrysanthemum Indicum”
“Chinese Art” 230n78 introduced in his The Botanical Magazine
Codell, Julie F. 240 by 187, 191f7.5
collecting
and the validation of acquisitions not Delécluze, Étienne-Jean
recognized by Parisian art art from China, and nineteenth-century
institutions 213–14, 218–19 French painting 93–118
Victor Hugo’s popularizing of the and C. Toogood Downing’s
collecting of “antiques” 157–60 observations 96–98
See also export goods to the West; Grand Ceremony project, and his view of
museums the decline of Chinese art as prior the
Conant, Ellen 136 encounter with European
Confucian ideas techniques 109, 111–12
admired by Americans in the eighteenth on Lamqua 96–98, 106–7
century 19, 22 de Lille, Abbé 60

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Index 313
D’Ennery, Clémence (“Gisette”) Duchesne de Bellecourt, Gustave 133,

creation of the Musée d’Ennery attributed 136–37
to 204–5, 232 Ducuing, François 134
friendship with the Goncourt Du Halde, J.-B. 22, 23
brothers 205 Dumoulin, Louis 283
“monsters” collected by 216–18, 224 Dunn, Nathan
See also Musée d’Ennery exhibition of “One Thousand Things” 6,
Denon, Dominique Vivant 116, 117f4.10 7f0.3
Derby, Elias Hasket export goods collected by 6
biography written by his grandson Dutch East India Company 246
28–29 and Van Braam Houckgeest’s involvement
China trading ventures 26, 30–32 with 89–90
library of 23
See also Derby waistcoat East-West relations in the nineteenth century
Derby waistcoat as a dark period 2
Chinese figural scenes on a Western form See also Opium Wars
29f1.4, 30 education
construction of 27–29, 27n32 Greco-Roman ancients and the Chinese
and Derby’s personal interest in Chinese both viewed as models for the
decorative arts 26 emerging American nation 10,
Desgranges, Clémence. See D’Ennery, 24–25
Clémence (“Gisette”) impact of international exhibitions on
Deshayes, Emile popular interest in Chinese art 4, 6,
Clémence d’Ennery’s letter to 227n73 125, 298
as the first curator of the Musée d’Ennery and publications about China available to
209, 231 Americans 18–19, 19n8, 298
modification of the Musée d’Ennery’s education and museums
layout by 230–31, 231n84 and the status of Asian “art” 219–20,
Doré, Henri, S. J. 279–80, 279nn26–27 227n74
Downing, Charles Toogood 77, 96–98, teaching the French public about the
101–2, 104, 106 historical and aesthetic significance
dreams and dreaming of Asian objects as a goal of 221–22,
and the dreamworld of Hauteville Fairy 228
174 Egypt and Eyptian artifacts 40, 59, 116, 158
psychoanalytical view of dreaming as a embroideries. See clothing and textiles
process of bricolage 151–52, 165, 172, Engleheart, Rev. G. H. 179, 180
174–75 Eudel, Paul 157–58
Romantic interpretation of China as a export goods to the West
dreamscape 154–56, 175 and Canton’s export art studios 72–76
Yuanming Yuan described in terms of by classical motifs on Chinese plates
Hugo 153, 154n13 exported to Salem 30–32, 30f1.5
Drouet, Juliette exhibitions of 6, 132–33
Guernsey House, La Fallue 166 France’s silk industry 136–37
on Victor Hugo’s passion for antiquing Japanese production of export art for
158 European clients 134–35, 144, 252,
See also Hugo, Victor—Hauteville House; 259, 289
Maison de Victor Hugo—chinoiserie stores run by Chinese expatriates 6
room Takashimaya Japanese-made Chinese
Du Camp, Maxime 155 coats 259, 261f9.14, 262f9.15, 263–64

