This text was excerpted and adapted from a live discussion between Adrienne L. Childs, Iris Moon, and Sequoia Miller in 2022.
Race and Ceramics
Adrienne L. Childs (ALC): Thank you for inviting us to have this conversation about how race figures into the wonderful world of Victorian majolica, or what we call “the majolica imaginary.”
This speaks to the wide variety of imaginative designs and forms that we find in nineteenth-century majolica from England, the European continent, and America. We hope to tease out what these things might tell us about common perceptions of difference and the ways in which ceramic wares embody, normalize, and circulate these notions. Many of the objects that we’re going to discuss are actually not in the exhibition Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915, but were published in the fantastic and expansive book that accompanies it. We do want to warn you that there are some potentially offensive images that we will discuss, but it’s important to open our eyes to the way that ceramics have circulated fraught ideas about race.
Iris, Sequoia, and I are going to briefly talk about our own work and thinking on racialized images in the world of ceramics and decorative arts. I’m going to start with my work on “ornamental Blackness” [fig. 1], the term that I developed to describe the Black body in European decorative arts. My inquiry into these objects attempts to develop a critical language and map out a strategy for interpreting a brand of luxury objects in which the vogue for representing the African body disseminates tropes of Blackness throughout spaces of wealth and refinement in Europe and beyond. Objects such as porcelains, clocks, and furniture represented not only the taste for the fantasy of the exotic, but also a manifestation of the Black laboring body in the guise of fashion and decor. I investigate the tensions inherent in the system in which actual Black bodies are enslaved, reviled, feared, and subjugated, on the one hand, and the symbol of luxury and opulence on the other.
Iris Moon (IM): The Chinese Musicians (ca. 1755) is a sizable piece of porcelain and features four figures, a man, two women, and a child. It was made by a porcelain manufactory in England [fig. 2]. I really became interested in this topic of chinoiserie for the opposite reasons that Adrienne was pointing out. Blackamoor figures are visible and highly charged figures. With chinoiserie in the eighteenth century, there is a sudden eruption of these figures that is widespread; however, they don’t even register as figures, but are seen as a style of ornamentation. Chinoiserie is a taste, an object, a place. Many of these different issues are swirling around in the eighteenth century, but they particularly accrued to the material of porcelain. I am interested in teasing out some of those issues. The eighteenth-century objects deemed chinoiserie beg the question: How do you think, talk, and write about race before it’s been mapped onto this kind of ethnographic and anthropological framework? The decorative arts play a huge role in that, which is why I was very much interested in joining this conversation.
Sequoia Miller (SM): I have a sustained interest in ceramics, and I generally work in twentieth-century material. But I have started to think about the continuities between the eighteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries and the long stories about how ceramics can embody ideas about racial types and racial stereotypes, and how these questions fit into larger theoretical frameworks.
Clarice Cliff (1899–1972) was an early twentieth-century English designer, widely celebrated for her many successful forms and surfaces. This teapot, Greetings from Canada (1937–39), was made by Cliff’s studio for the Canadian market [fig. 3]. There are clearly racist depictions of Indigenous Canadian folks that ornament this piece. There’s a way of presenting these kinds of geographical and figural images of a particular place as a way of kind of defining that place, and also creating this jumble of people and images that are both specific and completely generalized.
For example, there is a piece by a francophone Canadian artist named Léopold L. Foulem (b. 1945) in the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, Toronto, that is a contemporary blackamoor figure titled Contemporary Blackamoor Candelabrum (2005) [fig.4]. Foulem is pulling from a handful of racist tropes and stereotypes in a way that involves humor and irreverence. Foulem is celebrated as a pioneering queer artist who really brought the language of queer aesthetics into contemporary ceramics, but his ways of thinking about race and depictions of race are perhaps a bit different from Cliff’s.
ALC: Do you think Foulem is critiquing the blackamoor tradition?
SM: In a word I’d say no. I feel like at the time he was coming from a place of irreverence and camp. Quite a bit of Léopold Foulem’s work is within camp and kitsch discourses and aesthetics. He frequently repurposes figurines, molds, and novelty ceramics, and reframes them as queer vignettes and queer scenarios. In this case, I think there are readings of this in which the red lips can be lipstick as well as a racialized depiction. I think he’s playing with the Black Peter (Zwarte Piet) figure in Northern European Christmas and holiday traditions.
