Page 138 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

8 Henri Bertin (1720–1792) and
Images of the Yuanmingyuan in

Eighteenth-century France

John Finlay

In eighteenth-century France, the Yuanmingyuan was surprisingly well-known, at least
within a small circle of people eager for knowledge of the far-off empire of China.
Documentation of this knowledge survives in archival records, in selected references
in the literature of the period and in images that are often little-known or unrecognized
for what they are. Probably the largest group of such images of the Yuanmingyuan
was held in the collections of Henri Bertin and a network of collectors associated
with him. Henri-Léonard Jean-Baptiste Bertin (1720–1792) served as a Minister of
State (Secrétaire d’État) from 1763 to 1780 under Louis XV (r. 1715–1774) and
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Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792). As both an official of the royal government and an avid
private collector, Bertin sought knowledge from China through his correspondence
with the French Jesuit missionaries in Beijing, themselves highly educated men who
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provided him with numerous books and texts, objects, prints and paintings. Bertin,
like others of the day, emphasized the role of images in verifying, illustrating, and
literally illuminating what could be learned from texts. On numerous documents sent
from China, Bertin noted “voyez les peintures”—literally, “see the paintings”—
meaning that the texts were accompanied by pictures, often images created especially
for him.
The circulation of knowledge of the Yuanmingyuan is part of a broader encounter
between France and China and is the result of a purposeful acquisition of knowledge.
Two sets of Qing imperial images are key to this historical episode: the paintings of
the album “40 Views of the Yuanmingyuan” and the prints of the “20 Engravings
of the European Palaces.” In this chapter, I would like to introduce a few of the
versions of these images in France in the eighteenth century and the texts associated
with them and then to highlight some of the questions that they raise.
In 1738, the Qianlong emperor (H隆, r. 1736–1795) commissioned an album of
paintings entitled the “40 Views of the Yuanmingyuan” (Yuanmingyuan sishi jing
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tu yong 圓 園)十J圖K. The paintings accompanied 40 imperial poems on “views”
or sites in the garden-palace, and they were rendered in a hybrid Chinese-European
style that the emperor particularly favored. Completed in 1744, the album was kept
at the Yuanmingyuan, where it would have been rarely seen and never exhibited in
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any modern sense of the term. However, the preparation of a Qing imperial wood -
block edition of the “40 Views,” began almost simultaneously with the creation of
the album. The printed volumes, completed in 1745, contain black and white illus -
trations that reproduce the compositions of the original 40 paintings. These are
followed by the emperor’s poems, which are supplemented with extensive notes that