Kristel Smentek: Chinoseries for Beijing: An Eighteenth-Century French Gift to the Emperor of China

Kristel Smentek, Associate Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaks about how in 1766 a set of chinoiserie tapestries designed by François Boucher was presented to the Qianlong Emperor on behalf of the French administration.

This lecture examines the circumstances of the gift and the remarkable Sino-French exchange of art objects it initiated.

Kristel Smentek is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Architecture at MIT.

Her research interests include rococo art and design, the history of collecting and display, the history of the art market, and the impact of Asian-European exchange on eighteenth-century European art and aesthetic theory. She curated the exhibition Rococo Exotic: French Mounted Porcelains and the Allure of the East for The Frick Collection in 2007 and is the author of articles on the eighteenth-century print market, on the painter Jean-Étienne Liotard, and on the display of Chinese porcelain in eighteenth-century French interiors. She recently published a book about the French collector Pierre-Jean Mariette, Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2014), and is currently working on a new book project, tentatively titled Objects of Encounter: China in Eighteenth-Century France.

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