 Hi everyone and welcome back to and thank you for joining us for the final session of our symposium. The next two papers offer unique and complementary perspectives on Chonoiserie by going beyond the scope of traditional iconography. In their respective papers Katie and Marlise will address issues of identity, agency and the implications of both inter and intra cultural exchange. Both papers coincidentally are complementary in the sense that for example Katie's research on Chinese embroidery in the Parsi community examines the relationship between objects, materiality and their makers. While Marlise in her discussion of ceiling decoration considers objects their meaning and the making of identity. So without further delay I'd like to welcome Dr. Sylvia Hodling for our first introduction. Thank you Corinne and it is my absolute pleasure to introduce Katie Rosenthal, a third year PhD student in the history of art department at Brynmar College. Katie completed her undergraduate studies in 2015 with a dual degree in textile and surface design and apparel design from the Fashion Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin Madison where she was the recipient of the William F. Velas Merritt Scholarship. Before starting her PhD Katie worked as a textile and surface designer for five years. While at Brynmar she has worked as a collection assistant and researcher in the Brynmar Special Collections and the Asian section of the Penn Museum. Katie brings to her studies an extraordinary background in the material world of textiles and their design and her training in East Asian and South Asian languages and culture give her a sensitivity to histories of making, circulation, care and use across 19th century China and India. Her paper today grows out of her recent her recently completed MA thesis and is entitled Fashioning Parsi Identity, Chinese Export and Broaderie in 19th Century Western India. Please join me in welcoming Katie Rosenthal. Thank you Sylvia for that lovely introduction and to the Barnes and the Symposium organizers. And like the presenters before me I want to take a moment to express my support for the graduate students at Temple who are currently striking for fair pay and benefits. On this 19th century garment embroidered in China for the Parsi community in Western India, men and women carry offerings and fans. A sinuous dog crosses an angular bridge over Lily Pond, oversized butterflies flutter beside billowy cherry blossoms and a peacock perches on a craggy rock. Using parallel satin stitches sewn named for the glossy satin-like finish of the threads pulled into careful rows, an embroiderer in China has crafted idealized garden scenes atop crimson silk. In the 19th century Qing dynasty in China narrative scenes like these were often transferred from pictorial media such as paintings and pattern books. Auspicious motifs such as the stylized bats with spiraling wings that encircle the neckline would have had meaning for local customers who knew that the Chinese word for bat, fu, is a homonym for the word for fortune. Pairs of bats symbolically double the good fortune and are a common motif for the decoration of objects in China. In the case of a garment like this that was sent to India however such iconographic dimensions were unlikely to have translated for the wearer. Instead the embroidery was a welcome new form of embellishment for a tunic called a jubla that was historically worn by Parsi children of both genders and by women under saris. Parsi meaning Persian designates a diasporic group of followers of Zoroastrianism who first migrated to South Asia from present day Iran between the eighth and tenth centuries arriving in the northwestern Indian state of Gautrat. Though the Parsi community has always been a minority population in South Asia Parsi merchants came to play a majority role in what was known in the 19th century as the China trade the export of opium and cotton from India to China where these goods were exchanged for tea and other commodities that were brought to Britain. It was through this trade conducted at the southeastern port city of Guangzhou anglicized as Canton that Parsi consumers began buying Chinese needlework beginning in the mid 19th century. Embroidery from China can be seen in these paintings and photographs adorning the saris that are embroidered in what became known as a Chennai or Chinese style. Though costly Chennai garments enjoyed high visibility in 19th and early 20th century western India. Chennai saris referred to in Gujarati as Gaara became the characteristic attire of Parsi women who wore them for special occasions. As a group these Chennai embroideries their constituent materials and modes of fabrication resist the label of any single place of origin. Over time the term Chennai came to refer to a distinctive style of garments that bore memories of early Parsi trade with China but could eventually be produced entirely in India. Previous scholarship on Chennai embroidery has categorized it as part of the broader European fashion for the motifs and patterns of Chinese export objects or Shinoiserie. While consumers in 19th century Britain or India would likely have regarded the Chinese mythological figures architectural forms and auspicious signs seen on this European parasol and this Parsi Gaara as part of a generic Chinese visual lexicon their interactions with these objects were also layered and distinctive. Casting Parsi commissioning and wearing of Chennai embroidery as merely an emulation of a European or British style overlooks the unique relationships between embroideries from China and Parsi customers that are represented in Chennai works. Studying Chennai embroideries animates a vibrant form of intra Asian cultural exchange in handmade objects that does not conform to dominant historiographic narratives of British imperialism and industrialism. In this talk and in the broader project from which it emerged I move beyond the iconography and motifs of these garments their most visibly identifiable aspects in order to ascertain subtler information from the processes techniques and materials involved in their making. In doing so I show how these hand embroidered and sewn garments related to pre-existing and evolving markets for embroidery and dress in western India demonstrating that European chinoiserie composed only one part of the multidimensional flows of cultural material present in the Parsi market for Chennai embroidery. I will begin with the techniques and materials of Chinese embroidery that were brought to India then consider compelling evidence for the dialogue between embroiderers in China and western Indian embroidery and conclude with what this body of material can tell us about the Parsi community and the multidirectionality of intra Asian exchange in the 19th century. It is certainly true that part of the uniqueness of Chennai embroideries for their audience in western India lay in their iconography and style. The fact that both these tunics or jublah constitute Chennai embroideries even though they differ in thematic motifs however indicates that questions of technique materiality and medium were and are equally important for understanding the distinctiveness of the garments. Both jublah are embroidered almost