Page 118 - Made For Trade Chinese Export Paintings In Dutch Collections

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in Europe and their long afterlife en route to the China from 1250 to 2007, “was the image
museum storeroom. What, for example, was the skewed by Western ideas.” 15 We can see that
original site where the painting or the album was Chinese export paintings followed this shift in
intended to be seen? Were they seen in relation the perception of China in a number of ways,
to other artworks from China or not? Was the including through the appearance of new
painting or album intended to be a generic themes, or through the explicit (false) rendition
souvenir, a commemorative image, or was the of the paintings. Yet, recognising the possibly
topic meant to express a social or moralistic distorted China-image that some texts present,
message? Or were these paintings only ever I was able to interpret the corpus on the basis of
intended to be successful trade objects? What scholarly and objective study, through literature
happened to the painting before and after it research and by examining how the different 117
found its way into an institutional context? Has topics were reused and valued over the course
there been anything written about the painting of time.
or has it ever been on display? In short: what is This section focuses primarily on the site of
its cultural biography, which forms its material ‘the image itself’ as one of the sites at which
complex? meanings are made. Intersecting modalities, such
It is generally known that texts also construct as content analysis of the compositional features
the way in which we see and interpret things. In or formal components of a painting, a set or an
the case of documentary records and literary album, and other aspects, depending on
works, time- and culture-specific views guide the historiographies, play a role in our ability to
vision of how these paintings were received and appreciate their meaning and corresponding use
accrued value or, on the contrary, how they fell value. Thus, we get a clear-cut image of the
into oblivion. Clunas, in his early seminal work confluence of values, i.e. the cohesive
on Chinese export watercolours, asserts that the ‘commodity/export value’, ‘historic value’,
“interest in such material (Chinese export ‘artistic value’, and ‘material value’, combined in
painting) tailed off from the 1920s, while the newly formed Dutch corpus. Moreover, this
attention was transferred to sporadic and section recalls, on the one hand, parts of
generally less successful attempts to consolidate Chapter 3.3, in which I outlined the modus
a collection of ‘real’ Chinese painting.” 13 In the operandi of Chinese export painters and their
long twentieth century, almost nothing was practice, the market (site of production), the
written in the Netherlands about Chinese export techniques, methods and materials used, and the
paintings in public collections and, as far as I formal aspects of the paintings. On the other
know, only one small exhibtion was organised hand, with a view to understanding their use
on this topic. 14 Fortunately, the increasing value, I sometimes look ahead, to the case
scholarly attention given to the field of Chinese studies in Chapters 5 and 6, in which the site(s)
export painting in recent years has prompted a of where the paintings were and are seen
reinvestigation of this predominantly nineteenth- (consumed) by various audiences form the focal
century field of acquisition. point of study and the ‘social’ and
Moreover, contemporary eyewitness records ‘compositional’ modalities are at stake.
of Western missionaries, merchants and
explorers, also in ‘the East’, largely guided the Sets and albums
gaze of the people back home. While there was Sets of albums, sets of oil paintings, gouaches or
still talk in eighteenth-century texts of watercolours, and sets of single-sheet
admiration and respect for the highly-developed, watercolours can be understood as ‘sets’ because
utopian Chinese society, later, in the nineteenth- the images clearly belong together. They form a
century, the perception of China became more coherent whole in terms of style, colour use,
negative: a backward, underdeveloped nation materials used, or as a genre. They carry
that still had much to learn from ‘the West’. identical original frames or were commissioned
“A constant factor,” as Arie Pos argues in his and/or produced simultaneously. The
elaborate study on the written history of the documentary and serial nature of an album or a
literary chinoiserie and the Western image of set, which is often thematically constructed,

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13 Clunas 1984, 99.
14 In 2001, the thematic exhibition Sensitive plates. Nineteen Chinese paintings on glass was organised in Museum
Volkenkunde as a so-called Galerijtentoonstelling (Gallery exhibition).
15 Pos 2008, 15.