Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: Glass is one of the most durable and versatile materials in all of the decorative arts, and one of the world's greatest collections of glass objects is at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York.
Speaker: I've wanted to do an episode with the museum for a long time now, and I
Speaker: Now I have a great opportunity.
Speaker: Their curator, Christopher Kitt Maxwell, has put together an exhibition and catalog called In Sparkling Company, Glass and the Costs of Social Life in Britain During the 1700s.
Speaker: The exhibition opens on May 22nd and will run through the beginning of next year.
Speaker: Now, this is a little bit of an unusual exhibition.
Speaker: As you'd expect for a show at a prestigious institution, it does feature impressive and beautiful objects.
Speaker: But I think it's fair to say that what Maxwell has really tried to do with this show is to look beyond the objects themselves and into the lives of the people who made and sold and bought and used them.
Speaker: And glass was such a ubiquitous material in the British economy that with a little research, it can reveal an awful lot about the desires and aspirations and values of what was growing to be the most powerful nation in the world.
Speaker: Kit, thanks so much for joining me.
Speaker: Thanks for having me, Ben.
Speaker: Pleased to be here.
Speaker: Now, I want to start with a very broad question.
Speaker: What does glass tell us that we might not learn from studying other kinds of decorative arts?
Speaker: Well, as you said, glass has been ubiquitous in human life for thousands of years.
Speaker: And I think in terms of studies of the decorative arts, it's a somewhat siloed field.
Speaker: It tends to be overlooked for the other arts of fire, ceramics and metalwork, for example.
Speaker: But the developments in glassmaking, I think, can tell us a huge amount about the preoccupations, the cultural preoccupations, the economic preoccupations
Speaker: of countries that were producing glass at any moment in time.
Speaker: And that is particularly true of Britain in the 18th century, which in fact was enjoying a uniquely glassy moment at that time.
Speaker: Tell me more about that.
Speaker: What made the 18th century Britain a glassy place?
Speaker: Well, I'm glad you asked.
Speaker: At the end of the 17th century, the British perfected a new formula for glass.
Speaker: It was a formula that comprised a large percentage, around 30%, in fact, of lead oxide.
Speaker: And this made the glass...
Speaker: clearer, brighter, more refractive, stronger and heavier than glass had ever been before.
Speaker: It was known as lead crystal.
Speaker: And rock crystal had always been the benchmark or had long been the benchmark for glass making in Europe.
Speaker: And until that point, the Venetians had kind of dominated the market with their luxury soda lime wares.
Speaker: And these were exported
Speaker: internationally, all throughout Europe and into Asia.
Speaker: But they were very, very fragile, which suited the Baroque and Renaissance and before that sensibilities very well.
Speaker: But as we get closer to the 18th century, more robust wares seemed to be harmonizing with design movements at the time.
Speaker: So this new English lead crystal was perfect for the moment and could be transported widely because it was robust and strong.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so with this opening up glass wares to a broader swath of the population,
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: It's certainly in terms of geographically broad.
Speaker: So glass was exported to the British colonies, to North America, and right the way through the Caribbean.
Speaker: This innovative, expensive lead glass was already in the Caribbean, the British West Indies by the end of the 1600s.
Speaker: So it was certainly reaching broad audiences.
Speaker: So how much glass was being made?
Speaker: Can you give us a sense of that?
Speaker: And who was making it?
Speaker: Well, glass production was initially, lit glass production was initially centered in London, in the southeast, but it grew exponentially within the first few decades as various restrictions on the use of essential ingredients were lifted.
Speaker: I don't have a sense of, I can't tell you,
Speaker: quantities of glass that were being produced, but it certainly grew throughout the 18th century to make up a significant percentage of the national economy.
Speaker: So several hundred thousands of pounds worth of income was generated through the glass industry.
Speaker: Now, you referred a moment ago to Venetian glass, and of course, there's Bohemian crystal as well.
Speaker: And these are, as you say, generally elite and expensive materials and elite and expensive objects.
Speaker: As methods changed, as this new formula came to prominence, what kind of cultural status did glass have as a decorative arts material?