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314 Index
export goods to the West (cont.) internal power struggles in Japan between
and the term “trade painting” (“handhua”) the Tokugawa Regime and the
76–77n8 domains of Satsuma and Hizen
See also ceramics and porcelain; China 124, 125–26, 135
Trade and colonial and Early Siam’s attempt to delimit French and
Republican America; ivory; British colonialist activities in
lacquerware; reverse-painted glass; Southeast Asia 124, 137, 141–43
Salem; transnational exchange;
wallpaper Fan, Fa-ti 189
Exposition Universelle in Paris (1867) Federal-period furniture, and terminology
carnivalesque atmosphere of its opening established by Charles F. Montgomery
129–30 17n2
and the education of European audiences Ferrère, Raoul 128n15
“beyond chinoiserie” 125 Flaubert, Gustave 155
“Gallery of Machines” for the “France and Flour, Isabelle 142n53
its Colonies” display 126, 130f5.5 Frank, Caroline 17n3
general view of 126, 127f5.2 French Imperial Commission
invitation to participate from the French foreign countries invited to participate
Imperial Commission 125–26, 131 in the Universal Exhibition of 1867
iron and glass structure designed by 125–26
French engineer Frédéric Le Play L’Exposition universelle de 1867 illustrée
126, 129 published by 131, 134
Mexico’s pavilion 129, 134 French Impressionists and japonisme 214,
Exposition Universelle in Paris (1867)— 216, 217
Oriental section Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis.
Cliveden “Pagoda” made for 1, 1n1 See psychology and psychoanalysis
copy of the treaty from the Second Opium Friedländer, Saul 251
War and victory booty displayed at
the Chinese exhibit 125, 128–29, 131, gardens
133 combination of Chinese and Gothic styles
Jules de Lesseps service as the general in eighteenth-century picturesque
commission for most countries English gardens 163
in the Oriental section 126, European garden styles at Monticello 54
126n10 European garden styles at
review of the Chinese and Japanese Montpelier 55–57
exhibits by Gustave Duchesne de exotic botanicals in gardens and fictions of
Bellecourt 133, 136 the British middle class 178, 180–81,
“Salon Royal” for the Siamese exhibit at 183–86, 189–90, 193–94, 197, 200–201
122, 123f5.1 expansion of the gardening press from
See also Gréhan, Amédée; Gréhan, the mid-Victorian era 181
Amédée, Le Royaume de Siam Jiangnan garden design elements in the
Exposition Universelle in Paris (1867)— Chinese Pavilion at Laeken Park 291,
political subtext of the displays at 292f10.10
China’s involvement 144–45 landscapes produced when cultural and
and L’Exposition universelle de 1867 natural history intersect 184–85
illustrée published by the French and the visual imagination of British
Imperial Commission 131, 134 novels 178–79, 185–86
and French press accounts of the Chinese See also chrysanthemums; jardins
and Japanese exhibits 132–33 anglo-chinois

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Index 315
Gautier, Hippolyte 133 Gonse, Louis

Gautier, Judith (daughter of Théophile on the economic value of d’Ennery’s
Gautier) 157 collection 231n82
Gautier, Théophile 155, 157n24 promotion of the historical and aesthetic
on Hugo’s sale of his collection 158, significance of Asian objects 219,
158n28 222, 227–28, 228n75
poem “Chinoiserie” by 8 Gothic style
gazes and gazing combined with Chinese in eighteenth-
Edward Cossey’s absorptive gaze into a century architectural manuals 163
Japanese chrysanthemum 199–200 combined with Chinese references at
and the “gazing game” that animated Monticello 53–54, 64–65, 68
eighteenth-century sociability 87 combined with Chinese style at Hugo’s
gender Hauteville House 162–64, 166
Chinese garments worn by European integrated with cosmopolitan elements in
men and women in the late jardins anglo-chinois 59
nineteenth and early twentieth revival at Tushanwan 281–83, 291
centuries 246, 248 Green, Nancy 227n74
chinoiserie associated with women Gréhan, Amédée, and the article “Le Roi et
94–95, 214, 219, 219, 222 La Reine de Siam” published in Le Monde
and Clémence’s monsters 217–18 Illustré 142–43
expertise identified as a particularly male Gréhan, Amédée, Le Royaume de Siam
attribute in nineteenth-century modern-day websites documenting
French collecting 219–20n49, 222 participation in the Shanghai Expo
and the feminine reputation of the compared with 145
Musée d’Ennery 214–15, 223, 226, on Mongkut’s participation in the
230–32 Exposition Universelle in Paris
Gothic style gendered as masculine in (1867) 122, 124
contrast to Chinese as feminine 163 photogravures by the French artist
japonisme associated with Édouard Riou 122, 123f5.1, 137, 140f5.9,
femininity 219 142
Michel Calmann’s masculine collections Grootenboer, Hanneke 87
compared with the Chinese decor of Guérin, Jacques 9
“Mme Pierre Girod” 223–24 Guillaume Pauthier 4, 112n45
negative associations with Chinese Guimet, Emile, “NOTE” penned on the
masculinity 246 divide separating “science” from “art” by
Goncourt, Edmond de 220, 228
and Louis Gonse 227–28, 228n75 Guineaudeau, Bernard 230n80
Maison d’un artiste 227–28, 232 Guo Junlun 277n23
on public museums as “hospitals” or
“morgues” 226, 228 Haggard, Henry Rider
sensorial experience cultivated in his Allan and the Holy Flower 197
displays 227 Colonel Quaritch V. C.: A Tale of Country
Goncourt, Julesand Edmond de 207n11 Life 198–200
admiration for the Musée d’Ennery Gardener’s Year 200
205–6, 218 King Solomon’s Mines 198
on Chinese porcelain 155–56, 156n19 She 198
and Clémence d’Ennery 205, 205n5, 218 Harrison, Henrietta 272
Goncourt, Jules de, description of Clémence’s Hervey de Saint-Denys, Marie-Jean-Léon, d’
collection 205, 206–7 126, 128, 155, 157

