The present article seeks to analyze the presence and the symbolical meaning of oriental, and in particular Chinese, porcelain in English interiors in the 17th and 18th centuries. It examines how porcelain, through its dual status as both a natural and artificial artifact, and its exotic association with the Far East, contributed to the development of the rococo in the decorative arts in England and became a metonymy for women and the female material world.

From its first modest arrival in English interiors in the early 17th century to its role in the 18th-century craze for chinoiserie, oriental porcelain always held a significant place in interior decoration. Its function and status varied according to the place where it was displayed, from cabinets of curiosities to china closets and the tea-table. Chinese and Japanese porcelain also carried a set of different, sometimes antithetical meanings according to the type of collectors who acquired them and the way they were organised and arranged in the home. Chinamania was closely associated with women in the modern period, which led to gendered perceptions of porcelain, with the china closet becoming a metonymy for woman. In this essay, I trace the evolution of oriental porcelain in English interiors and unearth the symbolic, semiotic and cultural meanings of its presence in English men and women’s collections by bringing new material and new approaches into research on chinoiserie. I first examine the cultural and stylistic meaning of 17th-century porcelain collections to show that the fascination for porcelain items was grounded in their ambiguous status as curious, natural and artistic objects. I then turn to the case study of the furnishings of Colworth House in Bedfordshire to analyse the social function of porcelain as a signifier of taste, conspicuous consumption and status. This is followed by an interpretation of porcelain along gendered lines, in which I suggest that porcelain functioned as a memento and a fetish. Lastly, I offer a reading of the china closet which can be construed, I argue, as a feminine, rococo and “artinatural” space that epitomises the perceived characteristics of porcelain in the 18th century. 

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The china closet can also be read in terms of architecture, as a monument to the idea of rococo. If natural science was given pride of place in the space of the closet, the feminine accents of the rococo style also sprang up in the curvaceous lines of rocks, shells and porcelain dishes completed by glittering ornaments. Shells and porcelain have traditionally stood for women, as the well-documented comparison between women and porcelain throughout the 18th century testifies.29 The china closet, either a simple cabinet or a room, can be understood as a sign of the feminisation and rococo-isation of interior decoration. The idea of rococo pervaded 18th century European culture and, despite contrasted views of scholarship about its periodisation, may be seen to emerge in the early 18th century and evolve until the late 1760s.30 The rococo style has been assumed to have reached England in the decorative arts in the 1740s but the new hybrid genre of the novel, characterised by its interplay of various literary sources and genres (romances, drama, biographies, histories) has also been identified with the idea of rococo.31 The aspect of the china closet adorned with shells, a result of female handicraft, may not strictly correspond to the lavish rococo interior decoration of a French 18th-century boudoir, but signals, I am suggesting, the rococo-isation of English interiors. Arguably, the scantiness of surviving evidence about the display of female china closets, glimpsed though examples in female correspondence or diaries, only leads to hypothetical interpretations. However, the numerous satires on the fashion for female china closets found in the periodical press of the period help reconstruct a practice that must have been popular among the aristocracy and wealthy middle classes. I propose here to examine the rococo aesthetic of the female china closet by crossing contemporary references to real china closets with an analysis of two periodical essays, the first from The Spectator published in 1712, the second being the essay previously cited (The World, 38), published in 1753. This comparative study will enable me to show the evolution of the rococo’s imprint on English interiors.

In Joseph Addison’s Spectator essay number 37, dated 12 April 1712, the fictional persona of Mr. Spectator recounts his visit to an aristocratic widow’s library. The essay aligns Leonora’s reading tastes with female chinamania, depicting the lady’s library, in the narrator’s eyes, as a hybrid and counter-natural piece of furniture decorated with Chinese porcelain:

At the End of the Folio’s (which were finely bound and gilt) were great Jars of China placed one above another in a very noble piece of Architecture. The Quarto’s were separated from the Octavo’s by a pile of smaller vessels, which rose in a delightful Pyramid. The Octavo’s were bounded by Tea dishes of all shapes, colours and Sizes, which were so disposed on a wooden Frame, that they looked like one continued Pillar indented with the finest Strokes of Sculpture, and stained with the greatest Variety of Dyes. That Part of the Library which was designed for the reception of Plays and Pamphlets, and other loose Papers, was enclosed in a kind of square, consisting of one of the prettiest Grotesque Works that ever I saw, and was made up of Scaramouches, Lions, Monkies, Mandarines, Trees, Shells, and a thousand other off Figures in China Ware[…]. I was wondefully pleased with such a mixt kind of furniture, as seemed very suitable both to the Lady and the Scholar, and did not know at first whether I should fancy my self in a Grotto, or in a Library.

