“Material Displays: Porcelain and Natural History in the Duchess of Portland’s Museum”

Displaying Materials: Porcelain and Natural History in the Duchessof Portland’s Museum

Stacey Sloboda

Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 43, Number 4, Summer 2010,pp. 455-472 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/ecs.0.0159

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Sloboda / Porcelain and Natural History 455

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 43, no. 4 (2010) Pp. 455–72.

DISPLAYING MATERIALS: PORCELAIN AND NATURAL HISTORY IN THE DUCHESS OF PORTLAND’S MUSEUM

Stacey Sloboda

On 24 April 1786 and during the thirty-seven days that followed, London was witness to the auction of the celebrated collections of Margaret, second Duch-ess of Portland (1715–85). From its heyday in the 1760s until her death in 1785, numerous contemporaries noted the thrill of visiting Portland’s collections, which she divided between her London residence at Whitehall and her Buckinghamshire estate, Bulstrode. Inveterate country house visitor Lybbe Powys observed in 1769: “This place is well worth seeing, a most capital collection of pictures, number-less other curiosities, and works of taste in which the Duchess has displayed her well-known ingenuity. . . . I was never more entertain’d than at Bulstrode.”1 As the frontispiece to the auction catalog suggests, Portland’s museum offered visitors a fantastic visual profusion of curious objects from around the globe [Figure 1]. The image focuses on disorder, a spectacular disintegration imagined through the process of the collection’s dispersal at auction that could not have been reflective of how it actually had been displayed.2 At the same time, the image perceptively highlights the mingling of naturalia and artificialia that was crucial to the logic of the collection itself. While the auction catalog frontispiece does not tell us precisely how the collection was displayed in Portland’s time, it does provide an index to the conceptual categories that governed her acquisitions. Reading this image in tandem with other contemporary textual and visual accounts reveals that disorder, pleasure, and curiosity facilitated by the commercial and sociable exchange of objects were not just functions of the auction, but also key to understanding the logic of the collection itself.

Stacey Sloboda is Assistant Professor of Art History at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her research focuses on decorative arts and visual culture in Britain. She is currently complet-ing the book Chinoiserie: Style, Commerce, and the Boundaries of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 43, No. 4456

Figure 1. Charles Grignion after E. F. Burney, Frontispiece to A Catalogue of the Portland Museum, 1786. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

The two categories most evident in the print—natural history and porce-lain—dominated nearly ninety percent of the 1786 sale. With over four thousand lots on the block, twenty-nine days were dedicated to the auction of natural history specimens—including shells, corals, insects, and animals—while another five days were devoted to the auction of over one thousand pieces of Japanese, Chinese, and


European porcelain.3 While seemingly disparate practices, in the eighteenth century collecting botanical and other scientific curiosities and collecting china shared significant similarities. Both were focused on foreign and previously exoticized objects rendered into commodities through global networks of overseas trade, and both were gendered as feminine. Such practices were informed by a totalizing view of nature that was fed by European overseas exploration, exploitation, and trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the same time, these activities were eminently domestic. Amateur female botanists and china-mad women dot the pages of eighteenth-century art, literature, and history. Botany was considered an especially appropriate activity for serious and sober ladies, while collecting china carried a complex set of meanings, signifying both polite taste and sociability and the debasement of that taste through a preoccupation with foreign commercial goods.4 Beyond these similarities, however, porcelain also had deeper material, aesthetic, and semiotic connections to the study and collection of natural history. This essay explores the resonances between these two categories in Portland’s museum, not only to further understand her important and understudied collection, but also to uncover some of the social and aesthetic meanings of such objects in the eighteenth century that go beyond the now-familiar stories of fashion, commodification, and industrialization.

Margaret Cavendish Holles Harley Bentinck, second Duchess of Portland, was the only surviving child of Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford (1689–1741) and Henrietta Cavendish Harley (1694 –1755), daughter and heiress of John Holles, Duke of Newcastle (1662–1711) and great-granddaughter by marriage of the writer and scientist Margaret Cavendish (1623?–73). Lord Oxford was a bibliophile, pa-tron, and collector whose library formed the Harley Collection, one of the founding collections of the British Museum.5 For Portland, these family interests in science, the arts, and collecting were powerful and lasting influences. From the earliest days of her marriage in 1734 to William Bentinck, second Duke of Portland (1709–62), she was an avid collector of art and objects, particularly shells, porcelain, and other curiosities. These activities were fueled by her aristocratic status and a £20,000 dowry supplied by her mother’s vast inheritance.6 Following the latter’s death in 1755, she inherited the Cavendish property of Welbeck Abbey and an additional £8,000 per year. By this time, Portland was a regular fixture at auctions for paintings and other luxuries. Describing the high prices fetched at auction in 1758, Horace Walpole grouped her among the richest collectors of the day: “In short, there is Sir James Lowther, Mr Spenser, Sir Richard Grosvenor, boys with 20 and £30,000 a year, and the Duchess of Portland, Lord Ashburnham, Lord Egremont, and oth-ers with near as much, who care not what they give.”7 In an introduction to the 1936 reprint of Walpole’s account of the duchess’s collection, W. S. Lewis wrote more bluntly, “Few men have equaled Margaret Cavendish Holles Harley, Duch-ess of Portland, in mania of collecting, and perhaps no woman. In an age of great collectors, she rivalled the greatest.”8 While Portland’s money and her aristocratic status allowed her to circulate within this group of rich boys and conditioned the uniform praise that contemporaries heaped upon her, femininity—and the desire to perform it—presented a different set of interests and challenges for Portland as a collector. Porcelain played a central role in this process.


