Through trade with Japan and Europe, the screen began its journey westward. Japanese byōbu – literally ‘wind walls’ – reached the continent in the 16th century with Portuguese traders, followed some 100 years later by the great coromandel lacquer screens exported from China. These vast panels, deeply incised and gilded, caused a sensation in baroque and rococo interiors.
At Versailles, screens became a staple of demeure sophistication in the royal apartments, lending a touch of intimacy to all that gilding. And in Britain, they were just as fashionable, finding their way into country houses as part of the new ‘Chinese taste’, admired as much for their exotic allure as for their usefulness. A coromandel screen could anchor a cavernous drawing room or simply keep the chill out of a corridor. They spoke of refinement, certainly, but also of a curiosity about the wider world that was being folded into European decoration.
Ogata Kōrin, Cranes, Pines, and Bamboo. Japan, early 18th century. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
By the late 18th century, screens had entered the domestic life of a larger bourgeois audience. Portraits of the period sometimes show sitters posed beside painted or gilded panels, a discreet marker of refinement and intimacy. In Regency and Victorian houses, screens grew more adaptable. Some were upholstered in tapestry or silk, others painted with botanical motifs or chinoiserie scenes. They appeared in libraries and boudoirs, but were just as common in corridors and dressing rooms.
Artists such as Whistler incorporated them into their work, while the Bloomsbury circle turned them into experimental canvases, covering panels with bold patterns that blurred the line between art and decoration.
James McNeill Whistler, Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen, 1864. Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington D.C.
Colleen Dugan
Comments are closed.