Material Masquerade: Porcelain, Sugar, and Race on the Eighteenth-Century French Dining Table

Abstract

Abstract With the advent of biscuit porcelain at the Sèvres Royal Porcelain Manufactory in the 1750s, French porcelain at last achieved an ideal whiteness that could compete with foreign wares. Unexpected, however, was how this new material could replace the ephemeral sugar sculptures that transformed aristocratic dining tables into lavish multi-media assemblages. But replace, porcelain did not. Instead, the artificial whitening of both porcelain and sugar allowed the resulting figures to intermingle, playfully masquerading as each other while simultaneously erasing and displacing material histories linked to colonial expansion and emerging ideas of race. Taking up the ethos of the masquerade ball, whitening became the critical act through which these materials were ‘Frenchified’, moving carnivalesque early modern dining traditions into the age of colonialism.