New Book | The Art of the Chinese Picture-Scroll
Published by Reaktion and also distributed by The University of Chicago Press:
Shane McCausland, The Art of the Chinese Picture-Scroll (London: Reaktion Books, 2023), 299 pages, ISBN: 978-1789147964, £35 / $50.
The Chinese picture-scroll, a long painting or calligraphic work held within a horizontal scrolling mount, has been China’s pre-eminent aesthetic format for the last two millennia. This first extended history of the picture-scroll explores its extraordinary longevity, and its adaptability to social, political, and technological change. The book describes what the picture-scroll demands of a viewer, how China’s artists grappled with its cultural power, and how collectors and connoisseurs have left their marks on scrolls for later generations to judge. The return to mass appeal of scrolling—a media technology that seemed long outdated yet persists in our digital age—provides urgent and fascinating context to this book.
Shane McCausland is Percival David Professor of the History of Art at SOAS University of London. His many books include The Mongol Century: Visual Cultures of Yuan China, 1271–1368 (Reaktion Books, 2014), and he has curated numerous exhibitions in Europe, North America, and China.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction
1 On Origins and Uses over the First Millennium
2 Inscribing the Artist and the Collector: The Picture-Scroll in the Song–Liao–Jin Period
3 Handscrolls in Mongol Palaces
4 Musing on Shadows: Reading the Ming Picture-Scroll
5 Qing: Reading the ‘Baroque’ Handscroll
6 Modernist Uses of the Chinese Picture-Scroll
7 The Medium of Silent Poetry in the Late Modern World
References
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Index
New Book | East Asian Aesthetics and the Space of Painting
Isabelle Tillerot’s Orient et ornement: l’espace à l’oeuvre ou le lieu de la peinture was published in 2018; an English edition will soon be available from The Getty:
Isabelle Tillerot, East Asian Aesthetics and the Space of Painting in Eighteenth-Century Europe, translated by Chris Miller (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2024), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1606067970 (paperback), $70.
This volume offers the first critical account of how European imports of East Asian textiles, porcelain, and lacquers, along with newly published descriptions of the Chinese garden, inspired a revolution in the role of painting in early modern Europe. With particular focus on French interiors, Isabelle Tillerot reveals how a European enthusiasm for East Asian culture and a demand for novelty transformed the dynamic between painting and decor. Models of space, landscape, and horizon, as shown in Chinese and Japanese objects and their ornamentation, disrupted prevailing design concepts in Europe. With paintings no longer functioning as pictorial windows, they began to be viewed as discrete images displayed on a wall—and with that, their status changed from decorative device to autonomous work of art. This study presents a detailed history of this transformation, revealing how an aesthetic free from the constraints of symmetry and geometrized order upended paradigms of display, enabling European painting to come into its own.
Isabelle Tillerot is an independent scholar of eighteenth-century French art.
Exhibition | The Palace of Versailles and the Forbidden City
From the press release (6 March 2023), from the Château de Versailles:
The Palace of Versailles and the Forbidden City: French-Chinese Relations in the 18th Century
Palace Museum, Forbidden City, Beijing, 1 April — 30 June 2024
Hong Kong Palace Museum, 18 December 2024 — 4 May 2025
Fontaine à parfum, porcelaine à glaçure céladon craquelé et céramique brune, Jingdezhen, début de l’époque Qianlong (1736–1795), monture en bronze doré, Paris, vers 1743 (Château de Versailles).
Initially scheduled for 2020 and postponed due to the pandemic, the exhibition entitled The Palace of Versailles and the Forbidden City: French-Chinese Relations in the 18th Century will run from 1 April 2024 at the Forbidden City’s Palace Museum. On 6 April 2023, Palace of Versailles Chair Catherine Pégard and Xudong Wang, Chair of the Forbidden City’s Palace Museum, met at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing to reiterate their enthusiasm in seeing this joint project through to completion before Presidents Xi and Macron.
The Palace of Versailles is honoured to be working with the Forbidden City’s Palace Museum in Beijing in organising this exhibition surrounding the relationship between France and China in the 18th century and due to run from 1 April to 30 June 2024. The exhibition is a more in-depth version of the one that was rolled out at the Palace of Versailles in 2014 to mark fifty years of diplomatic relations between the two countries, initially sparked by General de Gaulle on 27 January 1964.