Speaker: Well, glass, although lead crystal was stronger, more robust, and it wasn't in itself necessarily prohibitively expensive, it did connote a certain lifestyle.
Speaker: And in order to preserve and use glass, you needed a certain means.
Speaker: You needed somewhere to store it safely.
Speaker: You needed to be able to clean it.
Speaker: You needed the food that it was designed to contain, the food and wines.
Speaker: And you needed to be able to support the social contexts for which it was designed.
Speaker: So although you could buy a set of wine glasses for just a few shillings, which was about the weekly salary of a glass worker, in fact, they required a much more significant income to support their use and care.
Speaker: So glass remained a fairly elite material throughout the 18th century.
Speaker: And I think one interesting comparison that I happened upon was Christmas reading Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol, which...
Speaker: I've read every year by tradition for years now, but I was particularly struck by Dickens' description of the Cratchits' Christmas lunch.
Speaker: So Bob Cratchit was a clerk working for Ebenezer Scrooge in the city in London.
Speaker: This was written in the 1840s.
Speaker: So he was literate and professional and supported a family in a small house in London.
Speaker: So Dickens describes Bob Cratchit's Christmas dinner and refers to the family display of glass, which comprised a custard cup without a handle and a tumbler.
Speaker: So even for a modest professional family, glassware was still considered prestigious.
Speaker: And you mentioned transportation and import, export.
Speaker: This is an age of global trade.
Speaker: There's increasing fluidity of economic exchange, both within and outside of Europe.
Speaker: How does glass fit into this sort of picture of global trade in the 18th century?
Speaker: Well, tableware, as I mentioned, enjoyed significant markets in British colonies.
Speaker: So it was exported to North America, the West Indies, which were the most profitable of all the North American colonies, and also into India.
Speaker: But it was also transported and traded in other forms.
Speaker: Besides vessels, so plate glass and lenses as well within scientific instruments were also transported and used as diplomatic gifts, particularly in the Far East.
Speaker: Now, we've picked a curious object to focus in on today.
Speaker: But before we get to that particular object, can you give me just a brief overview of the scope of the exhibition?
Speaker: What types of objects are you including and what overall story are you trying to tell with it?
Speaker: Sparkling Company is really a fairly broad and somewhat critical survey of glass and its meanings in Britain and the 18th century British world, let's call it.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: showcases the innovations of glass, so lead glass productions we've just discussed, plate glass too, but it also includes glass as a witness to certain events in the 18th century, showing how fully it permeated British life and embodied the sense of British modernity.
Speaker: So we consider the ways in which the words polished and polite were used interchangeably.
Speaker: in terms of behaviour and etiquette and civility, ideals of civility, and how glass became something of a metaphor for the polite person, the modern individual.
Speaker: And we also consider the way in which it bore witness to trade and to empire.
Speaker: to the economies of slavery and the social life of the 18th century and how all these factors and facets intertwine around the material of glass.
Speaker: All right, excellent.
Speaker: So let's dive into our curious object then.
Speaker: And what we're focusing on today is actually it's a piece of art painted onto a piece of glass.
Speaker: And we'll get to what that means in a minute.
Speaker: But the painting was actually not done in Britain, but in Canton.
Speaker: So could you just start by describing the piece and tell us how big is it and what scene is depicted on it?
Speaker: Yes, so this is a plate of glass, as you say.
Speaker: It is set into a gilt wooden frame and it measures 38 centimetres in height by 54 centimetres in width.
Speaker: And it is reverse painted with a
Speaker: a watery scene.
Speaker: We're looking out across an expanse of water to a quayside in the middle ground.
Speaker: And the quayside is set out horizontally with a row of two-story buildings in a European style.
Speaker: And between us and the buildings in this expanse of water are a series of small ships.
Speaker: And what date can you ascribe to it?
Speaker: We can be fairly specific about the date and say it is 1784 or 1785.
Speaker: So tell me, just because there's an interesting story here, you know, there's not a date written on it.
Speaker: How are you able to get that specific date?
Speaker: Well, this scene represents the European or the foreign Hongs or warehouses at Canton, which is a southern trading port in China on the Pearl River.
