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The Nanjing Market, detail, painting for Queen Marie Leszcznska wife of Louise XV, for the Chinese Chamber in her suite at Versailles, one of 8 Chinese themed paintings after Dutch engravings. Photo Peter McNeil Hong Kong 2025.
This talk will range across the materials and formats of silk, chintz, wallpaper, porcelain, and reverse-painted mirrors, in order to emphasise the dynamic exchange between Chinese entrepreneur-merchants and European consumers in the 18th century. The Chinese produced their European export wares from a vast range of visual sources including drawings, book illustrations, newspapers, coins, shipping and insurance papers, seals, European-made ceramics, glass and metal objects. Cases will include French, English, Colonial North American, Danish and Swedish connections. It will connect Peter’s own research on fashion culture with new work on European-style silks consumed in Ch’ien-lung China. Peter will also report on the recent exhibition in Hong Kong: The Forbidden City and the Palace of Versailles: China/France Cultural Encounters in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, which included remarkable examples of hybrid Chinese/French/British material culture.
Dr. Peter McNeil is Distinguished Professor of Design History at the University of Technology Sydney. An award-winning author, he is Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He works across design, fashion, textiles, interiors and domestic life and has published monographs including Luxury: A Rich History; and ‘Pretty Gentlemen: Eighteenth-Century Dress and The Macaroni Fashion World’. He has a long-standing interest in cross-cultural design, inspired by his attending the first classes on Modern Asian Art conducted in Australia by Professor John Clark at ANU around 1990.
Cost: $25 members, $35 non-members.
Light refreshments will be served.
Please make bookings and payments online via this website.
For further information email bookings@taasa.org.au.
Saddle Blanket, Qing, 1736-1795, brocade, gold and silver threads, The Palace Museum, photo Peter McNeil Hong Kong 2025
Teapot, commissioned by Imperial order and made in France by Joseph Couteau for the Qianlong Emperor. The Palace Museum, photo Peter McNeil Hong Kong 2025