entirely in a knotted stitch known as kaka or pearl in Gujrati. This was a distinctive Chinese technique created by wrapping the thread around the needle before reinserting it into the cloth. The style of working entire embroideries with knot stitches called tatsu in Chinese became very popular among Parsi women and was later replicated in Parsi embroideries and here I'm showing you images of a Chennai jublah embroidered with knot stitches that I researched at the Penn Museum last summer. In the 19th century embroideries were sold by weight and these garments with their dense applications of knot stitches were luxurious. In the domestic fashions of China in this period rather than stitching knots directly onto the garment the style was more often used in small doses on the accessories being produced in the growing commercialized embroidery centers of the southeast. Modular applique such as these sleeve bands were made in large quantities by professionalized male embroiderers in urban workshops and were outsourced to women in their homes. Highly mobile and relatively affordable these small pieces of embroidery were primary points of access for the latest fashions in both domestic and export markets. In addition to distinctive stitch techniques the ground fabrics for Chennai embroideries added to their unique value in the western Indian market. Despite the long existence of silk production in South Asia silk cloth had been imported from China for millennia and continued to be in the 19th century. Satin had long been a specialty of Chinese weaving and innovations in the early 17th century led to even smoother shinier fabrics that were simultaneously thick and supple. The ground fabric for both jublah shown is a form of this substantial satin cloth with excellent sheen and drape referred to in Gujrati as gujji. The satin originally imported from China clearly resonated with the western Indian market. It became a popular base fabric for high quality embroidered and embellished garments made in the region and was later woven by silk weavers in Gujrat who learned the technique for producing this satin cloth. On these jublah the elegant pearl or knot stitches and shining satin ground fabrics thus worked in tandem with the Chinese themes on the cloth to distinguish the Parsi community's embroidered garments from the environment at home in western India. Yet Parsi consumers never turned away from embroideries made closer to home and more local aesthetics also entered into Chennai embroidery. During the heyday of Chennai embroideries Parsi consumers were not only purchasing cloth embroidered in China but also embroidery from the Gujrati region of Kutch in West Gujrat highlighted here in yellow and sinned in present day southern Pakistan regions that were closely linked in their embroidery practices before the partition of India and Pakistan. Garments from 19th century Kutch feature silk embroidery done in chain stitch a technique for which Gujrat had long been renowned both at home and abroad. Less noted is that these garments from Kutch were also frequently stitched on gujji satin a material that registers the presence of Chinese silks even in a region that unlike coastal Surat in Gujrat or Bombay did not have direct trading ties to China. To compare the stitch types here is a chain stitch embroidery on gujji satin from the Kutch region of Gujrat on the left and on the right is a jubla worked in parallel satin stitch on another type of silk fabric from China that was also popular in the Parsi market and can be identified by its horizontal ribbing. While the interlocking of the chain stitches on the left creates intricate texture the satin stitches on the right float above the fabric and highlight the silken threads. Although the typical story of export goods from China is one of Western emulation in that both Western Asian and Western European customers tried to create their own versions of valued goods like Chinese porcelain or silk cloth I will suggest in this second section of the talk that Chennai embroideries actually provide evidence that embroiderers in China were exposed to the embroideries of Gujrat and incorporated these South Asian designs into their work. For instance Chennai borders that feature a scrolling design with alternating floral medallions likely took their inspiration from Gujrati embroideries. Here you can see a sari border embroidered in China on top and three garment hems embroidered in kuch below. The borders range in complexity of detail but share a relatively simple repeat of two flowers alternating with either leaves or birds. Both the leaf and bird motifs form an elongated s shape. In borders from kuch the main area is typically bound by thinner bands and topped with tulip like finials. The Chennai sari shown on top clearly follows the layout of the alternating floral medallions framed by s shaped leaves and topped with a row of petal like forms. However within the recognizable Gujrati border format alterations likely made by the Chinese embroiderer have been embraced suggesting an active back and forth between designs. For instance the small scale outer border of the sari displays lotus blossoms connected by the curling line work of a Ruyi design which was a combination of motifs used widely across Chinese artistic media. The creative flexibility shown in the melding of design and motifs was further required in adapting Chinese embroidery compositions to Parsi garments which had grown out of characteristic western Indian garment forms. The embroidered tunics shown here were made in the Bani region of northern kuch. Notably the embellishment on the bodice of the tunics from kuch often ends in a multi-lobed shape which bursts outward. These lobed forms appear to explain the presence of a similar element embroidered just below the neckline of a Chennai tunic that was created in China. As in the Bani design the lobes expand out from bursting arrays of floral motifs. These examples suggest a dialogue between Gujrati and Chinese embroiderers. Where and by what means this dialogue occurred is the final and still relatively unresolved question in the study of these embroideries that I will discuss today. In my larger project I have explored the potential circulation of printed Chinese embroidery pattern books and the possibility that Parsi traders brought Gujrati garment samples to China for reference in their commissions. The movement of skilled makers may also explain these connections. Many oral histories from within the Parsi community suggest that Chinese embroiderers likely migrated to Surat in Gujrati and other areas of Parsi settlement during the mid-19th century. The existence of large supplies of Chennai embroideries aligns with cultural historian Shernaz Kamas' oral records of the diasporic Parsi community. Many of Kamas' interviewees recalled Chinese peddlers bringing piles of pre-stitched cloth and border options to their homes offering customizations door-to-door in Parsi neighborhoods. This commercial model of peddling was active until the 1960s in concession areas of Guangzhou, the treaty ports of Hong Kong and Shanghai, and cities in India such as Mumbai or Surat. Apparently when the salesmen did their rounds they would set down their wares and rest