Louis XIV put in place in the context of his relations with Emperor Kangxi, which took the form of initiatives such as French Jesuits dispatched to China in 1685 to serve at the Chinese court as mathematicians to the King. This process paved the way for the two nations to begin forging a relationship built on mutual trust and admiration, one that remains unfamiliar to many, and lasted until the 18th century. This special diplomatic relationship and mutual respect helped usher in French appreciation for modern China and Chinese artistry.
In France, the court’s love affair with China and Chinese art shines through in a variety of different ways, and four key phenomena: importing Chinese artworks and pieces; altering certain imported artworks, notably by adding gilt-bronze frames to porcelain pieces and using lacquered panels on French furniture; imitating Chinese products, such as the frenzied quest to track down the secret to making kaolin porcelain; and Chinese art’s marked influence on French art, particularly in the field of decorative arts. The exhibition will illustrate how Chinese art served as a bottomless source of inspiration for French artists and intellectuals, in everything from painting, art objects, and interior design to architecture, landscape design, literature, music and the sciences.
Meanwhile, in the Chinese court, many French Jesuits also followed after the arrival of the ‘Mathematicians of the king’ sent by Louis XIV in China, some of whom served the court for a long time. With them as the intermediary, French culture had an important influence on many fields such as science, art, architecture, medicine, mapping and so on in the Qing court. Therefore, juxtaposed with French Exhibits in the Exhibition are also clocks, scientific instruments, prints, porcelain, bronzes, books, and other objects from the Palace Museum collection, directly reflecting the achievements of exchanges and cultural exchanges between the two sides.
The exhibition in Beijing will bring together a selection of pieces taken from the Palace of Versailles and Palace Museum collections, designed to serve as broader examples of the veritable fascination for Chinese art that took root at the court of Versailles and among French enthusiasts. It showcases the efforts and achievements made by China and France to achieve mutual understanding and cultural exchanges in the 18th century, and vividly restores the splendid cultural and artistic exchanges between the two countries for more than a century.
Exhibition commissioned by Marie-Laure de Rochebrune, Curator at the Palace of Versailles, and Guo Fuxiang, Curator at the Palace Museum.
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Note (added 18 December 2024) — The posting was updated to include the Hong Kong venue.
New Book | The Borders of Chinese Architecture
From Harvard UP:
Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, The Borders of Chinese Architecture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022), 448 pages, ISBN: 978-0674241015, $57.
An internationally acclaimed expert explains why Chinese-style architecture has remained so consistent for two thousand years, no matter where it is built.
For the last two millennia, an overwhelming number of Chinese buildings have been elevated on platforms, supported by pillars, and covered by ceramic-tile roofs. Less obvious features, like the brackets connecting the pillars to roof frames, also have been remarkably constant. What makes the shared features more significant, however, is that they are present in Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and Islamic milieus; residential, funerary, and garden structures; in Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and elsewhere. How did Chinese-style architecture maintain such standardization for so long, even beyond China’s borders?
Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt examines the essential features of Chinese architecture and its global transmission and translation from the predynastic age to the eighteenth century. Across myriad political, social, and cultural contexts within China and throughout East Asia, certain design and construction principles endured. Builders never abandoned perishable wood in favor of more permanent building materials, even though Chinese engineers knew how to make brick and stone structures in the last millennium BCE. Chinese architecture the world over is also distinctive in that it was invariably accomplished by anonymous craftsmen. And Chinese buildings held consistently to the plan of the four-sided enclosure, which both afforded privacy and differentiated sacred interior space from an exterior understood as the sphere of profane activity. Finally, Chinese-style buildings have always and everywhere been organized along straight lines. Taking note of these and other fascinating uniformities, The Borders of Chinese Architecture offers an accessible and authoritative overview of a tradition studiously preserved across time and space.
Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt is Professor of East Asian Art and Curator of Chinese Art at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Chinese Architecture: A History (2019). Her work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, Getty Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society.
c o n t e n t s
Preface
Introduction: The Borders Problem
1 Chinese Architecture before China
2 Han
3 Architecture before Reunification
4 Seeing the Sixth Century as the Seventh and Eighth
5 Tang Internationalism
6 Defining Chinse Architecture and Borders during Liao
7 Western Xia, Song, Japn, Jin
8 A Revisionist History of Yuan Architecture
9 Ming
10 The Long Eighteenth Century
Afterword
New Report | Survey of Asian Ceramics, National Trust for Scotland
Large dish, porcelain, painted in underglaze blue, iron-red, and gold, Imari-type palette, made in Arita kilns, Japan, Edo period, c.1700–20
(National Trust for Scotland)
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The report was released early this year; Patricia Ferguson provides an introduction here. The full report is available (for free) as a PDF file here.
