Faceted flask enameling a home-brewed China, ca. 1725–30

Cradled in the palm at barely the height of a hand, this little faceted flask was made to travel from cabinet to parlor table, its clear cut blank turned so a cordial might pour past the seated figure at its heart—and what a figure, this small enthroned sovereign of nowhere, this broad-hatted lord of an empire that never existed, whom the enamel names cosmopolitan and the drawing convicts as parochial in the same breath. He sits alone, scepter or parasol in hand, dignified as a prince receiving envoys, and he receives only rinceaux; the tendrils fencing him are the identical baroque scrollwork that curls up any south-German altar-frame, the winged putto crowning his cartouche is a cherub lifted straight from a devotional ceiling, and the fruit-laden candelabra flanking him were grown in an engraved pattern book, never in a garden he had seen. The linework is genuinely disciplined—tidy, legible, faultlessly wrapped around a curved surface that would defeat a lesser hand—and that very discipline is the indictment, for a fluency this total belongs wholly to the vocabulary it already possessed.

Call it, then, the worldly flask that never left the workshop, the parish that crowned itself the earth, the mask fitted so snugly it hardened into a mirror—every name true, every name the sentence. He did not blow this glass; he received a body shaped by other hands and painted a knowledge he had never gathered, so the worldliness is worn, not won, a whole continent surveyed through nothing wider than a print. This is provincialism at its most imperial, a hamlet dialect declaring itself the tongue of nations and mistaking the reach of its own scrollwork for the circumference of the globe—and the glass agrees, obedient, uncomplaining, small. Look last at the scepter, raised like the emblem of a throne no hand aboard this workshop ever approached, ruling to the edge of a reserve the pattern book had already conquered and no further. — NM