or embroider on the verandas of familiar homes. Kamas cites this as a channel through which embroidery stitches and designs were transferred to Parsi women and reinterpreted in their own embroideries. While mostly a domestic undertaking, Parsi women also parlayed Chennai embroidery into profitable enterprises. For example, Manek Mai Mula of Mumbai was the grandchild of a businessman in China who held on to an early Chennai sari. Shown here on Manek Mai's niece, Bichu Manek Shah, photographed at the age of 86. Manek Mai created a business in which saris were made to order with designs selected from Chinese plates. The designs were then copied by local embroiderers in her living room on large embroidery frames. Though anecdotal, such testimonies and related objects bring the parapathetic story of Chennai embroidery's home to western India. From the embroiderers in China who adjusted their craft for Parsi merchants abroad to Parsi women turning what they learned from itinerant salesmen into careers for themselves. The mercantile history of Chennai embroidery was shaped by everyday encounters between individuals whose paths were in turn altered by shifting global forces. Although material choices like the use of gujji satin were primarily determined by a larger set of market factors, the embroideries were always done by hand, meaning that the question of individual agency is present in each piece. The intra-Asian cultural networks that Chennai embroidery's forged serve as a reminder that artistic productions created under conditions of British colonialism in India nonetheless have the potential to tell far more complex histories that set aside the European factor and trace out more direct, even personal connections between South and East Asia. Thank you. I'm delighted to introduce our closing speaker of this important regional event so graciously hosted by the Barnes Foundation. Marlise Gabriel Brown is no stranger to the Barnes. She has been a gallery guide here as well as a spotlight lecturer at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and of course a valued instructor for a number of courses for us in her doctoral program at Temple University, a favorite being the Baroque curve. She came to us with a specialization in art and opera architecture and performance from Penn State University. In 2019 Marlise was invited to participate in the Mellon Foundation Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York before taking up a Fulbright Fellowship in Heidelberg, Germany for her dissertation The Mark Grafens Two Bodies, the Architecture and Performance of Wilhelmine's Bayreuth. I would like to commend Marlise and her peers here for their persistence in following their research in the face of a worldwide pandemic shutdown. Despite the difficulties, Marlise remained as a guest at the University of Heidelberg and on returning home of course facing the continued institutional and library shutdowns while working on her dissertation. So to the persistence of all of you, my real appreciation as an art historian for your determination to continue. Last year Marlise was awarded the Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Department of Decorative Arts. We may notice some of her work on the Limsley Project reinterpreting porcelain figures in future museum labels. She presently holds a graduate internship at the J. Paul Getty Museum in the Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department. Marlise is also the author of 18th Century Architecture for the Kahn Academy and Smart History. Today she's going to speak on a part of her dissertation research soon to be finished regarding Shinwazuri in Wilhelmine's Bayreuth, Shinwazuri and porcelain fashioning Wilhelmine Bayreuth's portraits in palace architecture. Marlise. Thank you Dr. Cooper and the Barnes Foundation. I also want to echo the previous presenter's support of the Graduate Student Union at Temple University. They are on strike for equitable and fair benefits and pay. The research and that they conduct and the teaching and mentorship that they provide undergraduates is absolutely essential at Temple University. I hope that they reach a fair and quick resolution in the future. Early modern monarchs constructed lasting images of their body politic and body natural through their policies they enforced, the wage, the battles that they waged, and their public displays of magnificence. Ever since Ernst Kantarovitz shaped the discourse of monarchical culture with his theory of the king's two bodies, countless studies have been presented on male monarchs, architectural magnificence, and self-fashioning in the past 60 years. More recently art historians have addressed the self-fashioning of women rulers. However, few authors have considered the architectural patronage of non-sovereign consorts in German courts or the prescribed boundaries that gender played in their patronage of architecture. This gap in the research marginalizes the profound contributions that non-sovereign noble women made in developing 18th century German architecture and obscures the agency that some women patrons had in shaping their body politic and body natural. My dissertation remedies this gap by investigating Macophine Villamina von Bayreuth's architectural patronage. During Villamina's reign as Macophine of Bayreuth, she commissioned architecture and interior design to establish her legacy, where the ornamentation of each built space performed different facets of her public and private identities. The fanciful irregular and organic devices of her body natural was primarily confined to the most private spheres of her architectural program, and here are just a few examples of things that she commissioned during her reign. However, in her public sphere, her body politic communicated normative ideals of good enlightened leadership. My dissertation combines an analysis of Villamina's inventories with contemporary literature on self-fashioning feminism and spatial theory to illuminate her agency in crafting her public and private identities. Born Princess Friderica Sophia Villamina, she was the eldest child of the soldier king Friedrich Wilhelm I of King of Brandenburg, Prussia, and Queen Sophia Dorotea. Her younger brother Friedrich, who we'll later know as King Friedrich the Great, identified Villamina as his favorite sibling. According to Villamina's memoirs, after marriage negotiations with the Prince of Wales fell through, Villamina agreed to wed Friedrich, the future mock-rafe of Bayreuth, who despite his significantly lower rank and modest principality, was a compatible match for the Prussian princess. Villamina's reign in Bayreuth marked a significant period artistic production improved a boon to the quality of court life in the Franconian town. Her birthright, her social political connections, and her extensive knowledge of philosophy and art enabled her to lure talented artists, architects, scenographers, musicians, actors, dancers to Bayreuth, and eventually her royal identity became synonymous with the town. Even today, the town is commonly referred to as Villamina's Bayreuth. The material that I'm presenting today comes from the third chapter of my dissertation which focuses on two of Villamina's shinwazuri interiors. The Spiegel-Scherben