Enamels “Ancient” and “Rare”: The “Summer Palace” Market in Imperial England

Authors

  • Kate Hill

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.23690/jams.v4i2.116

Abstract

The plunder of the Yuanmingyuan in 1860 brought new kinds of Chinese decorative arts to Britain. British collectors and dealers grappled with these novelties and established the market in Chinese imperial art over the next several years, quickly bringing a known system of values to material of which they had little knowledge. Emerging connoisseurs of this material focussed their attention first on Qing enameled wares, which had clear economic, social and artistic values, which could easily be understood and communicated in an unstructured marketplace. The judgments and choices they made laid the groundwork for the market in Chinese imperial art today.

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Published

2020-12-02

How to Cite

Hill, K. (2020). Enamels “Ancient” and “Rare”: The “Summer Palace” Market in Imperial England. Journal for Art Market Studies, 4(2). https://doi.org/10.23690/jams.v4i2.116

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 2 (2020): Asian Art: The Formation of Collections

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2020 Kate Hill

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Except where otherwise noted, the Journal for Art Market Studies is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 4.0 International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Articles can be read and shared if attribution is given to the original source (BY) and the use is not for commercial purposes (NC).