Chinese Art-Asian Antiques News This Week

Bidamount News December 12, 2025, Vol 612

Chinese porcelain from the collection of Queen Elisabeth Farnese Queen of Spain (r. 1714–1746)

By : Cinta Krahe

Abstract

Chinese porcelain epitomizes the scientific and technological achievements of Chinese civilization, remaining unrivalled in refinement until much of Europe mastered porcelain production in the mid-eighteenth century. By the early eighteenth century, this tradition was revitalized and expanded under Queen Elisabeth Farnese (1692–1766), wife of Philip V of Bourbon (1683–1746, r. 1700–1746), the first Bourbon king of Spain. Elisabeth Farnese assembled one of the most significant collections of Chinese and Japanese porcelain in Europe, numbering around 3000 pieces, alongside lacquerware, fans, paintings, and ivories. Her favourite residence, the palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso, was richly adorned with these objects, as documented in inventories drawn up in 1746 and 1766. The queen’s artistic vision was shaped by her Farnese ancestors, notably Ranuccio I Farnese (1569–1622) and Ranuccio II Farnese (1630–1694), who cultivated Asian art collections in Parma and welcomed the Jesuit Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628), a key intermediary with China. She also inherited important porcelain groups from the Spanish Habsburgs, including Maria Anna of Neuburg (1667–1740), widow of Charles II (1661–1700, r. 1665–1700), and from her mother Dorothea Sophie of Neuburg (1670–1748). Other objects came through the French line, including pieces from the Grand Dauphin Louis of France (1661–1711), son of Louis XIV (1638–1715). Architects such as Santiago Bonavia (1695–1759) and Filippo Juvarra (1678–1736) adapted the chinoiserie aesthetic to Spanish palatial interiors, creating elaborate porcelain rooms with consoles, ‘soldier vases’, lacquer panels, and mirror cabinets. Particular prominence was given to Dehua Blanc-de-Chine figures, large Jingdezhen ‘soldier vases’, and famille verte and famille rose baluster jars with auspicious imagery. Elisabeth’s taste also embraced exotic animal and delicate female figures, objects prized by European elites from Dresden to Stockholm. Despite subsequent dispersal of the collection due to political upheavals, foreign invasions, and the devastating fire of 1918, key pieces survive today in La Granja de San Ildefonso, and the new Museum of the Royal Collections in Madrid. Elisabeth’s patronage and collecting practices illustrate not only the transmission of Farnese traditions to Bourbon Spain but also the entanglement of Asian luxury goods with European diplomacy, dynastic inheritance, and artistic innovation. Her legacy underscores the centrality of Chinese porcelain in shaping courtly identity, aesthetic display, and cross-cultural exchange in eighteenth-century Spain.

Chinese porcelain is a testament to the scientific and technological advancements of Chinese civilization, showcasing a level of sophistication in ceramic production that remained unparalleled for centuries. In contrast Spain, and much of Europe, remained without the technology or knowledge to produce true porcelain until 1760 when the Buen Retiro Royal Factory was established in Madrid. From the time Spain arrived in East Asia in the sixteenth century, boasting a porcelain collection became a symbol of power and status for the Spanish Monarchy amid their global territories. In the late sixteenth century, King Phillip II of the Hapsburg dynasty (r. 1556–1598) established a foundational collection of Chinese porcelain, setting a precedent that was eagerly adopted by Royal Houses across Europe, including the French Bourbons and the Italian Farnese.