Speaker: And after 1757, it was the only port in China through which European East India trading companies were allowed to do business.
Speaker: And these various companies, which were often national monopolies,
Speaker: rented buildings on the quayside, which is where they stored goods, did business, traded with the Chinese Merchant Guild and kept their accommodations.
Speaker: And as a result, they flew their national flags above these buildings that were raised and learned every day that the supercargo or the lead merchant was in residence.
Speaker: So by the sequence of the flags, we can identify the year in which, the year that this painting represents.
Speaker: I think that's totally fascinating.
Speaker: But tell me about life in Canton in the 1780s.
Speaker: I mean, what sort of level of development are we talking about, levels of economic activity?
Speaker: What was the relationship with the British?
Speaker: Well, Canton was selected by the Chinese as the principal and then the sole port of official trade with Europeans.
Speaker: The Chinese were very keen to restrict European access to the mainland and interaction with the Chinese populace.
Speaker: And so all the trading companies were required to moor their ships at Wampo, which is an island about 15 miles downriver from Canton.
Speaker: And then they would be transported upriver in Chinese boats to these hongs, where the most senior merchants would disembark along with their merchandise for sale.
Speaker: And this, well, the voyage to Canton from Britain could take up to six months.
Speaker: Usually ships would stop
Speaker: in India and Bombay, possibly on the way around.
Speaker: So they would arrive between August and September, having set out at the beginning of the year.
Speaker: And unloading and reloading the ships would take several months on top of that.
Speaker: So it's three or four months before the return voyage.
Speaker: So it was an incredibly...
Speaker: busy season because the European ships tended to arrive together.
Speaker: There could be up to 4,000 European mariners in Canton during any one season.
Speaker: Slowly, by the end of the 18th century, the season became a year-round event as new routes were discovered to Canton.
Speaker: But it was a very concentrated space, but Westerners were not allowed outside the walls of Canton.
Speaker: And Chinese merchants were selected.
Speaker: They were officially nominated to do business with East India trading companies.
Speaker: But a lot of outside merchants came in to trade informally in China and silks and so forth.
Speaker: But the principal trade tea was done very, very officially.
Speaker: I see.
Speaker: And as you look at the scene depicted on this piece of glass, what does it specifically tell you or reveal about what's happening in Canton between these British merchants and Chinese merchants and others?
Speaker: Well, it looks like a rather benign scene.
Speaker: We see the Chinese ships in the foreground.
Speaker: We see orderly Western-style buildings along the quayside.
Speaker: The various companies embellished and extended their buildings over the years, creating some classical arcades and buildings.
Speaker: and verandas and so on.
Speaker: And we see the Danish, the French, the Imperial, the Habsburg, the Austrian flag, the Swedish, the British and the Dutch flags flying from left to right.
Speaker: What it doesn't show is that the business of trade and what exactly is being traded in these warehouses or Hongs.
Speaker: And that, I think, is where the story gets particularly interesting.
Speaker: Well, tell me about that.
Speaker: What are we not seeing in this picture that would be particularly interesting to understand?
Speaker: Well, we're not seeing the increasingly nefarious trade between the Europeans and the Chinese in opium.
Speaker: And the British really led the way in this, supported later by the Americans who launched their own East India Trading Company in 1784.
Speaker: So in 1757, the British East India Company took control of Bengal and they really kind of extinguished the cotton industry there and replaced it with an opium plantation system.
Speaker: And this opium was exported in increasing quantities from India to China by the East India Company, where it was sold illicitly.
Speaker: And this generated an opium crisis in China, which compelled the Chinese to purchase unofficially, illegally, opium from the British buying it in silver, which the British then used to purchase tea.
Speaker: And this was really a way to circumvent the requirement of the Chinese or the preference of the Chinese for silver, for trading in silver.
Speaker: They had very comparatively little interest in imported opium.
Speaker: European manufactured goods and silver was their prime currency of trade.
Speaker: And the British, of course, didn't much care to part with their silver on these terms.
Speaker: So opium was introduced to the equation.
