Page 159 - Made For Trade Chinese Export Paintings In Dutch Collections

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4.81. embody this trend. In a picturesque immediacy of these scenes is an illusion, looking
atmosphere on the terraces along the banks of at these paintings evokes a certain sense of
the Pearl River in around Canton and Macao, entering the stylishly furnished Chinese houses.
with exotic flowers and birds, the Chinese elite This artistic genre should, so Burke argues,
waited for their servants, drank tea, smoked “be approached as a genre with its own rules for
their pipes, listened to music or played the what should or should not be shown.” 167 The
Chinese famous board game go. represented interiors, full of details of material
Interior scenes, according to Clunas, had culture and architectural information may also
more to do with Western genre painting than distort the reality. The Rijksmuseum enamel
with the native Chinese painting tradition, in paintings are most suitable examples of
158 which this theme rarely appeared. 165 In the innovative and integrated artworks, EurAsian
Netherlands, the The Hague collector Royer in all their aspects, entangled with various
saw the informative value of images with this ‘layers’, emerged from transcultural encounters,
subject matter and he had his personal contacts artistic results of interpretation and
in China bring him paintings, which can be inspiration. 168
approached as a shared cultural repertoire. In his During his third visit to China from 1853 to
collection, now kept by the Rijksmuseum 1856, the Scottish botanist, Robert Fortune
Amsterdam, there are 14 paintings with this (1812-1880), recorded narratives of scenes and
subject, in enamel, copper and porcelain. 166 his adventures in A residence among the
(Figure 4.82.) While we know that the Chinese: Inland, on the coast, and at sea. 169
He recalls his visit to the Chinese hong merchant
Fig. 4.82. Interior scene
Howqua’s house and garden as follows:
(from set of 4),
anonymous, enamel
He now led me into a nicely furnished room,
on copperplate in low
according to Chinese ideas, that is, its walls were
relief, 1770-1775, 37 x
hung with pictures of flowers, birds, and scenes
48.5 cm, Rijksmuseum
of Chinese life. It would not do to criticise these
Amsterdam, inv.no.
works of art according to our ideas, but
AK-NM-6620-A.
nevertheless some of them were very interesting.
[...] In order to understand the Chinese style of
gardening it is necessary to dispel from the mind
all ideas of fine lawns, broad walks, and
extensive views; and to picture in their stead
everything on a small scale – that is narrow

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165 Clunas 1984, 53.
166 Inv.nos. AK-NM-6611-A and B, AK-NM-6612-A and B, 6614-A to 6614-D, 6619-A and B and 6620-A 6620-D.
According to Jan van Campen, curator of Asian export art Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, it is questionable whether
these artworks were initially meant for the export market (Van Campen, 2002, 3-27). As stated in Kaufmann, 2014,
219-220, the technique of enamel painting was probably first intended for the Imperial court itself. There are
numerous examples still visible in the successor collections of those of the emperor, now in the National Palace
Museum in Taipei and in the National Palace Museum in Beijing. Kaufmann got this information from Shi Ching-fei,
‘Evidence of East-West exchange in the eighteenth century: The establishment of painted enamel art at the Ching
court in the reign of Emperor K’ang-hsi, in: The National Palace Museum Research Quarterly, vol. 24, 2007, 45-78
(English summary, 78). Also, Xu Xiaodong (Berg et al. 201592-106) shows that this enamel painting technique,
initially brought from Europe, then reconfigured in Chinese porcelain and export-ware goods, gave rise to a new
dissemination of the technique and design in Europe. The contents of the images, however, appear more frequently
on paintings that were explicitly produced for the export market. The paintings could well have been exotica for
both the Chinese market and the export market. For this reason, I have included these paintings in the overview of
export paintings in Dutch museum collections in Appendix 1. Also, the Rijksmuseum owns two mirror paintings
with this subject matter, inv.nrs. BK-16726-A en B.
167 Burke 2001, 88.
168 For a multi-level image construction and decoding of the different EurAsian ‘layers’ of the Rijksmuseum
paintings, I refer to the article by Anna Grasskamp, entitled ‘EurAsian layers: Netherlandish surfaces and early
modern Chinese artefacts’ in the Rijksmuseum Bulletin (Grasskamp 2015, 374-383).
169 Fortune 1857. Robert Fortune was a Scottish botanist, plant hunter and traveller, best known for introducing tea
plants from China to India.