Page 44 - Bonhams Fine Chinese Art Nov 2013 London

The Liddell Moonflask
Captain Charles Oswald Liddell was born in 1851 in Edinburgh.
Having moved to China for family business, he worked there
from 1877-1913. He married Elizabeth Birt in 1880 in the Anglican
Cathedral in Shanghai, and thereby inherited Birt’s Wharf there,
expanding the business to Hangzhou, Tianjin and Harbin. He was
joined by his brother John when the firm became known as Liddell
Bros. In 1915 Liddell was Quartermaster and Hon. Captain in the 1st
Battalion, The Monmouthshire Regiment, having served previously
(and more adventurously) in the ‘Shanghai Light Horse’.
Liddell collaborated with A.W.Bahr in an exhibition in Shanghai in
1908 (he was Chairman of the North China branch of the Royal
Asiatic Society, and in writing descriptions for it which were printed
by A.W.Bahr, Old Chinese Porcelain and Works of Art in China, 1911.
A pair of Yongzheng semi-eggshell bowls, and a pair of Qianlong
famille rose ‘mille-fleurs’ cups from Liddell’s collection are illustrated Liddell’s collection was one of the earliest to be described as
in the book. Charles Russell contributed an illustrated article on ‘The
Liddell Collection of Chinese Porcelain’ to Old Furniture, June 1929,
in which he mentions and illustrates a 6-inch-high Yongzheng pink
vase, which had formerly been in the collection of Prince Chun; this
was sold at Elphinstone at Bluett’s exhibition in 1929, and is now in
the Percival David Foundation
After returning to the UK, he and his wife bought Shirenewton Hall
near Chepstow, where Liddell created a remarkable Japanese-style
garden (housing, inter alia, a colossal bronze temple bell imported
apparently from Japan). Here also the porcelain came to be
displayed; and an impressive display it indeed was.
Charles Liddell had formed his collection, except three pieces, while
trading in China for nearly forty years. He purchased a number of
them from two significant sources: the collection of Prince Chun,
the last Regent of the Qing Dynasty; and from the collection of
the private secretary and adviser to Li Hong Zhang. He also had
the friendship and assistance of E.O.Arbuthnot, who sent many
pieces to England, including ceramics which entered the enormous
Salting Collection, probably the largest Chinese porcelain collection
assembled in Victorian England. A pair of vases now in the Percival
David Collection (PDF B588-B589) was, Bluett’s recorded in their
Exhibition Catalogue, ‘purchased by Captain Liddell from a private
Collection in Shanghai in 1899’.
In May-June 1929 Bluett’s offered part of the collection for sale,
publishing a catalogue of The Liddell Collection of Old Chinese
Porcelain with 229 entries and eight illustrative plates, one of them
unusually in colour. Among this remarkable selection was the
following: Plate 102, p.295. One of three porcelain bottles in the
form of large pilgrim flasks painted with a design of the Imperial
dragon among clouds, the dragon in fleur de pêche (copper-red) and
the lower part of each flask painted with waves in cobalt blue. Two
of the flasks with the ground filled with enamel, one Imperial yellow
and the other with pale turquoise-blue and the largest flask with a
design on a clear white ground. Height 12½ inches. Qianlong mark
and period. (These were No.207 in Bluett’s catalogue, offered for
sale at £300 for the three, but remaining unsold).
42 | Bonhams
Porcelains formerly included in the Liddell Collection in 1929 show
the calibre of the group which Captain Liddell had assembled.
One of two Guyuexuan bowls (no.140 in the catalogue) was sold to
the Hon. Mountstuart Elphinstone for £150; it was included in the
Royal Academy Exhibition of 1935-1936, and in 1952 was part of
the Elphinstone gift to the Percival David Foundation, no.874. The
second of the two bowls was purchased, again for £150, by Charles
Russell, and was subsequently in the collections of Barbara Hutton
and Robert Chang, sold in Hong Kong in 2006 for £10m. A further
group of Chinese porcelains and works of art was sold at Sotheby’s
on 29 June 1944 by Captain Liddell’s widow. The Morning Post, on
24 May 1929, proclaimed that ‘The Liddell Collection’ was the finest
exhibited in public since ‘The Richard Bennett Collection’ which
Gorer had shown to great public interest in their Mayfair gallery.
representing ‘Chinese taste’; that is to say, in the words of the noted
collector Charles Russell (expressed in a review of Bluett’s sale
exhibition) ‘where favourite motives, emblems, or allegories are
treated formally in a way dear to a Chinaman if perhaps somewhat
lacking in breadth and strength to the Western eye …’ Bluett’s
added: ‘in the Collection now exhibited, one of which was formed, so
to speak, ‘at home’, the affluence of the aesthetic atmosphere of the
East is clearly indicated’.
The sale of this splendid Imperial moon flask from one of the last
great English collections is therefore a reminder that Chinese
ceramics have been enjoyed and appreciated uncritically by English
buyers for over four centuries. For over a century, more recent
knowledgeable specialist collectors like Liddell have understood
clearly the distinction between ‘Export’ ceramics decorating the
interior of a great English country house, and ‘Chinese taste’ wares
encapsulating the spirit and aesthetics of Imperial China since the
15th century. It was the decline and collapse of the Qing Dynasty
which made it possible not merely to interpret, but also to collect, the
great Imperial ceramics which for the first time began to come onto
the antique market in China.
Chinese manufacturers, and the culture of China, appealed to
the British public in large numbers as early as 1844, when a huge
‘Industrial’ Exhibition at Hyde Park sold out several catalogue print
runs totalling 125,000 copies. Familiar with shiny, thinly potted
brightly-painted Chinese ceramics since the early 17th century, and
endlessly attracted to different manifestations of ‘Chinoiserie’ design,
British collectors liked ‘Chinese pots’ long before being introduced
to the novel mysteries of Tang horses, Song Dynasty Ruyao, or
Ming enamels. There is a largely-forgotten generation of collecting
Chinese ceramics in England, running from Whistler to Salting
and Liddell, but pre-dating Bluetts and Sparks. The suppliers and
dealers were based not in elegant premises in Davies, Mount or King
Street, but in the network of small late Georgian terraces around
Wardour Street in Soho, where the young Duveen would go to hunt
out fine Kangxi blue and white for his ‘Industrial Entrepreneur’ clients.