Page 7 - Bonhams Catalog Cohen and Cohen Jan 24, 2023 New York

Cohen & Cohen, Palm Beach Exhibition, 2000

tobacco for Westerners which inexplicably didn’t need to be airtight, (lot 10), or perhaps a splendid suite of five colorful vases for the buffet
unlike Chinese snuff bottles which were designed to keep the table in your large country house (lot 99)? Any of these Export items
contents entirely dry in humid climates? Bizarrely shaped chairs, could readily and conveniently be purchased, as the mood took you,
using fine Chinese domestic well-grained rosewoods but carefully at one of the elegant luxury retailers lining Jermyn St in London, or Rue
copying a European model probably brought out to Canton on an St Honoré in Paris, or Nieuwe Spiegelstraat in Amsterdam. And while
East India Company merchant ship? And decorative, whimsical, you are choosing your new Chinese wallpaper, why not add a pound
colorful porcelain display figure models; birds (lots 7 and 126), or two of satisfyingly expensive imported ‘Bohea’ or ‘Green’ (Chinese
elephants (lot 3), lap dogs (lot 103), female figures (lots 19, 88, leaf teas) for the ‘lady of the house’ to serve to a guest in an elegant,
130, and 146), stolid Dutchmen and their lady companions (lot 30), translucent ‘China’ tea bowl and saucer (lot 44) in her ‘Withdrawing
whirling ‘Tyrolean Dancers’ (lot 133) copied from a German (Meissen) room’, dressed for the occasion in an embroidered dress made from
protype. Chinese Export ceramics exemplified ‘Visions of Cathay’ an imported bolt of shimmering Chinese silk?
for Westerners before novel photography demolished the visions
in the 1860s. Chinese ‘pots’, bucolic landscapes spanning hand- The outstanding range of fine and rare Chinese Export art, almost all
painted wallpapers, glittering reverse paintings on glass showing porcelain, contained in this unique auction recaptures the excitement,
demure shepherds and shepherdesses complemented and greatly the bright novel colors, and the overwhelming sense of exotic luxury
enhanced contemporaneous Western demand for bright, frivolous which appealed to so many buyers of Chinese Export art 300 years
colorful rococo furnishings and decorations in exotic ‘chinoiserie’ ago, and has continued to do so. If anything in the Decorative Arts
taste. Decorators replaced the heavier interior decorations of canon captures a sense of mutually uncomprehending civilizations
an earlier Baroque-inspired Europe, before ‘rococo chinoiserie’ bound together by cultural artefacts and profitable commerce, it is the
itself succumbed a generation after its peak decades to a new fine products of the ‘China Trade’. This auction memorably represents
preference for simpler, plainer Neo-classical furnishings rooted in the a vanishing, and perhaps unrepeatable, opportunity to acquire some of
rediscovered classical world of ruins at Pompeii and Herculaneum. the finest Chinese Export porcelains available on the global market, at
In Chinese Export art, therefore, understanding the historical context a very particular moment: when a new generation of Chinese-national
is an integral part of the pleasure of owning these pieces. An art collectors and museums are themselves beginning to assemble
armorial dish might have a splendid coat of arms, but - who was Export art collections, radically novel and unfamiliar in Chinese-
‘Leake Okeover’, and why would an unknown Squire in unknown speaking Asia, in the knowledge that these ‘China Trade’ mementoes
Rutland wish to commission an incredibly elaborate dinner service represent an extraordinary and unparalleled fusion of evolving Western
from the other side of the world (lot 74). How stimulating to drink a tastes with traditional Chinese craft skills.
bracing glass of hot toddy from your large, brightly colored Chinese
punchbowl depicting scenes of a fox hunt, while outside on the drive Colin Sheaf
of your Palladian mansion a pack of baying hounds and elaborately Chairman Emeritus, Asian Art, Bonhams
dressed mounted huntsmen milled around until a bugle sounded
the ‘Tally-Ho’ (lots 26 and 124). Would madam like a blue and white
garniture of elaborately decorated vases to dress the mantlepiece
in the style of Daniel Marot in your fashionable London town house