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Lot Essay
The Kangxi Emperor commissioned a work to portray significant Chinese industries of the era. Published in 1696, the Gengzhi tu, or Illustrations of Ploughing and Weaving, comprised woodblock prints by the court painter Jiao Bingzhen alongside poetry by the Emperor outlining the stages of silk cultivation and rice production. The Gengzhi tu remained popular throughout the following decades, and the Qianlong Emperor added the theme of porcelain production to the two existing series.
Westerners were fascinated by these exotic Chinese industries, and export artists of the later 18th and early 19th centuries created watercolor and gouache albums delineating the stages of rice, silk, porcelain and tea for their Western clientele. Highly idealized and romanticized, these portrayals, while broadly accurate, omitted the grittier aspects of these industries, depicting attractive pavilions in picturesque rural settings with workers in colorful clothing.
The themes of porcelain, silk and tea production even appeared, rarely, as decoration on porcelain, and still more rarely as the subject of wallpaper or in large-scale oil paintings, as in the present set. A very large set of four oil paintings was acquired in the 1850s by the Ethnography Museum in Copenhagen, each showing the multiple production stages in their entirety within a monumental landscape setting. Kee Il Choi, Jr, writing in Antiques magazine (October 1998), says of the Copenhagen set, "They were undoubtedly special commissions, perhaps presentation pieces intended for the home-based directors of the great East India companies. Their sheer size indicates they were made to impress as well as to inform."
Westerners were fascinated by these exotic Chinese industries, and export artists of the later 18th and early 19th centuries created watercolor and gouache albums delineating the stages of rice, silk, porcelain and tea for their Western clientele. Highly idealized and romanticized, these portrayals, while broadly accurate, omitted the grittier aspects of these industries, depicting attractive pavilions in picturesque rural settings with workers in colorful clothing.
The themes of porcelain, silk and tea production even appeared, rarely, as decoration on porcelain, and still more rarely as the subject of wallpaper or in large-scale oil paintings, as in the present set. A very large set of four oil paintings was acquired in the 1850s by the Ethnography Museum in Copenhagen, each showing the multiple production stages in their entirety within a monumental landscape setting. Kee Il Choi, Jr, writing in Antiques magazine (October 1998), says of the Copenhagen set, "They were undoubtedly special commissions, perhaps presentation pieces intended for the home-based directors of the great East India companies. Their sheer size indicates they were made to impress as well as to inform."