'A Passion for China: Adolphe Thiers’s collection'
Jean-Baptiste Clais (Musée du Louvre)
The talk will explore Adolphe Thiers's passion for China. Thiers (1797-1877) was a journalist, historian, and a major political figure in 19th century history, serving as deputy, minister, president of the council and, ultimately, president of the French Republic. In preparation for publishing a work on the art of the people of the world, with a special emphasis on Chinese art, he collected books, documents and objets d’art related to China. He gathered more than 170 works dating mainly from the 18th and 19th centuries: scrolls, album pages, engravings, prints, porcelains, jades, lacquers, and precious objets d’art in ivory, bronze, and inlaid wood, as well as more than 150 volumes of books. His interest in China started as early as 1811, and most of his collection was acquired between 1830 and 1860. This talk will focus on the complex relationship between Thiers’s passion for China and for art more generally, his social ambition, and his political and literary career.
Dr Jean-Baptiste Clais (柯诣) is a senior curator in the Department of Decorative Arts at the Musée du Louvre, where he oversees the Asian collections and arts of globalisation—as well as European porcelains. He began his career at the Louvre as curator of arms and Mughal art in the Department of Islamic Art, and he was later a curator of Chinese art at the Musée Guimet and curator of the oriental collection at the Delacroix museum. He is currently working on the history of jade between China, Central Asia and India as well as on a book on hardstone objects from Gujarat in the 16th-17th century.
All welcome – no registration required
This event is co-hosted by the University of Oxford’s History Faculty, Oxford Centre for Global History and Merton College
