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How Chinese porcelain changed the face of European design
Without a doubt, blue-and-white porcelain has proved to be the most successful and longest-lasting decorative accessory in Western interior design. In chinoiserie, it has always been the jewel in the crown, the constant North Star in the ever-changing decorative firmament. Once more valuable than gold, no princely collection of porcelain was ever considered too large. Although far more accessible today, the aesthetic value of a large blue-and-white ginger jar is no less high.
When trade with the Far East was first established by Portugal in the sixteenth century, the arrival of new materials ensured that Western visual and material culture would never be the same. Just as spices revolutionized Europe’s culinary experience and silks upended the native textile industries, porcelain transformed practices of collecting and display. The composition of this remarkably hard and lustrous material remained unknown, and it quickly became synonymous with its equally mysterious land of origin: China.
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The ordeal of transporting such a fragile luxury halfway across the world is a complex tale of pirate adventurers, sea battles, intrigue, smuggling, and colonization. The far-flung discoveries of Columbus, Vasco de Gama, and Magellan made Spain and Portugal the richest nations in Europe. Profit followed the Eastern trade wherever it went, and the transit of goods across the Pacific made Mexico City one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Well-appointed New World homes were filled with porcelain, silks, and lacquer siphoned off on their way to Spain.
In 1604 the newly founded Dutch East India Company captured the Santa Catarina, a Portuguese ship containing some 100,000 pieces of porcelain, and continued to wrest the Eastern trading monopoly out of Iberian control as the new century progressed. This had a lasting impact on Dutch prosperity and culture, raising Amsterdam out of the marshes and onto the global stage.
Porcelain was more readily available in Holland than anywhere else, becoming fully and fundamentally absorbed into Dutch art. There are few still life paintings without a Chinese cup or bowl, a favorite subject demonstrating the artist’s ability to capture the uniquely translucent gloss and perilous, precious fragility of the material. So insatiable was the demand for porcelain that when direct trade with China was briefly interrupted by dynastic upheaval in 1644, cities such as Delft turned their entire economies toward producing an imitation product that has come to permanently link Holland with blue and white.
Real Chinese porcelain remained in the exclusive possession of the very wealthiest families, but as collections grew, these precious specimens were moved out of closely guarded curiosity cabinets and onto highly visible shelves and mantelpieces. The fashion for displaying porcelain en masse was spearheaded by Amalia van Solms, Princess Consort of Orange, and found ready imitators. Large porcelain collections became a key domestic status symbol, resulting in the development of increasingly extravagant methods of display. These ranged from pyramidal shelves in the corner of a room to the all-out explosion of wall brackets, which the German royals particularly embraced and executed most spectacularly in the Porcelain Cabinet of Berlin’s Charlottenburg Palace.
In 1669 news reached France of a vast pagoda constructed entirely out of porcelain in the Chinese city of Nanking. This magnificent structure captivated the imagination of society and inspired Louis XIV to initiate an unusual building project the following year: the Porcelain Trianon, a fully furnished garden lodge on the grounds of Versailles where the king and his mistress could enjoy some privacy. Structurally, it was a French-style building, but the entire roof was covered in tiles and vases sculpted in blue-and-white faience to imitate Chinese porcelain.
The arrival of the highly theatrical Siamese Embassy at Versailles in 1686 delivered 1,500 pieces of Chinese porcelain into the royal collection, prompting competitive acquisitions among courtiers titillated by this taste of Eastern glamour. The most popular pieces in France were monochromatic wares, which were also the rarest, as the Chinese did not produce them for export. Groupings in deep blues, celadons, and dark reds were further enhanced by the practice of adding ormolu (gilt-bronze) mounts. Usually consisting of a base and a lid with scrolling handles, which added both value and function to otherwise purely decorative objects, these mounts converted the pieces into ewers, perfumiers, or candelabra.
