Page 141 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

126 John Finlay
a reference to the earliest extended description of the Yuanmingyuan, the famous
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letter of 1743 from the Jesuit missionary-artist Jean-Denis Attiret. Published in 1749
in the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, the letter described in great detail the buildings
and landscape, and Bertin surely knew this letter. 20 Attiret himself had stated that
the palaces of the emperor are impossible to describe in words, since they resemble
nothing in Europe, and that he would send images of them to Europe when he could. 21
The writer of the Bertin document repeats the thought that as fine as Attiret’s
descriptions are, the reader’s imagination would be well served by images, and thus
an album of paintings based on the imperial woodblock prints of the “40 Views” is
now being sent to Europe. It is clear that these paintings are specifically Bertin’s album
of paintings of the “40 Views.” 22
Also accompanying this set of paintings was what the writer describes as a rare
work, printed in a limited edition in two volumes and truly worthy of being sent
abroad. It is, of course, the 1745 Qing imperial woodcut edition of the “40 Views.”
The writer says the book includes a fine “preface” along with the names of the 40
individual views as well as the woodcut illustrations and the Qianlong emperor’s
40 poems with their massive body of notes. 23 These annotations offer an excellent
example of imperial propaganda, where the Qianlong emperor presents himself as
an accomplished poet as well as the legitimate ruler of China. 24 Bertin himself
knew no Chinese, and for his benefit the letter accompanying the album of paintings
and the woodblock edition of the “40 Views” explains in some detail the contents
of the printed book. While highly flattering in its judgments of the emperor’s poetry,
the discussion is still remarkably accurate and perceptive, obviously the work of
someone who had paid close attention to the imperial woodblock edition and wished
to inspire a similar appreciation in his correspondent.
Bertin’s collection included a number of larger-scale paintings that are based
on the “40 Views,” although they were not identified as such when he received
them. One of these paintings is simply inscribed with the title “Maison de plaisance”
or “pleasure palace,” a generic term that we have seen was used to describe the
Yuanmingyuan. 25 The painting takes the original composition of no. 2 of the “40
Views of the Yuanmingyuan,” the view entitled Qinzheng qinxian PQRS, and
greatly extends it, moving the vanishing point of the perspective grid to the center
and adding a number of buildings along the right-hand side. The architecture in all
of these paintings is drawn in precise, accurate detail—a fine example of the traditional
Chinese genre of ruled-line painting (jiehua TU). The landscape, itself even more
radically transformed from its original source, is depicted with a naturalism that
contrasts with its clearly fantastic elements. The Qinzheng qinxian painting is
unquestionably the work of a Chinese artist or artists who had also been trained in
European techniques of perspective and modeling with light and shade.
Four additional paintings from Bertin’s collection—paintings whose compositions
radically transform their Qing imperial models—are also derived from the “40
Views.” Like the single painting of the Qinzheng qinxian, they are quite large
(approxi mately 68 68 cm), and the four are bound together as the pages of an

album entitled “Chinese landscapes taken from the gardens of the Emperor and
others.” 26 The title implies again that Bertin did not know the actual subjects,
although he knew—or assumed—that the gardens were imperial. While they are
remarkably different from the original images among the “40 Views,” the Chin ese
sources of the four paintings in the album can be readily identified. The first is based