Osterley & Spring Grove tube station

Transcription

Osterley is a wonderful National Trust property that is often, in fact typically, represented as being European in its appearance, and neo-classical specifically. And yet, when one opens the doors to Osterley one is immediately overwhelmed with the Asian material goods dating from the 18th century. It's also the case that Osterley was owned by a family in the 18th century who played key governance roles in the East India Company. When you walk around the house you are surrounded by incredible objects from the east, from ivory junks to amazing porcelain parade jars, it's just fantastic - and these have sort of perhaps faded a little into the background what we expect from a country house interior. To the 18th century eye they would have been extraordinarily exotic and incredible objects to behold. The 18th century East India Company was set up to trade with Asia and controlled Britain's trade with Asia. Many of the items that were imported went into middling households, ultimately working class households, - tea, cotton textiles for example, saltpetre for gunpowder. At the same time the company allowed its captains and some of its senior staff to do what was called a 'private trade', which was to buy and sell things on commission in the Indies and bring them back to the UK, and almost certainly the goods that we have here would have come back as private trade commissions. This service is quite unique because it has this powder blue border which we haven't seen on any other armourial services which have entered the UK, so it's a really unique and special service. During the 18th century and the late 17th century around 5000 armourial services were commissioned in Canton for the English market. It's a very special commissioning process whereby coats of arms would be sent out on bookplates over to Canton, and then the finished product would return around three years later - so it was a very very long process. So these were incredibly unique and status-symbol pieces that really indicated both wealth and connection. What is really special about Osterley is that there is a whole sort of connection to India there, which can be picked up in its collection of textiles. This would have been brought into England between 1700-1730 (that was the sort of heyday of Kambi embroidery) and so you get a really intricate work of embroidery on normally a plain background and if you looked at them from a distance you would think they were painted on, but you have it go really close up to the textile to see that it's actually embroidered. Today we keep the fragments of this in our store room, you can see by just taking a look at some of the pieces here just how fragile it is. So we keep it in stores just to preserve it, to prevent it deteriorating further on exposure to light and other issues. At Osterley these Indian textiles are some of the remaining evidence of the monopoly with the textile trade that India and China had during that time, and how sought after these textiles were by wealthy families in England. This laquer secretaire is attributed to Thomas Chippendale and we believe it entered the house in the 1770s. It's most likely with most of the pieces that are made as a piece of "English furniture" that they're made from laquer screens which were then cut up. What's really interesting about this piece is its amalgamation of laquer and that the upper level is actually finished by the European attempt to recreate this incredible sheeny material in their own furniture, so this is really interesting piece in that it is made from a kind of amalgamation of different things but it's essentially attributed as an English piece. Chippendale was incredibly important to eighteenth-century furniture and interior design. We can see the ways in which English households were able to amalgamate these pieces into their own interiors, and make them appropriate for their own interiors. We often think of our current era as the period in which globalization and Europe's relations with Asia have taken off, but actually we take a much longer view, looking at the ways in which houses, in particular country houses and suburban villas, of the wealthy, which we now often think of as being quintessentially English, in fact were not just inflected with global material culture but were fundamentally infused and subsidised by Europe's trade with Asia.