ABSTRACT
Historical focus on chinoiserie has tended to isolate it as a mid-eighteenth-century phenomenon, its aesthetic swansong being the Prince Regent’s Chinese folly at Brighton, completed in 1822. This has resulted in the appropriation of the term to describe the taste in decorative arts of that period rather than a wide ranging phenomenon that began in the fourteenth century and which has continued in various manifestations ever since. From the very beginnings of the West’s encounter with China, interpretations of the country and its people have resulted in a multiplicity of intellectual and emotional responses.1 These have altered according to cultural and political requirements over the centuries. The China described by Marco Polo for example, was a beguiling contrast to medieval Europe, a place of wise despotic government, elaborate manners, moral certainties and prodigious riches. Polo served Kublai Kahn in the Mongolian government from 1275-1292. His Description of the World or Travels of Marco Polo, published early in the fourteenth century, served to verify the legends and vague notions of the remote Orient which had been known to the Romans as the source of precious silks but had faded from the European mind during the course of the Dark Ages.2 Polo’s book was to be the exemplar for centuries of romantic conjurings and speculations about the mythical land of Far Cathay while at the same time overseas exploration began to produce hard evidence of China. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Portugal, Spain and Holland had the monopoly of trade with the Far East so products from the Orient reached Europe by way of their ships. English means of commerce were less than straightforward. Thanks to the official licence of Queen Elizabeth I, ‘many a stately Spanish carrack weighed down with eastern merchandise’ was diverted to English shores by pirates.3 The eventual establishment of a British trading post in Canton in 1637 increased evidence of China’s legendary wonders, but Chinese export restrictions meant the merchandise was limited and therefore highly prized. It was because of this that the best of Europe’s craftsmen were employed in creating decorative pieces à la façon de la Chine, initially for the French court at Versailles. They produced embroidered silks, blue-and-white porcelain, carved ivories and lacquered furniture, objets d’art which had the same associative value as the rare and exotic things imported by the trading companies. In 1670, Louis XIV presented his mistress, Madame de Montespan, with a Chinese
1 See Jonathan D. Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998).
