Delaware Antiques Show 2024

panels, the interior panels include hand-marbled papers that mirror the color palette of the figures’ dress (fig. 4) . Both the engraved and hand- marbled papers are affixed to a stiff pasteboard and secured with gilt tape along the edges. The rectilinear form evocates a European conception and appropriation of a sacred East Asian architectural form: a Pagoda. When brought directly up to the user’s face, the sloped valances of this exaggerated architectural form frame the user’s eyes, concealing the rest of their face. Peering out from behind the screen, the user’s masked face is illustrated by the Orientalized figures. The Chinese figures—cast in an idyllic landscape akin to the idealized European peasants appearing in Rococo pastoral imagery—are made small enough to fit in the user’s hand to be manipulated and engaged with at the user’s command. The user’s agency is not limited to the fantasy invoked by the visuality of the scenes. The user rather engages these objects, as props in their performance of leisure, rest, and polite sociability, embodying the screens with a theatricality activated by the placement and positioning of the hand screens to the user’s body. This allows for a play between seeing and being seen, engaging users in a performative act—a concealment or imagination of self—engaging the racial other. Not only objects of adornment or play, the hand screens maintain a practical purpose: to shield the face from the heat of the fireplace. Thus, the Chinese figures not only play a part in amusing the user, but serve to comfort the person behind the screen––they protect the user’s carefully applied white makeup on white skin. In characterizing the visual language of these objects as harmless, neutral, and merely a product of the caprice of the style of Pillement or Chinoiserie, we risk overlooking how these racist representations of Chinese people functioned in comfortable, wealthy Euro-Atlantic domestic interiors. Rather, a reexamination of the aesthetic and material context for these commodities provides the means for interrogating the fraught act of imitation inherent in these eighteenth-century design trends. Fig. 4. Reverse of fig. 2, hand-marbled paper. Lanah Swindle, Lois F. McNeil Fellow, Winterthur Program in American Material Culture — 15 —