PORCELAIN IN EARLY MODERN COLLECTIONS

Developed in China around the late eighth to early ninth century, true, or hard-paste, porcelain was not made in Europe until the beginning of the eighteenth century. Porcelain thus had an iconic status in the Kunst- und Wunderkammern of the early modern period. Fabled, but almost entirely unknown to medieval Europe, only three pieces can be documented in European collections before 1500.9 With the establishment of maritime trade between China and Portugal by the early to mid-sixteenth century, porcelain began to trickle into Europe. It was celebrated for its rarity and exotic provenance, yet enough pieces were available to be presented, exchanged, and collected voraciously by its aristocratic enthusiasts. The examples in collections including those of the Medici, Archduke Ferdinand II, Rudolf II, and Philip II were generally associated with artificialia, and operated as examples of curious and wondrous materiality from a geographically distant place. Alchemists, craftsman, entrepreneurs, and princes were fascinated by this mysterious mate-rial: a natural substance transmuted into an artificial one, at once smooth, white, translucent, light, and hard. Early modern European attempts to solve the so-called arcana of porcelain included recipes composed of clay and melted glass, ground-up shells, or crushed and reconstituted Chinese porcelain, all of which provided less than satisfactory results. Despite the presence of more credible information, the popular idea that porcelain was made of crushed shells was still viable as late as 1646 in England, a notion that would later become important in the logic of the Duchess of Portland’s museum.

In England, which lacked the aristocratic interest in cabinets of curiosities seen across the Continent, porcelain nevertheless circulated as a novelty. Henry VIII received three pieces upon his ascension to the throne in 1509, and Elizabeth I was known to give and receive porcelain as gifts.10 Thomas Platter, a Swiss medi-cal student, visited London in 1599 and described the abundant curiosities he saw in the collection of Sir Walter Cope. Included in his list were costumes, weapons, and tools from around the globe, a round horn said to have grown from an Eng-lishwoman’s forehead, a unicorn tail, a mirror “which both reflects and multiplies objects,” and Chinese objects including an “artful little box,” “earthen pitchers,” and porcelain.11 In the next century, porcelain remained worthy of inclusion in a col-lection of rarities. The 1656 catalog of John Tradescant’s London collection, which displayed all manner of curious and rare materials from around the world, notes the presences of “Chinaware, purple and green” and a “variety of China dishes.”12 Nevertheless, a shift in perception is already discernable at this point; as a result of increased trade between Europe and China, porcelain gradually moved from being a wondrous, exotic material to a commonplace domestic object. Instead of find-ing a place in Tradescant’s collection amongst “mechanick” rarities that included figures cut into agate, shells, corals, or crystals, as well as turned and carved amber and ivory, porcelain was found among “Utensils and Householdstuffe.” While certainly no mere kitchen inventory—other “utensils” in the collection included a cloak rack made of carved whalebone and a “cup of Rhinoceros, Unicorn, & Albado’s hornes”—the emphasis on the useful rather than the wondrous qualities of porcelain became increasingly dominant beginning at this time.

Building on accurate information recounted in texts by Juan González de Mendoza in the late sixteenth century and the Dutch trade mission to China


of 1655–57, alchemists working at the court of Augustus II solved the mystery of porcelain in 1708. They correctly identified that the combination of soft white clay known as kaolin (from the Chinese gaolin) and hard feldspathic clay known as petuntse (from baidunzi), when fired at extremely high temperatures, produced the requisite material of true porcelain. Locating and successfully mining local sources of these materials and developing kiln technology that would fire evenly at high temperatures was as great, or greater, an achievement than the identification of the materials themselves. The recipe and its attendant technological and material knowledge quickly became Europe’s worst-kept secret. Industrial espionage, further experimentation, and the publication in the 1720s of two letters from the Jesuit priest Francois Xavier d’Entrecolles detailing the specific recipes and production methods used at the Chinese porcelain factory at Jingdezhen made porcelain produc-tion in Europe possible. By the 1750s, nearly every European country had at least one porcelain factory. This domestic production, combined with regular European trade with China, put some type of porcelain on the tables of even moderate-income consumers.13 With its expansion as a fashionable commodity throughout the eigh-teenth century, particularly in England, it is perhaps not surprising that English curiosity collections during that period, including those of Sir Hans Sloane, Dr. Richard Mead, and Sir Ashton Lever, whose collections otherwise shared similari-ties with Portland’s, contained relatively few examples of porcelain.14

Despite its ubiquity on the tea tables and mantles of a relatively broad range of consumers, porcelain remained a highly collectable object throughout the eighteenth century, capable of signifying taste and refinement, and was especially associated with female collectors. Queen Mary’s celebrated collection of blue-and-white porcelain at Kensington Palace set an aristocratic and feminized context for china collecting in England. China closets filled with curious, rare, and old porce-lains were an important component of the Georgian interior, and were particularly associated with the sophisticated and cosmopolitan taste of their owners. While the relatively widespread commercial availability of oriental porcelain in Britain brought the practice of china collecting within the grasp of a wide range of enthusiasts, at the elite—mainly female and aristocratic—level, collecting rare and old porcelains was a practice associated with polite sociability and good taste.

