Chinese Double Doors with Iron Bars & Lunette Transom: Painted Both Sides

Iron scrolls where you might expect glass, and paint coming away in long strips.

These double doors with iron bars and a lunette transom come from Shanghai, China, and date to the 19th century. They are lacquered wood and wrought iron, painted on both sides. Shanghai's 19th-century treaty-port architecture freely mixed Chinese workmanship with Western forms, and these show it. Scrolled ironwork fills each tall opening and fans across the half-moon above. Carved shells sit in the lower panels. The pale green-grey surface has flaked to dark wood in places. Eighty-three inches high.

They have the air of having seen who came and went, and of saying nothing.