East Meets West

July 17 2009, 4:53pm

These center tables, with their Chinese and Japanese porcelain and European lacquer work, represent an intriguing combination of objects from the oriental export trade and the European chinoiserie tradition, as seen in figure 1, which depicts a late 17th century bazaar in the Netherlands. “This fantasy of exotic luxury goods includes Japanese lacquer furniture, Chinese porcelain, ivory devotional sculptures, Indian chintzes and Turkish or Persian paintings.”1