Chinese figure with bird 1745 - 1760

This is a porcelain figure of a Chinese man with a bird, made at the Saint James’s Factory in France, sometime between 1749 and 1759. At this time, Europe was in the midst of ‘chinoiserie,’ a craze for Chinese art and design. European manufacturers struggled to imitate fine Chinese porcelain, which was an expensive and highly desirable import, and figures like this are examples of that. The figure performs an idea of ‘the Orient’ for a European market, and these kinds of exoticized figures were status symbols for their owners. Today, we can reflect on the way that objects like this, originally intended to communicate wealth and cosmopolitanism, speak to a history of trade, colonialism, and cultural appropriation. Historians use a range of documentary sources, including trade records, museum collections, and design books, to better understand the complex social context of this kind of work.