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316 Index
Hevia, James L. 129 Japan

Hobsbawm, Eric 282 Catholic painting academy established by
Hokusai, Katsushika Giovanni Niccolò (1583) in 271
as a source for Chapon’s designs for the internal power struggles between the
Exposition Universelle 127 Tokugawa Regime and the domains of
The Great Wave as a global icon 250 Satsuma and Hizen in 124, 125–26,
Holy Childhood Association (L’Oeuvre de la 135
Sainte Enfance) 272, 273, 282 Japanese exhibits at the 1867 exhibition,
Honey, David B. 4 Capon’s designing of 126–27, 129,
Honour, Hugh 130f5.4
on the mid-nineteenth-century revival of Japanese-made silk dressing gowns 253,
chinoiserie decorative 253f9.8, 255
schemes 149–51 Meiji period 144, 252, 263
on the “vision of Cathay” formed in the and the production of export art for
eighteenth century 7, 174 European clients 134–35, 259
Houssaye, Henri 162 Takashimaya Japanese-made Chinese
Hugo, Victor coats 259, 261f9.14, 262f9.15,
bricolage associated with his writing 263–64
process 164–65 upsurge of Western interest in Japanese
catalogue of objects sold at his rue de la art and culture linked to moribund
Tour d’Auvergne apartment 158, interest in China 299
159f6.2, 160, 161f6.4 and the Western views of Japanese items
Le Pot Cassé (1875) 156–57, 156n20 as superior to Chinese products 134,
popularizing of collecting of antiques by 260
the middle-class French public See also banyans; japonaiseries as a term;
fostered by 157–58 japonisme; kimonos; Satsuma;
the Summer Palace described in a letter Yokohama robes
to Sir William Butler 153–54, japonaiseries as a term 213–14n24
154n13 presented as japoniaiseries 214
See also Maison de Victor Hugo and small collectible Japanese objects
Hugo, Victor—Hauteville House 213
and the combination of Chinese and japonisme
Gothic styles 162–64 femininity associated with it 219
viewed as a form of self-mythicization and French Impressionism 214, 216,
162, 165 217
Hunt, John Dixon 58–59n23 and the Goncourts 210
Huysmans, Joris-Karl 217 impact on “high” art and high-end
decorative arts 2, 214
Impey, Oliver R. 213–14n24 and interactions with chinoiserie in light
ivory of the cultural dynamics of fashion
and exports from China to the West 6, and the transnational 239–40, 255,
154n15, 207 263–65
paintings of single eyes on tiny roundels as more serious than chinoiseries 228
of 87 and Napoleon III’s government 136
and the targeting of export products for
Jacquemart, Albert 299, 299n7 Western consumers 135–36
Jacquemart, Nélie, as co-founder of the and Yokohama robes as fashion rather
Jacquemart-André house museum than as aesthetic statement 252
218, 218–19n44, 228 japonistes 210, 217, 219, 222, 227–28

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Index 317
jardins anglo-chinois as conservateur adjoint of Chinese