cabinet, which means the Mirrochard cabinet, located in the Bayreuth Neuschloss and the Japanisch cabinet, the Japanese cabinet in the Alteschloss at the Hermitage. This shinwazuri interior operated the liminal spaces between her public and private identities. In the 18th century, the European reception of shinwazuri was polarizing. The style was simultaneously desired and criticized for its expression of whimsy, escape, and luxury. In this presentation, I argue that the Spiegel-Scherben cabinet and the Japanisch cabinet were semi-private spaces where artists used shinwazuri designs and porcelain, a coveted luxury commodity that was likened to white gold, to costume portraits of the Villamina and the guise of the multiple characters. The meanings of shinwazuri designs were not permanently fixed and could be layered to represent complex identities. Instead of conforming her decorative program to reflect the political limitations of her role as consort, shinwazuri gave her greater agency and ensured the endurance of her self-fashion legacy. It is reductive to say that Villamina simply had a predilection for architecture and luxury objects inspired by two Chinese and Japanese art and culture. Her personal library contains significant holdings of scientific and philosophical literature. After all, she was very good friends with full-tair. She owned numerous travel diaries and books on the history of Japan, China, the Levant, Turkey, Egypt, and Nubia. However, she also owned a very early copy of the opera libretto L'Eroschinesa by Johann Adolf Hasse and Pietro Mattestasio, which was inspired by the dramatic life of the Chinese emperor, Li Weng. Although Villamina could not visit these distant lands physically, it would appear that she was an eager armchair traveler. Shinwazuri was a vein of European art that drew inspiration from East Asian art and culture. Early intimations of the style can be found in Europe beginning in the 14th century. By the 18th century, most European collectors, purveyors, and creators of shinwazuri art viewed the East as a single entity. They made little or no effort to make informed distinction between the topographical, cultural, and stylistic differences between artworks imported from various areas. Instead, many collectors were simply enamored with what they considered to be exotic landscapes or unfamiliar architectural forms. The European demand for goods from East Asia, especially silk, lacquerware, and porcelain regularly exceeded the available supply. Eventually, European artisans began making local imitations. The recipe and process for creating true hard-paced porcelain was invented in China during the Tang dynasty. European scientists did not develop a comparable porcelain formula until the beginning of the 18th century in Meissen, Germany. By the middle of the 18th century, porcelain, whether it was imported or produced in Europe, was a symbol of luxury and power among European consumers. Filomena understood the aesthetic currency of ceramics and was an enthusiastic collector of decorative porcelain vessels, figures, and functional serving ware acquired from manufacturers in Europe, China, and Japan. While her inventories make it challenging to discern the exact number of soft and hard-paced porcelain objects she owned, by my estimate, Filomena owned approximately 900 individual pieces. In the posthumous inventory of Filomena von Bayreuth's estate, her porcelain collection is divided into six sections, which I argue establishes a hierarchy of value that she placed on the origin and type of porcelain. The first category lists Filomena's collection of Japanese porcelain, followed by Chinese porcelain. By far, her holdings of Japanese and Chinese porcelain were the largest in terms of volume. However, the remaining categories in the inventory do not follow this logic. The next category was pagodes and figures of various sizes, then French porcelain, Saxon, meaning Meissen porcelain, and finally porcelain of unknown origin and enamels. Was there a precedence for this method of ranking porcelain? Perhaps we should look at the collecting and presentation patterns of Augustus the Strong, a lector of Saxony and King of Poland, who was also the founder of Meissen porcelain manufacturing. Even before hard-paced porcelain production took off at Meissen, Augustus the Strong had one of the largest porcelain collections in Europe. By 1727, he had over 21,000 pieces of just Japanese and Chinese porcelain alone and began erecting a palace dedicated to the display of his porcelain collection. Art historian Cordula Bischoff claims that because of the technical difficulty of achieving the colorful enamels characteristic of Japanese and Māriware, Augustus and his contemporaries believed that Japanese porcelain was most valuable, probably why Vilamina had it at the top of her inventory. Returning to Vilamina's Japanese cabinet in the old palace of the Hermitage, the aesthetic and courtly social practice of handling porcelain and consuming tea is also key to our understanding of the ceiling. The stuccoist Pietro Ludovico Bossi created a dizzying collection of islands and possible architecture and fantastical beasts all set against an ultra marine background girded with a gilded latticework. Vilamina's portrait is at the center of the composition seated beneath a whimsical parasol held by one of her male attendants. Vilamina's body commands the space not only is she located at the center of the composition but the artist used isochromatic patterns to emphasize her importance. Her posture is erect and alert and she stares directly out at the viewers as she holds a handle as tea cup and a folded fan in her left hand. Seven of the eight men and I'm highlighting only four of them because I can't get a whole picture of the ceiling. Seven of the eight men on this ceiling are shown in profile view. And sorry they're back slightly hunched as they engage in conversation, drink tea, and attempt to look at Vilamina. The coupling of Vilamina's portrait as the lone female figure among eight men initially seems problematic. However, in 18th century Shenwa's reart there is typically an attempt to desexualize female and male bodies. There are several blue and white vessels represented throughout the ceiling and each one is meant to give the impression that they are authentic hard-paced porcelain. The shapes of two vessels are reminiscent of a large porcelain terrain or possible even tea caddies. The artist represented three different pilgrim bottles, one of which has a heavily ornamented base and neck. Vilamina and another figure hold tea bowls and the most ornate pilgrim's bottle and Schlossweze are reserved for Vilamina and her attendance. I surmise that she was an avid tea drinker from reading Vilamina's inventory of porcelain in silver objects. Although she did have porcelain in silver vessels preparing and consuming coffee and chocolate, her collection of teapots certainly and traveling tea sets far outnumbered her coffee and chocolate surfaces. The consumption and the trend for collecting wares to serve tea, coffee, and hot chocolate proliferated among Europe's social elite in the 18th century. In the 1730s tea was considerably more expensive than coffee. In the Japanesish