Featured on PDR in the collection “Chinese Arabesques” by Jean-Baptiste Pillement and Anne Allen (ca. 1790–99)

Gravity is an intermittent force in Jean-Baptiste Pillement’s designs for “New Suite of Chinese Arabesques”, etched by his wife, Anne Allen. Festoons drape and fishing lures drop within floral microcosms populated by tiny Orientalized figures and fantastical, Boschian critters. But the architectural structures — stairs, pagodas, pavilions, and bridges — seem enchanted, hovering in air or perching improbably on frothy foliage. The garden settings themselves, loosely framed by fantastical botany, float above, or beyond, our own grounded reality. Pillement’s knack for creating visual confections that facilitate intellectual and aesthetic escape sustained his success as a designer and proponent of the rococo decorative idiom, which he popularized far beyond its native France.