Neoclassical Republicanism
12
plain
2017-02-01T06:12:09-08:00
Cultural forces as well as financial incentives encouraged the US commercial penetration of the Asia-Pacific, such as Carrington’s engrossment of Pacific skins. In the early nineteenth-century, an exotic world brimming with fruitful landscapes and healthy compliant savages—a world once represented by the Americas before two centuries of colonization brought “civilization”—was now found in tropical Asia and the South Seas. Decorative arts that conflated contemporary Asian tropics with ancient Mediterranean sites of Western origins intermingled with the US drive westward to cross the sea toward Asia. Meanwhile, representations of an Asian aesthetic were transformed as Americans moved from colonials to state citizens. As in Europe, tastes turned away from a light-hearted rococo. Those lithe and twisting, carefree and feminine forms, often set around a fairy-tale orient were replaced by stern, conservative lines, subtle forms, geometric shapes, and polished wood veneers, gesturing in form to a classical antiquity [6]. This is a historical narrative we know well. The chinoiserie disappears and, according to much art historical literature, we are left simply with the ancient Roman and Greek motifs said to characterize the early republic.
But as we see in federal-era neoclassical mansion like Carrington’s, orientalist motifs do not really disappear in early 19th-century fashionable homes. They have merely been obscured in scholarship by an exclusive focus on so-called republican styles, an aesthetic that matched a new nation’s political ideology not its political reality. Yet indeed, the Asian and tropical exotica are so successfully intermingled with iconic elements of the European neoclassical style—nymphs and goddesses romping in verdant fields of broken urns and naked warriors— that the oversight is understandable. Narratives of Roman republican simplicity and Greek democratic virtue blended with new idealized visions of the Asian tropics, visions now based on Pacific exploration. An older world extending from Cape Town to Canton across the Indian Ocean, dominated by one all-powerful East India Company or another, receded and an early-modern-esque spirit of individual discovery and adventure returned, this time in the early 19th-century Pacific.
Once aware of the Classical-Asian tropical conflation, examples abound. Consider Sarah Peirce. In 1801 she married the globe-trotting Captain Nichols in her family’s parlor in Salem, Massachusetts. Sarah wore an empire-style gown made from fine cotton voile brought back from Bombay by her fiancé, along with a delicate Kashmiri camel-hair shawl, a gift from an Indian merchant. On her head, she wrapped a white lace veil turban fashion. Sarah Peirce had never traveled abroad, but she was well versed in an Asian aesthetic, complete with turban [7]. For her conservative New England family, her Asian textiles and style were perfectly in keeping with a room designed by Samuel McIntire, a leader in British neoclassical design.
________________________
[6] Matthew Thurlow, “American Federal Era Period Rooms,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000),
[7] Paula B. Richter, “Fabrics and Fashion of the India Trade at a Salem Sea Captain’s Wedding,” Global Trade and Visual Arts in Federal New England , Patricia Johnston and Caroline Frank, eds., University Press of New England, 2014.
