Page 66 - Made For Trade Chinese Export Paintings In Dutch Collections

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Chapter 3 18-10-2016 15:52 Pagina 1

Mapping Chinese export painting

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Whereas Chapter 2 set out to sketch the century on, as Kaufmann puts it, China
theoretical and methodical frame of reference, undoubtedly had “a huge impact on European
Chapter 3 aims to map the ‘state of the field’ cultures that was mediated through the United
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with regard to the cultural context of Chinese Provinces (Dutch Republic, 1581-1795).” The
export painting practice. This chapter consists of early interest in China rapidly spread from the
four parts. The first part briefly focuses on Netherlands throughout Europe, via the re-
Dutch sea trading activities in and around China selling of porcelain in France, England, Germany
from a historical perspective. Secondly, given the and other countries, and through the publication
unique nature of this category of Chinese of illustrated books depicting this unknown
paintings, it is necessary to define the terms empire. The result of this was the genesis of a
‘globalisation’ and ‘glocalisation’, both of which new European style called chinoiserie, a fashion
emerge when we study the westward movement that entered the European stage in the late
of these paintings. Thirdly, the modus operandi seventeenth century and reached its height
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of the export painting practice, revealed by the between 1740 and 1770. This style, states
relevant documentary tradition, will be Catherine Pagani, “had very little to do with
presented. This third part treats the most China per se but rather reflected an idealized
important actors of this global painting and highly decorative concept of the Far East,
phenomenon: the painters and their studios, the loosely combining motifs from Chinese,
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market, the techniques, materials and the media Japanese, and even Indian repertoires.” This
in which they are executed. Furthermore, to movement had a deep influence on interior
frame the context of this artistic phenomenon design, architecture and decorative art. The
more clearly, the last section of this chapter idealised vision of the Chinese empire was
discusses different views of this kind of visual expressed in the arts and gradually developed
art, then and now, culminating in the concluding into an autonomous style, which, in turn,
idea that Chinese export painting can be modified the European picture of the East. As
interpreted as a shared cultural visual repertoire. chinoiserie expert Hugh Honour remarks in his
seminal study Chinoiserie: The vision of Cathay,
3.1. this style phenomenon declined once European
Dutch sea trade and China eyes began to view it as the antithesis of
To understand the arrival of Chinese export Neoclassicism, the dominant movement from the
paintings in Dutch museum collections it is late-eighteenth century to the end of the
essential to take a closer look at the Dutch nineteenth century. Indeed, the fashion shifted
China trade practice in previous centuries. It is from baroque and rococo chinoiserie style to a
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well known that the Dutch have been an more neo-classical one. Despite this downturn
important trading community with China in European Chinese style, European commerce
through the ages. From the early seventeenth increased and, instead of buying Chinese-style
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1 Kaufmann 2014, 207.
2 Pagani 2000, 105. The term ‘chinoiserie’ appeared much later in an 1883 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Oxford
English Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. Catherine Pagani is Professor of Asian Art History and Associate Dean
of the Graduate School, University of Alabama. She has published several articles on Chinese material culture in
the eighteenth century.
3 Pagani 2000, 95-96.
4 Honour 1961, 175-177.