In 1714, the Italian Queen Elisabeth Farnese (1692–1766) married King Philip V of Spain (1683–1746), the first Bourbon monarch to come to the throne in Spain [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]¹. Shortly after she arrived in Madrid, taking the palace of Versailles where her husband was born as a model, she began building the Royal Palace at La Granja de San Ildefonso in Segovia, 80 kilometres outside Madrid, which was to become her favourite residence (Fig. 1). The Queen’s interest in Chinese art led her to gather roughly 3000 pieces of Chinese and Japanese porcelain, in addition to lacquer objects, paintings, fans, snuff bottles, and ivories to embellish the rooms in her palaces, as household ware, and for her own private enjoyment. The complete list of pieces in her collection is known thanks to two inventories. One was drawn up upon the death of her husband in 1746, and the other in 1766, upon her death [9]². The list follows the itinerary of the rooms in the palace where various objects such as paintings, porcelains, and furnishings were combined. In the queen’s inventories there are a great number of oriental pieces but during the second half of the 18th century, these objects became dispersed throughout other palaces in Madrid. Moreover, adverse circumstances such as mutinies, the French invasion in the 19th century, and the disastrous fire of 1918 which damaged a very significant part of the collection must all be taken into account, meaning that today only about 30 porcelain pieces are conserved.

The Queen’s interest in oriental art was conveyed by her ancestors from the House of Farnese. The inventories of Ranuccio I and Ranuccio II’s are surprising given the number of exotic objects and porcelain they contain. In 1617, Elisabeth’s great, great grandfather, Ranuccio I (1569–1622) received one of the first delegations from China headed by the Jesuit priest Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628) whereby precious gifts were exchanged. Later, Elisabeth’s grandfather, Ranuccio II (1630–1694), opened the “Galleria delle Cose Rare” (Galery of Rare Objects) in Parma’s Palazzo della Pilotta (Palace della Pilotta) where the most exquisite pieces were kept, and there was another room devoted exclusively to exhibiting ceramic vessels made in the ‘lands of India’ (terra d’India), porcelains, maiolicas and Murano glass placed in credenzas (sideboards) [10].

In her youth in the Parma court, Elisabeth Farnese was surrounded by artistic pieces of various provenances while she received a humanistic education allowing her to speak six languages [11]. Upon her arrival in Madrid, she took charge of the Court’s artistic direction and of a most valuable collection of art objects with which she decorated the royal residences. A portion of the Chinese pieces came from the inheritance of the Hapsburgs who had governed Spain during the 16th and 17th centuries. From Maria Anna of Neuburg (1667–1740), the wife of the last Hapsburg, King Charles II (1661–1700), she received a significant number of Chinese porcelain pieces, and from her mother Dorothea Sofie of Neuburg (1670–1748), she inherited another group of pieces upon her death in 1748 [12]. Other Chinese pieces came from Phillip V’s father, the Grand Dauphin of France (1661–1711), son of King Louis XIV (1638–1715) and the Spanish Infanta Maria Theresa of Austria (1660–1683). For instance, two Chinese jade bowls with their gilded silver mounts from the Grand Dauphin’s collection were deposited in the La Granja palace’s Casa de las Alhajas, where the most precious objects were stored. They are now conserved in the Prado Museum in Madrid [13].

The practice of exchanging gifts played a crucial role in fortifying political alliances and maintaining peaceful relations among various states. This tradition was evident in the diplomatic exchanges between Siam (present-day Thailand) and European powers during the 17th and 18th centuries. For instance, following the dispatch of an ambassador from Siam to Louis XIV in 1684, another delegation was sent to Spain in 1716. This delegation presented an array of gifts, including 700 Chinese and Japanese porcelain objects alongside approximately thirty lacquer objects and 48 Chinese paintings, some of them portraits of emperors of that empire (the Qing), which were added to the royal collection, solidifying the bonds between the nations. Furthermore, the Queen received gifts from her subjects in other territories, such as the governor of the Philippines, Fernando Manuel de Bustamante (1663–1719). He sent several porcelain pieces along with two Japanese lacquer desks with drawings to facilitate their assembly, contributing to the complete transformation of the objects [14].

The French architect and designer Daniel Marot (1661–1752) played a decisive role in spreading the fashion for displaying Chinese porcelain and lacquer throughout Europe. His engravings presented richly embellished spaces with Chinese lacquer panels embedded in the wall, mirrors and East Asian oriental porcelain [15], [16], [17]³. In Spain, the promoter of this style was the Italian architect Santiago Bonavia (1695–1759), who designed the rooms of the queen in Madrid’s Buen Retiro Palace decorated with porcelain placed on rococo consoles and soldier vases on pedestals.

