Page 360 - Chinese Art, Vol II By Stephen W. Bushell

io6 CHINESE ART. —

forget his own mental preconceptions, and must throw over his
artistic education, every critical tradition, and all the aesthetic
baggage that has accumulated from the Renaissance to our own
days. He must especially refrain from comparison of the works of
Chinese painters with any of the famous canvases which cover the
walls of our European collections, public or private. The Chinese
point of view differs essentially from that of the occidental, and the
wide abj'ss which parts them is proved by the career of the two
Jesuits, the P.P. Attiret and Castiglione, who were attached as
painters to the Imperial Court early in the eighteenth century, and
tried hard to make the Chinese accept European art, with its science
of anatomy, its modelling, its effects of light and shade, and the
rest. Astonished at first, the emperor let them go on, and they
painted portraits of himself, the empress, and princes of the blood,
with many of the high mandarins of the court ; decorated the palace
with allegorical pictures of the four seasons and finished altogether
more than two hundred pictures. But gradually a singular change
came over the spirit of the emperor, and, therefore, of the court.
The style of the Jesuit fathers was found to be too European ; the
modelling of the flesh tints, the chiaroscuro, the projection of the
shadows were declared to be shocking to Chinese eyes. The
emperor afterwards imposed on the missionaries the traditional
routine of Chinese painting, and even forced on them Chinese col-
laborators, till the P. Attiret wrote to Paris on November ist, 1743 :
" II m'a fallu oublier, pour ainsi dire, tout ce que j'avais appris et me faire
una nouvelle maniere pour me conformer au gout de la nation. . . . Tout ce
que nous peignons est ordonne par I'empereur. Nous faisons d'abord les
dessins il les voit, les fait changer, reformer comme bon lui semble. Que
;
la correction soit bien ou mal, il faut passer par la sans oser rien dire." [Lettres
edifiantes.)
When Lord Macartney came to the court of the same emperor
some fifty years later, bringing with him several pictures as presents
from George III., the mandarins-in-waiting were again shocked by
the shadows, and they asked gravely if the originals of the portraits