This article is part of our latest Museums special section, which focuses on the intersection of art and politics.
Tea.
And politics.
The connection goes back centuries. But perhaps there hasnt been a better time to consider it than now, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art has seized the moment in the recently renovated British Galleries. A whole room is devoted to the drink from China that became the quintessential British symbol.
Tea shaped British government policy and trade and, of course, it figured prominently in what happened in the American colonies.
Showcasing teas place in British history allowed the Met to address a subject we hadnt addressed before, said Wolf Burchard, who was the lead curator for the new galleries. That was the expansion of the British Empire, and it seemed an especially timely topic as Britain pressed ahead with Brexit, its withdrawal from the European Union.
The Met tells the story of tea and politics with two semicircular cases filled with 100 teapots, all made in Britain.
They are midway through the new galleries, a suite devoted to British decorative arts, design and sculpture from 1500 to 1900. Past the tea display are three 18th-century interiors, one from a mansion that was the residence of two British prime ministers and, for two years in the 1890s, of William Waldorf Astor, the heir to an American fortune who became a British subject. Also in the new galleries is a 17th-century staircase with elaborate carvings of pine cones, oak leaves and acorns. It was rescued from a Tudor manor demolished in the 1920s.
But about tea.
It became a quintessentially British symbol the national drink, Dr. Burchard said amid what he called dueling definitions of empire. There were the heroic moments of an artistic golden age in the 17th and 18th centuries, as craftsmen became innovators in silver and porcelain.
But their progress was accompanied by the steady rhythm of growth through exploitation, he said.
Tea let British dealers, and the British government, reach the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean and the American colonies. Tea sent unimaginable riches back to Britain and created, among a new consumer class, a desire for exotic goods.
Iris Moon, another Met curator who worked on the British galleries, said that telling that story let the Met move away from an aristocratic, privileged, upper-crust narrative and really turn the focus to the entrepreneurs, the merchants and the middle class, and think about whos making the stuff that became the backbone of commerce and in many ways British identity.
But the wall texts in the Mets new galleries also point out that the riches from tea were built on the labor of slaves and on resources appropriated from colonies.
We are thinking deeply about the stories told in our galleries, said Max Hollein, the director of the Met, and how every object on display is an outstanding work of art but also embodies a history that can be read from multiple perspectives: A beautiful English teapot speaks to both the prosperous commercial economy and the exploitative history of the tea trade.
Two takes on a single object: That is how complicated the history of something as mundane as tea is.
Lets go out for a cup of tea sounds pretty harmless, the British culinary historian Seren Charrington-Hollins said in an interview, but tea has a far more illicit history than any drug or hard liquor or anything. It was really dark because of the harm it did to people if you look at the conditions on the plantations. They were shocking, but nobody cared.
She said Britain used every bit of protocol and propaganda to be sure tea was seen as a British product.
Tea was almost unknown in the West before the 16th century. When it reached Britain, it was expensive and exotic and, according to The Book of Coffee and Tea, was served as much for its strangeness as its taste.
But profit-minded explorers had heard about it. And the British East India Company, chartered in 1600, became the face of Britain in much of the world as it set up trading routes to send tea back to Britain.
It took longer for tea to reach the American colonies, and eventually Britains efforts to tax tea both for the revenue and to bring the colonists into line backfired. Americans boycotted British tea for a while, and after Britain dropped the tax mandated by the Tea Act of 1773, the East India Company did not help matters. It shipped tea to several cities including Boston and New York tea that, by some accounts, was old and stale. That was what that famous clandestine raid dumped into the harbor in what became known as the Boston Tea Party.
The porcelain manufacturers in Staffordshire, England, who made teapots understood that tea was helping to drive the colonies away from Britain, and they did not wait to exploit the rift. No Stamp Act was the inscription on a teapot made specifically for export to the colonies. On the other side, it said America Liberty Restord as if the ceramist had run short on vowels.
What we are seeing is teapot makers pick up on topical issues, Dr. Moon said.
That is apparent with a George Washington punchpot on display (larger than a teapot and made for a drink with wine and spices).
Yes, the face of the general who defeated the British is on one side of a British-made object. It was a sign that the Staffordshire porcelain makers were also shrewd marketers. They made the punchpot for export to the new nation across the Atlantic, just as they created a teapot showing Frederick II of Prussia, better known as Frederick the Great, for their home market. A hero in Britain after the Seven Years War, Frederick was lionized on the teapot with the inscription Semper sublimis still towering.
The Washington punchpot was a contrast to the bombast of Frederick, Dr. Moon said.
Washington is in civilian garb with that quite delicate lace cravat, Dr. Moon said, and Martha Washington is on the other side.
This was a moment when George Washington was not interested in cultivating a military hero persona, but in reassuring the public that he was a civilian president, she said.
He reminded people on both sides of the Atlantic of the Roman statesman Cincinnatus, who, she said, was plowing his fields when the Romans were having a crisis.
Cincinnatus dropped his plow, helped out and went back to his plow, she continued. The British thought Washington was going to become a dictator, he was going to become a king.
But on the punchpot, destined for export to the new nation across the Atlantic, Washington was depicted as dignified, even statesmanlike not, she said, as a stark raving mad general.
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Ah, Tea. So Relaxing. But Its History Is Another Story. - The New York Times