Meissen Manufactory, Germany
ca. 1740
Hard-paste porcelain, gilt-bronze mount
Metropolitan Museum of Art
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/203065
Chelsea Porcelain Manufactory, manufacturer
ca. 1755
Soft-paste porcelain
Metropolitan Museum of Art
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/203344?ft=Chinese+Musicians+Chelsea&offset=0&rpp=40&pos=1
ca. 1937–39
White porcelain and glazed enamel
Gardiner Museum
https://emuseum.gardinermuseum.com/objects/5071/greetings-from-canada?ctx=7412aab3558d33bf41eda1db8946626cec7122ec&idx=0
Ceramic and found objects
Gardiner Museum
Four Continents: The “Known” World
IM: I think it’s important to contextualize majolica in a longer history of ceramics, but specifically that of porcelain, being the most distinguished type of ceramics in Europe. And the place where you’re really going to see race as a factor in the reading of these objects is in the context of four continents imagery.
This set from the German manufactory Fulda presents America, Europe, Africa, and Asia depicted in the form of female allegories, or personifications [fig. 5]. Of course, the world is not divided into just four continents. We know it’s a much bigger, more complicated, and messier place, but this allegory really sets the stage for thinking about the world and the different races that existed in the eighteenth-century imaginary. I think it creates a framework for thinking about race in an ideational and abstract way. The four continents structure also becomes a screen for masking or disguising much more violent and clearly racist depictions of people as well.
Fulda Pottery and Porcelain Manufactory, German
ca. 1781-88
Hard-paste porcelain
Metropolitan Museum of Art
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/202340?ft=Fulda&offset=0&rpp=40&pos=2
ALC: It is interesting to think about the four continents allegory being a Baroque and Rococo formulation that proposes how how we divide up the world. It presents a delineation of essentially four races. I see that Blackness is often depicted under the umbrella of the four continents, which masks that very violent and exploitative relationship between Europe and Africa in the eighteenth century.
In some ways the cornucopia being held by the allegory of Africa does speak to what’s being extracted from the continent in terms of the wealth and abundance of human capital, and, later, natural resources.
SM: The four continents imagery is working out a visual system for what these places can mean in the European imaginary.
Blackamoors and Such
ALC: In my estimation these large Minton Moors, Negro and Negress (1865), are some of the most fascinating objects that I have ever seen in majolica and very important to my study of ornamental Blackness [fig. 6]. These spectacular objects are over 6 feet tall and were created by the Minton manufactory. They are jardiniere, or planters. They would be in a grand home, specifically inside a conservatory, orangerie, or winter garden. These spaces might be where one would display and grow exotic plants and fruits from across the colonial world. As curator Jo Briggs points out in her Majolica Mania essay, the tropical environment gave the idea of excess, extremity, and difference. I agree that these these figures would have played right into that notion of tropicality and excess, and perhaps even a little bit of naughtiness.
Albert Carrier-Belleuse (1824-1887), designer
Minton & Co., Stoke-upon-Trent, Staffordshire, manufacturer
ca. 1867
Earthenware with Majolica glazes
Private Collection
Could these figures be allegories? The male figure has a head of a lion, a lion skin, a quiver, and a bow—all traditional symbols associated with the allegory of Africa. However, the woman is not an allegory. In my estimation she embodies the orientalist influence. The jewelry, the costume, the feathered fan, and the striped headdress are all typical of the way Europeans depicted North African women. In popular French orientalist imagery, many of the Black females are harem dwellers, often attendants to odalisques. This pair represents the kind of eclecticism that we find in majolica.
IM: What’s so striking is the base that features these incredibly sexualized satyrs. You are reading these two bodies within a kind of sexualized economy. This fits into that orientalizing discourse. I also think the pairing of the male and female breaks them out of the four continents model such that they read in a different way
ALC: These figures were designed by Albert-Ernest Carriere-Belleuse (1824–1887), the French sculptor who designed for Minton. They were derived in part from a French Baroque print of a guéridon, or candle stand, that may have been produced in silver at Versailles in the seventeenth century. The guéridon was supported by a Moor—a popular motif at Versailles during that period. While the Moor in the print was of an indeterminate race, Minton’s Moor is most certainly of Black African descent.
The traditional blackamoor celebrates Black servitude in luxury objects, but where does that end? Can a majolica Moor produced in the 1860s be separated from that tradition? In my estimation, it feels like it’s of a piece.
SM: I would agree. I think that there is a continuity—and a throughline. In the same way that the male blackamoor figure reaches back to the four continents, which had become such a pervasive idiom that you can point toward it without fully articulating it. Even though it’s not part of the formal system, you can find that the attributes are part of an economy of this brand of imagery.
I feel also there’s a confluence of labor and leisure within these works.
