Screen

bamboo screen In the second half of the 1780s, while travelling in Europe, Izabela Lubomirska visited England in 1787. Having encountered the new fashion in interior design in English residences, she wanted to transplant it to Łańcut. At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, during the last stage of the modernisation of Łańcut Castle, the rooms on the first floor adjoining the south wing from the side of the courtyard were converted into the “New Chinese Apartment”. The low-ceilinged rooms, reminiscent of Pompeian and Chinese interiors, were filled with original wares from the Far East or their European imitations. The fashion for Oriental products swept over Europe as early as the end of the 17th century. It became a real craze in England, revived periodically in the 18th and 19th centuries. European manufactures imitated Oriental art to meet the public’s demand for cheaper products. An example of this is the 19th century screen presented here. The openwork bamboo construction is filled with silk fabric covered on the face with a tempera painting of two figures of Chinese people shown in a genre scene against a landscape background. It is possible that the piece of furniture described was in the Chinese Apartment in the mid-19th century. The inventory of 1854, listing the furnishings of the Chinese rooms, records “a screen of cane, with a Chinese painting on silk”. Teresa Bagińska-Żurawska https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9243-3967