Patricia Ferguson, Survey of Asian Ceramics in the Collection of the National Trust for Scotland (National Trust for Scotland, 2023), 162 pages.
Between 2017 and 2019 the National Trust for Scotland delivered Project Reveal, a major collections project inventorying a collection of over 140,000 objects, distributed across 50 properties throughout Scotland. Encompassing major object groupings in the areas of fine and decorative art, household furniture and domestic life, these collections chart the experiences of people living in Scotland through 500 years of Scottish history, as well as demonstrating Scotland’s past relationships with the rest of the world.
This survey of Asian ceramics is a natural successor to Project Reveal. It delves deeper into the history and significance of a collection of circa 1,700 ceramic items. Undertaken by the independent researcher Patricia F. Ferguson this report sets out the survey findings, drawing together disparate existing research on the subject and contributing new collection research and knowledge. Focusing on key collections at nine different National Trust for Scotland properties, the report positions the collections within the broader context of historic ceramic production and collecting, with attention to influences such as: fashion and the role of royalty; production in and trade with China and Japan; and the growth of and changes in demand.
Patricia Ferguson is a ceramic specialist with an MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. She has worked in London at the British Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum, and as Honorary Adviser on Ceramics to the National Trust (England, Wales, and Northern Ireland). She published Ceramics: 400 Years of British Collecting in 100 Masterpieces in 2016.
Conference | Exploring the Histories of Chinese Collections in Europe
Gotha Research Centre (Das Forschungszentrum Gotha ), Universität Erfurt, Thuringia (large grey building on the left).
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From ArtHist.net:
From Cabinets to Museums: Exploring the Histories of Chinese Collections in Europe
Gotha Research Centre, University of Erfurt, 10–11 January 2024
Organized by Emily Teo
An international workshop at the Gotha Research Centre of the University of Erfurt, in cooperation with Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein Gotha
Chinese objects were acquired by European collectors for a variety of reasons: ranging from the aesthetic decoration of their residences, to using objects as a source of knowledge about foreign cultures. This workshop brings together historians and museum professionals to discuss the complex histories of Chinese collections in European contexts. Central to the workshop is the East Asian collection in Gotha. Around 1800, Duke August of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1772–1822) founded the Chinese Cabinet, a rich and diverse collection of East Asian objects in Gotha’s Friedenstein Palace. Themes that will be explored include the global circulation of artwork, China-Mode in 18th-century Europe, and the practices of collecting and displaying Chinese objects in European collections. The goal of the workshop is to historicize these collections and to explore their interconnections, leading to new directions for research on East Asian collections in Europe. Registration and contact: Emily.teo@uni-erfurt.de
Shoes from the East Asian collection in Gotha, founded by Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg as the Chinese Cabinet around 1800 (Schloss Friedenstein, inv. no. ETH14S).
w e d n e s d a y , 1 0 j a n u a r y
11.00 Tour of the Ducal Museum*
• Agnes Strehlau (Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein Gotha)
14.00 Greeting
• Martin Mulsow (Gotha Research Centre, University of Erfurt)
• Tobias Pfeifer-Helke (Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein Gotha)
14.15 Introduction
• Emily Teo (Gotha Research Centre)
14.30 Session 1 | Historical Collections
• Jean Theodore Royer (1737–1807) and His Chinese Collection: Thoughts on His Objectives and Collecting Strategies — Jan van Campen (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
• Noblesse Oblige — Francois Coulon (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes)
15.40 Coffee break
Object Workshop
16.15 Viewing East Asian Artefacts*
• Kerstin Volker-Saad and Agnes Strehlau (Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein Gotha)
18.00 Evening Lecture
• Traces of Guangzhou: Craftsmanship, Material (Dis)Connections and Chinesische Kabinette — Anna Grasskamp (University of Oslo)
19.00 Workshop dinner, for invited participants
t h u r s d a y , 1 1 j a n u a r y
9.30 Object Workshop
• Viewing Chinese Export Albums* — Ulrike Eydinger (Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein Gotha)
11.00 Coffee break
11.15 Session 2 | Transcultural Objects
• Gemstone Potted Landscapes: A Case Study for Exploring the 18th- and 19th-Century China-Europe Transcultural Materiality and Craftsmanship — Wen-ting Wu (National Taiwan University)
• From ’18 Stuck grose Vasen’ to ‘national wertvolles Kulturgut’: Chinese Monumental Vases and the History of Chinese Art History at the Dresden Porcelain Collection — Feng Schöneweiß (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut)
12.25 Lunch break
13.15 Session 3 | Chinese Architecture for European Princes
• Chinese Architecture at the Friedenstein Palace: Henri-Léonard Bertin, Herzog August von Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg and the Influence of the Drawings from l’Essai sur l’architecture chinoise (1773) — Kee Il Choi Jr (University of Zürich)
• Just for Decoration or Made for Pedagogical Purposes? Murals with Scenes from the Life of Confucius in Oranienbaum Commissioned by Duke Franz of Anhalt-Dessau (1740–1817) — Dorothee Schaab-Hanke (University of Bamberg)
• Think Big: Augustus the Strong and His Collections of Asiatica — Cordula Bischoff (Independent Researcher)
15.00 Final remarks
* Workshop presentations and the evening lecture at the Gotha Research Centre are open to the public with registration. Due to space constraints, the museum tour and object workshops are open only to workshop speakers. Object workshops will be held at the Perthes Forum, a 10-minute walk from the Gotha Research Centre.
