Seeing something made is half the pleasure of owning it
PAUL JOHNSON
Aproduct may now go two or three times round the globe before it reaches the shops. I note this after inspecting boxes in which some of my grandchildren's Christmas presents came. One flying bird was inspired by the design of an Italian, had the details worked out by a French firm, and had its parts made in China, which were then sent back to France for assembly. The packaging was English. A firm here has its soldiers hand-painted in China, and very well done they are. Another box said that the parts were made in Indonesia to British design. What interests me is the overlap of cultures produced by this global division of labour. I am intrigued by the idea of a Chinese maiden hand-painting a 'Desert Rat' from Montgomery's Eighth Army. What thoughts pass through her fanciful mind as she works?
This kind of co-operation, like everything else, is not new. The Dutch discovered in the 17th century that the Chinese could make porcelain better and more cheaply than anything they could produce in Amsterdam. So they sent out patterns, had the Cantonese make them, and brought back the results for sale all over Europe. The English followed suit. There is a species of pottery, eagerly sought by collectors, known as 'Chinese Lowestoft'. Christie's in New York are staging an exhibition this month of a magnificent example of early-18th-century Sino-French partnership in fine art. In 1709 Louis XIV, bankrupt and desperate for means to repel the invading English and Dutch armies, ordered a forced collection of silver to be melted down for specie. One of the presumed victims was Philippe Due d'Odeans, who was to succeed Le Roi Soleil as regent when the infant Louis XV came to the throne. He seems to have ordered a top-quality replacement service in porcelain to be made in China to his own specifications, which included the Orleans coat of arms on each dish. Another service was made, possibly for the young king, with the royal coat of arms as chief ornament. To have high-quality Chinese porcelain dishes with your own arms on them was the height of French Regency chic, together with a Watteau fete and the latest genre painting from Gersaint's shop. But then the international factories out East got on to the fashion and began to hire Chinese craftsmen to supply Western-style ware for the mass market in London and Paris, and such stuff lost its appeal for top people.
This 18th-century example of globalisation at least employed craftsmen, often the best in
the world. Today oriental labour is merely semi-skilled, and is employed primarily because it is cheap. I feel uneasy about using a product whose exact manufacture is uncertain and has perhaps circumnavigated the world, and been tinkered with in unknown countries, before it reaches my hands. In the 1930s, when I collected soldiers, eventually amassing about 2,000, counting in cowboys, Indians, pirates, etc., I was anxious to have only English-made men. German and, still more Japanese, soldiers I thought vastly inferior. (Alas! Where is this great army now? Long since melted down, like Louis XIV's silver.) But no one then thought of toys as being global rather than national. We boys would not have been happy to think that our British Grenadier had been made by mysterious foreigners in half-a-dozen unknown countries.
There is something intensely human in the desire to know exactly how a precious possession was made; best of all to see it being made. My mother told me that, when she and my father became engaged, he was not content to buy her a ring from a jeweller. He took her to a tiny workshop in a back street, where an old man with a skullcap and a magnifying-glass in one eye, selected and mounted the diamond before her eyes. I'm not sure he didn't cut it, too. My father held that 'to watch the creation of an object is a major part of the joy of possession', That is one reason people pay large sums to have their portraits painted. The rich insist, like the Duc d'Orleans, in participating in the process of production, if only marginally. A wise Savile Row tailor is only too anxious to solicit a stylistic contribution from his client, even if he ignores it in practice. Christian Dior used to say that when he made an important dress for a beautiful lady, he regarded her suggestions and comments as part of the creative transformation of silk and satin into art.
I sigh for those days when purchasing a special gift brought you into direct contact with artists who welcomed your views (or pretended to) and certainly did not regard creation as an exclusive communion with their own egos. In 15th-century Florence, when a young woman got engaged, the first thing she and her fiancé did was to visit the shop of Apollonio di Giovanni, who specialised in made-to-order cassette da sposa or bride-boxes. These wonderful objects, often designed and painted by leading artists, were made in the workshops on the premises, so that the happy couple could daily (if they chose) see them rise to perfection. These boxes contained a bride's jewels, her
keys and other objects precious to her, such as love letters. The decoration, chosen by the bride, often stressed chastity. and a favourite topic was the story of Susanna and the Elders. The British Museum contains an outstanding cassetta do sposa illustrating this theme, in which all the scenes, including the naked Susanna stepping out of her bath, are carved in ivory. What. I wonder, would have been the expression on this fortunate bride's face as she watched the craftsman carve this masterly work, perhaps with her future husband, soon to enjoy her favours, poking her in the ribs?
There is a full account of such bridal treasures in a fine new book about the Renaissance, Objects of Virtue, by Luke Syson and Dora Thornton, which you can get at the British Museum (40). The bride also took with her a huge and grandiose chest, known as a cassone. The authors say that half the families in Florence possessed cassoni, so they were not the privilege of the rich alone. They often came in pairs, and Apollonio's accounts show that in the year 1452 his workshop produced 23 pairs of these chests. One of his best, made after 1461, shows a splendid painting, 'The Conquest of Trebizond', on its side, and is now in the New York Metropolitan. The paintings on the lids and sides stressed fidelity, constancy, etc., but on the underside of the lid there was often a painting of a naked man and woman, to highlight another aspect of marriage. Indeed, a cassone, which was kept in the marital bedroom, often figures in salacious tales. In one of Boccaccio's, a lover tricks the husband into lying in the cassone, slams down the lid, then enjoys the wife on top of it, while the imprisoned husband has to endure his wife's noisy shouts of ecstasy. And am I not right in thinking that, in the interwar years, a cassone figured in that spine-tingling West End play Rope, the unfortunate victim being deposited therein?
A third type of bridal gift specially made in Apollonio's workshop has the deschi do parto, a birth-tray, made in preparation for the first fruit of the union, on which (I suppose) the new-born babe was presented to the family and which was later hung on the wall. These, too, were often the work of major artists, but in the 16th century they decided they were to grand for such artisanal work. So the custom, according to Vasari, lapsed, or lesser hands took over. Now brides and grooms simply send you lists with recommended shops. Who makes the things, and what they look like, nobody seems to care.
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