cabinet, the decision to represent Vilamina enjoying tea with eight people and showcasing the range of wares that she owned to enjoy this luxury was a powerful statement. Comparing the physiognomies of in Vilamina's Japanese cabinet to the overt European-ness of Antoine Watteau's chinoiserie-clad characters at Chateau de la Muette, it is clear that at least some of the figures in the Byroic ceiling are wearing a costume. Katie Scott and Stacy Siloda have written at length about court mask balls and their connection to chinoiserie, which during the 18th century was a common theme for court masks as well as opera. In this mode of costuming, whereby Europeans donned their own biased and limited perceptions of a cultural other, there is a rhetoric of humor bordering on spite here. This mode of costuming also means that the actor is commodifying culture. To play chinoise was to reduce people to fans, silk, tea, and porcelain. While I believe this form of masking is present in the Japanesish cabinet, I believe that Vilamina's final chinoiserie room, which was completed nearly 20 years later and which I'll discuss last, is a more mature performance of masking or costuming. In 1753, after a fire destroyed a significant portion of the old palace in the center of Byroit, not to be confused with the other old palace that I just talked about, she has two. Vilamina's architects began constructing the Neue Schloss just a few blocks away from the new Marguerite Felicius Alpern House. Vilamina commissioned another chinoiserie room, the Spiegel-Scherven cabinet, from Giovanni Battista-Pedrozi. Both chinoiserie rooms discussed today are called cabinets, which has led some art historians to believe that they were very private spaces that very few people would have had access to. In early modern Europe, a cabinet typically denoted a small room, but it could still operate as a semi-public space. According to the French Dictionary of 1680 and the Encyclopedia of 1751, cabinets like a salon could serve as a place for conversation or to host intimate audiences. I believe that Vilamina's Japanisches cabinet and Spiegel-Scherven cabinet operated a liminal space between public and private court life. If we look at the ground plans for both palaces, we see that these cabinets are preceded by the more formal and therefore very public audience chambers and enter chambers. However, these cabinets also lead to music rooms, which were typically semi-public spaces. Since Vilamina was an avid musician and composer and kept a company of Italian opera singers on retainer, she frequently used her music rooms. Moreover, during Vilamina's tenure, the only appropriate way to access her music rooms was through her formal audience rooms and thereby her chinoiserie cabinets. On the ceiling of the Spiegel-Scherven cabinet, we see a similar composition, imaginative beasts, quirky bridges, and Vilamina's portrait seated in a sedan-shaped water taxi. In both rooms, islands are a prominent, if understudied, feature of the compositions. In these ceilings, Bosse and Podrozzi used geography, perspective, scale, and the laws of physics, and they suspended them here. Irrationality is a common feature of European chinoiserie design, which diverges from the European Enlightenment's championing of reason. The folds of Vilamina's blue and white robe and the paneling of her sedan chair resemble shards of broken porcelain. In this final portrait, stucco portrait, it appears the margolfine is actually transforming into a porcelain vessel. Although the fashion for consuming tea, coffee, and chocolate escalated in 18th-century Europe, many people, including rulers and religious leaders, actively decried the trend. Even the British artist William Hogarth published a satirical print promoting biased, gendered capitalist associations between women and imported luxury goods like tea and porcelain. In this print from 1724, Hogarth depicts an aristocratic woman whose obsession with imported luxuries has literally transformed her abdomen into a fan and her head into a useless teapot. Then in 1729, a poem called, quote, tea, a poem, or Ladies into China cups, end quote, was anonymously published in London. This story filled with themes of jealousy, trickery, deceit, centers on goddesses who use tea to enchant other women into revealing their weaknesses. Under the cursed tea, the goddesses transform these women into porcelain vessels that will then perpetuate a poisonous cycle of infusing and tainting the tea and the bodies of unknowing women. Vilhelmina von Beirreuth was said to have been heavily involved in designing the artistic program of her apartments at the Neuschlafs. In fact, there are several authors who have gone as far to identify her as a collaborator and designer. So it seems unlikely that the blue and white patterning of her robe and sedan were aligned with the sexist and dehumanizing tones of Hogarth and the anonymous author of the toxic teapot ladies. However, I do not think that her porcelain-like attire was a sheer coincidence either. The dazzling use of mirrors in this interior can be read as a clear expression of Vilhelmina's noble magnificence, a material expression of her body politic. Since the completion of Louis XIV's Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the importance and prominence of mirrors in interior design began to supplant the long-standing prestige of history paintings. In these interiors, mirrors amplified the light in a room while simultaneously recording and showcasing the elegant gestures of the room's inhabitants. The multiplication of mirrors essentially multiplied the performing body. Mirrors in private spaces typically invite introspection, whereas mirrors in the public realm typically became a way to adjust appearances and to perfect the self. The reflective surfaces in the Spiegel-Scherven cabinet forced the inhabitants of the room to participate in the composition as Vilhelmina sips tea and studies ancient scrolls with foreign ambassadors. For Vilhelmina's guests, it's a very difficult task to perform a flattering portrait of the self in this room. Visitors catch fragmented glimpses of themselves, mouths agape, necks stretched, jockeying around to get a better, more flattering reflection in the ceiling. The mirrors closest to Vilhelmina are the least fragmented. Meanwhile, Vilhelmina's portrait and those of her kneeling dignitaries are rendered permanently in painted stucco relief. They are the only figures that remain fixed in the ceiling. In this way, the marcofine at the center of the composition, she becomes a central symbol of stability, reason, and majesty in this room. Returning to the ornamentation of her robe and sedan, I do not believe that Vilhelmina's artist intended to make visual connections between her, or sorry, I do believe that Vilhelmina's artist intended to make visual connections between her body and porcelain vessels. However, instead of trivializing her as a senseless woman and consumer, I believe that porcelain-like ornamentation is a powerful performance of her body politic. Here, she is performing a role as a philosopher, a diplomat, and her body is ensconced in a very powerful global currency, porcelain. It is no coincidence that Vilhelmina chose Shinwazuri rooms as a space