Page 73 - Made For Trade Chinese Export Paintings In Dutch Collections

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evident that, citing an idea from Dikötter, “there Due to the moderate quality and limited
is always a complex and historically situated availability of scarce historical sources, the
interplay between the global and the local and sketch of this global practice is comprised of
that historical agents have at least some capacity fragments. As Anne Gerritsen states, however, in
to appropriate cultural products and integrate her lecture ’Glueing the Pieces Together: Writing
them into their everyday routines and social Global History from Shards?’, “Fragments and
practices.” 45 In the nineteenth century, when the shards also have stories to tell as fragments.
Western countries and China were world Writing a global history from a fragmentary
partners, Cantonese export painters and their record is perhaps a different kind of history.” 48
clients from around the world had this capacity As a result of the growing interest in Chinese
72 in abundance and thus were able to play new academia and the rapid museum expansion in
and unfamiliar things over and over again. Their the Pearl River delta, the production side of this
work was always evolving and always phenomenon is high on the South Chinese
unchanging at the same time, with little mix and research agenda. This will undoubtedly lead to
match. I consider the locally produced new discoveries that can clarify and deepen the
commodified paintings in this time of existing understanding of global connections
multilateral globalisation of exchanges as across time and space, garnered from those
metaphors for the historical Chinese global trade fragments and shards already found. In this
that was taking place in that era. The next section of this chapter, I will provide a summary
section will examine local and global aspects of of those bits and pieces. The painters and their
Chinese export painting on the basis of the studios, the market with its specific components,
major actors in this artistic phenomenon. and techniques and methods connected with
Chinese export painting, will be treated in the
3.3. following paragraphs. This general typification
The modus operandi of a global will make clear and concretise the specific
painting practice and its products character of the examined corpus.
The cultural context of the Chinese export
painting practice is largely known to us via the The export painters and their studios
observations and accounts of contemporary The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
foreign (English, French, Dutch, Swedish and Cantonese practice of Chinese export painters
American) inhabitants of Canton, Hong Kong and their artworks was a special one. This
and Macao, travellers to these harbour cities, ‘situated community’ was characterised by its
and traders in all kind of goods. 46 These locality, which was an important dimension of
accounts, which carry the authority of the value. The producers of the paintings worked in
eyewitness, together with English- and Chinese- a spatially-bound context that provided the
language newspapers from the time, give a good, frame within which various kinds of action
although subjective, insight into the world of could be initiated and conducted meaningfully,
that time and provide us with a general productively, reproductively, interpretively, or
description of this painting practice. Twenty- performatively. For the painters, it was clear
first-century (art)historians also try to unbundle beforehand that the artwork was being made for
the modus operandi of Chinese export painters. 47 export to foreign countries. 49 Most of the

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44 Appadurai 1996, 188.
45 Dikötter 2006, 261-265.
46 Quotations form an important part of this chapter. Amongst others, this includes texts from visitors who were
in China before and after the two Opium Wars (first: 1839-1842 and second: 1856-1860): De Guignes 1808; Downing
1838; Medhurst 1840; Borget 1845; Tiffany 1849; Lavollée 1853; Davis 1857; Fortune 1857; Yvan 1858; Hunter 1882; and
Ball 1892. Given the paucity of Chinese language sources, these English- and French language observations form a
significant contribution to knowledge in the West about China. Samuel Wells Williams’ A Chinese Commercial
Guide consisting of a Collection of Details and Regulations Respecting Foreign Trade with China, from 1856 is
apparently also an informative source, as are the records of Hendrik Muller (‘Onze vaderen in China’, 1917) about the
trade history between the Netherlands and China.
47 Clunas 1984; Crossman 1991; Garrett 2002; Lee Sai Chong 2005; Van Dyke 2005; Jiang 2007.
48 Anne Gerritsen, 2 December 2014, Material Agency Forum Archaeology, Leiden University Libraries.
49 That not only Europeans and Americans were eager to buy these kind of paintings is made evidently clear by
the study of Jessica Lee Patterson on the several examples of Chinese reverse glass paintings in Thai Buddhist
monasteries. Patterson 2016.