...And a Touch of Europe

If we go back to our comparison, we can see both differences as well as similarities. Both show a landscape on the lid and on all four sides of the boxes. The landscape Heinrici designed on the lid was highly influenced by the European landscape tradition in paintings, with architectural shapes referring to church buildings. In contrast, the framing borders with their floral images are highly influenced by Asian examples..

But there is more. If design motifs from East Asian lacquerwares were considered desirable, the playful Rococo aesthetics went even further. If we look carefully at the borders of our box (fig. 24) we see an unusual architectural combination featuring Greek columns, an Egyptian pyramid, and other ruins. A common practice in 18th century Europe, the feeling of the ‘exotic’ is conveyed here through a chaotic pastiche of non-Western design elements to give the box an ‘Asian’ feeling. These incoherent elements would have never been assembled in East Asian lacquerwares, as this practice was an expression of an exclusively European imagination of foreign lands in that period. Overall, finding an exact definition for our lacquered box may be tricky. If you label it as either a ‘European’ or an ‘Asian’ object, you are missing a lot of the history that the box has to tell. Is it an Asianized European object, or a Europeanized Asian one? Rather than focusing on a strict definition, it may be more interesting to look at this box in the light of the stories of cultural and material exchange between these two regions.

Before you leave: do you want to discover a little bit more on these 18th century European fantasies towards Asia? Then go for the longread on Chinoiserie!