Portland’s collection hovered productively between the model of an early modern cabinet of curiosities, where materials prized for their singularity, curiosity, or rarity were set in relation to one another, and the modern Enlightenment museum, in which disparate materials and forms were cataloged and systematized. Bettina Dietz has argued that specialist/amateur, science/art, cabinet/museum binaries are too simplistic to describe the interests of private collectors in the eighteenth century, and Portland’s collection was no exception in this regard.15 She took an interest in both categorization—conventionally understood as a specialist’s pursuit—and decoration, entertainment, and delight—principles generally associated with ama-teur interests. According to the preface of her auction catalog, Portland’s aim was no less than “to have had every unknown Species described and published to the World.”16 Hyperbolic as this claim is, it highlights the importance of the concept of materiality to the collection. In this regard, porcelain was an especially significant component. The rarity and expense of the pieces she acquired established Portland as a formidable collector with vast resources, who carried on her familial tradition


of voracious collecting. Likewise, as a category, porcelain located her interests within the realm of sociable femininity through objects securely associated with feminine taste. Finally, porcelain played a particular semiotic role within the col-lection itself, providing a conceptual bridge between the natural and the artificial, and thus acting as a unifying element among its aesthetically and conceptually disparate parts.

ENGAGING THE CURIOUS MIND

The duchess’s intellectual and aesthetic curiosity motivated the totalizing claims of her collection. In 1760, the Duchess of Northumberland dined at Bul-strode and described her tour through the house and its collections. Moving from the Drawing Room, she notes that “There is another Bedchamber & thro that the Dss. Dressing Room, where there are a thousand Curiositys.”17 Portland’s close friend and collaborator, Mary Delany, frequently described the collection itself and individual objects within it as “curious,” while her friend and sometimes competitor at auction, Horace Walpole—who had an even larger ceramics collec-tion than Portland’s—described the content of her collection in the same terms.18 Curiosity was a significant intellectual and aesthetic position often associated with the predisciplinary early modern collection. Kryzstof Pomian has observed that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century use of the term relates to senses of desire, inter-est, and totality that went beyond the obvious and the everyday. He remarks that curiosity is “a desire and a passion: a desire to see, learn or possess rare, new, secret or remarkable things, in other words those things which have a special relation-ship with totality and consequently provide a means of attaining it.”19 Curiosity is thus both a quality within an object itself, and a particular intellectual or aesthetic attitude toward that object.20 The totalizing interests of curiosity unified a chaotic jumble of seemingly unrelated objects such as paintings, porcelain, shells, insects and animals, and ethnographic objects through intellectual and visual pleasure.

This curious disposition was signified through disorder. Remarks in the preface to the auction catalog read simultaneously as an apology for and a celebra-tion of the spectacular disorder of the collection and its description at auction, and make an appeal to the broad-minded curiosity of its potential buyers:

Had her Life been continued a few Years longer, it is possible that every Subject in this Catalogue would have been properly described and char-acterized . . . all that could be done by the Compiler was only to give in general the classical or popular Names to such Articles as were known to have any, and to leave the great Bulk of Non-descripts to the Examination and Determination of the Curious. Some Persons, perhaps, may object to the Promiscuous Assemblage of the various Subjects here exhibited, and be ready to wish they had been allotted in Order and method . . . But . . . the Majority of the World are not Methodists. They love Variety more than Order . . .21

Portland herself could be categorized as one of these lovers of variety. While her eventual goal might have been to categorize all the natural history specimens, the presence of works of art and artifice—porcelain chief among them—suggests that


the collection was never meant to be seen as a discrete wholly scientific endeavor, but was motivated by sociability, taste, and aestheticized forms of curiosity.

Curiosity and disorder were important themes in French collections curieuses, with which Portland’s elite form of collecting was closely allied. Such collections were predicated on the commercial availability of shells, porcelain, lacquerware, and natural history specimens from around the globe in eighteenth-century European mercantile centers such as Delft, London, and Paris. The rich aesthetic connections between oriental objects and natural history specimens brought together in a commercial context are suggested by François Boucher’s 1740 trade card for Edme Gersaint’s shop, A la Pagode [Figure 2]. The intermingling of shells, plants, porcelain, and lacquerware—a central feature of both Gersaint’s trade card and Portland’s auction catalog frontispiece—suggests a pleasurable aesthetic variety, for which curiosity is a unifying aesthetic gesture. This type of curiosity was enabled through mercantile exchange made possible by imperial commerce. As Susan Stewart has observed, collections enabled through commercial acquisi-tion are characterized by extraction and seriality, highlighting the signification of exchange.22 The juxtaposition of disparate materials in this type of collection put the terms of naturalia and artificialia in productive visual relation to one another, while emphasizing their decontextualized status as examples within categories. “The Orient” provided another unifying term. While aesthetically and materially various, Gersaint’s compilation of odd pieces is unified by their oriental provenance and the hybrid aesthetics of chinoiserie. In this way, the proliferation of goods conditioned by mercantile exchange is refigured in the collection as cultural and aesthetic eclecticism. Whereas the Kunst- und Wunderkammern of the previous centuries emphasized the singular and special nature of these types of objects, elite eighteenth-century European collections like Portland’s emphasized the similarities between them.23 This curious disposition relied on the viewer to make visual con-nections between disparate objects and categories. In an effort to convey totality, the emphasis on the visual demanded an eye geared toward similarity rather than difference. The disorder emphasized in the auction catalog frontispiece was thus not only an image of the commercial dispersal of the collection, but also a repre-sentation of the conceptual exchanges that had organized it, enabling the curious viewer to make connections between and across categories.

