Enfilade

Designed by Jean Jans, the Younger (active 1668–1723), after Albert Eckhout (c. 1610–1666), The Battle of the Animals, detail, Gobelins Manufactory, ca. 1723 (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, WA1901.1).

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Next week at Harvard:

Mei Mei Rado | European Tapestries at the Qing Court: Global Textiles and a Cross-cultural Medium
Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, Cambridge, 7 November 2023, 6pm

This presentation draws from Dr. Rado’s forthcoming book The Empire’s New Cloth: Cross-cultural Textiles at the Qing Court (Yale University Press, early 2025). Large-scale pictorial tapestries ranked among the most precious art forms in the early modern period. While their circulations and functions among European courts have been well studied, less known are their journeys to China and subsequent roles in stimulating new developments in Qing imperial arts.

The first part of this talk uncovers the history of French tapestries that entered the Qing court during the eighteenth century as diplomatic gifts and trade goods, including the first and second Tentures chinoises woven by the Beauvais Manufactory and the Tenture des Indes made by the Gobelins Manufactory. Their trajectories reconstructed from both the French and Qing sides offer a window into the complexity of global networks and contingency of cultural encounters. These tapestries’ themes, marked by idealized exoticism compressing distance and time, functioned as a kind of diplomatic lingua franca adaptable to express divergent cultural and political visions. The second part of the presentation examines how European tapestries gave rise to a new type of textile art form in the Qing imperial workshops and an innovative mode for furnishing the palace interiors. The medium’s architectonic tension and interactive visual potential enabled the Qianlong emperor to envision his own physical presence in relation to the tapestry in space and offered him new ways to reenact narratives charged with imperial significance.

Mei Mei Rado is Assistant Professor at the Bard Graduate Center, specializing in textile and dress history, with a focus on China and France from the 18th through early 20th century. Before joining BGC, Dr. Rado was Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles at LACMA, having previously held fellowship positions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, and the Palace Museum in Beijing.