At the Crossroads of East and West: What Qing-Dynasty Export Porcelain Tells Us About Global Artistic Exchanges

Chinese Porcelain in the Western Canon

From a luxurious symbol of Oriental exoticism in royal courts to a sought-after commodity found in the average European household, Chinese porcelain has kindled fascination and shaped Western material culture ever since Marco Polo recounted his adventures in the mysterious “Cathay” to his fellow Europeans.

Chinese objects have lurked in the backgrounds of centuries-old European artistic masterpieces. One example is the Renaissance master Giovanni Bellini’s The Feast of the Gods, which features a party of Olympian gods relishing fruits and wine in three blue-and-white ceramic bowls. The bowls were likely personal possessions of Bellini’s patron, Duke Alfonso d’Este, obtained through diplomatic gift-giving along the Silk Road.

Similar porcelain pieces were also rendered by Dutch still-life painters like Willem Kalf, Juriaen van Streeck, and Johannes Vermeer, who witnessed the rise of large-quantity import and reproduction of chinaware following the “Carrack” trade and the advent of the Dutch East India Company. This craze for porcelain swept beyond the Netherlands, leaving marks on the canvases of, for instance, French artists Jacques Linard and Alexandre-François Desportes.

The Western Canon on Chinese Porcelain

If this narrative is reversed, one might ask: What was the influence of European art on Chinese porcelain? Have Western artistic and cultural tastes ever left traces on Chinese ceramic craftsmanship?

The answer is yes! One such tale begins in a historic port city in southern China—Guangzhou (Canton).

Direct porcelain trade between China and Europe was arguably driven by the Dutch East India Company through the port of Guangzhou in the early 17th century. This was during China’s Ming dynasty. More European trading companies established themselves in Guangzhou while the Ming dynasty was replaced by the Qing in 1644. After the Qing Emperor Qianlong declared Guangzhou the only legal port for foreign trade in 1757, the city attained an ever-important status. What concomitantly rose to prominence was the porcelain native to Guangzhou. The Kwon-glazed porcelain there is renowned for its chromatic richness, which differs from blue-and-white porcelain prevalent elsewhere in China.

When the Judgment of Paris Meets Kwon-glazed Porcelain

Upon visiting the Guangzhou Museum, one may notice a piece that stands out from the rest of its permanent collection of dazzling art and craft objects—a porcelain bowl made during the Qianlong era (1736–1796). Its jade-like white base color, the gold rim, and the glazing technique resemble that of the Kwon-glazed porcelain. Yet, the nudity depicted in a quasi-Baroque way is almost too particular, if not discordant, to the era’s aesthetics. A possible explanation for such a mismatch of style and iconography is that the bowl was not intended for China’s domestic markets but for Europe.

The bowl’s dimensions confirmed this theory. Measuring 11 cm (4 3/8 in.) in height and 26 cm (10 1/4 in.) in lip diameter, it was not meant to fit Chinese culinary traditions. Instead, it is a punchbowl for mixed drinks, which gained popularity in Europe in the 17th century. Presumably, similar containers with an “Oriental” touch would have been considered rarities and treasured by Eurocentric standards. And they sure can find their place as household displays or in gift exchanges.

The image on the bowl also clearly catered to European tastes, however outrageous it may seem to a Qing audience. It features a reclining male and three standing female nudes, the dynamic of which points to the Judgment of Paris. With Eris’ Golden Apple of Discord in his left hand and a shepherd’s crook, Paris is scantily clad and looking self-assured. The figure in the center—the erotic Aphrodite, whose drapery is stretched by the putto on the bottom-right—calmly accepts the apple while, behind her, the crowned Hera and armored Athena sternly gaze at each other.

How could Chinese craftsmen have heard of this Greek mythological story and put together a composition as such? Very unlikely through reading Homer or Ovid. Yet, comparing this Qing-dynasty depiction of the Judgment of Paris to, say, a 16th-century engraving on the same subject by the Italian Marcantonio Raimondi or a 17th-century painting by Peter Paul Rubens, the striking compositional resemblance between them make one presume that European clients provided Qing craftsmen with templates of these Western artworks to copy.

Thematic inconsistencies between the painting and the Greco-Roman myth show that this intercontinental exchange was less grounded on cultural understanding than, perhaps, simply trade. The resemblance of Paris’s smile to almost a smirk, for instance, awkwardly deflects from the moral of the myth. The lack of nuanced facial expressions also fails to capture Hera and Athena’s jealousy and Aphrodite’s triumph. All these miss the mark of how choosing Aphrodite equals choosing personal gratification over the fate of a nation, and thus imply that the Chinese artisans involved might have imitated the scene without studying its origins.

To say this punchbowl is a factory product isolated from the Qianlong-era cultural environment is, in fact, no exaggeration. The Guangzhou Museum is not the only institution that houses a ceramic with Western mythical motifs. The object is but one of the Chinese export porcelain products traded to Europe and North America between the 16th and the 20th century, and now scattered across China and beyond. China’s Dongguan Museum and the USA’s Mount Holyoke College Art Museum exhibit similar punchbowls. There are also porcelain plates, evidently made from a similar template, now housed in China’s Guangdong Museum and France’s Galerie Nicolas Fournery. Many more are held by private collections or international auction houses.

Despite efforts to recreate a Western subject, traces of a lack of proficiency in Western techniques remain pronounced in all of these porcelain artworks. The use of soft stippling to achieve enamel shadings and abundant blank space to depict the figures’ bodies evokes a sense of lightness commonly seen in Chinese ink and wash paintings, yet this omits complex muscle textures and weakens the tonalities of human flesh if judged by Western standards. Figures also display elongated arms and shrunken legs, not to mention the unbalanced contour of Hera, whose weight rests on her right leg in what appears to be a dramatic yet unnatural contrapposto. More striking are the stiff stripes on Athena’s back, which are perhaps abdominal muscles mistakenly depicted in place of dorsal muscles.

The poor anatomy possibly is a result of Chinese artists’ inexperience in Western art forms. It is also plausible, though, that the Western originals received by the Chinese were only inexpensive prints of unimpressive quality and caused artists’ misreading. Besides, the painting may not even have aimed at completely imitating the Western style—the broad cyan brushwork tinting the background greenery and the drapery’s thick curvatures manifest a strong, intentional presence of Chinese aesthetics. Whether regarding this as stylistic blending or aesthetic discordance, it is, nevertheless, clear that the medium of enameled porcelain itself and the exotic feel the medium carries were European clients’ true priorities.

At the Crossroads of East and West

As one can see, recounting the story of these Qing-dynasty porcelain pieces, whether the one in Guangzhou or around the world, can be a difficult endeavor: from being finished in a Cantonese workshop to being stored in a European merchant vessel’s hold to being filled with drinks and handled by guests at 18th-century dinner parties, and ultimately to where it now stands. Whether any single exhibition space in the modern day can exhaustively inform its audience of this cross-continental odyssey, as it seems, is greatly uncertain. What is certain, however, is that the separation between East and West—at least in the history of art—may not be as large as one might think.

Author’s bio:

Yi Xin grew up in Beijing and is currently a senior at Beijing Huijia Private School. As a passionate art history student, he is also enthralled by Classics, architecture, and philosophy. If not tirelessly traveling in the streets of Athens, Florence, and Beijing, you’ll oftentimes find him wandering in the historical and literary realms of these fabulous cities.