The messy process of categorization was central to this approach. Lin-naeus’s new system of classification, introduced to England in 1735, offered a concrete method for collecting the rare and remarkable objects of the world. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Linnaean method provided a system by which the curious objects of collections moved from being wondrous emblems as-sociated with the Wunderkammer to the status of scientific evidence associated with the Enlightenment museum. Portland employed two Linnaean scholars to assist in the cataloging of her vast collections, a project with which she was intimately involved, though she published none of her discoveries. Daniel Solander—a pupil of Linnaeus, curator of Joseph Banks’s natural history collections, and a member of Captain Cook’s 1768 voyage to Tahiti—was involved particularly with the cataloging of shells, but left the project uncompleted upon his death in 1782. John Lightfoot, the author of Flora Scotica, a Linnaean catalog of Scottish plants, was the duchess’s chaplain but also played an integral role in the organization and de-


Figure 2. François Boucher, Trade card of Edme Gersaint, 1740. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

velopment of the collection, and it was he who prepared the descriptions for the auction catalog after her death.24 Mary Delany gives some indication of his role at Bulstrode in a 1768 letter to her niece:


Mr. Lightfoot and botany go on as usual . . . and her Grace’s breakfast-room, which is now the repository of sieves, pans, platters, and filled with all the productions of that nature, are spread on tables, windows, chairs, which with books of all kinds, (opened in their useful places), make an agreeable confusion; sometimes, notwithstanding twelve chairs and a couch, it is indeed a little difficult to find a seat!25

This collaborative process, as Delany indicates, was one in which disorder reigned. With specimens strewn about tables, windows, and chairs, the process of catalog-ing was one of “agreeable confusion.” Even in its early days, Portland’s collection seems to have been known as a fruitfully chaotic source of knowledge. In 1742, a young Elizabeth Robinson, later Montagu, wrote to the duchess exclaiming:

Pray do not compliment my head . . . It is not a head of great capacity, but a great part of the space is unfurnished. I only beg if you furnish it, it may be with a little more Order than your Closet; for with heads as with Drawers, too full one can never find anything when one looks for it. A head made up with the variety of your Closet must be excellent for mak-ing dictionaries, writing grammars for all the languages spoken at Babel, or a natural History of the Creatures in Noah’s Ark, or for drawing plans for the Labyrinth of Dedalus. What cunning confusion, and vast variety, and surprising Universality, must the head possess that is but worthy to make an inventory of the things in that closet. So many things there made by Art and Nature, so many stranger still, and very curious, hit off by chance and causality.26

Thus, when approached by the curious mind, the confusion inherent in the collec-tion is productive of learning; the concept of “furnishing” the mind suggests the close relationship between objects and knowledge. While Portland’s interest in both natural history and china collecting placed her safely within the intellectual and material interests considered acceptable for her gender and class—which could be seen as fundamentally marginalizing her and her collections—those same material interests, and the scale at which she was able to pursue them, placed her in proxim-ity to some of the most significant philosophical and scientific figures of her time. Daniel Solander, Joseph Banks, and J.-J. Rousseau all considered her their patron, and in the days before the institutional laboratory, her collection was an important resource for scientific and philosophical inquiry.

PORCELAIN AND SOCIABILITY

Like curiosity, the practice of china collecting was a contested term in the eighteenth century, signifying taste, intelligence, and the right use of wealth as well as the debasement of each of those terms.27 Portland’s collections could potentially be understood either as a noble contribution to knowledge or as a deranged mass of useless commodities. Critics frequently targeted foreign luxuries—particularly porcelain—as examples of the extravagant and effeminate taste that resulted from imperial commerce.28 Despite these associations, descriptions of Portland’s collection nearly universally tended toward the positive, suggesting that it contained affirma-tive signifiers of taste and intelligence. Porcelain seems to have been particularly useful in this regard; its acquisition, exchange, and display were vital components of the social networks of leisured men and, particularly, women. Ceramics were given


as mementos of friendship, were bequeathed to younger women as heirlooms, and were acquired and exchanged by friends and family members intimately familiar with one another’s collections. There is little documentation of how the duchess acquired her porcelain, though common methods of gift exchange between friends, purchase at auction (for foreign wares) and in retail shops (for domestic wares), are activities in which she was known to engage with particular gusto. Jo Dahn has analyzed Mary Delany’s correspondence, which included frequent references to her own and to other female friends’ china collections, to argue that acquiring, giving, and displaying ceramics allowed an elite woman “to actively produce her own subjectivity.”29 As both Delany and Portland show, this subjectivity was pro-duced through various forms of commerce—in the sense of both the economic and the sociable exchange of objects. Things collected, given, and displayed were part of networks of exchange that bridged the categories of public and private. While the Habermasian public sphere was formed through polite discourse facilitated through conversation and print, and located paradigmatically in the coffeehouse, objects were also catalysts of discourse, and the collection and the activities that surrounded it were another site of sociable conversation, knowledge production, and the formation of subjectivities.30

