An exhibition curated by University of Toronto students
During the 2023 academic year at the University of Toronto, Dr. Karine Tsoumis instructed the fourth-year seminar Global to Local – Ceramics at the Gardiner Museum. In the context of this course, each student conducted a close study of an object from the Gardiner’s collection.
We were tasked with understanding its material nature, formal, and functional uses, and to reflect upon its social, political, economic, and cultural implications. This exhibition shares our collective work and the ceramic stories uncovered.
Pair of sweetmeat dishes with figures of an African man and woman (c.1760) by Nympenburg Porcealin ManufactoryGardiner Museum
Pair of sweetmeat dishes with African figures
By Mina Zhou
This pair of sweetmeat dishes features a Black African man and woman in exoticized clothing. Used on the tables of 18th-century Europe, such containers held sweetmeats, food delicacies made with sugar. In high demand, sugar was then cultivated on colonial plantations in the Americas where enslaved and indentured African and Indigenous labour was exploited.
Positioned as ornaments framing and holding the dishes, the figures romanticize servitude and reduce the Black body to the status of a commodity. They show the role that European porcelain played in normalizing the exploitation of African individuals and in shaping harmful visual stereotypes.
Dish with boar hunting scene (c.1500-1550) by Italy, Tuscany, CafaggioloGardiner Museum
Dish with boar hunting scene
By Brynn Evans
This dish was created in Cafaggiolo near Florence,
where the Medici family supported a maiolica workshop. Merging styles from Italy, the Islamic world, and Asia, this dish is a material expression of the cross-cultural encounters taking place through trade in the early modern period.
Dish with boar hunting scene (c.1500-1550) by Italy, Tuscany, CafaggioloGardiner Museum
Italian potters used the medium of maiolica,
an earthenware covered by a white tin-glaze, to emulate Chinese blue and white porcelain, then expensive and rare. The knot pattern was likely influenced by Islamic metalwork, also widely consumed in Italy
while the boar hunting scene in the centre speaks to both European and Persian hunting traditions.
Écuelle and Stand from the Japanese Service for Sans Souci Palace (c.1769-1770) by Royal Porcelain ManufactoryGardiner Museum
Écuelle from the Japanese service for Sans Souci Palace
By Celina Lee
Frederick the Great commissioned this écuelle (or small tureen) as part of a service ordered from the Berlin porcelain manufactory, which he acquired in 1763. The piece highlights the mobility of objects and ideas in 18th-century Europe.
Écuelle and Stand from the Japanese Service for Sans Souci Palace (c.1769-1770) by Royal Porcelain ManufactoryGardiner Museum
While the écuelle’s form is rooted in the French ritual
of the toilette, its chinoiserie ornament – featuring an imaginary conception of Asia – was inspired by Jean-Baptiste Pillement’s popular engravings.
Écuelle and Stand from the Japanese Service for Sans Souci Palace (c.1769-1770) by Royal Porcelain ManufactoryGardiner Museum
Intended for use at the “Japanese House,” a pavilion in the gardens of the King’s summer palace at Sans Souci, the service further emphasizes his ownership of a porcelain manufactory as a statement of power.
Pickle or sweetmeat stand
By YuYing Mao
Pickle or sweetmeat stand (c.1765) by Derby Porcelain ManufactoryGardiner Museum
This exuberant stand features a man
sitting on top of a rock encrusted with seashells, coral, and weeds. He holds a large scallop-shell dish like the ones surrounding the stand. Made at the Derby porcelain manufactory, it would have been used to serve pickled fruit or vegetables or perhaps sweetmeats.
The piece exemplifies the theatricality and the embrace of motifs from nature that characterize the Rococo style. Shells and other marine forms were some of the most popular motifs of the style that spread across the decorative arts in mid-18th-century England.
Pierrot scent bottle
By Taylor Smith
Pierrot scent bottle (c.1765) by Fürstenberg Porcelain ManufactoryGardiner Museum
Shaped as the clown Pierrot, this scent bottle would have contained perfume as well as beauty patches, used to cover skin blemishes, in the small container underneath. Applied to the skin or pieces of clothing, perfume was a necessary combatant to the odours of the 18th century.
Pierrot scent bottle (c.1767) by Fürstenberg Porcelain ManufactoryGardiner Museum
The character of Pierrot originated from the French iteration of the Commedia dell’arte, an Italian street theatre popular throughout Europe.
Small, portable, and easily kept in a pocket, the clown-shaped bottle would have stimulated conversation when displayed, showcasing the owner’s cultivated taste for theatre.
This exhibition was curated by students enrolled in the seminar “Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art and Material Culture: Global to Local – Ceramics at the Gardiner Museum,” taught by Dr. Karine Tsoumis (Senior Curator, Gardiner Museum) for the University of Toronto in the Winter term 2023. The exhibition was co-ordinated by Celina Lee, Rylie Loft, and Rebecca Zifarelli.
Authors of exhibition text (in order of appearance):
Celina Lee, Rylie Loft, and Rebecca Zifarelli (Introduction)
Sheena McKeever
Kiran Li-Yang
Caillie Waters
Rebecca Zifarelli
Rylie Loft
Mina Zhou
Brynn Evans
Celina Lee
YuYing Mao
Taylor Smith