In 1710 the secret to producing true porcelain in Europe was finally cracked at Meissen in Saxony under the patronage of Augustus the Strong. This breakthrough enabled the concept of a chinoiserie porcelain room to flourish, reaching an apogee in the Kingdom of Naples, where Augustus’s granddaughter had a boudoir constructed entirely out of the material. Maria Amalia of Saxony’s famous room is made from interlocking panels of white porcelain, molded together with colorful Chinese figures and flowers, all produced by her own Royal Porcelain Factory of Capodimonte. It was so successful that when Maria married Charles III of Spain and moved to Madrid, she took the entire factory with her and had the room faithfully reproduced at the Palace of Aranjuez.
The infectious mania for collecting porcelain crossed the English Channel when Mary Stuart and her husband, Willem III of Orange, left Holland to inherit the English throne in 1689. They invited the leading French designer Daniel Marot to produce plans for new apartments at Hampton Court Palace featuring walls covered with thousands of plates and vases. Soon English ladies were as infatuated as their European counterparts, as ridiculed in a 1725 poem by John Gay: “China’s the passion of her soul / A cup, a plate, a dish, a bowl / Can kindle wishes in her breast / Inflame with joy, or break her rest.”
Although England had been relatively late to the Eastern trade, the country made up for the delay with an astonishing commercial success unparalleled in history. The Honourable East India Company, which was founded in 1600, took to the seas with such vigor that by the 1800s the joint-stock venture had conquered the entire Indian subcontinent with a private army that controlled half the world’s commerce. The importation of an average half-million pieces of porcelain annually during the eighteenth century triggered a trickle-down effect from the upper to the middle classes.
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Acquisition of fine china was encouraged by the widespread habit of tea drinking, which gripped the English more strongly than elsewhere. The new-fangled “China Drink” was naturally best enjoyed in Chinese vessels. Like porcelain, tea was an expensive luxury, and it required so much paraphernalia to be served elegantly that an English writer warned that “a tradesman had better trust his hand in the mouth of a lion . . . than his purse in the hands of his wife, that’s a tea drinker.” A popular design for teacups and dishes has always been the chinoiserie Willow pattern — the most consistently reproduced pattern of all time.
Chinoiserie as a decorative style owes its very existence in large part to the passion for collecting real Chinese porcelain; the great distance and political isolation of China disallowed any experience of Asian culture other than through its exported manufactures. Porcelain pieces remain the pride of any Chinese-inspired interior scheme, as well as pro-viding a constant resource for countless forms and patterns conjured up by European arti-sans over the centuries.
Dragons & Pagodas: A Celebration of Chinoiserie by Aldous Bertram, published by Vendome Press.
Erik Kvalsvik1/7An efficient yet immensely charming display of Chinese export porcelain at Alvøen Manor, Norway.
Alamy2/7This unique pyramidal ceiling inside Lisbon’s Santos Palace (now the French Embassy), features 261 carefully suspended Ming dynasty plates, collected during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the powerful Lencastre family.
Hakan Groth3/7The remarkable, highly inventive porcelain stove in the Chinese Salon at Sweden’s Drottningholm Palace was presented to King Gustaf III upon his visit to the Russian Imperial Porcelain Factory outside St. Petersburg in 1777.
Aldous Bertram4/7Tiny vases hang like droplets beneath a groaning array of blue-and-white porcelain over the entrance to the Porcelain Cabinet at Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin.
Aldous Bertram5/7A large Chinese temple jar sumptuously painted with pheasants among sprays of blue and gold peonies sits in a fireplace in Berlin’s Charlottenburg Palace. In the background, the chimney is lined with blue-and-white Delft tiles, a tin-glazed earthenware produced in Europe to imitate porcelain, which was at that time an exclusively Chinese product.
Aldous Bertram6/7The seventeenth-century Dutch designer Cornelis Pronk made several iconic designs for porcelain that were painted in China and sold in Europe. The original designs are shown here alongside surviving plates.
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