IM: It’s almost like the laboring has become sexualized in the sense that they are placed in a subordinate position that I think is incredibly problematic. But clearly that’s where they derive a lot of their visual force.
Commodities and Containment
ALC: Let’s talk about the issue of colonial commodities and how racialized figures turn up in majolica serving receptacles. These vessels often embody the connections between race and labor in ways that make you wonder if there is a conscious disregard for these problematic inflections.
In the case of the Joseph Holdcroft tobacco jar (ca. 1870s–80s), it draws upon the history of tobacco coming to England via the labor of Black slaves in Virginia, going as far back as the late seventeenth century [fig. 7]. The adhesion of the Black body to tobacco was so strong that it was used to advertise the substance routinely in England and beyond. This advertisement of Chance’s Best Virginia tobacco is a good example of that [fig. 8].
Yet by the 1870s, when this vessel was created, the figures became more whimsical.
IM: I think that this notion of the racial phantasmagoria is spot on. Even though we are talking about an object made after the age of emancipation, there is this constant specter of re-enslavement and containment that appears under the guise of whimsy. I also want to point out the monstrous quality of the feet at the work’s bottom that is a denigrating representation of the subhuman. This curious object makes it an acceptable place to do that.
Longton, Staffordshire
ca. 1870s – 80s
Earthenware with majolica glazes
Collection of Marilyn and Edward Flower
Anonymous
c. 1730
British Museum
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_Heal-117-22
SM: I love the idea of that specter of containment. We have a container that stands in for the body with a head on top. The commodity in the vessel—in this case, tobacco—replaces the body and really speaks to the system of dividing, conquering, and then selling. The next step is to make it consumable. To turn these segments or segregations into saleable entities that could then circulate globally.
The Black heads, on the side, with the lion headdresses, are another reference to the four continents. Again, there is that continuity, that little nod to the lineage of racialized depictions that reaches back centuries.
East as Fantasy
IM: I think with chinoiserie themes, there is a strange familiarity that emerges from its long life in the British context. However, it’s a familiarity that is predicated upon a foreignness and unknowability and projected onto a fantasy of the East. Even though it is contrived, there is an intense fascination and focus on getting the details right. It doesn’t matter if we’re referring to India, Japan, China, or Southeast Asia, they all are blended into this fantasy of Cathay.
What kind of visual work is chinoiserie doing in the nineteenth century? In a work like the Japanese Boatmen (ca. 1875) designed by Johann Hasselmann (John) Hénk (1847–1921) for Minton, it is unclear if we’re dealing with chinoiserie in its eighteenth-century incarnation or if we’re dealing more with a fascination with Japan after it “opens up to the West” following Commodore Matthew Perry’s initiation of trade relations with Meiji Japan [fig. 9]. But again, it still retains that projection of a fantasy of an unknowable world as well as a real interest in ornamentation and the superficial aspects of the culture.
SM: You totally hit it right when you said that the people and the place are operating at exactly the same register. They don’t function as people, characters, or even caricature. They are consumed by this obsessive attention to ornament.
IM: This is a fantastic piece with beautiful details, but the figures are a part of the pattern. There is also a keen attention to the tree branches, the pine needles, and the flowers. We are not talking about mapping an actual place or representing people. It’s a fantasy.
ALC: Absolutely, and I think that is what it is meant to be. In terms of its function, is it a vase?
Minton & Co., Stoke-upon-Trent, Staffordshire, manufacturer
ca. 1875
Joan Stacke Graham Collection
IM: The Majolica Mania co-curator Earl Martin says it is probably a flower holder.
SM: The flower holder on the side creates an asymmetry that is reminiscent of the ikebana tradition.
ALC: The piece presents a beautiful, sweeping incorporation of nature and figures into one decorative flourish, but what bothers me is the fact that it is called Japanese Boatmen, although there is a female character here.
IM: Interestingly, in contrast to the blackamoor trope in which the figures are hypersexualized, there is an emasculation and de-sexing of the figures here and in the larger sweep of chinoiserie. This relates to the long familiarity with this imagined unfamiliarity. Chi-ming Yang’s wonderful scholarship on chinoiserie and performing China speaks to the notion that the construction of British identity in the eighteenth century is predicated on the construction of the Other as both a mirror and a means to differentiate British culture.
ALC: As our discussion has revealed, nineteenth-century majolica—a popular and captivating ceramic phenomenon—often reduced different cultures to vignettes in the form of fanciful objects. Here, we have considered how the prejudices or fantasies that informed these compelling objects become veiled by bright chromatics, familiar designs, and whimsical delights. A set of complex tensions indeed.