Two meticulously sculpted, milky-white elephant heads jut out from the neck of each vase. The sheer amount of surrounding rococo detail—feathers, faux beads, and flourishes of gold trim—overwhelms. Still, one can only imagine the effect of candlelight catching the glisten of pink-and-white painted enamel as the vases were displayed in an eighteenth-century interior on a mantelpiece or commode alongside porcelains of different shapes, as part of a set of matching wares, or garniture.
How do the vases produce an uneasy sensory overload by mingling different orders of chinoiserie imagery, animal and human, sculpted and painted? What can a decorative object tell us about the history of East—West exchanges as they shaped the emergence of new racial thinking in the eighteenth century? Even a pair of vases could, from the interior of an elite bedchamber or drawing room, reference the larger flows of transcontinental trade and its discontents.
Far from being passive furnishings, objects orient consumers in relation to each other and their environment. We get to know three-dimensional things by handling them, arranging them, even seeing them reproduced in visual art and literature. In the eighteenth century, porcelain and chinoiserie artifacts were generally collected and comprehended as pieces of larger sets.
The making of a metaphor is itself a process rife with decontextualizing and recontextualizing one thing in relation to another, or in the case of metonymy, one part in relation to a whole. Yet the act of isolating and closely scrutinizing a representative example can illuminate the ways that intercultural knowledge coalesces, assumes material form, and accrues racial meanings over time.
In , during the reign of Augustus II, Meissen became the first European factory to successfully imitate Chinese hard-paste porcelain. Economic and cultural historians have long studied how Chinese technology spurred European manufacturing in the eighteenth century, and porcelain design was part of this trend in imitating and attempting to outperform China. An Asian female figure with hair tied into horizontal plaits stands above a cauldron of billowing incense, while a juvenile holds a leafy parasol above her head and a man places a basket of flowers at her feet.