The duchess’s museum emphasized commercial, imperially driven modes of acquisition and exchange; but both porcelain and the many other types of objects crafted by Portland and the women around her also signified the social exchange that was at the heart of her collection. This sociability, understood as relations governed by cultural conventions, was intimately tied to eighteenth-century class- and gender-based codes of politeness. For Portland and other elite women and men, objects were an especially important component of sociability, as they both facilitated and signified political, familial, and affectionate bonds.31 Portland and her daughters, as well as Mary Delany and other female visitors to the house, were constantly engaged in needlework, ivory- and wood-turning (at which the duchess was said to be an expert), shell arrangement, painting, and other forms of artistic production. Delany designed the shell grotto at Bulstrode and made gifts of vari-ous works to the duchess and her daughters. Her letters are filled with accounts of making, remaking, arranging, and displaying all manner of crafts, particularly while in Portland’s company.32 On 18 January 1758, for instance, Delany spent the day “at Whitehall, and helped the Duchess to reinstate all her fine china and japan in her cabinets, which were emptied in the summer, in order to new hang her dressing-room with plain blue paper, the colour of that in my closet.”33 Many of Delany’s celebrated paper mosaics were based on examples from Portland’s gardens and collection. She collected 972 of her paper mosaics made between 1772 and 1782 in the ten-volume Flora Delanica, creating a paper museum that complemented Portland’s physical one.

The seriousness with which these activities were pursued went beyond the leisured crafts of idle female hands. Portland’s collection provided raw materials and subject matter for artistic, scientific, and philosophical activities by both visiting amateurs and professionals. Such visits were occasions for the exchange of ideas, and sometimes objects, and the production of new forms of knowledge through the joint work of hostess and visitors in acquiring, making, categorizing, and displaying things. The collaborative aesthetic and intellectual interest that visitors


took in the ongoing acquisition, arrangement, and organization of the collection meant that the museum, which highlighted both materials and their conceptual connections, was a site for sociability. The museum thus emphasized the concept of sociability in two senses: first, in the relations between people facilitated by objects; and second, in the relations between objects facilitated by ideas. The categories of natural history and porcelain mingled within the collection to produce a holistic knowledge about the nature of materials, while people mingled to create aesthetic and intellectual products with and about those objects.

Foregrounding both social and commercial exchange, Portland’s porcelain collections circulated around the dual notions of taste and rarity. She collected individual pieces of varying patterns of nominally useful wares, primarily of the rarest and costliest types that not only affirmed her status as an elite collector, but also provided an underlying logic for the collection as a whole. The acquisition, organization, and display of disparate specimens were key practices in the pursuit of natural history in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England; indeed, scientific practice was predicated on methods and systems of collecting.34 Porcelain drew attention to that fact, aestheticizing the practice of collecting. Exceptional, old, and expensive porcelains in Portland’s museum signified as sociable and aesthetic examples of curious materiality. Rather than acquiring sets, which might indicate a predominantly useful or decorative intention, Portland composed her collection almost entirely of unique pieces and small groups of like objects.35 This emphasis on the singularity of various pieces denied both the useful and the decorative con-notations of a set, in which a repeated number of items were supplied for a specific function or aesthetic effect. Instead, single examples and small groups emphasized the variety of the objects, and indicated that her porcelain was primarily intended for examination, rather than use or ornamental display.

To this end, the way in which the porcelain was displayed was crucial to its meaning. At Bulstrode, the collection spanned the duchess’s entire apartment, which comprised eight rooms and three closets, or smaller rooms. The porcelain seems to have been housed in a closet that acted as a gateway to the natural his-tory collection.36 Mary Delany described a visit by the royal family to Bulstrode in 1778:

The Queen most graciously came up to me and the 3 princesses. The King and the 2 eldest princes were in the dining-room looking at the pic-tures, but soon came in, and then they all went in a train thro’ the great apartment to the Duchess of Portland’s china closet, and with wondering and enquiring eyes admired all her magnificent curiosities.37

Like Portland, both George III and, particularly, Queen Charlotte were avid natu-ralists and collectors of curious and scientific specimens, and the Queen had a vast collection of both oriental and European porcelain.38 Given the royals’ interests and Delany’s indication that they admired “all” of Portland’s curiosities, it seems likely the china closet was an introductory part of the natural history collection.