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Several meanings can be ascribed to the presence of porcelain in English interior decoration. Oriental porcelain can be construed, I suggest, as a memento for men and a fetish for women. Porcelain was the material emblem of long-distance travels, and more symbolically, of what was perceived as commercial successes resulting from the Anglo-Chinese trade. Porcelain acted as a narrative object that visually told a story. Numerous export porcelain plates and dishes represented East India Company vessels moored in Canton or sailing along the Chinese coast, or imaginary Chinese landscapes and everyday scenes that provided the basis for chinoiserie design used by European porcelain factories for the decoration of their wares.20 English ceramic makers also decorated their vessels with images based on illustrations from travel books, such as Johan Nieuhof’s famous 1673 Embassy from the East India Company. Analogous to sea-narratives and travel books which were highly popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, the iconography on oriental porcelain traced one episode of an imaginary journey to China or Japan while porcelain itself was the tangible evidence of an actual journey to Canton. By viewing oriental porcelain, or by gazing at images of China or at chinoiserie vignettes, the viewer was reminded of the commercial voyages that had been undertaken to acquire these commodities, while he could slip into the role of traveller and explorer and let his imagination wander along the distant shores of the Far East, the “Terra incognita and undiscovered provinces” mentioned by Parker and Stalker in their 1688 Treatise on Japanning and Varnishing21. Porcelain wares functioned as mementoes of the (East India Company’s) commercial endeavours that had been necessary to bring these commodities back to England. A Chinese porcelain sauceboat in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, decorated with two cartouches depicting English ships departing Plymouth in the background (a floating English flag planted on the ground identifies the English coast) and arriving in the Pearl River in the foreground (a pagoda and a typical Chinese rock identify the Chinese coast) is one of numerous examples of how designs worked as travel-narratives (figure 1). The distance between the English coast and the Chinese one, rendered by the use of perspective in the scene, acquires a temporal dimension as it stands for the actual duration of the voyage and that of the written narrative. If not all men were merchants who had actually gone to China, they could picture themselves as potential merchants or adventurers and explorers. Porcelain could appeal to merchants’ dreams of exploration and wealth, but also appealed to the scientific and exploratory nature of the connoisseur and virtuoso.

If the function of porcelain as travel narrative played the role of a memento for male audiences, it played the role, I argue, of a fetish for female audiences. Freudian interpretation of the fetish underlines the role of the fetish as a marker of an absence or a lack.22 By invoking this lack, the fetish also disavows it and makes the absent object present. In William Burnaby’s The Ladies’ Visiting Day dated 1701, the female character Lady Lovetoy laments over a lack, namely the impossibility for women to travel to the East. The purchase of exotic goods is presented as a replacement of voyages to China:

Fulvia: I wonder your Ladyship, that has such a Passion for those Parts of the World, never had the Curiosity to see ‘em.
Lady Lovetoy: Alas! The Men have usurp’d all the Pleasures of Life, and made it not so decent for our Sex to Travel; but I manage it as Mahomet wou’d ha’ done his Mountain […] Every Morning the pretty Things of all these Countries are brought me, and I’m in love with every Thing I see.

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The china closet and, by extension, the Lady’s dressing room where oriental porcelain was displayed, were often compared to an oriental temple, but were also seen as an emblematic temple of femininity. The female closet where porcelain, shells and sometimes books, were stored served as an instrument of female sociability, an intimate gynocentric space where women could exchange their knowledge and expertise. The visits paid by women to their respective homes often led to the inspection of the china closet and fuelled discussions on porcelain. Lady Dashwood, for example, asked for Mrs Philip Lybbe Powys’s opinion on oriental porcelain displayed in her china closet at Kirtlington Park: “Her Ladyship said she must try my judgment in china, as she ever did all the visitors of that closet, as there was one piece there so much superior to the others. I thought myself fortunate that a prodigious fine old Japan dish almost at once struck my eye”(Climenson 198). The china cabinet functioned as a female museum, as was explained in an essay from the World:

You are not to suppose that all this profusion of ornament is only to gratify her own curiosity: it is meant as a preparative to the greatest happiness of life, that of seeing company. And I assure you she gives above twenty entertainments in a year to people for whom she has no manner of regard, for no other reason in the world than to shew them the house. [I am] continually driven from room to room, to give opportunity from strangers to admire it. But as we have lately missed a favourite Chinese tumbler, and some other valuable moveables, we have entertained thoughts of confining the shew to one day in the week, and of admitting no persons whatsoever without tickets.

