Page 139 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

124 John Finlay
do not appear in the painted album. Although the woodcut edition was not published
or officially available to the public, copies of it soon spread beyond court circles. 5
The copy of the woodcut edition of the “40 Views of the Yuanmingyuan” that
is usually cited as the first to reach Europe is the one provided to Georges-Louis
Le Rouge (ca. 1712–ca. 1796), who reproduced the 40 compositions in 1786 in port -
folios 15 and 16 of his highly successful series Jardins anglo-chinois à la mode
6
(Anglo-Chinese gardens now in fashion). However, an album in the Bibliothèque
nationale de France, which contains only the prints and none of the text from the
woodblock edition of the “40 Views,” bears the bookplate of the sixth Duc de
Chaulnes (Michel-Ferdinand d’Albert d’Ailly, 1714–1769) and was included in the
posthumous sale of his collection in 1770. The title on the album, “Various palaces
and temples of China, drawn and engraved in China,” and the lack of any other
contemporary inscriptions indicate that Duc de Chaulnes was not aware of the actual
7
identity of the images. The prints are in random order, with no relation to the ori -
ginal sequence of the “40 Views.” Their condition clearly identifies them as printers’
proofs that had never been trimmed and bound in a Chinese book, another indi -
cation of the incomplete contemporary understanding of these pictures. For example,
print no. 9 in the album (see Figure 8.1) is actually no. 40 of the “40 Views of the
Yuanmingyuan,” the view entitled Dongtian shenchu L天M處, the last of the series.
In the lower left-hand corner of the image is an inscription with the names of the
artists. The title—there for the benefit of the imperial bookbinders—appears in small
8
characters in the wide margin at the right, but these margins would have been
trimmed and the characters hidden in the binding process, which would also have
left characteristic pinholes in the page. Bertin himself was one of the executors of
the estate of the sixth Duc de Chaulnes—a man whose son was also an avid collector
of Chinese objects and images. Among the archival documents related to Bertin,
9
inventory lists of material sent from China include objects destined for the Duc de
Chaulnes, although it is sometimes difficult to determine whether these notes refer
10
to the father or his son. From the dates—almost all after the father’s death in 1769—
the majority of them surely refer to the son, the seventh duke. 11 The two Ducs de
Chaulnes, father and son, were important players in the network of like-minded men
directly linked to Henri Bertin.
Two remarkably similar albums of paintings that copy the “40 Views” appeared
in European collections in the late eighteenth century. One album, now in the
National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, comes from the collection of Jean Theodore
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Royer (1737–1807). Royer was a lawyer, an antiquarian, a print collector, a member
of various learned societies, and a sinologist, which was a rarity in the Netherlands
in his time. The other album, in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, comes from
13
the collection of Henri Bertin. Images from the Royer album have been published, 14
but the Bertin paintings are almost completely unknown. They are mounted in an
album that bears the title “Haidian, pleasure palace of the Emperor of China.” 15
“Pleasure palace” (maison de plaisance) is a term used in the eighteenth century as
a conventional description of Chinese imperial buildings, including those of the
Yuanmingyuan. Haidian NO is the location of the Yuanmingyuan, the town where
the Jesuit missionaries maintained a house that they occupied when the emperor
was in residence there, and the name was well-known in eighteenth-century Europe.
The Royer and Bertin albums were both painted in China in a hybrid Chinese-