The conference was organized in conjunction with a major international exhibition featuring Chinese reverse glass paintings from Vitromusée Romont’s permanent collection as well as works from two private collections in France and Germany. I joked with many of my colleagues that this was destined to be a “conference of extreme focus,” but I was eager for the chance to see the exhibition and the museum’s permanent collection. I’ve always been fascinated by this type of smooth, limpid painting on the reverse side of a piece of glass. First introduced to China by Jesuit priests at the Forbidden City in the middle of the 18th century, the practice of reverse glass painting in China was taken up in earnest in the 1780s by the emerging community of artists in Guangzhou who catered particularly for foreign clients.

In 1801, when John E. Sword, Captain of the ship Connecticut headed out on his second voyage to China, he brought with him a portrait of Washington he had purchased from Gilbert Stuart. While in China, Sword commissioned 100 copies of the Stuart portrait in oil on canvas and reverse glass from artists in Guangzhou, which he proceeded to sell in Philadelphia to a community eager for their own portrait of the first President. When Stuart learned of these Cantonese versions of his Washington portrait, he successfully sued Sword for copyright infringement in the Philadelphia courts. How ironic then, that even the ‘original’ Stuart painting was in fact also a copy of sorts – one of over 60 replicas Stuart painted of his Athenaeum portrait and sold widely for $100 apiece.

The collection includes a diverse range of historic and contemporary works of art in glass including stained glass, glass objects, and tools and materials related to the glass arts.

The conference brought together senior and emerging scholars from Asia, Europe and the Americas to explore one specific artistic medium from multiple perspectives. For two days, we listened to astonishingly wide-ranging talks on Chinese reverse paintings: not only new research on works made for 18th century clients in London, Paris and Amsterdam, but also examples which survive in Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Buddhist temples (and desperately need to be better documented and preserved), talks on works made at Beijing workshops for the Qianlong Emperor, and even a talk on 19th century Japanese export reverse paintings (a new collecting goal for PEM!)

Content is critical at events like this and we were rewarded abundantly, but these types of gatherings are also essential for networking and cross-pollination. The conference opened dialogues between people working in widely disparate areas of Asian and European art history. Within the stone walls of the 13th century castle and over hot cups of Swiss chocolate during breaks between talks, we hatched dozens of ideas for future research and exhibitions. These hothouses of deep conversation are where the seeds for future international collaborative projects are sown. It may be years before some of these ideas bloom, but the feeling was palpable that something significant was happening at this gathering in a little village in Switzerland. Later this year, Vitromusée Romont will publish the proceedings from the conference, sharing some of this new research with a much wider audience.

Last minute, I managed to see my dear friend and Asia in Amsterdam co-curator Femke Diercks for dinner and meet her new baby for the first time. In retrospect, the whole trip – even getting stranded overnight at Schiphol – now seems like a gift. If I wasn’t going to be able to go anywhere for a long time, it seemed appropriate to end my travels with a stimulating and convivial conference and then to see a host of friends old and new before hunkering down for a full year.