Page 144 - Made For Trade Chinese Export Paintings In Dutch Collections

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a vague hint of form. And those faces, all so Chinese art at the Academia Sinica, recalls the
powder white and rosy red, and the raised, research of Lai Yu-chih, in which she argues that
arched eyebrows, and the small, black almond- these kinds of pictures with European perspective
shaped eyes that do not seem to see what is and featuring precious species from afar “helped
around them, but rather only vague, distant bolster the heavenly mandate of emperor’s
mysteries! The slim fairy tale creatures of the Qianlong’s reign.” 103
porcelain vases and from silk fans and screens Cantonese painters were asked to “depict all
and bizarre drawings. And all equally colourful, that is curious in vegetable nature,” according to
like rice paper, such intense colours that are seen Giles Eyre, quoted in Plants of South Asia in
in China. [...] And when I was back in the dark relation to a commission given to a local painter
sampan, gliding over the silent, murky river, I in 1803 by an East India Company servant. 104 143
could hardly believe that I had seen the brilliant, The colourful images of many different insects,
colourful dolls from the old vases and rice paper dozens of birds, shells, reptiles, and mammals,
pictures in real life, and that maybe everything and hundreds of different kinds of plants –
was no longer just a projection of in that particularly ornamental varieties – and images of
immense theatre, that is China. 101 flowers and fruits, were a much better indication
of the natural colour than the real dried samples
It is clear from the large number of sets and collected. 105 In British naturalists in Qing China,
albums stored around the world and in the Fa-ti Fan examines the collection of natural
Dutch collections that the audiences (buyers, history drawings by the English naturalist John
consumers) accrued use value to this subject Reeves (1774-1856), which number more than
matter. The otherness of what these members one thousand and thus, according to Fan, form
of the Chinese elite looked like, the detailed the largest collection of its kind. 105 It is clear
painterly execution, the clear colour-use, the that Fan is not aware of the Royer Collection in
velvet-like appearance of the paintings on pith Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden, which
paper, and the fact that they were often contains, amongst other things, many ‘flora and
published in handy, portable sets and albums, fauna’ paintings. Indeed, the more than 2,350
are all aspects that lend this genre a high images on this specific topic that are in the
material and artistic value. Leiden Royer Collection far exceed the numbers
in the Reeves Collection.
Chinese flora and fauna Given the many written records on this
(including bird-and-flower painting) subject, it is generally known that the beautifully
Scientific interest in countries where Western rendered plants and animals impressed Western
nations operated expressed itself in, among other contemporary botanists and merchants. The
things, the demand for botanical images and most cited observer of that time (1830s),
drawings of native fauna. In China, in the Downing, also wrote about these kinds of
nineteenth century, many watercolours of paintings with admiration:
Chinese plants and animals were painted, some
of them commissioned. These pictures already [T]he way in which they [the artists] work to
circulated readily in and out of China during the produce that extreme fineness of detail, which is
nineteenth century. In her study of the flow of so conspicuous in the best specimens of these
prints and other images in the early modern drawings. The fine down or rather feathers on
period, in and around multilayered circuits the back of a butterfly are often so perfect, that
between Europe and China, Wang makes clear it would appear almost as if they had been
that “the cross-cultural circulation of some counted for the purpose. Although a great part
images of fauna in the early modern period also of this effect is produced by the natural texture
brings into relief the issue of a globalized court of the rice paper [sic], still a considerable portion
culture that connected China and Europe.” 102 of merit is due to the way in which the colours
Wang, a specialist in early modern and modern are laid on. 107

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102 Wang 2014-b, 382.
103 Ibid.
104 East India Company officer (no name, no year), quoted in Plants of South China 1982, 2, in turn, quoted in
Tillotson 1987, 57.
105 Crossman 1991, 57. Fan 2004, 49.
106 Fan 2004, 40-57.
107 Downing 1838, facsimile, 1972, 99-100, quoted in Claypool 2015, 31.