Bantam Work, Renamed: How to Read an Early-19th-Century Coromandel Screen

The eight-panel screen carries a European trade name that misleads on both origin and purpose — getting that wrong changes what you think you're buying.

The screen standing in the shop is Chinese, eight panels, early nineteenth century, incised lacquer on a clay-and-cloth ground: a Coromandel screen, in the name the trade has used since the nineteenth century, though the objects were never made anywhere near the Coromandel Coast. We have gone over both faces panel by panel — the palace scene on the front, the children and mythical creatures on the reverse — checking the incised line for wear, the fills for loss, and the hinges for movement.

The bottom line. This is a genuine kuancai (incised-lacquer) screen, not a European reproduction: the cut-and-filled technique, the layered ground, and the subject matter are all consistent with the Chinese workshop tradition, not a Western imitation of it. The colour and lacquer detail are intact across both faces, with the wear you would expect from age rather than damage. It is a later example of the type — eight panels, not the grander twelve-panel format the tradition is best known for — and it should be priced and understood as that, not inflated by a trade name that implies something else. Full condition and dimensions are on the product page; nothing about the screen's structure is in question.

Why is a Chinese screen called "Coromandel"?

The name is European and it arrived after the fact. The Coromandel Coast, in southeastern India, had nothing to do with making these screens — it was a transfer point where cargo moving out of China was loaded onto European ships, and the name stuck to the goods rather than the source. It was not even the first name attached to them: when these screens reached Britain in the 1670s and 1680s, they were called Bantam work, after the Dutch trading port of Bantam in Java, the other stop on the route. "Coromandel" only enters general English use in the nineteenth century, a century and a half after the objects themselves. The Victoria and Albert Museum, which holds documented examples of the type, is direct about this in its own catalogue notes on the technique.

What is the actual technique, and how do you tell it from a fake or a repaint?

The Chinese name for the technique is kuancai — incised polychrome, or cut colour. We look for the same sequence a workshop would have followed. Softwood panels, cypress traditionally, are joined and covered with a built-up ground layer, then finished in a small number of thick coats of true lacquer — sap of the lacquer tree, blackened and worked with oil so the cured film stays carvable rather than brittle. One correction worth making here, because it circulates widely in dealer listings: these screens are not built up from thirty coats of lacquer. That figure belongs to carved lacquer (tihong), a different technique that genuinely does need dozens of coats. The V&A's own analysis of comparable screens describes two or three lacquer layers over the built-up ground, not dozens.

Once that black lacquer film is cured and polished, the design is cut directly into it — not carved in relief, but engraved into a hard surface with no room to correct a line — and the recesses are filled with colour. On a genuine screen, the black lines stand as fine raised outlines against the colour fills, and under magnification you can see the cut edge of the lacquer rather than a painted or printed line sitting on top of the ground. That distinction — cut versus painted — is the fastest tell we use on a piece we haven't seen documented before.

What did we find on this screen, specifically?

The front carries a palace scene: attendants and guards among pavilions and garden architecture, figures in elegant dress, river landscapes, musicians and craftsmen, bordered by a running frieze of vases, scrolls, censers and scholars' objects — the grouping generally known in English-language museum catalogues as the hundred antiques, a arrangement of auspicious objects rather than a narrative scene.

The reverse changes register entirely: children in traditional costume at play among dragons and other mythical creatures, a subject called baizi tu, the picture of a hundred sons — traditionally a wish for many male heirs and, by extension, success in the civil examinations. On a screen made as a gift, that reverse subject is not incidental decoration; it is close to the point of the object.

On examination, the incised line is crisp across both faces and the colour fills — the reds, greens and blues in the front panels — are full, without the flat, worn-through patches that show on screens where the ground has lost its colour over time. The hinges move freely and the eight panels fold and stand true. Our one qualification: this is an eight-panel screen at roughly 122 inches wide and just over 74 inches high, and the tradition's best-documented, most collected period — the Kangxi reign, 1662 to 1722 — produced twelve-panel screens closer to 250 centimetres (about 98 inches) high as the standard grand format. This screen's proportions and panel count place it later, in the early nineteenth century, working the same technique two centuries into the tradition rather than at its most celebrated moment. That is not a defect. It is what the screen is, and it should be read as a later, still-authentic example rather than marketed with a vintage it doesn't carry. The screen has not yet been weighed; a confirmed figure will be added to the product page once that's done.

What does the Perret et Vibert receipt actually establish?

The screen comes with a purchase receipt from Perret et Vibert, a Paris gallery, dated to around 1940. Perret et Vibert were a real and established Paris firm — founded in the 1870s by Alfred Perret and Ernest Vibert, known as La Maison des Bambous for their early bamboo furniture and basketry before turning to Japonisme in the 1880s, and dealing from 1887 onward in Chinese and Japanese furniture, screens, bronzes, porcelain and lacquer alongside their own production. They exhibited at the Paris Universal Exhibitions and traded from 170 boulevard Haussmann from the end of 1917 until the firm closed in 1994.

A receipt from a gallery like that dates a transaction, not the object. It establishes that a Chinese screen was bought in Paris in 1940 from a dealer who genuinely traded in this material — it does not, on its own, date the screen to any earlier period, since Perret et Vibert sold both antiques and contemporary production side by side. Whether the document narrows the object further depends on what it actually describes. The receipt is available on request, and our standard offer stands here as it does for any piece in the shop: we offer a video call walkthrough of the object, on request, before you commit to anything.

The screen in this article is the Chinese Qing Eight Panel Screen, Early 19th Century Coromandel, currently in the shop.