Page 39 - Christie's London China Trade Paintings Kelton Collection

... the river of Canton is covered with boats and vessels of various sorts and sizes,
all, even the very smallest, constantly and thickly inhabited ...
George Macartney, 1st Earl Macartney

*19
CHINESE SCHOOL, CIRCA 1810
Chinese craft on the Pearl River – a set of forty
pencil, watercolour and bodycolour heightened with white on paper watermarked ‘J Whatman 1804' and '1805'
each 14æ x 19in. (37.4 x 48.2cm.) and similar
ten framed, thirty unframed (40)
£30,000-50,000 US$38,000-62,000
€34,000-56,000
PROVENANCE:
Anon. sale, Christie's, New York, 15 Oct. 1986, lots 48-51.
'It was not ... until the end of the century that sets of paintings in a 'Company' style began to be made in Canton. As in India these
paintings depicted themes and subjects which specially interested the European merchants in Canton and their families in the
west. Exotic insects, birds, fruit and fowers had a special appeal. Sets of pictures were made of the many diferent types of boat
which crowded the Pearl river. ...' (M. Archer, Company Drawings in the India Ofice Library, London, 1972, p.253). Following the
receipt of paintings of Chinese plants for its Library, sets of 'drawings on Miscellaneous Subjects' were requested by the Court of
Directors of the East India Company in 1805 and large sets of watercolours were dispatched from Canton in 1806, and are now in
the India Ofice Library, and include two sets of 40 and 41 drawings of boats, comparable in sizes and subjects, albeit with earlier
watermarks of 1794, to the present set (for which see M. Archer, Ibid, pp.255-56, nos 206 and 207).
The craft are depicted on the Pearl or Canton River and its associated waterways between Bocca Tigris and Canton, the
picturesque river that took western supercargoes from Whampoa (Huangbu) Reach to the foreign factories at Canton. The
watercolours include scenes taken at Whampoa and Canton, and along the waterway in between. The myriad craft include ferries,
a dragon boat, rice and salt boats, a white cargo ship, chop boats for transporting merchants to Canton, a foating shop and foating
brothel or fower boat, a duck boat, watermelon boats, and others.