How might an artist go about depicting an unfamiliar culture?
In 1696, before England established regular trade relations with China, London-based artist Robert Robinson grappled with this challenge when he was commissioned to fill a panelled room with scenes of Chinese life. The 11 ‘chinoiserie’ panels Robinson produced, now in the V&A collection, present a fairy-tale world of vaporous landscapes, theatrically costumed figures, curious animals and ornate chariots. The fantastical scenes are at odds with equivalent decoration on objects of Chinese origin, but they are closely in line with contemporary perceptions of China as a model of imperial, cultural and material affluence, evident in England since the intensification of European-Chinese trade in the 1660s. Tracing Robinson’s visual sources reveals his improvised depiction of China to be the product of creative adaptation of a range of European and English printed illustrations, shedding light on the role of reproducible media in facilitating the wide dissemination of stereotypical ideas about ‘The Other’ in early modern Europe.
Robinson’s professional circles as a versatile City of London artist provided him with all the reference materials necessary to represent a culture that he had not seen. As well as being an accomplished panel painter, Robinson worked as a scene painter for the theatre, a self-publishing mezzotinter, and a printmaker. By the 1690s, English interest in Chinese culture was such that that China was being staged in London’s performance arenas, in illustrated books, prints, and pattern-books for artisans working across media. Well versed in graphic reproduction, Robinson wasted no time in borrowing from printed sources he encountered in his various workplaces, carefully selecting images he deemed appropriate for his exotic scheme.
Robinson’s work for the Duke’s theatre Company, painting stage scenery for dramatist Elkanah Settle, granted him access to the illustrated book and print collection of Settle’s ‘creative director’, actor Thomas Betterton. Betterton was a keen collector of French costume designs from Paris and Versailles, produced by artists such as Jean Bérain. One of Bérain’s designs for the opera Roland, staged at the Carnaval de Versailles in 1685, offers a precedent for Robinson’s incense-bearing figure in the ‘Chinese Princess’ panel, featuring the wide, feathered hat, protruding moustache and bell-sleeved gown all seen in the latter.
Access to the collections of his theatrical contacts also explains the conjunction of western classicism and non-western exoticism in Robinson’s panels. His ‘Chinese Princess’ group, featuring a European woman attended by a figure with a parasol and another carrying the train of her dress, appears to be modelled on a mezzotint of protagonist Semernia in Aphra Behn’s 1689 play The Widow Ranter, set in colonial Virginia. The two Black attendants in the original are made racially ambiguous in Robinson’s panel, as they are in two contemporary ‘Indian Manner’ tapestries attributed to the contemporary royal workshop led by John Vanderbank.
Robinson and Vanderbank faced a similar challenge – how might artists create grandiose images of cultures of which they had no experience beyond the printed page. Both artists did, however, have another source of inspiration. They tapped into life in a hazily defined ‘East’ through the pageants of the annual Lord Mayor’s Show. The 1690s’ shows regularly featured an elaborate chariot, carrying a classical deity, drawn by exotic animals with ‘Asian’ riders. As a recurring image aligned with contemporary English conceptions of East Asian splendour, it is unsurprising that the pageant scene was incorporated into the decorative schemes of both artists. Robinson may have been able to study the chariot from life through Settle, who wrote the speeches for the 1690s’ shows, or through its illustration in a now-lost 1687 mezzotint by Isaac Beckett.
A final type of source material Robinson consulted was a pattern-book, a manual of linear designs, simplified from more intricate sources, for use by goldsmiths, weavers, and paper-stainers alike. As seen on a 1690 silver porringer by London goldsmith John Duck, a ubiquitous motif on early chinoiserie silverware is the leaning, moustachioed warrior figure, usually with a hanging sword and a fan in one hand. The man leading the procession in Robinson’s ‘Chinese Dignitary’ panel matches this description, and even wears the same plumed headpiece as his flat-chased counterpart.
Early English chinoiserie did not accurately represent Chinese culture, as would later examples, modelled on imported Chinese objects. Yet, as Robinson’s working method proves, seventeenth-century artisans were less concerned with cultural authenticity than they were with producing convincingly coherent scenes from material at hand. However inauthentic his paintings of Chinese life, Robinson could rest assured that his patrons would encounter the same China in their newly panelled room as they would in the theatre and in books, and, chances are, they were satisfied with it.
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This was such an interesting read, obviously alot of reaserch has good in to it. I can’t wait to see more of what this Author has to say.