Exotic mania [ Taste & Manners ]
… sophisticated taste, chinoiserie was a fundamental part of polite society in which aristocratic and socially important women used to collect a great variety of Chinese decorative objects. Queen Mary, Queen Anne, Henrietta Howard, the … purchasers seemed, paraphrasing John Locke, to furnish their minds with ideas about China’s art and language. Elite women and their obsession with chinoiserie seem to project Locke’s conceptual metaphor - ‘ the mind is an empty cabinet … One of these truths was that with their collecting of Chinese and Chinese-inspired objects and art, wealthy and refined women were contributing to the socio-cultural exchanges between East and West, between Oriental and European cultures of …
Animals | Australia | Chinoiserie | Collecting | Commerce | Exoticism | Menageries | North America
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