William Fehr Collection
- Title
- William Fehr Collection
- Date Created
- c. 1740s
- Creator
- N/A
- Identifier
- William Fehr Collection, D117
- Original Location
- Canton, Qing Empire
- Current Location
- Cape Town, South Africa
- Description
-
This plate, produced specifically for the Cape in Canton around the 1740s, stands out conspicuously among the William Fehr collection, inviting us to explore a largely forgotten, centuries-long connection between colonial southern Africa and the Chinese cultural world. The plate’s Cantonese painters participated in the messy transoceanic chains of production that shaped such ‘entangled objects’. They interpreted an African environment, sketched by Dutch illustrators, through the lens of Chinese expectations of elite European consumers’ tastes. The plate exemplifies Giorgio Riello’s observation that material culture can help re-articulate ‘our spatial understanding of the past in ways that are not necessarily apparent in documentary sources’.
It depicts Cape Town’s iconic landscape as seen from a Table Bay littered with Dutch ships, combining several seemingly unrelated visual cultures. For example, the ‘tablecloth’ covering Table Mountain – the feature after which the Khoekhoe named the place ǁHui ǃGaeb (‘the place where the clouds meet’) – is portrayed as Chinese xiangyun (‘auspicious clouds’) over a shanshui (‘mountain and water’) scene, while the sea and sky resemble washed-out European watercolours. The scene is framed by laub-und-bandelwerk in gold and black, which was characteristic of Viennese porcelain in the 1730s, itself inspired by French Baroque aesthetics, and topped with unidentified arms.
- Credit
- Wiliam Fehr Collection (D117), Iziko Museums of South Africa, Cape Town.
- Contributor
- Dr. Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh, Junior Research Fellow, University of Cambridge
- Item sets
- The Things They Carried Exhibit
- Site pages
- Map
- Media
-
CD117[30].jp2
Part of William Fehr Collection