Speaker: But also this painting itself demonstrates that glass too was being exported.
Speaker: to China in increasing quantities.
Speaker: Plate glass wasn't produced in China until the 18th century, until the period of European interaction, when the skills of glass blowing and plate glass making were introduced.
Speaker: And the Chinese had a great interest in mirrors and in plate glass for windows.
Speaker: And I think by the early decades of the 19th century, some 100 tons of plate glass were being exported by the British.
Speaker: We'll be back with Kit Maxwell in just a moment.
Speaker: First, just a reminder that you can find images of this reverse glass painting at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast or on my Instagram at Objective Interest.
Speaker: If you have comments or suggestions for future episodes, please email me at curiousobjectspodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker: And if you'd like to support Curious Objects, I'd be really grateful if you take a minute right now to leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening.
Speaker: Thanks so much.
Speaker: This is a fascinating aspect of the story to me, because what we're talking about with this painting is, you know, it's not a piece that was made in one place.
Speaker: It's a piece that was made in two places.
Speaker: That is the glass manufactured in Britain, the painting applied in China, and then the piece actually made for a British audience.
Speaker: So it goes halfway around the world,
Speaker: gets painted and then gets sent halfway back around the world the other direction.
Speaker: And you've just described how long that journey was, you know, via India around the Cape of Good Hope.
Speaker: This is no casual endeavor.
Speaker: So, you know, really, we're talking about a great deal of effort and expense going into the production of this work.
Speaker: And yet, you've told me that these works were actually produced in significant quantities.
Speaker: Is that right?
Speaker: Yes, this is a subject of increasing scholarly attention at the moment, but these harbour scenes were popular and they exist in numerous versions reflecting the state of the occupancy of the Hongs at various points throughout the second half of the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Speaker: So they were popular among mariners as souvenirs.
Speaker: one could assume.
Speaker: But they also appear on porcelain.
Speaker: These views also appear on porcelain and in fact, in one instance, on wallpaper too.
Speaker: But you're right, it's an incredible oceanic footprint.
Speaker: But glass had, this sort of glass had great advantages when it came to long distance transportation.
Speaker: It could be stored easily in the ship once.
Speaker: framed, it was even more secure, it didn't react to the damp of the humidity of either the climate in Canton, or in the hull of the ship.
Speaker: And the Chinese developed special backing special device that surrounded the frame on the inside of spacer, which allowed the wood of the frame to expand and contract without putting pressure onto the glass.
Speaker: So it's really quite ingenious.
Speaker: Yeah, very clever.
Speaker: And so the method here, what we've referred to as reverse painting, involves creating a picture by painting on one side of the glass and then looking at it from the other side of the glass.
Speaker: Now, where did that method originate and how did it proliferate in Canton?
Speaker: The technique of reverse painting on glass is really an ancient one.
Speaker: It can be dated back to the Roman Empire.
Speaker: And as you say, it involves, it really is painting in reverse in every sense.
Speaker: You apply the paint on the reverse side of the glass, the opposite side from which you view it.
Speaker: And you then by definition have to begin with the highlights of the painting and then work backwards into the background.
Speaker: And it really enjoyed popularity throughout Europe.
Speaker: But the Chinese had a very strong tradition of graphic arts, porcelain painting, ink painting, and so on, and developed a thriving export trade in porcelain painting and oil painting as well, which was an imported European technique, as well as this reverse painting on glass.
Speaker: And already by the 1740s, we...
Speaker: We have reports from Jesuit missionaries who were stationed at the Imperial Court in Beijing, describing how they were learning the techniques of glass painting from Chinese artists.
Speaker: And so you say by the mid to late 18th century, large quantities of plate glass were being imported to China.
Speaker: Now, some of this, as with the picture we're talking about now, was intended for Chinese artists to work on and then send back for British consumption.
Speaker: Was other glass meant for consumption in the Chinese domestic market?
Speaker: The evidence suggests increasingly that there was an emerging interest in reverse painted glass in China at this time.
Speaker: Certainly by the 19th century, it had become absorbed into Chinese folk traditional culture.
