In 1691, he bought a “Jappan travelling strong water cellar, £5 7s. 6d.”; a “Persian carpet (all of silk) to lay under a bed, and an old china roulwaggon, 22 guineys”; “a piece of blue Indian stuff, £2 15s.”; and “a candle-skreen, £1 6s.” (The “roulwaggon” is a kind of vase.)
In 1692, he enters “two china rice potts for dear wife, £5”; “a china jarr, £2 10s.”; and “a parcel of china, £2 14s.”
It is evident from the above that at the close of the seventeenth century, Huguenot, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, English and Dutch artists and artisans had combined to produce a style, the leading spirit of which in England and Holland was Marot.
A noticeable fact in connexion with the European craze for Asiatic art products is that, though the English and Dutch highly admired the native wares, the European merchants sent out their own patterns and designs for furniture and ceramics. It is even maintained that the famous “Willow Plate” was the design of a Dutchman. The evidence of the practice of exploiting foreign labour in the field of home taste is overwhelming; and, as the century advanced, the guilds, city companies and other trades unions in England, France and Holland grew more and more restive under the burden of “Chinese cheap labour.” Mazarin was one of the early enthusiasts in France to encourage Eastern importations.
In the Mémoirs of La Grande Mademoiselle (1658), we read: “The Cardinal (Mazarin) behaved in a very delightful and galant manner. He took the two Queens (Anne of Austria and Henrietta Maria) and the Princess of England and myself into a gallery that was filled with all that could be imagined in the way of precious stones, jewels, furniture, stuffs and everything beautiful from China; crystal chandeliers, mirrors, tables and cabinets of all kinds, silver vessels, perfumes, gloves, ribbons and fans.”
Towards the close of the century the craze for Oriental wares had assumed such proportions that in France Louis XIV enacted sumptuary laws to protect native industries; and in Holland and England the artisans grumbled bitterly over the hard times occasioned by the vogue. The Eastern workmen accepted patterns and supplied orders that natives of Western Europe could not venture to undertake. The guilds and city companies admitted the superiority of Oriental work, and cried aloud for protection. Thus, in 1700, the Joiners’ Company addressed a petition against the importation of manufactured cabinet work from the East Indies. In this they state that they have “of late years arrived at so great a perfection as exceeds all Europe.”
“But several merchants and others,” they continue, “have procured to be made in London of late years and sent over to the East Indies patterns and models of all forms of cabinet goods, and have yearly returned from thence such quantities of cabinet wares, manufactured there after the English fashion, that the said trade in England is in great danger of being utterly ruined, etc., etc.”
The following goods, manufactured in India, have been imported within these four years, viz.:
Plate LIII.—Clocks and Details, by Marot.