The China Trade and Emerging Imperial Aesthetics in Federal America

Speaker Name: Patricia A. Johnston, Ph.D., Rev. J. Gerard Mears, S.J. Chair in Fine Arts, and Chair, Department of Visual Arts
Department: Department of Visual Arts
University or Organization: College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA

Immediately after the Revolution, American ships embarked for China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other destinations. Viewing themselves as citizens of a rising imperial state, Americans imported vast quantities of luxury goods and arts, especially porcelain, silks, lacquerware, painting, sculpture, furniture, wallpaper, and textiles. This direct trade made Asian visual arts and other materials less expensive and more available to all Americans, particularly in the port cities of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, and Salem. As new materials, forms, imagery, and aesthetics arrived, they were absorbed into American visual culture—not as marginal, or as a distinct style, but as integral to a dominant Neoclassicism.

This talk rethinks the Neoclassical aesthetic in one seaport, Salem, Massachusetts, in light of global influences. Federal-period Americans seamlessly blended the two distinct aesthetic systems of Greco-Roman neoclassicism with Asian aesthetics in their homes, dress, and decorative styles. Globally influenced objects provided styles and themes that eventually permeated American visual culture, becoming visual signs of experience, social status, and economic success. These international forms help shaped Americans’ new sense of their place in the world, contributing to the nation’s developing identity as a commercial empire. 

Patricia Johnston, the Rev. J. Gerard Mears, S.J., Chair in Fine Arts and Chair of the Visual Arts Department at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester MA, is the author/editor of three books: Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography (1997), which won three book awards for its study of the relationship between fine and commercial photography; Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture (2006), which examines how concepts of high and low art changed from the 18th to the 20th centuries; and Global Trade and Visual Arts in Federal New England (2014). In 2016-17, she was the Terra Foundation Senior Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has held prior research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is presently writing a book Art and Global Knowledge in Early America. 

Presented by Association of Graduate Art Students (AGAS)

Image: Portrait of Captain Benjamin Carpenter, collection of Peabody Essex Museum