From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market: Jingdezhen Porcelain Production as Global Visual Culture

This article describes the emergence, circulation, and provenance of major visual sources on Jingdezhen ceramic history and production. Beginning with the album referred to as "Taoye tu" (Pictures of porcelain production) in eighteenth-century Qing court documents, it follows the dissemination of the visual genre from the Qing imperial court to European, Japanese, and North American consumers across various mediums and disparate political units. Rather than analyze them as disparate genres, this article proposes to view Qing court paintings, export art, woodblock prints, and foreign translations as global historical phenomena, in order to show the existence of a shared visual culture in which production was the primary pictorial theme.