Speaker: But it seems that although the hub of the reverse painting was undertaken in Canton,
Speaker: or the hub of reverse painting was in the harbour town of Canton, there was certainly a demand for it at the imperial court.
Speaker: And we can assume therefore that higher levels of Chinese society at that time.
Speaker: So there's no signature on this picture, but what do we know about the sort of artists who might have made this painting?
Speaker: Where were they working?
Speaker: Was it in a shop?
Speaker: Would they have been an independent craftsman or someone working as part of a larger operation?
Speaker: What do we know about the actual production?
Speaker: Well, you're right.
Speaker: Very few Chinese glass painters are known.
Speaker: There are some, but this piece isn't attributed.
Speaker: And these painters would have had studios in Canton and would have been visited by the supercargos, probably on an individual private basis.
Speaker: Supercargos were the senior merchants aboard the vessels.
Speaker: They weren't sailors.
Speaker: They were East India Company officials who undertook the business of
Speaker: of the company in Canton.
Speaker: And they were, as part of their perks, they were given a certain allowance of private trade.
Speaker: So that enabled them to purchase things like porcelain or wallpaper or reverse painted pictures to bring back and sell commercially for their own profit.
Speaker: So these sorts of paintings would have been commissioned on a private basis.
Speaker: And so how many artists do you think were doing this kind of work?
Speaker: I mean, is this a more of a niche industry where a small handful of people would have developed the artistic technique to do this?
Speaker: Or was this more of a widespread trend?
Speaker: Very, I mean, comparatively little is known about the extent of reverse painting in Canton in terms of the number of workshops.
Speaker: It was certainly an established industry there in as much as the Imperial Court in Beijing recognised that this was the place to send to for artists and for examples of reverse painted glass.
Speaker: So it was...
Speaker: Certainly more than a handful and many of these artists would paint speculatively.
Speaker: So this, for example, was probably not painted to commission, but may have been one of several that the artists prepared before the beginning of the season in order to have ready for the
Speaker: for purchase when the Europeans arrived.
Speaker: And they certainly vary in scale and complexity and quality.
Speaker: And there are smaller versions which depict some generic fashionably dressed European women, which probably would have been popular souvenirs among the sailors.
Speaker: No Western women were allowed into Canton.
Speaker: So it wasn't exclusively
Speaker: male environment in terms of the European presence.
Speaker: I see.
Speaker: Well, and so the artist who painted this picture, you're speculating, may have had an idea of the sort of scene that a British trader would have found appealing.
Speaker: You know, listeners may be familiar with Chinese export porcelain.
Speaker: There was by this point in history, as we've been talking about, this great exchange of
Speaker: of goods and services between China and Great Britain.
Speaker: But tell me about this.
Speaker: I'm really trying to dig into the sort of artistic process.
Speaker: Were there pieces that might have been made on commission, on demand for British traders?
Speaker: Would those have been significantly more expensive?
Speaker: Were pieces like this one produced in multiples?
Speaker: I mean, would the same scene have been painted by the same artist a dozen different times and sold to a dozen different merchants?
Speaker: I mean, how sort of bespoke was the artistic process, if you will?
Speaker: Well, that really depended on your budget, one assumes.
Speaker: There are certainly portraits of identifiable East India Company officials, which were certainly commissioned, but therefore certainly bespoke.
Speaker: But then there are these more generic views,
Speaker: which were probably produced in advance.
Speaker: And there were certainly the portraits of the European women.
Speaker: These were stock that I imagine were kept rolling, produced throughout the year and always available.
Speaker: But the artist of this picture, of the harbour, would have had a great interest in selling it
Speaker: in that season because the flags may well change and it would be more difficult to sell the following year.
Speaker: So he would have had a particular market.
Speaker: I say he, we assume it was a male artist in Canton.
Speaker: But we assume that the artist would have had a market in mind and directed this to that.
Speaker: When you say you assume it was a male artist, how strong is that assumption?
Speaker: We don't have any reports, we don't have any evidence of female artists working in Canton on glass.
Speaker: And I think that would have been culturally egregious in 18th century China.
Speaker: Okay, let's talk about the British consumer now.
