These things mattered deeply to Wen Zhenheng. In his world of complex status distinctions, the superiority of the refined over the vulgar was always threatening to get lost whenever the uncultured rich asserted their power over the merely well educated. Wealth was no guard against vulgarity. On the contrary, as the ever-growing ranks of the nouveaux riches in the commercial age in which Wen found himself rushed to live ostentatiously without learning to live well, wealth was more likely to produce vulgarity than assist someone to buy his way out of it. The untutored ate off gold and silver plates without the least awareness that they were engaging in boorish display. They washed their calligraphy brushes in recently fired porcelain cups, when they really shouldn’t have used porcelain at all, but jade or bronze—Wen allowed the use of a porcelain water pot only if it had been produced before 1435. These were tough rules. They favored the cultural insider with knowledge that the merely wealthy could not hope to gain—except, ironically, by buying a copy of A Treatise on Superfluous Things. In the war of status, the recently arrived were always at risk, since they did not get to the write the rules. On the other hand, at least they could play the game. The poor, after all, never got the chance.
Had Wen Zhenheng gone to the wharves along the Grand Canal, which ran through his city, to inspect the ceramic cargoes being shipped out to the Dutch, he would have ridiculed what he found. Most of it was carrack porcelain, made for export. Seen through Wen’s eyes, carrack porcelain was too thick and clumsily painted, and the motifs with which it had been decorated lacked all delicacy. It was just the sort of junk that you could pawn off on foreigners who didn’t know any better. A Suzhou gentleman would never have dreamed of passing around snacks in shoddily painted bowls with “high-quality item” written on the bottom (a mark a lot of the export pieces bore), or serving candied fruit on footed dishes with milky glazes pricked with perforations and bases bearing fake fifteenth-century dates, or pouring fine tea into cups that had been made only the year before. A snooty Beijing guidebook of 1635 allows that Jingdezhen potters are still able to turn out the occasional “fine piece” that would not embarrass its owner, but observes that the true connoisseur would do best to stay away from anything contemporary. When in doubt, old porcelain was usually the safer choice.
If Europeans were, by Chinese standards, poor judges of what was being unloaded from VOC ships, they were excellent judges by their own. For what could they compare the Chinese porcelain with but the rough, brittle earthenware plates and jugs that Italian and Flemish potters produced? These the Chinese wares surpassed in fineness, durability, style, color, and just about every other ceramic quality. They were beyond the capacity of any European craftsman to reproduce, which is why, as soon as a VOC ship reached Holland, people came from all over to buy these wares.
At the start of the seventeenth century, when porcelain first began to arrive in northern Europe, the prices it fetched were high enough to be out of reach of most people. In 1604, when Shakespeare has the comic Pompey in Measure for Measure regale Escalus and Angelo with a long-winded account of the last pregnancy of his employer, Mistress Overdone, he tells them that she called for prunes. “We had but two in the house, which at that very distant time stood, as it were, in a fruit-dish, a dish of some three-pence;—your honours have seen such dishes; they are not Chinese dishes, but very good dishes.” Mistress Overdone did well enough as a procuress to be able to afford good dishes, but not Chinese porcelain. The line would not have worked even just a decade later, when Chinese porcelain started flooding the European market and prices began to come down. As the author of a history of Amsterdam observed exactly ten years later, “the abundance of porcelain grows daily” such that Chinese dishes have “come to be with us in nearly daily use with the common people.” By 1640, an Englishman visiting Amsterdam could testify that “any house of indifferent quality” was well supplied with Chinese porcelain.