to include the only permanent portraits of herself. Whether Vilhelmina costumes herself in the guise of an emperor, a goddess, an ambassador, the meanings of Shinwazuri designs were not always fixed and they could be easily layered to represent complex identities. The whimsical style, she was used as a mask or costume to mitigate the serious claims that Vilhelmina made in these portraits. Instead of conforming her decorative program to satisfy the social and political limitations of her role as a consort, Vilhelmina's architectural patronage gave her greater agency and ensured the endurance of her self-fashioned legacy. Thank you. Thank you both for sharing your research. Your papers were a tremendous work of erudition and quite the visual feast with all that flora, fauna, and those stucco flourishes and it's great to see new scholarship focusing on interior decoration and material culture. So my first question, if I can decipher, my writing is for Marley's and the ceiling decorations, which are just the decorative program, like I wonder, is just so rich and the motif so symbolically like a redolent that I wonder about the audiences that have the privilege of entering these cabinets and whether or not they have the visual literacy as well as Vilhelmina's like erudition to decipher or decode what they see above them. And if not, was it a waste of time, were they worthy of entering her cabinet even? That's an excellent question. Thank you. So I would say certainly for the later cabinet, the Spiegel-Scherven cabinet, the blue room, the program of the composition changes a lot. She has other chinoiserie rooms in other palaces, but also in the old palace where there is an emphasis on the chaos, on the confusion of so many intricate, tiny designs kind of swirling around the room. But when it comes to the final Spiegel-Scherven cabinet, the ornamentation of her in the center with the two kneeling dignitaries, they're very large and very prominent in relation to all of the other swirling designs around them. So it's very clear what the narrative focus of the composition is in comparison to some of her other rooms. I would say that not, certainly not everyone would have been as well read as she was, especially in terms of philosophy and in terms of travel diaries, but a lot of people would have been familiar with some of the ideas that she's trying to communicate in these particular ceilings. So yeah. So in most cases, embellishment and the emblematic would come together. Okay. So she didn't waste, you know, thousands of, you know, pellets of gold or whatever the currency was. Thousands of dollars, yeah, like pellets back in the day. And on a related note, like Katie, you mentioned like early on that was the original, like earlier phase of Chennai embroidery, that a lot of these pictorial, these decorative motifs were divested of their original meaning. So it was, they were incorporated purely for their aesthetics, but when local artisans melded their own designs with these Chinese prototypes, did they infuse like new meaning in the outcome? Thank you. Yes. And there's, and there's some interesting potential examples of that even before Parsi embroiderers were the makers. And in the process of commissioning, these were very, especially the early, earlier examples, we can kind of surmise that they were highly customized, where the consumer would have been able to request certain motifs. So there's some ability for them to kind of map on their own associations, even if they weren't the maker. And there are some examples of this. Actually the, this kind of central motif of the dog crossing the bridge is, yes, excellent. Thank you. That's a sort of curious repetition on a lot of Parsi garments. And it's thought that it could be associated with Zoroastrian eschatology, which basically places the dog as kind of the guard of the sacred bridge into the afterlife. So that is a potential example of kind of harnessing pre-existing languages and applying new associations as the market transferred. I'm going to bounce back to Marlise. So it seems to me that Vilhamina is an exceptionally like learned patroness. And so I'm just wondering if her usage of Chou Noiseray, how she, how it was like displayed, how it was incorporated in her decorative scheme and used as a didactic tool. Was it unique? Like how did her contemporaries showcase Chou Noiseray? Yeah. So even within Chou Noiseray, a lot of Chou Noiseray rooms, especially in 18th century in Germany, they're also typically mirror cabinets and porcelain cabinets as well. So there are lots of examples of that throughout Germany. But I would say that, for example, her sister, who was in the town of Ansbach, which is not very far away, it takes like half a day's travel by carriage for her at this time. She has a very elaborate mirror porcelain cabinet. And there are all kinds of mice and figures on little stands in the room. But in the center, she has a portrait of herself on the ceiling. But rather than using Chou Noiseray to communicate these ideas, she has herself represented as a Greek goddess. I can't remember which one. I think it's Minerva. So I would say that for Vilumina, it's pretty unusual to see somebody representing themselves in Chou Noiseray garb with people and like animals coming from all over the world. Also, there is a space, a palace outside of Stuttgart, where there's Sibia Augusta, had a mirror cabinet that was very elaborate and lots of Chou Noiseray designs. And her portraits are represented over and over again. But the portraits that she represents herself, she's clearly in costume. Many of them are like Comedian de Arte figures. There's different racialized depictions of her representing different races. But it is quite clearly communicating the idea that it's all farce, that these are costumes. And I feel like Vilumina, by the time we get to this room, she is projecting this idea that she is a diplomat. She is traveling, whether it's real or imagined, is up to you. But communicating the idea that she's worthy or deemed worthy of this role. Well, Minerva's a good one, by the way. So Katie, this is a related question. So I'm just wondering if consumers in Western India, if they valued Chennai as well as the domesticated or localized interpretation of Chennai equally? To clarify, you mean embroideries that were produced by Chinese embroideries versus their own domestic productions? That's a great question. I would say based on the oral histories that I read, on which kind of heirlooms are most have been passed down and saved and most proudly displayed, at least in, I guess we could say, the contemporary community, there is an emphasis on pride of having invertebrates that came directly from China. And I think part of the appeal of this style was an association, a direct association with the China trade, which was the reason for the Parsi community's upward social mobility. And they became merchants involved in this and families that benefited from that became really pillars of the community. And you can still see that in kind of the architecture and the infrastructures today, lots of the hospitals and schools, they're built by Parsi families. And if you trace back the origins of their wealth that often goes to the China trade. So