Overview

This volume offers the first critical account of how European imports of East Asian textiles, porcelain, and lacquers, along with newly published descriptions of the Chinese garden, inspired a revolution in the role of painting in early modern Europe. With particular focus on French interiors, Isabelle Tillerot reveals how a European enthusiasm for East Asian culture and a demand for novelty transformed the dynamic between painting and decor. Models of space, landscape, and horizon, as shown in Chinese and Japanese objects and their ornamentation, disrupted prevailing design concepts in Europe. With paintings no longer functioning as pictorial windows, they began to be viewed as discrete images displayed on a wall—and with that, their status changed from decorative device to autonomous work of art. This study presents a detailed history of this transformation, revealing how an aesthetic free from the constraints of symmetry and geometrized order upended paradigms of display, enabling European painting to come into its own.

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9781606067970

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"""Tillerot's book now available in English will provide scholars of eighteenth-century art and architecture new territory for research.""--Beverly Mitchell ""ARLIS/NA"" (3/1/2024 12:00:00 AM)"

Author Information

Isabelle Tillerot is an independent scholar of eighteenth-century French art. She is the author of Jean de Jullienne et les collectionneurs de son temps: Un regard singulier sur le tableau (2010) and Beautés arbitraires: Essai sur l'imagination à l'epoque moderne (2021).

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