At the end of the 1811 trading season, Edward Carrington returned home to his New England “town” of Providence, Rhode Island, from Canton, China, then the world’s third largest and most cosmopolitan city. He had lived there for nearly a decade as a resident merchant and nominal U.S. consul to China. A shrewd businessman, he had made a small fortune in cornering the transpacific fur trade. As post-Revolutionary Americans sailed en masse beyond Cape Horn, quickly identifying potentially profitable resources, Carrington stood ready in Canton to broker their cargoes [1]. He kept close track of American ventures in the Pacific, and shortly before leaving, he wrote his American agents asking them to buy up all the seal skins they could obtain. In characteristic deadpan, Carrington noted in his ledger in 1810, “By seal skins … $40,411.51."[2] He left shortly afterward. Within a year of returning to the United States, Carrington did what all successful British and American China traders did: he built a neoclassical mansion house lavishly embellished with East Asian elements, including carved teakwood tables, cane and bamboo chairs, fine porcelain vases, and lacquered cabinets. With prestige born of wealth and global connections, Carrington like other American “China merchants,” became a civic leader and a tastemaker, and his house a leading cultural standard, admired and imitated throughout the United States. Carrington’s house begs the question: why have American art historians relegated Asian-Pacific aesthetics to a side story in interpretations of federal-era arts and architecture rather than an integral part of this period’s neoclassicism?[3]
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[1] See “An East Indies Trade for the United States,” in “Tea, Sovereignty” in this book.
[2] Jaques Downs, Golden Ghetto: The American Commercial Community at Canto and the Shaping of American China Policy, Lehigh University Press, 1997, pp. 89-90.
[3] See Johnston and Frank, eds, Global Trade and Visual Arts in Federal New England (University Press of New England, 2014), “Emerging Imperial Aesthetics of Federal New England: An Introduction” and passim.