Speaker: You mentioned earlier that perhaps the sort of maritime scene would have appealed to sailors, which seems reasonable.
Speaker: But other sorts of scenes might have appealed to other sorts of people.
Speaker: Were these scenes largely being created for the benefit of the merchants and sailors who were in Canton?
Speaker: Or were they also being created for these people to bring back and sell to people in the British mainland who might have other interests?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I think a bit of both.
Speaker: There is certainly, as I say, these bespoke portraits that speak to a very close connection between the patron and the artist.
Speaker: But there were different types of scenes that were commissioned in Canton for Western market.
Speaker: You have birds and gardens, which are commonly applied to, in fact, to mirrors and scenes depicting
Speaker: courtly couples in gardens, or auspicious scenes, lakes and golden pheasants and scholars rocks and so on.
Speaker: And these would have probably been sold speculatively upon arrival in, a large portion of these would probably have been sold speculatively upon arrival in Britain, where there was a huge fascination with China, the notion of chinoiserie, which is a 19th century term,
Speaker: referred to as the Chinese taste in the 18th century, was not one of a mimicry, but it was one of revisionist approaches to xinoiseries suggest that it was one born of great admiration.
Speaker: China was an ancient culture and one that really fascinated the
Speaker: Europeans as a parallel to the classical antique origins of European civilization as they perceived it.
Speaker: So it was an admiration that was born out of fascination and a degree of respect as well.
Speaker: So how expensive do you think this particular picture might have been?
Speaker: And what sort of, you know, what class would have been the likely target for a piece like that?
Speaker: I think it would certainly have been the supra cargo class.
Speaker: So these would have been the most elite members of the East India Company officials traveling to Canton.
Speaker: And they would have been the ones who disembarked the ship at one per and went up river and lived and worked in the Hongs.
Speaker: So this put them really at the upper middling levels of mercantile society.
Speaker: And the values of these pictures are certainly variables, the quality of glass, obviously the oceanic footprint, the sorts of frames that they're put in.
Speaker: So mirrors, reverse painted mirrors sold in London at auction for 20, 30 pounds a pair.
Speaker: And the average image
Speaker: disposable income of a family at the threshold of the middling classes was £16 per annum.
Speaker: So this is disposable income after the bills and so on and so forth have been paid.
Speaker: So these sorts of pictures would have been really quite expensive and not within reach for many people.
Speaker: I mean, would they go all the way to the top of the socioeconomic ladder?
Speaker: Were pictures like this hung in the halls of the great English country houses?
Speaker: Or are we talking really just about the upper middle class?
Speaker: They certainly made their way into aristocratic and royal residences.
Speaker: We have records of reverse painted pictures in the collection of Frederick Prince of Wales in the mid 18th century.
Speaker: And George IV had a great interest in Chinese export art, although
Speaker: There are no surviving reverse painted pictures in the Royal Collection that can corroborate this, but we can certainly imagine that, well, we know that they're certainly present in the mid 18th century and probably remained there through into the 19th.
Speaker: So this picture, as you said, is dated to 1784 or 85.
Speaker: When did this art form decline?
Speaker: When did it sort of fall out of fashion or when do you stop seeing examples?
Speaker: Well, the Chinese reverse painted pictures continued to be produced in Canton really into the early 19th century.
Speaker: It was the opium wars and the changing relationship between Britain and China that really changed the system of patronage and the basis of trade there.
Speaker: In England, generally, reverse painted pictures and first painted mirrors and the reception of these Chinese objects began to decline really by the early 19th century.
Speaker: Painting on glass had moved into the domestic amateur realm, and it wasn't considered as high a form of art as it once had been.
Speaker: So there were various artistic, cultural, political, economic factors, I think, that contributed to the demise in popularity and really the demise in popularity of this art form.
Speaker: It's been overlooked really ever since and has been written off as folk art or somehow substandard.
Speaker: But the process of making it is so technically demanding and it relied on such good quality glass.
Speaker: To do a reverse painted picture like this on bad quality glass would have resulted in
Speaker: all sorts of warps and distortions and you would be able to see the air bubbles and so on.
