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Tour of the Chinese Parlor at Winterthur
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Tour of the Chinese Parlor at Winterthur
computer-generated transcript - may not be 100% accurate
" OK so Pauline today you're showing us the Chinese parlor the Chinese parlor and I don't think it takes much imagination to -- out why it was named the Chinese are -- no doubt about it but it's a huge room. It's probably. Thirty by 25 ever even bigger something like that and now it's not a historic architectural. Room from someplace else."
" Actually it isn't this this room was created out of three rooms in the original house specifically to house this wallpaper Bob. When DuPont was expanding the house in the 1930s. He was fortunate enough to be able to buy a complete set of Chinese wallpaper he got it from the dealer. And the story is that in point of fact -- probably never been used up until the time that DuPont bought it. But it's antique it's -- yes it's from the late eighteenth century. Now had he planned on making the room have this kind of cold up the top well actually in order to accommodate the full length of the paper he needed to raise the ceiling. And he did it by creating that -- so this room really was created specifically for the paper. As a matter of fact if you look over for example over there the cupboard here. You'll see that the area. Directly over the cupboard is actually in painted it's not wallpaper. He did that to preserve as much of the full length of the wallpaper as possible we didn't have to cut it so we had hired an artist to replicate that's right the designers -- work."
" Now there's a great deal of depth to this is gonna look at the have -- big long uninterrupted over here. There's a great deal of depth and perspective what are we looking."
" Well actually this is a very good example of a Chinese version of perspective essentially what you have is three layers here but they're going up vertical. The large area in the foreground is a depiction of scholars and their scholars life. For the Chinese this is the highest form of occupation is to be a scholar so this whole. Lower sash aren't aren't that easy to -- the elite of scholars. And if you let your eyes go -- you're gonna come to the next layer. Which is the layer which addresses the lives of the merchants and the artisans and there along the edges of a river that's right and you'll notice how they're smaller in scale than the scholars use. And then if you keep going all the way to the top you come up to the working class in this case the peasant class. And so essentially it's a comprehensive view of Chinese life. But it's very clearly hierarchical and you can see where the values with -- values are depicted in this -- so I didn't."
" At its simplest level the hierarchies are depicted by size that's right the most important being the largest and the least important being the peasants being the spots."
