In Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics, Elizabeth Chang contends that as a place, a product, and an idea China provided a crucial counterexample to emergent modernist trends of visual and literary realism in Victorian Britain. She argues that, “In the century in which realism reached its greatest heights, the persistence with which authors and artists continued to invoke a defiantly antirealist aesthetic that they claimed to be Chinese demonstrates an aspect of realism’s development that has so far received little attention” (5). The use of the image of China as a foil that serves to reinforce Enlightenment rationality is a well-established aspect of Sino-European cultural relations, analyzed most recently in David Porter’s The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Chang’s focus on the nineteenth century provides a necessary extension of this trend in scholarship, crucially connecting the idea of a peculiarly “Chinese” way of seeing to the formation of modernist realism. Her approach proposes a useful corrective for historians of art and material culture, demonstrating that nineteenth-century British aesthetic engagement with China is characterized not by more “accurate” representations of China, as has frequently been argued, but rather a “further preservation of what were thought of as Chinese ways of seeing within a modernizing British vision” (64–65).

Each of the book’s four chapters, “Garden,” “Plate,” “Display Case and Den,” and “Photograph,” focus on one site through which British viewers interpreted Chinese aesthetics. The precision of these chapter titles belies the extraordinary range of material that Chang actually discusses within them. The subjects of “Garden,” for example, range from William Chambers, to William Wordsworth, to the botanical spy Robert Fortune, all by way of the 1793 Macartney Embassy, the first British embassy to China, while “Display Case and Den” demonstrates a rhetorical relationship between the opium den and Victorian exhibition spaces. Weaving visual, literary, cultural, and political evidence into a logical and persuasive narrative, Chang is a skilled analyst of literary, visual, cultural, and political material. The ways in which they are brought together is both enlightening and a model of interdisciplinary scholarship.

Throughout the book, Chang makes an especially strong case for the importance of everyday objects in the development of visual and literary modernism. The chapter titled “Plate” explores the blue willow pattern plate as an object, an image, and a narrative to demonstrate its outsized role in “the making of the creative British visual subject” (74). Scholarship of the period has tended to cite the importance of material culture and low-brow objects to high modernism, but rarely analyzes it in critical detail. Chang’s attention to material objects such as the blue willow plate, along with gardens, exhibitions, paintings, popular fiction, travel narratives, and literature, as key components of visuality demonstrates a productively ecumenical approach.

At the same time, Chang limits her attention to the case of China rather than a broader focus on “the East.” To a large extent, this offers a useful, culturally specific analysis. However, it will leave art historians, who are far more familiar with the aesthetic and stylistic influence of Japan upon nineteenth-century artists and designers known as japonisme, to wonder how Britain’s “Chinese eye” was constructed through or cast upon Japan and its cultural production. As Chang points out, Japan offered a radically different model of Asian modernity from China. Yet since some of her key examples, such as James Whistler’s Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks (1864), bear the evidence of Japanese objects and compositional strategies alongside those of the Chinese (or the European construction of it), some discussion of their relationship would have productively complicated and deepened our understanding of how Asian objects more broadly were implicated in the construction of European perceptual modes.

The political consequences of Britain’s Chinese eye are made clear in the final chapter of the book, which deals with military and travel photography by Felice Beato, John Thompson, and Isabella Bird during and following the Second Opium War (1856–60). Here Chang draws attention to the paradox of nineteenth-century European admiration for photographic realism and disdain for what had long been understood in Europe as a Chinese penchant for aesthetic imitation. Those who were interested in the J. Paul Getty Museum’s 2010 exhibition and catalogue Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road (click here for review) will find this book a useful critical complement.

Britain’s Chinese Eye looks more like a study of the word than the image, and scholars of nineteenth-century visuality may be tempted to overlook it on those grounds. This would be a mistake. The black-and-white illustrations throughout the book are sparse, but strategically chosen, illustrating images that are either well-known or representative of their type. Chang’s synthetic approach to realism as a phenomenon of the literary and visual world is not new, but the focus on how this was constituted interculturally and in an imperial context is illuminating. An admirable combination of literary and visual interpretation, Chang’s work should be read by anyone interested in sophisticated interdisciplinary analysis.