The exchange and display of porcelain allowed women to circumscribe an artistic practice and field of expertise of their own. It gave them authority in the realm of domestic interior decoration as well as in that of scientific knowledge. In her analysis of the Duchess of Portland’s collection of porcelain and shells, Stacey Sloboda has shown how the collection and display of naturalia ‒shells‒ and artificialia –porcelain‒ connected natural history to art, and argued that porcelain occupied an intermediary position, as both exotic curiosity and manufactured object, “complicat[ing] the binary of ”raw“ imperial specimens versus ”cooked“ Western objects of connoisseurship” (Sloboda 467). The china closet decorated with shells thus merged natural history and decorative arts. It can also be read, I suggest, in terms of narration and architecture. Women read exotic stories on the surfaces of oriental porcelain but the authority they exerted over the display of porcelain wares also transformed them into authors. David Porter has argued that the decorative patterns of transitional porcelain wares of the Ming and early Qing dynasties often represented women in ideal garden scenes. He proposes to read these scenes of female communities evolving in peaceful natural surroundings depicted on Chinese porcelain as contemporaneous analogues of female utopias and Sapphic literary works that developed in English literature in the last decades of the 17th and early 18th centuries. Porcelain surfaces read by elite women nurtured their dreams of female academies, retreats and friendly communities.

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1 Acknowledgements: The author wishes to thank the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, for providing support for work on this article through the grant of a postdoctoral fellowship.

See Jennifer Chen, Julie Emerson and Mimi Gates, eds., Porcelain Stories: From China to Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000) ; John Ayers, et al., Porcelain for Palaces: the Fashion for Japan in Europe 1650-1750 (London: Oriental Ceramic Society, 2001) For a history of the imports and collections of Chinese porcelain see chapter 1 of Stacey Pierson, Collectors, Collections and Museums: The Field of Chinese Ceramics in Britain, 1560-1960, (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007).

2 Oliver Impey, “Japanese Export Porcelain”, in Porcelain for Palaces, 25-35.

3 Rose Kerr, “Missionary Reports on the Production of Porcelain in China”, Oriental Art, 47. 5 (2001): 36-37.

4 For a definition of these terms, see Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux, Paris, Venise : xvie-xviiie siècle, Paris, Gallimard, 1987.

5 Anna Somers Cocks, “The Nonfunctional Use of Ceramics in the English Country House During the Eighteenth Century”, in Gervase Jackson-Stops, et al., The Fashioning and Functioning of the British Country House, Studies in the History of Art 25 (New Haven: Yale UP. 1989).

6 The collection bore the name “the Museum Tradescantium or a Collection of Rarities Preserved at South Lambert neer London by John Tradescant of London”. Cited in Douglas Rigby, and Elizabeth Rigby, Lock, Stock, and Barrel: the story of collecting (London: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1944), 234.

7 Mercure Galant (juillet 1678), cited in Hélène Belevitch-Stankevitch, Le Goût chinois en France. 1910. (Genève: Slatkine, 1970), 149.

8 See John Ayers in Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 256-266 and Oliver Impey, “Collecting Oriental Porcelain in Britain in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, in The Burghley Porcelains, an Exhibition from the Burghley House Collection and Based on the 1688 Inventory and 1690 Devonshire Schedule (New York: Japan Society 1990), 36-43.

9 See Pierson 31-33.

10 See Oliver Impey, “Porcelain for Palaces”, in Porcelain for Palaces, 56-69.

11 Cited in Joan Wilson, “A Phenomenon of Taste: the Chinaware of Queen Mary II” Apollo 126 (August 1972): 122. For the decoration of Kensington Palace, see Rosenfeld Shulsky, “The Arrangement of the Porcelain and Delftware Collection of Queen Mary in Kensington Palace,” American Ceramic Circle Journal 8 (1990): 51-74; T.H. Lunsingh Scheurleer, “Documents on the Furnishing of Kensington House,” Walpole Society 38 (1960-1962): 15-58, and Oliver Impey and Johanna Marshner, “ʽChina Mania’: A Reconstruction of Queen Mary II’s Display of East Asian Artefacts in Kensington Palace in 1693”, Orientations (November 1998).

12 For more information on the arrangement of porcelain in these rooms, see Robert J. Charleston, “Porcelain as a Room Decoration in Eighteenth-Century England,” Magazine Antiques 96 (1969): 894- 96.