having kind of a direct tie to that source, I guess, is I think particularly valued, but it's, I'm just kind of interpreting that based on how I've seen the heirlooms sort of treasured and displayed. Well, during our break earlier, Katie, I asked you about whether or not some of the salesmen who traveled to the Gujati region, if they remained in that community. And you said some did, but they pursued other professions. But did any of them continue, like in the production of these fabrics that still exist today? I would say that primarily the, and the production of Chinai style, embroideries does continue into today. And I would say primarily it is manufactured by the Parsi community or in India. Even the evidence that some of the Parsi, I mean, the Chinese embroiderers who came and settled in areas of Parsi settlement, the evidence that they might have stayed is primarily just oral. And there's not, at least as far as my research has been able to uncover this point, much evidence of kind of elongated settlement. And yeah, I mentioned what I did read is that the families who did potentially stay were best known for becoming dentists or restaurant owners. So quite a different trade from embroidery. But I'm saving the most important question for the end. And this one's for you, Marlies, no pressure at all. Is there any possibility that Walt Disney's animators looked at Hogarth's, you know, illustration for the inspiration behind Mrs. Potts and Beauty and the Beast? Honestly, I would not be surprised. There's, yeah, the Disney exhibition that was at the Met and that was at that now at the Huntington Library and Museum. I mean that there, I think there could be some cross over there. Up until today, I did not know that teapot ladies were actually a genre. So I will not go down the rabbit hole, you know, this weekend. But let's open up the floor to questions. Where's our red box? Okay. Which can be thrown across the room. That's why it's so cushioned. I'd like to see that happen. Thank you so much for your talk today. They were great. I wanted to follow up on the teapot lady question. I wonder if we could just go back to the ceiling and maybe the the bigger image of the woman dressed in the guess that. So I guess what I really want to ask about this is sort of the sexual politics of the image. You know, in an earlier version, she's admired by two men. It's unclear if they're both Chinese or if one is Chinese and one is another ethnicity Persian or then the feathered headdress looks vaguely. I mean, I'm trying to understand sort of the references in the earlier one. This one's clearly two figures dressed as Chinese but having possibly European features and not dark hair. It's unclear to me. However, she definitely seems to be the receptacle because she's got the vase and then there's this kind of phallic thing going towards her. I just want to know what do you think the sexual politics of this is especially with sort of the way that the oval squares and gem shaped objects that are surrounding her look kind of like medieval decorative elements. I just wondered if you had a read that kind of moved into that. Yeah. So thank you. That's an excellent question. I had not thought about this figure. So this is a bridge behind me, but I had not thought of it in that way until you just mentioned that. And now I can't unsee it. So thank you. But yeah, I would say so one thing about the figures, especially in the Japanese cabinet, I know that there has been repainting on certain parts. So I do wonder if over time the pigments that they're using, if they've changed them at certain points. So I do wonder exactly what it would have looked like during her time. And I know that they've been repainted because they're in one of the lacquer panels. It's not on the ceiling. It's on the wall. There is a helicopter painted into it as a little tongue-in-cheek nod. But so that's like a hint that some things have changed. Just a few. So I do wonder. But I also feel like the androgyny in terms of the racialization of the figures, that is something that I go back and forth with a lot in my papers thinking of this as a costuming, which we see in a lot of ways. But I would also say about in terms of the sexual politics of, I mean in the Japanese cabinet where she's on the ceiling with eight other men. That was very unusual to see something like that where you have somebody who is a princess of Prussia, very, very high-ranking, and to see her as this lone female figure in the room. I think in that particular room her artists are still using chinoiserie in a way where there are so many figures, there's so many forms and animals and flora on it that everything almost becomes ornament, that bodies become ornament. And I feel like it's when we get to this point that you begin to see a narrative come out. But I feel like because of the fact that they're mere ornament, that there's that kind of de-sexing idea to it. Thank you. Thank you both so much for the wonderful talks. My question goes to Katie. When you were describing the traveling vendors who would end up just showing the stitch work on the renders of the communities, and that's just such a lovely and lively thing I was picturing it in my head. But then there is a puzzling question underlying it, because the stitch work, this is the technology technique connected to a much-valued merchandise, and they were just freely sharing that technique. You wouldn't find the lithography company nowadays sharing that technology with whoever wants to make chips. But this embroidery, as you were describing, so what, like, why were they not jealously guarding their trade secret? Well, porcelain was guarded, the technique, that was guarded, but this somehow is different. Why? Wow. That's an excellent question, and it is not something I have thought about. But I guess you're bringing up porcelain. I think porcelain, as a sort of trade secret, was a much more complex process. This stitch technique could really be kind of reverse engineered just from having a garment. You could, if you already, especially these people who already had embroidery skills, which many of these Parsi women did, you could look at the stitch and figure out how to do it. I'm not sure why they would be so free to share the designs that they're also trying to sell, but I think part of it is a knowledge that these things, they couldn't help but be spread. You can trace the designs from your garments, which I believe people did, especially you'll see designs get more and more sort of bulbous and lumpy, less refined and defined, and to me that indicates that tracing paper was just laid over an existing embroidery and you're catching all of that texture, and it's hard to really get a nice refined design from that method of transfer. So there's sort of open source to begin with, and I guess it was beneficial for them to more protect their positive relationship with their customers, because they were, from what was reported by this, by Sharnos Kama's oral histories, they were very intimate relationships, and in that the embroiderers would really come back to the same houses and had kind of very distinct families that they would visit. Beyond that, the intimacy is difficult to gauge. This is for Katie also. I wonder if you could