Page 90 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

“True Beauty of Form and Chaste Embellishment” 75
provenance and is therefore important and objective object data, rather than the
subjective marketing language of the sale catalogue. It is well known that such
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labeling continued in museums well into the later twentieth century but the broader
impact of such nomenclature for objects was to have a further consequence in the
form of the creation of a new category of Chinese objects. In collections management
terms, this became a new class of Chinese objects, one which included a wide range
of materials that were united by one particular descriptive term: “imperial.” As the
Summer Palace was a “palace,” it was an imperial location and therefore objects
from it were also “imperial” by association. Before the advent of Summer Palace
objects on the market, the word “imperial” was not frequently used to describe
Chinese things, and this is especially true of Chinese ceramics. After 1860, however,
as part of the new Summer Palace category, the objects within this category were
automatically defined as “imperial” by virtue of provenance and this was therefore
a method of authentication in addition to an identifier. An “imperial” object, especially
one acquired direct from the source, was by default “authentic” because it was
theoretically untainted by the market and therefore subject to the prospect of faking.
Of course these objects were distributed through the market but in the early years
of their collecting, the likelihood of faking was very slim. Later, of course, the
provenance itself would be faked, that is assigned to objects that were not or could
not be proven to be from the Summer Palace. 19 Connoisseurship thus became a
liability.

A New “Imperial” Style
The art literature also demonstrates that such objects were seen further to represent
a new style by association—that of “imperial taste,” meaning the purported taste of
the Chinese emperor. This was a new concept because it looked to China for its
characterization, rather than the observations of the outsider connoisseur, such as
Marryat whose work was discussed above. Essentially, if a Chinese object was
“imperial,” it was also by definition “domestic,” not made for export. It reflected
Chinese taste in Chinese objects, therefore. This new notion of cultural “taste” also
revealed one of several contradictions in the reception of the events at the Summer
Palace. The emperor was symbolically defeated during the destruction, and shown
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to be weak, but his objects were more valuable because they belonged to him. From
the 1870s, we can see this conflicted notion underlying the presence of the new
category of object, “imperial taste,” in the art literature of the period, as well as in
descriptive entries in auction and museum catalogues. One of the first incidents of
use of the term “imperial taste” in English appears in an essay by Captain J. H.
Lawrence-Archer (1823–1889) in the Art Journal in 1875. Lawrence-Archer was
writing about Ming porcelain (also an early appearance in the literature) and
recounted his personal observations of the art market in China during a visit in or
before 1862, not long after the plunder of the Summer Palace. He makes a number
of interesting comments that are indicative of the reception of Summer Palace material
by art collectors in Britain as well as their interpretation. With reference to the
ceramics, he notes that they have a different visual appearance and style than others,
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exhibiting “true beauty of form and chaste embellishment.” There is also something
he describes as “imperial taste” that “delighted not in the grotesque.” 22 This was
thus contrasted with foreign taste by implication and was something definable as