The supply of porcelain was all because of what the Amsterdam author called “these navigations,” which were changing the material lives of Europeans in ways and at a rate that often surprised them. This is why René Descartes was moved in 1631 to call Amsterdam an “inventory of the possible.” The English traveler John Evelyn was equally impressed by Amsterdam when he visited the city a decade later. He marveled at the “innumerable Assemblys of Shipps, & Vessels which continualy ride before this Citty, which is certainely the most busie concourse of mortall men, now upon the face of the whole Earth & the most addicted to commerce.” Amsterdam, however remarkable, was no great exception compared to other urban centers in Europe. When Evelyn visited Paris three years later, he was struck by “all the Curiosities naturall or artificial imaginable, Indian or European, for luxury or Use” that “are to be had for mony.” In a market area along the Seine, he was particularly amazed by a shop called Noah’s Ark in which he found a wonderful assortment of “Cabinets, Shells, Ivorys, Purselan, Dried fishes, rare Insects, Birds, Pictures, and a thousand exotic extravagances.” Purselan—porcelain—was one of the extravagances one could now easily buy.
The explosive growth of the market for Oriental manufactures soon began to affect their production. Chinese potters had for centuries been keenly aware of the importance of shaping their wares to foreign tastes, flattening the usual gourdlike shape of a vase to look like a Turkish flask, or building up dividers on plates to suit Japanese eating habits. As European demand grew, Chinese porcelain dealers in Southeast Asian ports learned what Europeans liked, then took that knowledge with them back to their suppliers on the mainland to redesign their products accordingly. When it came to supplying the foreign market, the potters of Jingdezhen were unconcerned about Wen Zhenheng’s standards of Chinese taste. They wanted to know what would sell and were ready to change production by the next season to accommodate European taste. When Turkish tulips became all the rage in northern Europe in the 1620s, for example, Jingdezhen potters painted tulips on their dishes. Never having seen a real tulip, the porcelain painters produced blooms that are almost unrecognizable as tulips, but that didn’t matter. The point was that they responded immediately to changes in the market. When the tulip market famously collapsed in 1637, the VOC rushed to cancel all orders for dishes decorated with tulips, for fear of being stuck with stock no one would buy.
One of the more striking hybrids to emerge from the potteries of Jingdezhen specifically designed to appeal to European taste is a large soup dish the Dutch called a klapmuts. The shape of this dish was reminiscent of the cheap wool felt hats worn by the lower classes in Holland, hence the name. Judging from the great number of klapmutsen in the White Lion’s hold, this was a popular item, and the name, though it gestured to something unsophisticated, stuck.
The Chinese had no use for such a dish. The problem was soup. Unlike European soup, Chinese soup is closer to broth than stew; it is a drink, not an entrée. Etiquette, therefore, permits lifting your bowl to your lips to drink it. This is why Chinese soup bowls have steep vertical sides: to make it easier to drink from the brim. European etiquette forbids lifting the bowl, hence the need for a big spoon specially designed for the purpose. But try to place a European spoon in a Chinese soup bowl and over it goes: the sides are too high and the center of gravity not low enough to balance the weight of the handle. Hence the flattened shape of the klapmuts, with the broad rim on which a European could rest his spoon without accident.
Chinese consumers were not much interested in the export ware made for the Europeans. If the odd piece circulated within China, it did so purely as a curiosity. The few carrack porcelains that have surfaced in two early-seventeenth-century Chinese graves probably came into their owners’ possession for this reason. One serving plate decorated in the European style was found in the grave of a Ming prince who died in 1603, and two pairs of plates in the klapmuts style were found entombed with a provincial official. Both grave sites are in the province of Jiangxi, where the porcelain manufacturing center Jingdezhen was located, which helps to explain how these
men got hold of these pieces. Why they wanted them is something we can only guess. They may have regarded the carrack style as a bit of tasty foreign exotica that happened to be locally available. There is an intriguing convergence here: the upper classes at the opposite ends of the Eurasian continent were both acquiring carrack porcelain, Chinese because they thought it embodied an exotic Western style, and Europeans because it seemed to them quintessentially Chinese.
