Page 145 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

130 John Finlay

Figure 8.3 Anonymous Chinese artist, Plate No. 1, unfinished painting from the album
“Twenty views of the European Palaces in the Garden of Perfect Brightness,”
ink, opaque and transparent watercolor on Chinese paper, ca. 1786,
approx. 50.5 56.9 cm, The University of Manchester Library, U.K., Rylands
Collection, Chinese Collection 457. Copyright of The University of Manchester.

the moment the plates were completed and that the later presentation to the emperor
was that of completed bound albums. The current condition of the prints in the
Rylands Library bears this out; the other known examples are mounted in Chinese
style for inclusion in albums, trimmed and pasted to thicker sheets of paper with silk
borders. Delatour himself commented on the condition of the prints he received:

In time I gave great care to the conservation of these prints, which were printed
on too fragile a paper even though it had been dipped in alum. In pasting each
sheet on a sheet of thin French paper, I have saved them all from the inevitable
tearing by those who would handle them without taking precaution. 40

Like the descriptions of the six paintings derived from the “40 Views of the
Yuanmingyuan,” Delatour again delegated the task of describing the 20 engravings
and the unfinished painting to another of his friends, in this case a certain Monsieur
Mai, whom he also refers to as a Jesuit, Father Avril. 41 The brief descriptions of
the 20 plates follow the numbering of the Rylands album, which is the same as the
Chinese order of the engravings—with one important exception, a question that is
discussed immediately below. Mai’s notes detail the architectural elements we see
in the engravings, but these are then followed by a set of general “Observations” on
the hybrid architecture, which he sternly condemns as “Italo-Gothico-Chinois.”
Clearly, according to the values of French neo-Classical architecture, what Castiglione
—who is credited here with the designs—built for the emperor of China is a grotesque