At Whitehall, the porcelain collections were housed in the duchess’s dress-ing room, a semi-public space intended for reading, conversation, and small social gatherings.39 Thomas Rowlandson offers a satirical view of that space, in which a variety of large ceramic vessels are displayed in close proximity to one another


in and on top of glass-fronted cases, on the chimney-piece, and in the hands (and laps) of her guests [Figure 3]. “A Rout at the Dowager Duchess of Portland’s” parodies the duchess’s well-known love of animals (she had a large menagerie at Bulstrode) as conflicting with the expectations of elegant sociability that tea drinking was meant to confer. Picking up on the curious confusions of Portland’s collection, Rowlandson depicts a collision between natural and artificial worlds. An elegantly dressed servant is molested by a dog, causing him to overturn a tea tray onto the laps of two screaming ladies. This event evokes no reaction among the other guests immersed in conversation and flirtation, except for the lady directly across from the group, who watches in amusement as her teacup totters upon its saucer. Crouching behind this lady, a girl offers milk from another china saucer to a cat standing on its hind legs.

Rowlandson’s parody succeeds because porcelain was intimately connected to politeness, particularly figured as feminine sociability. Skilled comportment and handling of the tea service was a visible testimony of polite femininity, while the delicate and decorative qualities of porcelain itself were strongly associated with the docile female body.40 Collecting china at the aristocratic level likewise affirmed a tasteful and feminine aesthetic sensibility. In Portland’s collection, porcelain acted as a type of gateway, offering a decorative and sociable context for the practice of looking at the other specimens and curiosities on view. At Whitehall, the porcelain on display in glass cases in Portland’s collections allowed visitors the opportunity to make visual and conceptual connections between the lovely porcelain and the more aesthetically challenging dried plants, animals, and insects and the perhaps more beautiful but equally obscure shell collections, which visitors would have known about, though they weren’t displayed in that space.

Figure 3 Thomas Rowlandson, A Rout at the Dowager Duchess of Portland’s, 1793. © Museum of London.


THE ARTFUL NATURE OF PORCELAIN

How were these connections specifically drawn? While eighteenth-century collectors were increasingly concerned with principles of systemization and taste, they maintained an interest in the relationship between naturalia and artificialia, as well as a focus on the exotic—all of which were emblematic concerns of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinet of curiosities. As porcelain lost some of its status as a rare and exotic emblem of mysterious materiality throughout the eighteenth century, it gained associations with taste, distinction, and systemization through connoisseurship. The rarest types of porcelain, namely those least available through commercial East India trade or domestic suppliers, were consequently the most prized by elite collectors. Early Chinese and Japanese pieces became signifiers of aristocratic taste and elevated connoisseurial distinction in English collections. Japanese exports of porcelain through the Dutch East India Company ceased in 1745, which severely constrained the already scarce supply of fine Japanese porcelain available in Europe, and made it especially desirable.41 Portland’s collection was mostly amassed through commercial networks facilitated through the East India Company, private trade with its agents, and personal connections with figures such as Joseph Banks, who culled objects specifically for her on his journeys. Porcelain, most of it Asian, aestheticized this process and complicated the binary of “raw,” imperial specimens versus “cooked,” Western objects of connoisseurship.42 Porcelain was the ultimate “cooked” object, emerging from the earth to be fashioned through the kiln into an object of refinement and culture. Mediating between nature and art, porcelain acted as a representative of Chinese and Japanese cultures, further contributing to the universalizing aims of the collection. Portland’s collections were composed primarily of “old,” meaning rare, Chinese and Japanese porcelains, with limited examples of Chelsea, Sèvres, and Meissen, often in patterns in imitation of the oriental styles also on display in the collection. In his account of her collec-tion, Horace Walpole noted that Portland favored blue-and-white porcelain with a brown edge.43 Such a description coincides closely with much Japanese porcelain of the Kakiemon and Arita styles, as listed in Portland’s catalog, though this was only one component of the collection, not its dominant style.

As discussed previously, early modern collectors, merchants, natural historians, and ceramicists frequently connected the material of porcelain with all manner of other natural materials, but especially with that of shells. The word “porcelain” itself derives from the Italian porcella, a white and shiny cowrie shell, whose material and visual properties porcelain was thought to share. In the sixteenth century, Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa, Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner, and numerous others cited the cowrie shell, or ground-up shells generally, as the base material of porcelain.44 At the same time, numerous Dutch still-life paintings indicate the shared visual and conceptual associations between insects, plant life, shells, and porcelain. Even after the early eighteenth-century European discovery of true porcelain, the imaginative connection between porcelain and shells contin-ued. Throughout the century, both shells and porcelain were highly fashionable, keenly collected, and eminently feminized objects. Likewise, each was associated with global commerce and cross-cultural collecting.

The imaginative view of the Portland museum indicates how such associa-tions operated conceptually in the collection. Shells in the foreground intermingle


with a series of porcelain jars. The carp vase placed immediately next to the shells thematically links ceramics and the marine world. The vase was one of a group, auctioned as Lot 431 on the fifth day of the sale, described as a “most beautiful group of carp, of the fine purple ground, decorated with pea-green scroll leaves,” and was likely of similar appearance to a late seventeenth-century Japanese pair pictured here [Figure 4]. In the center of the engraving, coral juts like flames out of the top of the celebrated Portland Vase, which was made of glass, another material frequently thought to be an ingredient of porcelain. Vases provide a receptacle for other plants on the far wall, and porcelain jars mingle happily among treasures of the sea upon the cabinets in the background. Shells, coral, glass, and porcelain—along with insects, dried plants, and preserved animals—offered a decorative interplay of materials that evidenced a taste for curiosities. In this context, porcelain helped to unify odd, sometimes beautiful, sometimes repulsive specimens of nature into a tasteful display of rational and sociable inquiry.