and architecture and gardens claimed as manuscripts at the Bibliothèque
authentic by William Chambers 55, Royale 99, 99–101n20
59, 60 on the datings in Delécluze’s Grand
at Catherine the Great’s Tsarskoye Selo Ceremony project 109, 111
60, 61 and Delécluze 99, 101, 101n21
comte d’Artois’s Bagatelle 60, 61
cosmopolitan aesthetic of 53, 58–61, 69 Kangxi emperor (r. 1662–1722) 1
Jardin de Monceau 58–59n23, 59, 60, 61, and Delécluze’s Grand Ceremony 109, 111
63 publication of the Mustard Seed Garden
of the prince of Kassel at Mulang 63n32 Manual during his reign 99, 99n18
and the proto-nationalist interpretations Kavanagh, Dennis J., S. J. 275, 276
of Carmontelle 58, 58–59n23 Kawakami, Akane 213–14n24
and the trans-Atlantic landscapes of Kim, Hae Jeon, and Marilyn R. Delong 260
Monticello, Montpelier, and Poplar kimonos
Forest 53–58, 64–69 fabric used for 136–37, 138f5.8
Water Garden at Cliveden 1, 1n1 and men’s banyans 246
Jefferson, Thomas and the presentation of goods in Liberty
“Benches for Porticoes and Terraces” catalogs 248, 252, 252n39
51f2.6 tea gowns produced for Western fashion
garden design as an interest of 50, 53–54 248, 257
and the gardens at Yuanming Yuan (Old use of kimono cloth widths in
Summer Palace) 65, 66 Takashimaya Japanese-made Chinese
“General Ideas for the Improvement of coats 263
Monticello” 54–55, 54n14 Yokohama robes distinguished from 252
“Notes for Railings on the Terraces” King, Amy M. 199
47f2.2 King, Michelle T. 272
See also Monticello; Poplar Forest Kitson, Peter 4
Jeremiah Lee Mansion 62 Koechlin, Raymond 223–24
Jesuit missionary presence in China Kracke, Waud 151, 172
and the aftermath of the First Opium War
271 lacquerware
Bowen’s maps of China drawn from American-made imitation lacquerware
surveys made by Jesuit 62
Missionaries 19–22, 20f1.1, 21f1.2 lacquer paintings displayed by Siam at the
and Salem’s Social Library collection Universal Exhibition of 1867 141
19, 22 lacquerware decoration viewed as belated
and their broader goal of accessing divine and vulgarized 2
knowledge through objectivity and and Western views of Japanese items as
curiosity 19–20, 279–81, 287 superior to Chinese products 134,
See also Attiret, Jean-Denis; Beck, 263
Aloysius; Kavanagh, Dennis J., S. J.; Lamqua (Guan Qiaochang) 96–98, 106–7
Tushanwan (French Jesuit Orphanage Langweil, Florine
workshop in Shanghai); Xujiahui on the dismantling of the “Salle Langweil”
Catholic community by the Musée Unterlinden in
Jones, Owen 280, 299 Colmar 220–21, 228
Josiah Quincy House 62 evaluation and promotion of Chinese art
Julien, Stanislas 155 210

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318 Index
Larousse, Pierre, definition of “Chinoiserie” panel with mandarin eating fish, inscribed
in The Grand dictionnaire universel du “SHU-ZAN” 171–72, 172f6.12, 174
XIXe siècle 8, 214–15, 215f8.7 red panel with incised and gold-painted
Larroumet, Gustave 160, 163–64 decoration and insert of a Chinese
latticework. See Chinese latticework shawl box lid 171, 171f6.11
Le Monde Illustré wall shelf supporting two Guanyin
article with the engraving “Le Roi et figures 168, 169f6.7
La Reine de Siam” published in wall with ceramic and porcelain
142–43, 143f5.10 collection 167f6.5
image of the Chinese pavilion at the Manet, Édouard 216, 217
Exposition Universelle in Paris (1867) Marcel, Alexandre 286
128f5.3, 131 design for the Chinese Pavilion at Laeken
Leopold II of Belgium Park 284–86
buildings commissioned for the royal and the Panorama of the World Tour
park of Laeken 268 (Panorama du Tour du Monde) 283
See also Chinese Pavilion at Laeken Park Sino-Japanese hybrid La Pagode (1897) on
Le Rouge, Georges-Louis 59 the Rue de Babylone in Paris 284
Levine, Gregory 269–70 Marot, Daniel, Nouvelles Cheminée faittes en
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 151, 164–65 plusieurs endroits de la Hollande et autres
Liberty & Co. Provinces 166, 167ff6.6–6.6, 168
evening cape made from a Chinese skirt Méry, Joseph 155, 175, 175n55
248, 248f9.7 Meyer, Henri, China Carved up by European
“Mandarin vestments” adapted for Nations 2, 3f0.1
furniture purpose 246 modeling. See Western pictorial strategies
presentation of goods in their (perspective, shading)
catalogs 248, 252, 252n39 Mongkut, King of Siam
Littré, Émile 8 and the article with the engraving “Le Roi
Loudon, John 181 et La Reine de Siam” published in
Le Nouvel Illustré 142–43, 143f5.10
McClintock, Anne 251 and the Paris Universal Exhibition of
McQueen, Alison 216n31 1867 122
Madison, James portrait by Jean-Marius Fouque 137, 139
Montpelier 56f2.8 Montgomery, Charles F. 35n45
plantation estate in Orange, Virginia terminology in his Winterthur catalog
50 17n2
“trans-Atlantic” responses to the Monticello
American landscape developed at Chinese gongs imported by Jefferson for
Montpelier by 50, 53, 55–57, 56f2.9 52ff2.7–2.8, 66–67, 297–98
Maison de Victor Hugo, location of 149 Chinese latticework at 45, 46f2.1, 48–50,
Maison de Victor Hugo—chinoiserie room 51f2.6, 51f2.6, 55, 58f2.10, 69
150f6.1 “Indian hall” at 49n4
bricolage of many elements in the wall and Jefferson’s knowledge of Chambers’s
decor of 12, 151, 166, 167ff6.6–6.6, designs 65–66
168 two-story temple/reconstructed garden
entrance wall 168, 169f6.8, 170ff6.9–6.10, pavilion at 64–65, 67–69, 68f2.13
171 watercolor by Aaron Vail 45, 48f2.5, 50
fabrication by Hugo for Juliette Drouet’s watercolor by Jane Braddick Peticola 45,
Hauteville Fairy 149, 165–66 47f2.3, 48f2.4, 50