do a little direct comparison of the ways that preferences were communicated from Gujarat to China with what occurs in Europe from, say, England to China, specifying what sorts of things are wanted for the market. Were patterns sent? I mean, there seems to be a difference in the way the protectionist attitude towards porcelain technology versus embroidery technology, but what are the differences between the India-China relationship and the, say, the English-China relationship? Thank you. Yeah, that's a great question. I think there were many distinctive kind of overall trends that you could say shaped broadly the Parsi market and their preferences for these garments. I think one of the things that I really don't want to get lost in this conversation is that the Parsi garment types were different. And, you know, as we're looking at these, like, are different from both Chinese and European garments. They were specific. I mean, just for it to be a sorry, rather than, you know, a tailored petticoat or already creates such a different market and such a different set of needs and necessitates different designer responses. Some other kind of defining features between the two markets, the European market for chinoiserie fabrics generally preferred, like, a cream or white ground, and then more colorful embellishment. And in the Parsi market, generally deeper darker ground fabrics were preferred, and often the embroideries were done in all white. And there are a few different potential explanations for this, one of them being that Parsi women wear a white blouse underneath their garment called a sodra. It's a sacred garment. And so it would kind of offset that and then pick up on it with the white embroidery. And, yeah, but I think thinking about kind of the the worn application of these things and how differently they kind of shape and respond to the body creates a very different set of market preferences. Ah, yeah, I would love to know more about that. I have tried to figure out how things were ordered. And it's, I think that it happened through a lot of different ways. So one of one of the potentials that I've looked into is the possibility of selecting motifs from printed embroidery pattern books. They're wood block printed. And I have found some of those from the 19th century that you can create pretty direct connections between the motifs and what you can find on the embroideries. And I think that, especially, you know, when we're seeing garments where there's more of a direct tie to Gujrati embroidery, I do think that there's a very strong possibility that those the embroideries from Gujrati were brought to China and kind of designs were negotiated with with the embroiderers because they were there. So they could, you know, it was Guangzhou or Canton was a complete, it was a very densely populated market and shopkeepers were lined up to kind of cater to foreign traders and the the Parsi population was a significant one of those populations there interacting with shopkeepers and placing orders. We have a question from the chat. So this question is for you, Marlise. This comes from Dr. Elisa Robertson and she says, can you offer your impressions regarding how Princess Willamina and Voltaire exchanged rhetorical and social progress conversations? Could his emphasis on tolerance have been informed by his discourse with her? Oh, okay. Thank you. Dr. Elisa Robertson is also my sister. So thank you. So, yes, there was lots and lots of conversation, not just between Willamina and Voltaire, but Willamina and Sleipnitz, other political philosophers in Germany as well. There is an notion that Willamina's ideas were certainly informed by these people that she's talking to. I have encountered fewer arguments of Willamina directly influencing, you know, something that Voltaire would have written about, but that is a little bit outside of my dissertation to go far into the philosophical meat of things. Also, Willamina, there is an argument for her being part of a secret fraternal order, and that's something that I have tried to get a firm documentation on it, even visiting the order and can't get a, you know, firm yes or no. So a lot of these ideas were certainly being circulated amongst each other, but as far as a direct connection on a specific idea of Voltaire's, I cannot confirm or deny. I don't know enough, so thank you. Can you hear me in this? Okay. I have one question for Katie. To what degree did the Parsi community keep ties to Iran and to, like, Qajar forms and was there any sort of synthesis happening there in terms of the way that they adapted the forms coming from China and their own sort of cultural lexicon, or did they sort of leave Persian identities behind? I'm curious about this Qajar connection. Thank you for that. Yeah. It's kind of amazing how much they actually have held on to this Persian identity, considering that they migrated to Northwest India in the eighth and, between the eighth and tenth centuries. And, you know, the name for this community is still, it means Persian. And I would say in different periods, there's been more of kind of intentional identification with their Persian or Iranian or kind of nationalism, essentially, for different kind of political reasons. But in terms of the aesthetics and how that plays out in the textiles, that's been less my focus. But I think that it is kind of been inseparable in some ways. I mean, and some of the bases of these designs really go back to very ancient origins that sort of spread all across Central Asia and along the Silk routes. And it's like the alternating bird and floral borders. It's kind of impossible to assign them to one specific culture, because it's so widespread over such a long period of time. But I would love to investigate those connections westward more. Thank you. This one's for Marlise. I'm curious about Wilhelmina's musical compositions, and if they were, if you know anything about them, and if they were equally as sort of voyeuristically influenced. So I've listened to a lot of her compositions. They're quite beautiful. However, from different musicologists that I've read analyzing her musical compositions, they tend to say, like, some of them are derivative of other musicians and composers, but which I feel is a bit unfair. But I would say that she did an op, I think it was Art Dzerksies, and so, which is also something that you see represented in one of the ceilings, not in her wing, I believe. I believe that that is in her husband's wing, which she decorated or she didn't decorate, but it seems that she was perhaps involved in the commission to redecorate some of the ceilings in his apartments, which is again very unusual. Typically you see them involved in their own suite of apartments, but not going over to their spouses. So, yeah, I would say that they're not nearly quite as imaginative or unique in the way that her ceiling commissions are. This is on. Thank you. Thank you all so much for coming. Thank you so much to all of our speakers, to my colleagues at the Barnes who helped out today, to all of you for coming, to the advisors for your work with these students. Good luck to all of you, all of you guys as you finish up these projects, and we look forward to reading the books. So, thank you all.