Decoration on porcelain provided another venue for this synthesis of the natural and the artificial under the rubric of aesthetic curiosity. Portland owned abundant examples of Japanese Kakiemon porcelain, which was characterized by sparse decorative motifs in red, orange, and green overglaze enamels. This style may have appealed to her not only because of its rarity and consequent aristocratic associations, but also due to its emphasis on clearly delineated observations of natu-ral motifs. The restrained decoration of Kakiemon possessed a visual clarity that may have sat well among the cataloged naturalia of the collection. A Japanese dish similar to a pair described in Portland’s catalog as “fine fluted japan dishes of the lion butterfly and sprigs” exemplifies this aesthetic [Figure 5].45 Porcelain decorated with or shaped like plants, flowers, or insects constituted another large part of the collection, and likely functioned in the same manner. Objects such as this Chelsea leaf dish were a particularly good fit in Portland’s collection, not only because of their expense and association with aristocratic taste, but also for their botanical form [Figure 6]. The categories of animal, insect, and plant illustrated upon or through a porcelain ground acted as an index for the museum as a whole.

It is this dual interest in the scientific and the aesthetic that porcelain so productively mediated. The display of porcelain and natural history together en-couraged visitors to think aesthetically about the study of nature, and scientifically about art and its materials. In the eighteenth century, porcelain was more than a fashionable, feminine commodity; as Portland’s collection shows, it was under-stood as a mediatory object, connecting ideas of art and nature into the logic of social and commercial exchange. Drawing on the global associations and origins of porcelain and natural history, the objects in Portland’s collection conveyed the sense of material totality at the heart of her project, while their feminized associa-tions secured the process of collecting and display as one associated with tasteful and sociable inquiry.


Figure 6. Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Leaf Dish, 1752–58. © Museum of London.

Figure 4. Japan, Leaping Carp, late 17th century. Private Collection.

Figure 5. Japan, Foliate Dish, c. 1690. The Burghley House Collection.


NOTES

1. Lybbe Powys, Passages from the Diaries of Mrs. Philip Lybbe Powys, ed. Emily J. Climenson (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), 120–21.

2. See Cynthia Wall, “The English Auction: Narratives of Dismantlings,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31 (1997): 1–25.

3. A Catalogue of the Portland Museum (London: Skinner and Co., 1786).

4. See Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996); Patricia Phillips, The Scientific Lady: A Social History of Women’s Scientific Interests, 1520–1918 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990); as well as Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, “Women, China, and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1996): 153–67; Moira Vincentelli, Women and Ceramics: Gendered Vessels (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2000), 106–31; and Stacey Sloboda, “Porcelain Bodies: Gender, Acquisitiveness, and Taste in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Collecting Subjects: The Visual Pleasures and Meanings of Material Culture in Britain, ed. John Potvin and Alla Myzelev (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 19–36.

5. Acting on her mother’s behalf, Portland negotiated the sale of the Harley Collection for what she considered the nominal sum of £10,000. See letter from Margaret, second Duchess of Portland, 3 April 1753, Add MS 17521 f. 30, British Library, London.

6. The secondary literature specifically on Portland is scant though she emerges as a major figure in the recent exhibition catalogues, Mrs. Delany and her Circle, ed. Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2009) and Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, ed. Michael Snodin and Cynthia Roman (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2009). For biographical sketches, see Katherine Harriet Porter, “Margaret, Duchess of Portland” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell Univ., 1930); Charlotte Gere and Marina Vaizey, Great Women Collectors (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 77–87; and Rebecca Stott, Duchess of Curiosities: The Life of Margaret, Duchess of Portland (Welbeck, Eng.: The Pineapple Press for The Harley Gallery, 2006).

7. Horace Walpole, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1937–83), 21: 200.

8. W. S. Lewis, introduction to The Duchess of Portland’s Museum, by Horace Walpole (New York: The Grolier Club, 1936), v.

9. The earliest is the Gaignières-Fonthill vase, a Yuan dynasty celadon bottle vase given to Charles III of Durazzo by Louis the Great, King of Hungary, in 1381. Another celadon item, the Katzenelnbogen bowl, is listed in the 1483 inventory of the German Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel. A third celadon piece, a dish, was part of a famed gift to Lorenzo de’ Medici by the Sultan of Egypt in 1487.

10. See Julie Emerson, Jennifer Chen, and Mimi Gardner Gates, Porcelain Stories: From China to Europe (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 2000), 136; and David S. Howard, The Choice of the Private Trader: The Private Market in Chinese Export Porcelain Illustrated from the Hodroff Collection (Lon-don: Zwemmer, 1994), 13.

11. Thomas Platter, The Journals of Two Travellers in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Lon-don: Caliban Books, 1995), 33–35.

12. John Tradescant, Musæum Tradescantianum: Or, a Collection of Rarities Preserved at South-Lambeth neer London (London: John Grismond, 1656), 52–53.

13. See Sarah Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics: Products for a Civilised Society (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1999); and Hilary Young, English Porcelain, 1745–95: Its Makers, Design, Marketing and Consumption (London: V&A Publications, 1999).

