Page 91 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

76 Stacey Pierson
other—taste, and by extension, style, in Chinese objects was no longer universal, at
least among specialist collectors. This notion is not grounded in visual characteristics
alone, however, but is also attributable to the provenance of the objects. The same
objects, seen before 1860, would not have been described as “imperial” or seen to
have the visual characteristics of imperial objects because they needed to be associated
with an imperial location. Even when they appear in the market, which Lawrence-
Archer took great advantage of during his visit, the objects were still seen to be imbued
with a special and separate character that soon would evoke a visual classification
as well as textual. Of course, like other discursive terms, the notion of “imperial
taste” reflected the values of the time and place in which it was employed as well as
the China in which the objects were made and consumed. Thus, the Victorian
definition of Chinese “imperial taste” was not the same one associated with say, the
collector Percival David (1892–1964) in the mid-twentieth century. In the nineteenth
century, as we will see, imperial taste in Chinese ceramics was seen to be associated
with colour, in monochrome porcelains as one group and polychromes as another.
In the twentieth century, “imperial taste” was not limited to particular visual char -
acteristics but rather reflective of what was used at the palace during the Qianlong
period and therefore associated with the body of the emperor. 23 Nor were the mostly
eighteenth—and nineteenth-century objects taken from the Summer Palace necessarily
repre sentative of imperial objects of other periods in Chinese history, at least as was
known and understood by collectors in Britain before the 1890s. Some of the soldiers
present during the destruction did leave descriptions of objects seen and/or taken but
few were knowledgeable about the age or dating of the objects and few if any would
have had experience of collecting Chinese objects at the time. 24 As far as primary
and secondary collectors knew, before they had access to Chinese texts about ceramics,
or read accounts of visits to Chinese collections, the objects from the Summer Palace
were representative of all that was imperial.
The Victorian definition of “imperial taste” in Chinese porcelain is a good example
of how such historical events can shape object interpretations and definitions. If
“imperial taste” could be seen as a defined category of ceramics, then style would
be a corollary of this. As Lawrence-Archer noted earlier, the ceramics—mainly
porcelains—taken from the Summer Palace brought at least one new style (i.e., newly
defined) to the attention of collectors. What Lawrence-Archer called “pure colours,”
representing “the finest chromatic effects with few pigments” with beautiful forms
and “chaste embellishment” appears to follow on from a few earlier references to
what are likely to be monochrome-glazed porcelains. 25 In Robert Fortune’s (1813–
1880) very interesting account of A Residence Among the Chinese: inland, on the
coast, and at sea. Being a narrative of scenes and adventures during a third visit to
China, from 1853 to 1856 (1857), he remarks that: “The self-coloured porcelains,
such as pure whites, creams, crimsons, red, blues, greens and violets, are very fine,
and much prized by Chinese collectors” indicating that these were being contrasted
with porcelains with decoration. 26 In 1850s Britain, monochrome-glazed Chinese
porcelains (excluding white figurines from Dehua, aka blanc de Chine) could really
only be seen by those visiting China, a rare occurrence, and thus readers or collectors
had little opportunity to see such wares outside of China, until the plunder of the
Summer Palace. Fortune’s account suggests that within China, monochromes were
favored or at least those are what Fortune was shown during his visit. 27 Clearly this
was a style that was also attractive to foreign collectors, as Lawrence-Archer’s remarks