Delaware Antiques Show 2024

the suite of ornaments depicts Chinese figures set in pastoral landscapes. Each vignette captures the same three figures absorbed in leisure, playing games. Rather than accurate representations of Chinese people, these caricatures draw upon racial stereotypes from the collective imaginary in eighteenth- century Europe and Britain, evidenced by the two engravings on the presentation panels. One imagines the figures engaged in a game of leapfrog (fig. 1) and another envisions the same figures as they wistfully fly a kite (fig. 2) . The juxtaposition between the distorted and dehumanizing portrayal of the figures’ physical attributes, paired with activities they are engaged with, speak to a codified Chinese type circulated and readopted by Western designers and decorators, and most famously popularized in the “Style of Pillement.” 3 As an aesthetic novelty, the hand screens invite its user and spectator to indulge in a cultural space controlled, commodified, and mediated by the Western gaze. Through these fashionable hand screens, China and its peoples are reduced to a consumable, miniature form. Made of pasteboard, laid paper, and mounted on turned marbled handles, each hand screen measures only twelve inches. The vibrantly colored fanciful costumes of the figures, clearly, do not reflect authentic Chinese garments, but draw more inspiration from Commedia dell’arte costumes than from actual Chinese prototypes. In addition to the hand- colored engraved scenes on the exterior , 3 Loren L. Zeller, “The Influence of Jean-Baptiste Pillement’s Art on Ceramics,” Transactions 31 (2020): 163. Fig. 2. Makers once known. Hand screen, ca. 1759–76. Bequest of Henry Francis du Pont 1961.0892.002 Fig. 3. Jean-Baptiste Pillement. Engraving, 1759. Rare Book Collection, Winterthur Library — 14 —