Thursday October 5, 2023
6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

The Robert and Marian Cumming Lecture

Speaker: Dr. Iris Moon, Associate Curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

In this talk, Dr. Iris Moon of The Metropolitan Museum of Art will consider the place of Chinoiserie and the porcelain made at the Chelsea manufactory in 18th-century Britain. Chinoiserie is typically considered a style of decoration inspired by European fantasies of China and East Asia as distant, faraway places that embodied notions of the foreign and the strange. However, the figurative work of Joseph Willems, the only named modeler known to have worked at Chelsea, suggests a more nuanced and complicated perspective on this 18th-century British style. Meant to conjure the faraway and strange, Chinoiserie, in Willems’s hands, evokes feelings of sympathy for the intimate and familiar.