LONDON, ENGLAND.- Fine art and antiques shipped from China during the formative years of that country’s trade with the West are to be sold in a themed sale titled Export Art of the China Trade at Bonhams in London on Tuesday 18 March 2003. The sale is expected to raise more than £750,000.
Having discovered the South China coast in 1514, the Portuguese were the first to gain the formal right to trade with China, followed in the early 1600s by the Dutch and the English. A trade mission was established in Macau by 1557, but it was not until the 18th century that secure access to Chinese markets was established, via a sole trading area granted to European merchants in Canton (now Guangzhou). Trade flourished.
‘Chinamania’ and a craze for ‘chinoiserie’ swept through Europe, often driven by members of royalty like Queen Mary, wife of William III, who lavishly decorated her beloved Kensington Palace with rooms and assemblages of bright porcelain and lacquer. This craving for an exotic ‘Oriental’ look became so extreme that the most enthusiastic followers were mocked for their blind devotion to it.
During the height of the European export trade from China, between about 1700 and 1820, Canton remained the only city that allowed Westerners to live in trading Factories, or "Hongs," for mercantile activities. Each Hong contained a number of specialized rooms in the well-ventilated airy upper storeys of the building, such as counting rooms, sleeping quarters, banquet rooms, and a treasury; while the ground floor afforded ample storage space, as purchases mounted up in preparation for the long journey home.
By the late 18th century, there were about 13 Hongs, each one associated with a major Western trading nation. Ensconced along the quarter-mile waterfront south of Canton’s city walls, each nation’s Hong was distinguished by its flag flying above the Pearl River. There, "foreign devils," as the merchants were known to the Chinese, conducted business, but were forbidden to bring their wives, enter the city gates, or ride in sedan chairs.
Bonhams’ sale includes a ‘famille rose’ porcelain punchbowl, circa 1780, finely enamelled around the exterior with a continuous scene of the bustling waterfront at Canton, depicting the various European Hongs, identified by their flags, from left to right, Denmark, Royalist France, Sweden, Britain and Holland. The busy scene also depicts many European and Chinese traders in the courtyards and in sampans in the harbor, while the interior of the bowl is decorated with a central floral medallion enclosing a basket of flowers, encircled by four sepia vignettes and eight shaped-oval panels alternately enclosing landscapes and flowers. The bowl is estimated at £17,000-25,000.
The sale includes a wide variety of objects that would have been traded through the Hongs, together with an interesting series of 10 Chinese school watercolors, circa 1800, each finely depicting scenes showing the manufacture of porcelain at the kilns in a romanticized Jingdezhen. The watercolors show in careful detail potters at work at their wheels, artists painting patterns and applying glaze, and the finished pots being removed from the kilns and packed in crates for export. To be sold as one lot, they are estimated at £25,000-35,000.
One of the most expensive lots in the sale is a fine pair of famille rose candle holders modelled as elegant maidens. They wear puce-enamelled floral long-sleeved knee-length tunics, and their faces are delicately modelled with gentle smiles and neatly-coiffed hair left in the biscuit. They are estimated at £40,000-60,000.
Among a range of unusual wares potted in Japan for the export trade is an extremely rare 17th century Kakiemon figure of a bijin (beautiful woman) standing by a puppy, which appears to be unrecorded and is estimated at £20,000-30,000.
The sale also includes porcelain dinner services, mirror paintings, carved ivories, lacquer ware and cloisonné, almost all attesting to the Western fascination with the arts of the exotic East,and illustrating the craftsmanship with which Chinese and Japanese artists responded to this booming late 17th and 18th century demand.