Mounted Oriental Porcelain in the J. Paul Getty Museum

Купить бумажную книгу и читать

Название:Mounted Oriental Porcelain in the J. Paul Getty Museum

Издательство:J. Paul Getty Museum

Автор:Sr. Francis Watson, Gillian Wilson, Anthony Derham

Год: 1983

Количество страниц:104

Язык:English

Форматpdf

Размер:13,6 Mb

Ever since the Middle Ages it was the practice in Europe to mount exotic objects such as oriental porcelain in settings of precious or semiprecious metal as tribute to their rarity and value. In the seventeenth century, when Chinese and Japanese porcelains began to reach the West in considerable quantities, the practice continued, especially in France. With the opening of the eighteenth century, it became increasingly fashionable in Parisian society to decorate the interiors of houses with Far Eastern materials such as lacquer and mounted porcelain

This taste was catered to by the marchands-merciers, members of a guild who combined the functions of the modern interior decorator, the antique dealer, and the picture dealer. These men devised highly ingenious settings for Far Eastern porcelains to adapt their exotic character to the French interiors of the period. At first these were of silver (occasionally even gold); later, during the Rococo period when gilding was very lavishly used for the decoration of walls, furniture, light fittings, etc., gilt bronze was the material generally adopted.

The marchands-merciers not only designed such mounts and employed some of the most skillful craftsmen of the day to execute them but also marketed them. The survival of the account book of one of their number, Lazare Duvaux, whose shop Au Chagrin de Turquie in the rue Saint Honoré was patronized by the most fashionable sections of Parisian society, has provided us with an immense amount of information about mounted oriental porcelain, its makers, its cost, who collected it, and so on. This information has been drawn on in cataloguing the Getty Museum’s collection of mounted oriental porcelain, which is unusually large and of exceptionally high quality.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Catalogue:

Oriental Porcelains with European Mounts in the J. Paul Getty Museum

Appendix:

Chinese Dynasties and Imperial Reign Dates

Glossary

Selected Bibliography

Index

About the Authors

Sir Francis Watson is former director of the Wallace Collection in London and former surveyor of the Queen’s works of art.

Gillian Wilson is curator of Decorative Arts at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Anthony Derham is director of Oriental Art at Christie’s, New York.