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This essential reference volume, the first in a five-volume set, describes a million photographs at the National Museum of American History for curators, researchers, historians, artists, filmmakers, and collectors. See "Photography" for other volumes in this series.

National Museums is the first book to explore the national museum as a cultural institution in a range of contrasting national contexts. Composed of new studies of countries that rarely make a showing in the English-language studies of museums, this book reveals how these national museums have been used to create a sense of national self, place the nation in the arts, deal with the consequences of political change, remake difficult pasts, and confront those issues of nationalism, ethnicity and multiculturalism which have come to the fore in national politics in recent decades. National Museums combines research from both leading and new researchers in the fields of history, museum studies, cultural studies, sociology, history of art, media studies, science and technology studies, and anthropology. It is an interrogation of the origins, purpose, organisation, politics, narratives and philosophies of national museums.

This book explores the relationship between collecting Chinese ceramics, interior design and display in Britain through the eyes of collectors, designers and tastemakers during the years leading to, during and following the Second World War. The Ionides Collection of European style Chinese export porcelain forms the nucleus of this study – defined by its design hybridity – offering insights into the agency of Chinese porcelain in diverse contexts, from seventeenth-century Batavia to twentieth-century Britain, raising questions about notions of Chineseness, Britishness, and identity politics across time and space. Through the biographies of the collectors, this book highlights the role of collecting Chinese art objects, particularly porcelain, in the construction of individual and group identities. Social networks linking the Ionides to agents and dealers, auctioneers, and museum specialists bring into focus the dynamics of collecting during this period, the taste of the Ionides and their self-fashioning as collectors. The book will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of art history, history of collections, interior design, Chinese studies, and material culture studies.

An examination of museums in China, surveying their development from the nineteenth century, and looking in particular at their incredible recent proliferation.

This is the classic introduction to Chinese calligraphy. In nine richly illustrated chapters Chang explores the aesthetics and the technique of this art in which rhythm, line, and structure are perfectly embodied. He measure the slow change from pictograph to stroke to the style and shape of written characters by the great calligraphers. It is a superb appreciation of beauty in the movement of strokes and in the patterns of structure--and an inspiration to amateurs as well as professionals interested in the decorative arts.

During a relatively short period, from around 1765 to 1780, the Dutch lawyer Jean Theodore Royer (1737-1807) was intensely engaged in the study of Chinese culture. Befriended VOC officials and their Chinese relations in Canton collected Chinese objects for him and helped him with his greatest ambition: the composition of a Chinese dictionary. The objects were given a home in his museum on the Herengracht in The Hague. Better than travel journals, they gave a picture of life in China in Royer’s time. Because the selection was largely made by modest Chinese traders, the collection does not so much give a picture of the material culture of the Chinese elite, but rather that of the ambitious, upwardly-mobile world of small traders and craftsmen. These are mostly ephemeral objects that have rarely been preserved, but they came to The Hague, thanks to Royer and his Chinese contacts. A bequest from his widow then ensured that the collection ended up in two Dutch museums: Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where the objects are still present today.

Growth of Chinese museums in the 21st century reflects the government’s Museum Development Plan for 2011-2020 to open one museum per 250,000 people, with the goal of attracting one billion visitors. This book builds our knowledge of the roles of China’s museums through social and political changes, governance, and the private and public sectors.

The commedia dell'arte was an improvised drama performed by masked players. How did the actors react to these demands and limitations? What force kept this form of theatre alive for more than two centuries and made Harlequin such a potent image? In this study of the commedia dell'arte, originally published in 1987, Professor Nicoll's concern is not to provide an historical survey of its origins or to trace the ascent and descent of Harlequin or any or any other character or 'mask', but rather to explore critically the answers to these and related questions. His arguments are based on the evidence of the play scenarios and contemporary documents as far as possible, and are illuminated by many illustrations that are either little-known or had not previously been reproduced.

National Museums and the Origins of Nations provides the first international survey of origins stories in national museums and examines the ways in which such museums use the distant past as a vehicle to reflect the concerns of the political present. Offering an international comparison of institutions in China, North and South America, the Middle East, Europe and Australia, the book argues that national museums tell us more about what sort of community a nation wishes to be today, than how and why that nation came into being. Watson also reveals the ways in which narrative and exhibition design attempt to engage the visitor in an emotional experience designed to promote loyalty to, and pride in, the nation, or to remind visitors who are not citizens that they do not belong. These narratives of origin are, it is claimed, based on so-called factual accuracies, but this book reveals that they are often selective, emotional and rarely critiqued within institutions. At a time when nationalism is very much back on the political agenda, this book highlights how museums reflect current political and social concerns. National Museums and the Origins of Nations will appeal to academics and students engaged in the study of museums, heritage, politics, nationalism and history.

Su Bai is Professor, Department of Archaeology, Beijing University.