Once VOC ships started delivering their ceramic loads more regularly in the 1610s, Chinese dishes did more than decorate tables, fill sideboards, and perch atop wardrobes: they appeared on Dutch canvases. The earliest Dutch painting showing a Chinese plate, by Pieter Isaacsz, was painted in 1599, several years before the first big auctions of captured Portuguese cargo were making these objects available to Dutch buyers. The first painting to display a klapmuts is a still life by Nicolaes Gillis painted two years later. Gillis has arranged a litter of fruits, nuts, jugs, and bowls on a table. To us it looks like any other Dutch still life, but to a viewer in 1601, it featured a Chinese porcelain of the sort that only the wealthiest could afford, and that most Dutch people had never seen in real life, let alone touched. Gillis could not have afforded to own the piece he painted. It would be another two years before the cargo of the San Iago arrived in Amsterdam, and another decade before Chinese wares were priced within the reach of ordinary buyers. It is therefore likely that he was painting it on commission for the owner: not just a still life, then, but the portrait of a prized possession.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, a Dutch house was a house decorated with china. Art followed life, and painters put Chinese dishes into domestic scenes to lend a touch of class as well as a patina of reality. In Delft, Chinese porcelain started to become available before Vermeer’s lifetime. The flagship of the Delft Chamber of the VOC, the Wapen van Delft, sailed twice to Asia, returning in 1627 and 1629 with a combined load of fifteen thousand pieces of porcelain, some of which would have remained locally. The largest personal collection in the city belonged to Niclaes Verburg, the director of the Delft Chamber. Verburg could afford whatever his ships brought to Rotterdam and his barges floated up to Delft, for when he died in 1670, he was the richest man in Delft.
Though not quite in Verburg’s league, Maria Thins aspired that her house should meet current standards of elegant taste. If Vermeer’s canvases are anything to go by, the Thins-Vermeer household owned several pieces. The klapmuts in Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window also appears in A Woman Asleep, so that was probably a family possession. The household may also have owned a blue-and-white Chinese ewer, or pitcher, for one appears behind a lute on a table in Girl Interrupted at Her Music. This could not have come directly from the VOC, however, as a European craftsman has gilded the lily by adding a silver lid. There is also a carrack-style ginger jar sitting on the table at the left-hand side of Woman with a Pearl Necklace. The curving reflection of an unseen window to the left on the surface of the jar shows why Vermeer, who was so captivated by light, must have enjoyed painting something as lustrous as a Chinese pot. On the same table, directly in front of the woman with the necklace, there is a small bowl with steep curving sides—evidence of yet a fourth Chinese piece in the Thins-Vermeer collection?
THE PORCELAINS THAT VOC SHIPS brought back to Europe were expensive items of conspicuous consumption that fell into the hands only of those who could afford them. For everyone else, European ceramics producers came up with import substitutes to cash in on the taste for things Chinese. Among the most successful were the potters and tile makers of Delft. They were descendants of sixteenth-century Italians from Faenza (which gave its name to the polychrome earthenware known as faïence) who had migrated north to Antwerp in the sixteenth century looking for work, and continued farther north to escape the Spanish military efforts to suppress Dutch independence. They brought their knowledge of ceramics production with them and were able to set up kilns in Delft’s renowned breweries, many of which had been forced to close down as working-class taste shifted from beer to gin. In these newly converted potteries, they began to experiment with imitations of the new ceramic aesthetic coming from China, and buyers liked what they produced.
Delft potters were unable to match the quality of Chinese blue-and-white, but they did manage to produce passable imitations at a low price. Delftware became the affordable substitute for ordinary people who wanted Chinese porcelain but in the early years of the VOC trade could not dream of acquiring more than a few pieces. Delft potters did not just imitate; they also innovated. Their biggest success at the low end of the market was blue-and-white wall tiles for the new houses that the Delft bourgeoisie were building. The blue of these tiles exuded an enticing whiff of Chineseness, and the sketching style in which the figures were painted onto their surfaces vaguely replicated what people might have thought of as Chinese. Anthony Bailey puts it nicely in his biography of Vermeer. “Seldom has long-distance plagiarism produced such an original result—the creation of a type of folk art.” The industry boomed. By the time Vermeer was painting, a quarter of the city’s labor force was engaged in one way or another with the ceramics trade. Delft porcelain sold well and widely among those who could not afford the Chinese product, and the city’s name traveled with the product. Dishes in England became known as “china,” but in Ireland they were called “delph.”