Speaker: So it did require glass of a significant quality, which carried expense too.
Speaker: Well, and I hope listeners will take a look at the pictures online.
Speaker: It's quite an interesting experience to look at the picture.
Speaker: You know, listeners may have seen reverse painted glass
Speaker: In other contexts before, but if you haven't, it creates a special quality of color and contrast.
Speaker: And you mentioned to me that this color really translates even under dim light, such as candlelight.
Speaker: The great advantage to reverse painting on glass is that the surface can be cleaned.
Speaker: So in a world of candles, you can easily remove soot and any kind of wax or any kind of dirt from it without damaging the painting itself.
Speaker: And the colours retain, they don't fade with exposure to daylight.
Speaker: So these...
Speaker: paintings really retain their original brightness and the layer of glass adds a kind of depth to them, which is particularly appropriate with an acquiesce scene like this.
Speaker: It really enhances the visual experience.
Speaker: When the reverse painting is combined with mirrors as well, the viewer can see themselves as part of this Far Eastern, this Chinese landscape or experience.
Speaker: So they're quite interactive in many ways.
Speaker: You say that this form has been largely overlooked.
Speaker: Is there much of a private market, a trade in reverse painted glass from 18th century China?
Speaker: There certainly is.
Speaker: Chinese export arts generally are subject to considerable scholarly attention at the moment from both Asian scholars and European.
Speaker: Both recognise their uniqueness and their importance in the artistic canon.
Speaker: But reverse painting on glass in particular has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in the last few years.
Speaker: There's a great new publication that came out last year by Thierry Audric,
Speaker: which was the culmination of his PhD on Chinese reverse painted pictures.
Speaker: And that was followed shortly after by a conference at the Vitru Musée in Romand, Switzerland.
Speaker: And the proceedings of that will be coming out, I think, in 2021, later this year, offering diverse perspectives on Chinese reverse-painted pictures, again, from both Asian and European and American scholars.
Speaker: Excellent.
Speaker: Something to look forward to.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Have we missed anything significant about this particular picture?
Speaker: Ah, let me see.
Speaker: I think we've covered...
Speaker: Most of it.
Speaker: I mean, there's so much more to say about glass generally in China.
Speaker: One thing that you mentioned in our call some weeks ago that caught my attention was you talked about the ingredients for the lead glass process coming from India.
Speaker: Could you just tell me a little more about that?
Speaker: Because it really ties into this idea of a truly global trade.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: One of the key ingredients to lead glass manufacture is saltpeter, which is potassium nitrate.
Speaker: And it helps to burn off impurities, essentially, in the process of glassmaking.
Speaker: So it's essential for the clear, refractive qualities that we associate with British lead glass.
Speaker: And for a long time, the saltpeter trade was a monopoly of the king.
Speaker: This was relaxed in the late 17th century, which really enabled
Speaker: the burgeoning of the glass industry had access to this raw ingredient, which incidentally was the key ingredient to gunpowder, which was why it was such a protecting trade.
Speaker: But after 1757, the British took Bengal and the saltpitter mines in Bengal and
Speaker: And by the end of the 18th century, they controlled something like 75% of the global trade in saltpeter.
Speaker: And the East India Company kept huge saltpeter warehouses on the south bank of the Thames, right next to the glass making, the glass house, the London glass houses.
Speaker: So the two were very much hand in hand.
Speaker: The saltpeter was key both to British glass making, but also to British colonial expansion through saltpeter.
Speaker: through gunpowder as well.
Speaker: Saltpeter was used in other industries like soap making too, but it was certainly crucial for the glass making industry.
Speaker: And the access to these saltpeter mines in Bengal was crucial to its success.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Well, thank you very much.
Speaker: This has been a fascinating little peek into the exhibition.
Speaker: And I wish you the best of luck with that opening.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: Thank you for having me.
Speaker: It's been fun.
Speaker: That's our show.
Speaker: Thanks for listening.
Speaker: We'll be back next episode with a look at a series of dolls made as part of the Works Progress Administration.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: And I'm Ben Miller.