14. Sloane had modest amounts of porcelain, which he seems to have been interested in primarily for its use or its subject matter, as in the case of several Dehua figurines in the form of Taoist and Buddhist deities, or a pair of polychrome porcelain phoenixes. See Soame Jenyns, “Oriental Antiquities from the Sloane Collection in the British Museum,” British Museum Quarterly 18 (1953): 18–20; and Joe Cribb, Jessica Harrison-Hall, and Tim Clark, “Trade and Learning: the European ‘Discovery’ of the East,” in Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Kim Sloan (London:


British Museum Press, 2003). On Mead’s collections, which contained little to no porcelain, see George North, Museum Meadianum (London, 1755). I am grateful to Craig Hanson for this reference and his discussion of Mead’s collection with me. The painter Sarah Stone documented some examples of Italian majolica, Oceanic stoneware, and Chinese ceramics in Lever’s collection; see Roland W. Force and Maryanne Force, Art and Artifacts of the Eighteenth Century (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1968).

15. Bettina Dietz, “Mobile Objects: The Space of Shells in Eighteenth-Century France,” British Journal for the History of Science 39 (2006): 363–82.

16. Catalogue of the Portland Museum, iii. Italics original.

17. Elizabeth Seymour Percy, Duchess of Northumberland, The Diaries of a Duchess, ed. James Grieg (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1926), 16.

18. Mary Delany, The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany, ed. Augusta Waddington Hall, Lady Llanover, 6 vols. (1861–62; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1974); Walpole, Portland’s Museum and Correspondence; and Timothy Wilson, “‘Playthings Still?’ Horace Walpole as a Collector of Ceramics,” in Horace Walpole’, 201–19.

19. Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 58–59.

20. See Bettina Dietz and Thomas Nutz, “Collections Curieuses: The Aesthetics of Curiosity and Elite Lifestyle in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” Eighteenth-Century Life 29, no. 3 (2005): 66.

21. Catalogue of the Portland Museum, iii–iv; italics original. Nandini Bhattacharya has observed the emphasis on disorder and rationalization in her analysis of Portland’s auction catalog in Slavery, Colonialism and Connoisseurship: Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literary Transnationalism (Burl-ington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 109–112.

22. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Col-lection (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1993), 153.

23. Dietz, “Mobile Objects,” 371.

24. Jean K. Bowden, John Lightfoot: His Work and Travels (Kew: Royal Botanic Gardens, 1989).

25. Delany, Correspondence, 4: 238. Italics original.

26. Elizabeth Robinson to Margaret, Duchess of Portland, 27 January 1742), MO 317, Montagu Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

27. Barbara M. Benedict, “The ‘Curious Attitude’ in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Observing and Owning,” Eighteenth-Century Life 14, no. 3 (1990): 59–60.

28. See David Porter, “Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Aesthetics of Chinese Taste,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35 (2002): 395–411; Kowaleski-Wallace, “Women, China, and Consumer Culture,” 153–67; and Sloboda, “Porcelain Bodies,” 22–24.

29. Jo Dahn, “Mrs. Delany and Ceramics in the Objectscape,” Interpreting Ceramics 1 (2000), http://www.uwic.ac.uk/ICRC/issue001/delany/delany.htm.

30. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Cat-egory of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989). For a complication of Habermasian categories, see Lawrence E. Klein, “Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 1 (1996): 97–109. On material culture and subject formation, see Potvin and Myzelev, Material Cultures.

31. See Marcia Pointon, “Material Manoeuvres: Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough and the Power of Artefacts,” Art History 32 (2009): 485–515; Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, eds., Mrs. Delany; and Snodin and Roman, Horace Walpole, for contemporary examples.

32. See Dahn, “Mrs. Delany and Ceramics;” Lisa L. Moore, “Queer Gardens: Mary Delany’s Flowers and Friendships,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 (2005): 49–70; and Amanda Vickery, “The Theory


and Practice of Female Accomplishment,” 94–109, and Maria Zytaruk, “Mary Delany: Epistolary Ulterances, Cabinet Spaces, and National History,” in Mrs. Delany, 130–49.

33. Delany, Correspondence, 3: 477.

34. Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 55; Craig Ashley Hanson, The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009), 15-16.

35. Walpole went so far as to describe it as “a collection of odd pieces” in his Duchess of Portland’s Museum, 5.

36. Delany, Correspondence, 5 :381.

37. Ibid., 5: 371–72.

38. See Clarissa Campbell Orr, “Queen Charlotte, ‘Scientific Queen,’” in Queenship in Britain 1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic Politics (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2002), 236–66; and Jane Roberts, ed., George III and Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste (London: Royal Collection Publications, 2004).

39. Delany, Correspondence, 3: 477.

40. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), 20.

41. John Ayers, Oliver Impey, and J. V. G. Mallet, Porcelain for Palaces: The Fashion for Japan in Europe, 1650 -1750 (London: Oriental Ceramic Society, 1990), 24.

42. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).

43. Walpole, Duchess of Portland’s Museum, 5.

44. The Book of Duarte Barbosa, ed. Mansel Longworth Dames (London: Hakluyt Society, 1921), 2: 213–14.

45. Catalogue of the Portland Museum, 19.

Documents

“Material Displays: Porcelain and Natural History in the Duchess of Portland’s Museum”