via free access
Index 319
Morris, William and the rift between “science” and

“Chrysanthemum” wallpaper by 194–96, “art” 219–21, 228
195f7.7 Salem East India Marine Society 25
idealization of preindustrial craft by transformation of private residences into
282 public museums 218–19, 221
Mueggler, Erik 189 V&A catalog entry for Chinese dragon
Musée chinois in the Palais des Beaux-Arts robe claimed to have been found in
(1855) 108 the Summer Palace 235, 235n1, 240,
Musée chinois of Empress Eugénie at 242–43n14, 242–44, 264
Fontainebleau (1863) 298 V&A catalog entry for European-Chinese-
and the formative period of French Japanese Gown 249–50
museum building 224, 232 See also Musée d’Ennery; Musée Guimet;
as mere “curiosities” and not a “real Pavilion of Hidden Books
museum” display 224 Mustard Seed Garden: a Chinese Painter’s
as a symbol of Asian nations subjugated Manual (Jieziyuan Huazhuan or Jieziyuan
by the French empire 215–16, Huapu)
216n31 “Book of Rocks” from 103f4.4
Musée d’Ennery “Book of Trees” from 102f4.3
as an alternative to the Louvre and the Delécluze’s assessement of Chinese art
Musée Guimet 231–32 100–103, 106, 108–9, 111–12
as Clémence d’Ennery’s creation 204–5, editions of 99, 99n18, 99n20, 101
208, 208n12, 210, 230–32 model landscape composition from
eight categories of objects in its collection 104f4.5
209
floorplan of 212f8.6, 223 Napoleonic period
and the monster theme (chimères) in and eighteenth-century chinoiserie 116,
Clémence’s collection 207–8, 208f8.1, 155
209f8.2, 218 and the incorporation of Greco-Roman
opening in 1908 of 209, 213 forms 38
and the question of what a “real museum” Napoleon III
of Asian art should be 214–15, 217, coup d’état in December 1851 152
220–22, 224–25, 230–32 and Exposition Universelle in Paris
small sculptured items preferred by (1867) 125, 129, 142
208f8.1, 209f8.2, 210, 211f8.4, 211f8.3, 227 and japonisme 136
Musée Guimet 212f8.5 and Mexico 134
Musée d’Ennery archives at 208n12 and Siam 139, 141
Musée d’Ennery contrasted with 221, Niemcewicz, Julian Ursyn 63
224, 230–32
opening in 1889 by Émile Guimet 219 O’Malley, Therese 50n5
as a “real” museum 220, 230 Opium Wars
museums and Chinese exhibits at the Paris
as accessories to civic education 227n74 Universal Exhibition 125, 131, 133
aesthetic preference for “broken bodies” and ending of the dream of China
as a basis for Western museum cherished by the Romantics 2, 154,
collections 269–70 175
and the challenge of geographically and First Opium War (1839–42) 93, 271, 271,
culturally pinning down an object that 298
might more usefully be thought of as increasingly negative view of China in the
always in motion 264–65 West in the wake of 7, 118, 213, 246

