Chinoiserie

Focusing on Thomas Burke's bestselling collection of short stories, Limehouse Nights (1916), this book contextualises the burgeoning cult of Chinatown in turn-of-the-century London. London's 'Chinese Quarter' owed its notoriety to the Yellow Perilism that circulated in Britain at the fin-de-siècle, a demonology of race and vice masked by outward concerns about degenerative metropolitan blight and imperial decline. Anne Witchard's interdisciplinary approach enables her to displace the boundaries that have marked Chinese studies, literary studies, critiques of Orientalism and empire, gender studies, and diasporic research, as she reassesses this critical moment in London's history. In doing so, she brings attention to Burke's hold on popular and critical audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. A much-admired and successful author in his time, Burke in his Chinatown stories destabilizes social orthodoxies in highly complex and contradictory ways. For example, his writing was formative in establishing the 'queer spell' that the very mention of Limehouse would exert on the public imagination, and circulating libraries responded to Burke's portrayal of a hybrid East End where young Cockney girls eat Chow Mein with chopsticks in the local cafés and blithely gamble their housekeeping money at Fan Tan by banning Limehouse Nights. Witchard's book forces us to rethink Burke's influence and shows that China and chinoiserie served as mirrors that reveal the cultural disquietudes of western art and culture.

In Beyond Chinoiserie, historians of art, literature, and material culture address artistic relations between China and the West during the nineteenth century, a time when Western powers’ attempts at extending a sphere of influence in China led to increasingly hostile interactions.

This volume examines the ways in which an intellectual vogue for a mythic China was a constituent element of British modernism.

Encompassing a wide range of interest areas from architecture to objets d'art, this sourcebook details the history of one of the most enduring styles, Chinoiserie.

This title presents 50 of Bernd Dams and Andrew Zega's expert watercolour illustrations, focusing on Chinoiseries pavilions. 36 of the works delve into the past, reconstructing exceptional historical structures from the 17th to the 19th century, with a predominately French style.

Chinoiserie, a decorative style inspired by the art of the Far East, gripped Britain from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Despite taking its name from the French word for 'Chinese', the style also incorporated influences from other Asian countries, helping to shape the period's popular fantasy of the 'exotic Orient'. Wealthy consumers jostled to obtain imported wallpaper, lacquered cabinets and hand-painted porcelain, while domestic manufacturers such as Royal Worcester and Chippendale met demand with mass-produced items of their own. Though interest in the style waned as the Gothic Revival took hold, many examples of Chinoiserie have been preserved. In this beautifully illustrated book, Richard Hayman tells the story of this fascinating phenomenon, and explores the profound impact of Chinoiserie on the material culture of the West.

Chinoiserie is one of the strongest, most consistent strains in western taste. It has affected every area of decor and design, transforming furniture and garden follies, tableware and tapestries.

The taste for chinoiserie, which originated and developed in the West during the 17th century, reinterpreted the themes, ornamentation and decorative techniques of the Far East and China. This volume is the first published on Italian Chinoiserie, a style developed slightly later in Italy than at other European courts, but which flourished rapidly and spectacularly during the 18th century when a passion for the Orient heavily influenced the rococo style. Throughout the peninsula many of the Italian courts - from the Bourbons in Sicily and Campania to the Savoys in Piedmont, from the Veneto to papal Rome and including Florence and the Medici, later Lorraine, Grand Duchy - indulged their enthusiasm for chinoiseries creating some intriguing works of art. No field was left untouched and the author of this volume has taken pains to cover them all: from architecture (the Chinese Palace at Palermo) to interior decorative painting (the rooms frescoed by Tiepolo in Vicenza and the 'Chinese' rooms of Naples and Palermo), from ceramics and porcelain (the Capodimonte Porcelain Room) to cabinet making (Venetian lacquered furniture in particular, but also the Lacquer Room in Turin), to fabrics and all other decorative arts. ILLUSTRATIONS 200 colour & 95 b/w *