“To Imitate China”: A Close Reading of a Pair of Eighteenth-Century Hand Screens By Lanah Swindle
A pair of eighteenth-century hand screens (hand-held fire screens), with scalloped forms terminating in turned walnut handles reveal engravings from the popular series of drawings titled Recueil de plusieurs jeux d’ enfants chinois (Collection of Several Chinese Games for Children) by French landscape painter and decorator Jean-Baptiste Pillement (1728– 1808) (figs. 1, 2) . 1 This design series, engraved and published by
Fig. 1. Makers once known. Hand screen, ca. 1759–76. Bequest of Henry Francis du Pont 1961.0892.001
Pierre-Charles Canot in London in 1759, marked Pillement’s thirteenth independent folio of ornaments cast in the “Chinese” style over a period of four years. 2 Pillement’s enfants chinois , or Chinese children, are an amalgam of iconographic images created by French artists and circulated as prints. These images present a contrived, Eurocentric view of Chinese people (fig. 3) . The affixing of these engravings on the panels of the hand screens served to codify a complicated visual grammar that created a troubling tension between the user of the screen and the figures represented on the screen. This object of adornment produced within the European design aesthetic of Chinoiserie incites the imitation of and performance of the other. While the subject matter of these hand screens may present itself as benign, Pillement’s design renderings of the racial other are not. When published on December 26, 1759, Recueil de plusieurs jeux d’ enfants chinois contained fourteen copperplate engravings fixed on laid paper. Two of these engravings appear on the presentation panels of the hand screens. Framed by European and British fictions about China and its peoples,
1 Recueil de Plusieurs Jeux d’Enfants Chinois, inventé et dessiné par Jean Pillement et grave par P. C. Canot. Published according to the Act of Parliament on December 26, 1759, London. 2 Maria Gordon-Smith, “The Influence of Jean Pillement on French and English Decorative Arts, Part One,” Artibus et Historiae 21, no. 41 (2000): 182–83.
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