Fascinated with everything oriental, Elisabeth Farnese also requested the services of the Italian architect Filippo Juvarra (1678–1736), the most prominent representative of the Chinese style in the Savoy Court, having designed palaces in Turin in Northern Italy, such as the Royal Palace and Stupinigi palace.⁴ One of Juvara’s first samples of the Chinese style was for the King and Queen’s bedroom, the Chambre du lit (Bed Chamber) at the La Granja de San Ildefonso palace, designed between 1735 and 1736 and embellished, as Marot proposed, with Coromandel (kuancai 款彩) type lacquer panels, porcelain figures on shelves and ledges on the wall, and large ‘soldier vases’ placed in the corners of the rooms. The Chinese decoration was combined with paintings from Italian artists [18] (Fig. 2).

The Mirror Room (Gabinete de los Espejos) was the vanity room for the Queen, with mirrors, lacquers, and 71 shelves of different sizes for 120 porcelain figures while the windows were covered with red lacquered panels made in Spain by the master Antonio Hurtado in 1736. Unfortunately, the room and its artistic objects, suffered enormous damage in the 1918 fire and today all that has been conserved are Japanese figures of beautiful ladies (bijin) in their kimonos, made at the beginning of the 18th century, very similar to those that King Augustus the Strong (1670–1733) kept in his Dresden palace⁵ (Fig. 3).

One of the Queen’s favourite porcelain styles, appearing in her inventories under the heading “Chinese White wares” (Porcelana blanca de China), were made in the Dehua kilns in the southern province of Fujian and were relatively abundant in trade in art during her reign. Many of the pieces were acquired in Paris as the Queen had agents there who purchased for the Spanish Crown. One of the most interesting pieces in the Queen’s collection is a clock dated around 1735 using Chinese blanc-de-chine figures to embellish the piece made by the preeminent French clockmaker of the king Pierre Le Roy (1717–1785), from 1760 Horloger Ordinaire du Roi, very well regarded for the technical quality of his machines. A porcelain figure of Budai⁶ dated to the early Kangxi reign (1662–1722) is placed in the lower part⁷ while another figure is of a boy monk, perhaps Buddha’s cousin-disciple Ananda⁸; the third, in the upper portion, is of two individuals playing xiangqi or Chinese chess (Fig. 4). Other figures appear in the inventory as "two old bald men laughing with their bellies exposed, are nine fingers tall".⁹ Perhaps they were a set, likely the Immortals of Harmony and Union (He-He Er Xian 和合二仙), usually depicted as two monks with bare bellies, one holding a lotus flower (hé 荷) which is homophonous in Chinese with harmony (hé 和), the other holding a covered box (hé 盒) which also pronounces as hé and is homophnous with union (hé 合), and the character for box 盒 is sometimes just written in its variant form 合. The two figures are based on monks Hanshan and Shide from the Tang dynasty (618−907), revered as incarnations of the bodhisattvas Manjushri and Samantabhadra.¹⁰

The slender figures of the Chinese ladies were a symbol of refinement, one of the most prized and admired objects of European royalty over the first three decades of the 18th century. With their elegant posture and exotic attire, these pieces incarnated European’s enchantment about China. The description in the 1746 inventory of Queen mentions “two figures of women with taps; they have a gilded bronze pedestals and ruffs made of the same material”.¹¹ While documentation regarding its acquisition remains elusive, it is highly probable that these pieces were transferred from France, where they were frequently embellished with gilded bronze mounts to serve a new purpose, such as ewers (Fig. 5).