Exhibition | Shoes: Inside Out
Eighteenth-century women’s shoes (Hampshire Cultural Trust’s Collection).
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Now on view at The Arc:
Shoes: Inside Out
Willis Museum and Sainsbury Gallery, Basingstoke, Spring 2023
The Arc, Winchester, 24 November 2023 — 6 March 2024
From the functional and practical to the fashionable and extravagant, shoes have played an intriguing role in our social history and modern lives. They can tell us about a person’s work, leisure choices, status, and aspirations—but the story is not always straightforward. Conformity to gender stereotypes is blurred, power statements conceal repression, and the utilitarian merges with the frippery. Shoes: Inside Out is an exhibition featuring footwear from our past, as far back as 11 AD, to the present. Through the themes of work, protect, play, empower, transform, identify, and aspire, 70 pairs of shoes from Hampshire Cultural Trust’s Collection explore how shoes have shaped—and have been shaped by—society. From Georgian high society shoes to 1970s platforms and current high-end designer heels to everyday boots there is a shoe to fit all interests. Alongside the footwear, a display of high-definition x-rays of some of the shoes allow us to glimpse the story within, uncovering developments in the shoes’ construction and revealing an ethereal reminiscence of a life lived.
New Book | Pockets: An Intimate History
We now have two books on pockets (Carlson’s joins that of Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux, published by Yale UP in 2019). From Hachette Book Group:
Hannah Carlson, Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close (Algonquin Books, 2023), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1643751542, $35.
Who gets pockets, and why? It’s a subject that stirs up plenty of passion: Why do men’s clothes have so many pockets and women’s so few? And why are the pockets on women’s clothes often too small to fit phones, if they even open at all? In her captivating book, Hannah Carlson, a lecturer in dress history at the Rhode Island School of Design, reveals the issues of gender politics, security, sexuality, power, and privilege tucked inside our pockets.
Throughout the medieval era in Europe, the purse was an almost universal dress feature. But when tailors stitched the first pockets into men’s trousers five hundred years ago, it ignited controversy and introduced a range of social issues that we continue to wrestle with today, from concealed pistols to gender inequality. See: #GiveMePocketsOrGiveMeDeath.
Filled with incredible images, this microhistory of the humble pocket uncovers what pockets tell us about ourselves: How is it that putting your hands in your pockets can be seen as a sign of laziness, arrogance, confidence, or perversion? Walt Whitman’s author photograph, hand in pocket, for Leaves of Grass seemed like an affront to middle-class respectability. When W.E.B. Du Bois posed for a portrait, his pocketed hands signaled defiant coolness.
And what else might be hiding in the history of our pockets? (There’s a reason that the contents of Abraham Lincoln’s pockets are the most popular exhibit at the Library of Congress.) Thinking about the future, Carlson asks whether we will still want pockets when our clothes contain ‘smart’ textiles that incorporate our IDs and credit cards. Pockets is for the legions of people obsessed with pockets and their absence, and for anyone interested in how our clothes influence the way we navigate the world.
Hannah Carlson teaches dress history and material culture at the Rhode Island School of Design. After training as a conservator of costume and textiles at the Fashion Institute of Technology, she received a PhD in material culture from Boston University. She has contributed articles to Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life; Dress; and MacGuffin: The Life of Things.