via free access
320 Index
Opium Wars (cont.) Qing Dynasty

lootings in the aftermath of the Second and Chian’s involvement in international
Opium War 2, 128, 131, 133, 152–54, and national exhibits 144
215–16, 216n31, 269 degeneration of East-West relations over
Second Opium War (1856–60) 136, 152 the course of 2
dragon robes as part of official dress
Palace of Fontainebleau, displays of Chinese during 243, 244f9.4
articles in 216, 216n31 emperors. See Kangxi emperor
Paris Universal Exhibition. See Exposition (r. 1662–1722); Qianlong emperor
Universelle in Paris (1867) (r. 1735–1796)
Pauly, Philip J. 184 missionary engagements with 263, 271
Pavilion of Hidden Books (Shuyinlou) Taiping Rebellion and Boxer Uprising
as the former residence of Shen Chu during 263, 269, 276
277, 277n23
horizontal beam from 277–79, 278f10.4 Rado, Mei Mei 239–40, 257
Pawson, Eric 189 Rangan, Haripriya, Judith Carney, and Tim
Perrault, Charles 105–6, 115–16 Denham 189
Phillips, Henry, Flora Historica 190 Reed, Christopher 219
Pointon, Marcia 87 reverse-painted glass
Poplar Forest Fatqua, Madonna and Child with Joseph
Chinese latticework on the roof at 50, 78, 79f3.3
57, 58, 58f2.10 interiors with miniature mirrors
garden at 57–58 incorporated into them 85, 86f3.9,
as an “occasional retreat” 50, 53 87–88
porcelain. See ceramics and porcelain landscapes with mirrored space
Porter, David 163 incorporated into them 83, 85,
Prost, Lucie, and Chantal Valluy 207n11, 86f3.8
209, 210, 210n17, 213, 219n46, 231n82, Portrait of Catharina van Braam
231n84 Houckgeest 88–90, 89f3.10
psychology and psychoanalysis practice of 78–79, 81–83, 81f3.6
and dream imagery 172, 174 printmaking process compared with 81,
and the intellectual space of not knowing 83
240n7 replicas of Gilbert Stuart’s George
interiority 239, 253 Washington portraits 72–73, 74f3.2,
psychological disavowal and erasure 76, 77
250–52 reproduction of François Boucher’s
Jupiter and Calisto on glass 78, 80f3.4,
Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–1796) 81–82
abdication of 1 tension between mimicry and invention
architecture during the reign of. inherent in 76, 78–79, 81–83, 88–91
See Pavilion of Hidden Books of William Orme’s mezzotint on a
(Shuyinlou) Chinese export rosewood cabinet 83,
embroidered yardage during the period 84f3.7
of his reign 250 Ringmar, Erik 154, 154n13
Lord Macartney’s mission to the court of Riou, Édouard
187 portrait of the Siamese King Mongkut
patronage of the Jesuits 20 122, 140f5.9
Qinding Xiqing Gujian commissioned by Salon Royal 122, 123f5.1, 137
112 robes. See clothing and textiles

via free access
Index 321
Sabine, Joseph 187 Sullivan, Michael

Salem on nineteenth-century engagement with
Chinese objects collected prior to the Chinese art 4, 151n6
American Revolution in 17, 17n3 on the upsurge of interest in Japanese art
classical and Chinese aesthetics blended and culture 299
in domestic interiors and possessions Summer Palace. See Yuanming Yuan
of seaport elites 17, 25–26, 40
See also Bentley, Rev. William; Tachibana, Setsu, and Charles Watkins
Crowninshield family; Derby, 193
Elias Hasket textiles. See clothing and textiles
Salem East India Marine Society 25 Thomas, Greg M. 16n31, 133
Salem Social Library Thoms, Peter Perring 4, 5f0.2
Bowen’s Geography in 19–21, 20f1.1, 21f1.2 Tibetan objects
collection of the classics in 23 Tibetan mask for ritual dance 158,
English-language books on China in 22 159f6.3
Jesuit treatises translated into English Tibetan men’s robes (chubas) 246
in 19 Tinqua (Guan Lianchang) 98
Sandrart, Joachim von 105–6 Tissot, James 216, 217
Sargent, William R. 31 Tong Bingxue 145
Satsuma transnational exchange
earthenware exported by 135, 136f5.7 and the challenge to social order due to
presentation as a “modern,” trade-friendly the inherent fluidity of transnational
alternative to the feudal Tokugawa objects 240–42, 240n6, 256–57,
regime 125–26, 135 263–64
Seymour, Thomas, furniture produced for Chinese robes in Western fashion as
Elizabeth Derby West based on Sheraton’s material metaphors for cut-up
drawings 35, 35n45, 35n47 cultures 245, 246, 248
Shanghai Expo 143–45 and ecological imperialism 187–88
Sheraton, Thomas and the facade for King Leopold II’s
The Cabinet-maker’s and Upholsterer’s Chinese Pavilion 268–70, 283–86,
Drawing-Book 35, 35n45, 35n47, 288, 289, 291–92
36f1.8 and hybrid silk robes and gowns created
on chaise longue forms 37, 37n50 by Yokohama merchants 251–52, 255,
Grecian couch of 38 256ff9.10–9.11, 257, 264
Siam incorporation of classical and Chinese
and France’s colonial holdings in visual traditions into Federal-period
Southeast Asia 124n5, 141–42, 141n51 visual culture 32–33, 34f1.7
political subtext of its participation in the integration of Chinese and Japanese
Universal Exhibition of 1867 124, 137, cultivated garden flowers into the
141–44 gardens and fictions of the British
See also Mongkut, King of Siam middle class 186, 193–94, 197–201
sinology, establishment as a new academic and interactions between chinoiserie
discipline 4 and japonisme 239–40, 255,
Sloboda, Stacey 216 263–65
Staunton, Sir George Leonard 22 inventory of maritime commodities
Stuart, Gilbert, and replicas of his George itemized in the Portrait of Catharina
Washington portraits 72–73, 74f3.2, 76, Van Braam Houckgeest 88, 89f3.10
77 and the jardin anglo-chinois 59–61

