Illumination.(Collectors' notes)(lacquer art by William Gibbs )

Christiaan J. A. Jorg, a specialist at Leiden University in the Netherlands on East-West interactions in the decorative arts, has kindly shared some perspicacious observations about the early eighteenth-century japanned panels in the Vernon House in Newport, Rhode Island, which were the subject of an article by Caroline Frank in our September 2006 issue (pp. 104-113). He writes:

In her fascinating article, Caroline Frank comments on the sources that the lacquer artist William Gibbs may have used for the Vernon House panels and mentions the influence of the lavishly illustrated Dutch travelogues about the East. Contrary to her assumption, however, most of the copperplate engravings in those books were printed as part of the text pages, and neither those pages nor the ones bearing full-page illustrations were sold separately at the time. Therefore Gibbs must have had access to complete books, which as Frank indicates, did circulate in the American colonies, perhaps even on a wider scale than is generally thought.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

One of the motifs used on the Newport panels is a man apparently impaled on the end of a pole. Gibbs has depicted this as a torture scene, because, as Frank rightly remarks, oriental punishments and cruelty fascinated contemporary Western readers, and so such scenes would have had wide appeal. However, originally the motif had another connotation, namely the accomplishments of jugglers in India and China, as is clear from engravings in Dutch travel books, such as those illustrated here (Figs. 1, 2). Gibbs could have used such prints, which were widely disseminiated and were also used for motifs on Western decorative arts (including textiles, lacquer, silver, embroidery, and ceramics) to make his own chinoiserie while changing the content.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Another example is the seated crowned figure, for which there is a model in Joan Nieuhof's Het gezantschap der Neerlandtsche Oost-Indische Compagnie, aan den grooten Tar-tarischen Cham, den tegenwoordigen keizer van China ... [An embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Grand Tartar Cham emperor of China ...], one of the most popular travel books about China (see Fig. 3). Its many illustrations were frequently used for chinoiseries by European artists in the seventeenth and ...