The Porcelain Room

Arriving in Europe in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, vast quantities of translucent, elegantly decorated white-bodied porcelain from China and Japan heightened Europeans’ fervor for these wondrous wares and inspired specially designed rooms that showcased porcelain from floor to ceiling as crowned jewels in an integrated architectural and decorative scheme.

Because recent generations have come to know porcelain mainly in the form of relatively inexpensive dinner ware and knickknacks, it is difficult to convey a sense of the exalted position that early porcelain held and the intriguing stories surrounding it. In tribute to porcelain’s beauty and honored tradition, the Seattle Art Museum has created its Porcelain Room.

Click and drag to explore the Porcelain Room

Brimming with more than one thousand magnificent European and Asian pieces, this Porcelain Room has been conceived to blend visual excitement with an historical concept. Rather than the standard museum installation arranged by nationality, manufactory, and date, our porcelain is grouped by color and theme.

Today, when porcelain is everywhere in our daily lives, this room evokes a time when it was a treasured trade commodity—sometimes rivaling the value of gold—that served as a cultural, technological, and artistic interchange between the East and the West.