via free access
322 Index
transnational exchange (cont.) promotion of woodcarvings made at

nineteenth-century artistic relations 275–76
between China and the West, and and Tushanwan ornamental elements
the complexity of artistic relations 268–70, 275–76, 284
between China and the West woodcarvings made at 273–74, 274f10.2,
297–99 275f10.3
and the pairing of Chinese and Western
forms in mid-eighteenth-century Universal Exhibition of 1867. See Exposition
European high-style Universelle in Paris (1867)
furnishings 34–40
plant exchange and dissemination rooted Vachon, Marius 4, 222–23, 224n64, 228
in cash crops 189 Van Braam Houckgeest, Andreas
and Takashimaya Japanese-made Chinese Everardus
coats 259, 261f9.14, 262f9.15, 263 account of Dutch ambassador Isaac
and “trans-Atlantic” responses to the Titsingh’s journey to Beijing 90
American landscape developed by China Retreat built near Philadelphia
Jefferson at Monticello and Poplar by 62–63, 64f2.12, 90
Forest 49–50, 53–55, 57–58, and the Dutch East India Company
64–69 (VOC) 89–90
and “trans-Atlantic” responses to the Portrait of Catharina van Braam
American landscape developed by Houckgeest commissioned by 88–90,
Madison at Montpelier 50, 53, 55–57, 89f3.10
56f2.9 Vasseur, Adolphe, S. J. 282
and the transplantation of the Verne, Jules
chrysanthemum figure into the British Around the World in Eighty Days (1873)
domestic vernacular 184–85, 194–96, 283
195f7.7, 196f7.8 on the Musée d’Ennery as a “real
and the V&A European-Chinese-Japanese museum” 217, 222
robe 245–46, 247f9.6, 248, 264 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
See also classical and Chinese aesthetics (1870) 197
blended in domestic interiors and Vernon House in Newport, Rhode Island
possessions 62
Turkey and Turkish artifacts 40, 59, 60
costumed servants at the Jardin de wallpaper
Monceau 63 “Chrysanthemum” wallpaper by William
and the “Oriental section” of the Universal Morris 194–96, 195f7.7
Exhibition of 1867 126 and export goods that traveled to the
Tushanwan (French Jesuit Orphanage West after the Treaty of Nanjing
workshop in Shanghai) (1842) 6, 62, 132
carving of wooden panels for the Chinese Washington, George
Pavlion at Laeken Park 268–71, as the American Cincinnatus 32–33
275–76, 280–83 concepts of empire and commerce
curriculum and pedagogy of 272–73 inextricably linked by 18
and the fostering of Chinese national Greco-Roman ideals in grand manner
identity 281, 283 portraits of him 16
Gothic revival at 281–83, 291 replicas of Gilbert Stuart’s George
Jiangnan architecture copied by 276–79, Washington portraits 72–73, 74f3.2,
278ff10.4-10.5 76, 77

via free access
Index 323
Western pictorial strategies (perspective, Xujiahui Catholic Community