Exhibition | The Fabric of Democracy
La fête de la Fédération textile, 1790
(Musee de la Toile de Jouy)
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Now on view at the Fashion and Textile Museum:
The Fabric of Democracy: Propaganda Textiles from the French Revolution to Brexit
Fashion and Textile Museum, London, 29 September 2023 – 3 March 2024
Curated by design historian Amber Butchart, this exhibition explores printed propaganda textiles over more than two centuries. Discover how fabric designers and manufacturers have responded to political upheaval from the French Revolution through to Brexit.
The mechanisation of textile industries from the mid-18th century led to the development of printing techniques that could create more detailed imagery on cloth, quicker than ever before. These increasingly affordable processes ‘democratised’ textile decoration, allowing governments, regimes, and corporations to harness the power of print to communicate, from wartime slogans to revolutionary ideals.
While propaganda is usually associated with public art and monumental sculpture, this exhibition explores how fabrics have been used as a political medium both in the home and on the body, through furnishing and fashion. Find out how textiles were used as a tool of the state across the political spectrum, from communism to fascism. Discover how a fraternal crisis in the monarchy played out on cloth, and how democracies promote national identity through textile design. On display will be textiles from countries including Britain, America, Italy, Germany, and Austria—ranging from French toile de Jouy to Japanese robes from the Asia-Pacific war, to Cultural Revolution-era Chinese fabrics rarely exhibited in the UK.
Amber Butchart is a curator, writer, and broadcaster who specialises in the cultural and political history of textiles and dress. She is a former Research Fellow at the University of the Arts London and is a regular public lecturer across the UK’s leading arts institutions. She researches and presents documentaries for television and radio, including the six-part series A Stitch in Time for BBC Four that fused biography, art, and the history of fashion to explore the lives of historical figures through the clothes they wore, and she is the history consultant and regular on-screen historian for BBC One’s Great British Sewing Bee. Amber is an external adviser for the National Crime Agency as a Forensic Garment Analyst, working on cases that require investigation of clothing and textiles. She has published five books on the history and culture of clothes, including The Fashion of Film, Nautical Chic, and a history of British fashion illustration for the British Library.
Exhibition | Boy’s Dress, 1760–1930
Now on view at the Fashion and Textile Museum:
Oh Boy! Boy’s Dress, 1760–1930
Fashion and Textile Museum, London, 29 September 2023 – 3 March 2024
The Fashion and Textile Museum is excited to present Oh Boy!, an exploration into historical boy’s dress. Curated by leading fashion historian Amy de la Haye, alongside renowned expert collector Alasdair Peebles, the exhibition presents an unrivalled collection of an often-undervalued area of fashion history, spread over two acts.
29 September — 16 December 2023
Act One: Breeched, No More Dresses explores the ceremony of entry into the masculine world, taking place after six years of age, as boys abandoned dresses in favour of breeches. Focusing on the period from 1760 to 1810, Act One presents a dimity gown and coat, a robust three-piece fustian breeches suit, and a block-printed skeleton suit, alongside other fascinating pieces.
21 December 2023 — 3 March 2024
Act Two: Ship Shape delves into the vogue for nautical wear dating from 1860 to 1930. Starting with a miniature suit that an admiral had made for his young son and including linen and wool serge suits, loosely inspired by naval dress, accompanied by accessories. The space will be imaginatively adorned, showcasing Alasdair’s skills as a decorative period interior painter and exploring the topic of collecting as narrative.
Amy de la Haye is Professor of Dress History & Curatorship, and joint director of the Centre for Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion (LCF). Recent and current projects include Gluck: Art & Identity at Brighton Museum (2017), Ravishing: The Rose in Fashion at MFIT (2021), Wild & Cultivated: Fashioning the Rose at London’s Garden Museum (2022), Making Mischief: Folk Costume in Britain at Compton Verney (2023), and Making More Mischief… at LCF Stratford (2024). She has published extensively and writes for SHOWstudio. Formerly she served as curator of 20th-century dress at the Victoria and Albert Museum with exhibitions including the radical Streetstyle: from sidewalk to catwalk (1994).
Alasdair Peebles works as a freelance decorative painter, specialising in hand-painted wallpapers and the restoration of painted finishes in Historic houses. For the last thirty years, he has built a private collection focused exclusively on boy’s and youth’s clothes from 1750 to 1950. He is currently co-authoring a book on men’s and boys’ dress for Bloomsbury. He has lectured widely, regularly lends clothing to museums for exhibitions and works with costume designers on period film projects including Little Women and Mary Poppins.
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