Page 98 - Christie;es Marchant January 18 2018

PROPERTY FROM THE ROSEBROOK COLLECTION
195
CHINESE SCHOOL, EARLY 19TH CENTURY
Porcelain Production, A Set of Four
Depicting four stages in the production
of porcelain:
Shaping bowls on a kick-wheel
Perfecting the shape
Glazing the wares
Packing the fnished wares
oil on canvas
18º x 23æ in. (46.4 x 60.3 cm.) the image;
25Ω x 27 in. (64.7 x 68.9 cm.) the frame (4)
$15,000-25,000
PROVENANCE
With Martyn Gregory, London.
The Kangxi Emperor commissioned a work
to portray signifcant Chinese industries
of the era. Published in 1696, the Gengzhi
tu, or Illustrations of Ploughing and Weaving,
comprised woodblock prints by the court
painter Jiao Bingzhen alongside poetry
by the Emperor outlining the stages of
silk cultivation and rice production. The
Gengzhi tu remained popular throughout
the following decades, and the Qianlong
Emperor added the theme of porcelain
production to the two existing series.
Westerners were fascinated by these exotic
Chinese industries, and export artists of the
later 18th and early 19th centuries created
watercolor and gouache albums delineating
the stages of rice, silk, porcelain and tea for
their Western clientele. Highly idealized and
romanticized, these portrayals, while broadly
accurate, omitted the grittier aspects of these
industries, depicting attractive pavilions in
picturesque rural settings with workers in
colorful clothing.
The themes of porcelain, silk and tea
production even appeared, rarely, as
decoration on porcelain, and still more rarely
as the subject of wallpaper or in large-scale
oil paintings, as in the present set. A very
large set of four oil paintings was acquired
in the 1850s by the Ethnography Museum
in Copenhagen, each showing the multiple
production stages in their entirety within a
monumental landscape setting. Kee Il Choi,
Jr, writing in Antiques magazine (October
1998), says of the Copenhagen set, “They
were undoubtedly special commissions,
perhaps presentation pieces intended for the
home-based directors of the great East India
companies. Their sheer size indicates they
were made to impress as well as to inform.”

96 CHINESE EXPORT ART