13 Impey, and Ayers, Porcelain for Palaces, 56-57.

14 Hilary Young, English Porcelain, 1745-1795: its Makers, Design, Marketing and Consumption. (London: Victoria and Albert Publications, 1999), 167-69.

15 See Tessa Murdoch, Noble Households. Eighteenth century inventories of great English houses, (Cambridge: John Adamson, 2006).

16 For studies on chinoiserie, see Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: the Vision of Cathay (London, 1961); Oliver Impey, Chinoiserie: the Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decoration (London, 1977); Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding, “Dragons, clochettes, pagodes et mandarins: Influence et representation de la Chine dans la culture britannique du dix-huitième siècle (1685-1798)”, unpublished PhD thesis, Université Paris 7 Denis Diderot, Paris, 2006 ; David Porter, The Chinese Taste in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

17 Collett-White 48.

18 The poem depicts the drowning of Walpole’s cat Selima while attempting to catch a goldfish in the porcelain tub. For a study of Walpole’s ceramic collection, see Timothy Wilson, “ʽPlaythings Still?’ Horace Walpole as a Collector of Ceramics,” in Michael Snodin and Cynthia Roman, eds., Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill (New Haven, CT: Yale U.P, 2009).

19 For more information on Beckford’s collections, see Derek Ostergard, ed., William Beckford, 1760-1844: An Eye for the Magnificent (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001).

20 See Craig Clunas, ed., Chinese Export Art and Design (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1987).

21 John Stalker and George Parker, Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing Being a Complete Discovery of these Arts. (Oxford, 1688), Preface.

22 Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in Adam Phillips, ed., Sigmund Freud: the Penguin Reader, (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 91-93.

23 The World n°38 (20 September 1753).

24 I draw here upon William Pietz’s anthropological study of the history and origin of the term “fetish”. See his articles on the subject, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res 9 (Spring 1985), and “The Problem of the Fetish, II: the Origin of the Fetish,” Res 13 (Spring 1987).

25 The World No. 38 (20 September 1753).

26 See Chapter 3 in David Porter’s The Chinese Taste in England, 57- 93.

27 Catherine Lahaussois uses the expression “broderies de porcelaine” in Antoinette Hallé, De l’immense au minuscule. La virtuosité en céramique, (Paris : Paris musées, 2005) 48.

28 For a study of the Duchess of Portland’s passion for conchology, see Beth Fowkes Tobin, “The Duchess's Shells: Natural History Collecting, Gender, and Scientific Practice”, in Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, eds., Material Women, 1750-1950 (London: Ashgate, 2009), 301-325.

29 See Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the 18th Century (New York: Columbia UP, 1997) 20-29; David Porter, “Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Chinese Taste.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35.3 (2002): 395-411.Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding, “Frailty, thy Name is China: Women, Chinoiserie and the threat of low culture in 18th-century England”, Women’s History Review, 18.4 (Sept 2009): 659-668; Stacey Sloboda, “Porcelain Bodies: Gender, Acquisitiveness and Taste in 18th-century England”, in John Potvin and Alla Myzelev, eds., Material Cultures, 1740-1920 (London, 2009), 1-36.

30 William Park. The Idea of Rococo (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 75-77.

31 See chapter 4 in Parker’s The Idea of Rococo, 96-106. For a study of history of the rococo and its presence in English decorative arts, see Michael Snodin ed., Rococo Art and Design in Hogarth’s England (London: V&A Publication1984) and Charles Hind, ed., The Rococo in England. A symposium (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1986).

32 The Spectator no. 37, 12 April 1712.

33 Ibid.

34 “The senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet, and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the memory, and names got to them.” John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) Book II, Chapter II, section 15.

35 Alain Bony, Léonora, Lydia et les autres : Etudes sur le (nouveau) roman (Lyon: PUL, 2004), 9-12.

36 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le cuit, (Paris : Plon, 1978).

37 Batty Langley, Practical Geometry, (1726), 101.

38 The World No. 38 (20 September 1753).

39 For a study of the sensualist aesthetic of chinoiserie, see Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding, “De l’exotisme au sensualisme: réflexion sur l’esthétique de la chinoiserie dans l’Angleterre du XVIIIe siècle”, in Georges Brunel ed., Pagodes et Dragons: exotisme et fantaisie dans l’Europe rococo (Paris Musées: Paris, 2007), 35-41.

40 Philippe Minguet, L’Esthétique du rococo. (Paris : Vrin, 1966).

41 See Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding, “Dragons, clochettes, pagodes et mandarins”, 103-119.

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