Emblems of Empire: Selections from the Mactaggart Art Collection (review)

Emblems of Empire marks a new milestone in the production of beautifully illustrated, scholarly catalogues of Chinese costume, textiles, and painting. Several things make Emblems of Empire exemplary. To begin, Emblems of Empire is exceptional in addressing textiles in relation to painting and vice versa. Brilliantly following the collecting practices of Cecile and Sandy Mactaggart, it reunites materials traditionally viewed in a single glance in China’s imperial palaces but normally segregated in modern museums because of the artificial distinction of the decorative and fine arts. Emblems of Empire thus restores a sense of the rich visual world of late imperial China.

To articulate how ‘emblems of silk and ink’ functioned in late imperial China, the catalogue is structured into three chapters plus a conclusion. In the first chapter, ‘The Court,’ careful choices of objects from the Mactaggart Collection permit the narrative to establish the court as constituted by its social space, mediated by ritual and especially by dress, rather than by its physical space. Typically, art-historical scholarship has been preoccupied with the architectonic structures of the court as the habitat for court activity. In contrast, Emblems of Empire reveals the court to be an institution composed of clothed figures, the differentiation of rank of robed figures analogous to the differentiation of humble and palatial buildings found at court, the repetitive similarity of the robes of those of lower rank as much building blocks of the court as paving stones, timber beams, and roof tiles. By focusing its narrative on robes and rank badges, ‘The Court’ represents late imperial Chinese courts in a fresh way.

The second chapter, ‘Palaces,’ breaks new ground by considering imperial textiles as furnishings. While it is known that textiles were used to adorn interiors and to enhance the function of wooden furniture, the organization of scholarship by media has meant that textiles and furniture are normally studied separately. Painted and printed images cue the reader’s art-historical imagination by showing how the kinds of objects included in the catalogue were used historically for palace events. The textiles explored in this chapter – namely, cushion covers, table skirts, carpets, hangings, and embroidered pictures – are little examined in their own right in existing scholarship, let alone studied together. ‘Palaces’ thus directs us to new ways of thinking about interiors that respect the comprehensive material culture of these spaces.

The Manchu conquerors of China sought primacy in the larger world, and the third chapter, ‘Universal Rule,’ contemplates objects that expressed Manchu rule within and beyond the borders of China. Works from the Mactaggart Collection pictorially represent and physically document this world view eloquently: mid-eighteenth-century French copperplate engravings of The Conquests of the Qianlong Emperor together with Chinese paintings – specifically, the mid-eighteenth-century Southern Inspection Tour of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1739–96) and the mid-nineteenth-century Muslim Rebellions in Shaanxi, Gansu and Xinjiang Provinces – elucidate events that defined the global reach of the Qing empire. Textiles produced for military use, such as a saddle cloth and a red banner, reveal the material culture of the martial power of Qing universal rule. Furthermore, the ability of the Qing dynasty to use diplomacy to consolidate its empire across Eurasia is manifest in robes made for Tibetan aristocrats and dancers from Chinese silk along with a Mongolian-style robe made for a Tibetan lay official from Russian silk.

Beyond seeing Qing dynasty court culture through clothes and other textiles, Emblems of Empire advances the study of Chinese costume and textiles in several other ways. Notably, it expands knowledge of North American collecting of Chinese art in the twentieth century into Canada, thus revising a narrative dominated by American collectors. If any fault is to be found, it is in the fact that, like many survey texts or coffee-table books, Emblems of Empire presents works from the Mactaggart Collection in a narrative whose thematic structure occasionally takes precedence over chronology to tell history in...