Delft tiles appear in five of Vermeer’s paintings. As painters and ceramic tile makers were members of the same artisans’ guild, St. Luke’s, of which Vermeer was a headman, he certainly knew the men who owned the kilns. He would even have known some of the ceramic painters, who enjoyed a status above ordinary tile makers. Vermeer seems to have enjoyed the whimsical sketches that decorate the tiles—buildings and ships, cupids and soldiers, men peeing and angels smoking—since he reproduces some of these in his own paintings. He seems to have loved the cobalt blue they used, as it became one of his trademarks as a colorist. Perhaps in his use of cobalt blue and his detailed re-creations of light on shining surfaces we begin to see the first hints of a decorative style known as chinoiserie that would overwhelm European taste in the eighteenth century.
Absent concrete evidence, we can still imagine that as a working artist living in one of the VOC chamber towns, Vermeer saw examples of Chinese painting. We know that several Chinese paintings made it into the collection of Niclaes Verburg, the Delft VOC director, but these are unlikely to have been shown outside his home. Still, some images of what the Chinese regarded as beautiful must have been brought back by curious sailors and circulated in the public realm. John Evelyn reports that he saw unusual foreign pictures in Noah’s Ark in Paris. Were there Chinese paintings among them? When a satirist in Amsterdam amused his readers by imagining “a painting in which twelve mandarins were sketched with a single stroke of the brush,” he expected his readers to be familiar with the bold, flowing brushstrokes of Chinese artists. If Chinese paintings were circulating in the Netherlands, surely Vermeer would have managed to see them.
The circulation of decorative objects did not go only from China to Europe. European objects and pictures circulated in China too. On 5 March 1610, while the White Lion was on its third voyage from Amsterdam to Asia, and a few years before Wen Zhenheng started writing his Treatise on Superfluous Things, an art dealer called Merchant Xia paid a call on a favored customer. Li Rihua was a renowned amateur painter and a wealthy art collector living in Jiaxing, a small city on the Yangtze Delta southwest of Shanghai. Li moved in the same social circles as the Wen family and probably knew the author of Superfluous Things. He was one of Merchant Xia’s regular customers, having bought paintings and antiquities from him over a long stretch of years. Xia was just back from Nanjing, the center of the antiques and curiosities trade at the opposite end of the Yangtze Delta. He brought a selection of rarities for Li to view: a porcelain wine cup from the 1470s; an old bronze water dripper of the sort calligraphers used to thin their ink, which was fashioned in the shape of a crouc
hing tiger; and two greenish earrings the size of a thumb. Xia assured Li that the earrings were a rare type of crystal from a kiln that produced such things only in the 950s, implying that he expected them to fetch a high price.
Li liked most of the things on offer, but he quickly realized that Merchant Xia was wrong about the earrings. He decided to have fun with Xia by pretending to examine them with due care, and then pointing out that they were made of glass. Not only were the earrings not tenth-century antiques; they were not even Chinese. As Li wrote in his diary later that day, “These items were brought here on foreign ships coming from the south—items of foreign manufacture, in fact. The glass objects you find these days are all the work of the foreigners from the Western [Atlantic] Ocean, who make them by melting stone, and not naturally produced treasures.” Li enjoyed getting the better of Merchant Xia, but not out of malice. He knew that forgery was all part of the game of buying and selling antiques, and quite enjoyed the fact that this time it was the dealer who had been fooled, not the customer. Merchant Xia left suitably chastened, and probably embarrassed more for having paid a high price for the earrings in Nanjing than for trying to sell them to someone as alert as Li Rihua.
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