shading) establishment by Jesuit Claude Gotteland
by Cantonese painters after Western following the Treaty of Whampoa
models 9–10, 171–72 (Huangpu) 271–72
Chinese woodblock prints 299n6 and the orphanage at Tushawan
and Delécluze’s assessment of the 272–73
practice and state of painting in
China 97–98, 102–9, 111–12 Yokohama robes and dressing gowns
hybrid images painted by Cantonese and engagement with japonisme as
painters after Western models fashion rather than as aesthetic
171–72, 173f6.13 statement 252–54, 256ff9.10–9.11,
Siam’s production of Christian export 257, 264
art 141 production by Western firms such as
and the view of China and its art Liberty 252, 252n39, 255
as static 105–6, 112, 115–16 Shiino Shobey’s conception of 252
and the work of Giotto, Fra Angelico, and Yuanming Yuan (Old Summer Palace)
Holbein 104–5 garden building recreated by Chapon
Whistler, James McNeill for the Exposition Universelle in
Chinese porcelains collected by 299 Paris (1867) 127–29, 128n15
and japonisme 214 Jefferson’s knowledge of the emperor’s
La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine 1 gardens at 65, 66
Wong, Winnie 73n3, 75, 282 looting and destruction of 2, 128, 131, 133,
Wood, Gillen D’Arcy 186 152–54, 215–16, 216n31, 239
V&A robe claimed to have been found in
Xiqing Guijian or Qinding Xiqing Gujian 235, 235n1, 236–38ff9.1–9.3, 239–40,
(Imperially Ordained Mirror of 242–45, 242–43n14, 244f9.5, 254,
Antiquities Prepared in the Xiqing 264
Hall) 112, 112n45, 116 Victor Hugo’s description of it 153–54

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Beyond Chinoiserie 2018

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Beyond Chinoiserie

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Chuxiong George Wei (University of Macau)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ewcd

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Names: Chu, Petra ten-Doesschate, editor. | Milam, Jennifer Dawn, 1968–

Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Introduction: Beyond Chinoiserie 1

1 The China Trade and the Classical Tradition in Federal America 16

2 Jefferson’s Interest in China and the Gongs of Monticello 45

3 Copying in Reverse: China Trade Paintings on Glass 72

4 Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Art from China, and Nineteenth-Century

5 Staging China, Japan, and Siam at the Paris Universal Exhibition of

6 Victor Hugo and the Romantic Dream of China 149

7 Chrysanthemums and Cultivated Visions of the Victorian Garden 178

8 The Musée d’Ennery and the Shifting Reception of Nineteenth-Century

9 Fashion, Chinoiserie, and the Transnational: Material Translations

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

10 From Shanghai to Brussels: the Tushanwan Orphanage Workshops and

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

0.1 Henri Meyer (French, 1844–1899), China Carved up by European Nations.

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

2.1 South Terrace, Monticello, Charlottesville, VA. [photo: Jennifer Milam] 46

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

7.3 “W. Luxford,” in Percy S. Follwell, The Book of Chrysanthemum (London: J. Lane,

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Willow pattern plates; China trade paintings; James McNeill Whistler’s La

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004387836_002

Perhaps the lack of interest in the nineteenth-century artistic exchange

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

While nineteenth-century scholarly interest in China was ever expanding,

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

figure 0.4 George Chinnery, Riverscape, c. 1840? Bonham Sale,

16 See chapter 4 in this volume, especially note 7.

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

chinoiserie were gradually supplanted by neoclassicism—Johnston argues

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

varieties, Chang argues that it echoes in interesting ways the contemporane-

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

The China Trade and the Classical Tradition in

Federal America has long been recognized as the foundational period of

1 For an example of scholarship connecting neoclassical decorative arts with American

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004387836_003

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam - 978-90-04-38783-6

4 Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Art from China, and Nineteenth-Century

5 Staging China, Japan, and Siam at the Paris Universal Exhibition of

6 Victor Hugo and the Romantic Dream of China 149

7 Chrysanthemums and Cultivated Visions of the Victorian Garden 178

8 The Musée d’Ennery and the Shifting Reception of Nineteenth-Century

9 Fashion, Chinoiserie, and the Transnational: Material Translations

10 From Shanghai to Brussels: the Tushanwan Orphanage Workshops and

0.1 Henri Meyer (French, 1844–1899), China Carved up by European Nations.

2.1 South Terrace, Monticello, Charlottesville, VA. [photo: Jennifer Milam] 46

7.3 “W. Luxford,” in Percy S. Follwell, The Book of Chrysanthemum (London: J. Lane,

16 See chapter 4 in this volume, especially note 7.

1 For an example of scholarship connecting neoclassical decorative arts with American

13 Emanuel Bowen, Complete System of Geography, 2 vols. (London, 1747).

15 Confucius, Morals, 2nd ed. (London: F. Fayram, 1724).

36 Conversation with Emily Murphy, October 9, 2015.

1 Gardiner Hallock, “Jefferson’s Terrace Railings to be Reconstructed,” Monticello Blog &