Other figures of ladies appear playing a pipa, a lute, and one of these is described in the 1746 inventory as “a figure representing a woman with little figures below playing the vihuela (a string instrument)” (Fig. 6).¹² Figures closely resembling these are preserved in Augustus the Strong’s collection in his Dresden palace,¹³ the Drottningholm Palace in Stockholm, in the Sanssouci palace near Potsdam, and in Berlin’s Charlottenburg palace [19]. A comparison with an identical figure conserved in the United States is very interesting. Painted in Europe with cold pigments over the glaze, these pieces are very rare and only conserved in very early porcelain collections in Europe.¹⁴

Animal figures were among the Queen’s top favourites. Lions on square pedestals are the most abundant: the Queen had a total of 50 (Fig. 7).¹⁵ There were also parrots, cocks and dogs. In one of the entries of the La Granja inventory is “a crab in a boat shaped cup”.¹⁶ Although no piece of these characteristics is currently preserved in Spain, in the Augustus the Strong collection there is one that fits this description.¹⁷ Rose Kerr and John Ayers [20] illustrate a water dropper for practicing the art of calligraphy. Based on their research, from the 1690 shipwreck of the Vung Tao, approximately 3000 pieces of Chinese white porcelain were retrieved, among which were some identical to this water dropper. It is intriguing how these vessels, originally crafted for the desks of Chinese scholars as symbols of career success, gained such popularity in European export trade.

Following Marot’s guidelines, the Queen decorated La Granja de San Ildefonso palace with majestic soldier vases made in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province. Several pairs with King Philip V’s coat of arms were sent by the governor of the Philippines, Fernando de Valdés y Tamón in the 1730s, and are now preserved in different collections in Europe¹⁸ [21], [22]. Before his death in 1741, the governor commissioned identical vases bearing his own coat-of-arms [23]. The corners of Queen Elisabeth Farnese’s bedroom were decorated with blue-and-white ‘soldier vases’—monumental Kangxi porcelains of about 1.5 m in height, painted with hunting scenes around 1700. The nickname ‘soldier vases’ originated in Dresden, where Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony, famously exchanged 600 cavalrymen (dragoons 龙骑兵) with Frederick William I of Prussia in 1717 for 150 Chinese porcelain vases. Since then, these monumental pieces have been known as ‘soldier vases’, or sometimes ‘dragoon vases’. Hunting decoration is related to the Manchus’ favourite pastime that they continued to practice in the woods not far from the capital of Beijing (Fig. 8). Large baluster vases of the famille verte type, a style typical of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, were placed in niches at the palace entrance. The vases were decorated with cranes, a symbol of longevity, and peacocks, a symbol of power and beauty (Fig. 9).

During the first third of the 18th century, the Chinese Imari style, which originated in Japan, was very popular in Europe. Several Chinese vases with figurative and floral designs, decorated with qilins, chrysanthemums and peonies, dating from the Kangxi¹⁹ period (1662–1722) are conserved in the palace of La Granja (Fig. 10). Other jars are decorated in famille rose with peony branches and birds, made during the reign of emperor Yongzheng (1722–1735). These include an exceptional piece appearing in one of the entries of the 1748 inventory as an “octagonal vase with branches, flowers and birds”²⁰ (Fig. 11). Also noteworthy is a vase in the famille rose palette but dated to the mid-18th century to emperor Qianlong’s reign (1735–1795), adorned with a phoenix among peonies, which represents one of the most important motifs in Chinese iconography: it symbolizes the sun, good fortune, and abundance, for legend has it that the phoenix only appears during times of peace and prosperity (Fig. 12). This vase continues to preside over the official banquets of the Kings of Spain today.

Elisabeth Farnese’s passion for beauty led her to form a significant collection of art. Over her lifetime, she brought together 3000 porcelain vessels from China and Japan, in addition to many other East Asian objects, and in her personal library she kept a significant number of books related to the history and culture of Chinese civilization. Her collection can be visited today in the La Granja de San Ildefonso palace, located in one of the spots in Spain with the greatest natural beauty. A selection of her collection can also be admired in the recently opened Museum of the Royal Collections (Gabinete de las Colecciones Reales) in Madrid which has devoted an entire room to the Queen as a collector.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Cinta Krahe: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Hand Made and Handheld..Exhibit and Catalog

The catalog of the pieces for the above exhibit can be seen in this catalog. Made available through Arts Of Asia magazine. CLICK HERE TO ORDER

Note: I have already bought this catalog, it is a very good reference on the topic, an essential I think if you are a collector. Best Peter

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