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“Reflections on the Exhibition,” the well-connected art collector John Ferguson noted the

London organizers’ pretentiousness regarding their art historical knowledge. His views

depart from other Western art scholars and organizers. Ferguson noticed the undignified

way in which the London Committee ignored the Chinese Committee’s object-

descriptions of lent artworks from China, instead making “Scores of such corrections.”

Ferguson described a contrast: “few corrections had been made in the labels of objects

loaned by others, the Chinese Government seems to have been singled out…In contrast to

these frequent changes in the labels supplied by the Chinese Committee I have not found

a single similar correction in the labels of articles from the David or Eumorfopoulos

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collections.” Thus, Ferguson, a close friend of Guo Baochang, the porcelain expert in

charge of the selection of porcelain sent from China to London, echoed Fu Zhenlun and

Zhuang Shangyan’s criticisms. His article clarified in detail the nature of the London

organizers’ condescension toward Chinese attribution of objects. One of Ferguson’s

complaints was that the British opted to use vague labels such as “? Sung” for object

descriptions instead of using dates submitted by the Chinese experts. Ferguson aptly

called such pretentiousness as “Western scholars… attempting to teach China how to

classify its own artistic productions.” The disparagement of Chinese views stands in

ironic contrast to the self-congratulatory declarations by Sir Percival David, the

exhibition director, who stated that people can, after seeing the art exhibited at the

Burlington House, cease applying to Chinese pictorial art the canons of criticism that

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“were applied to European painting.” What David meant, of course, was that the

exhibition had revealed so much about Chinese art that Westerners should be able to