LASTING IMPRESSIONS
An exhibition in Beijing of British prints from the 18th and 19th centuries features works by several artists. Lin Qi reports.
The year of 1793 saw the first British diplomatic mission to China led by George Macartney (1737-1806), seeking to open trade routes with the Middle Kingdom.
Among his delegation known as the Macartney embassy, there was an artist named William Alexander, then 26, who would record the events through drawings and paintings.
It is said that Alexander produced more than 2,000 sketches and watercolors of the views he saw during the voyage. He reproduced some of them as etchings after his return to London.
Macartney’s goal to establish diplomatic and trade relations with China may have failed, but Alexander’s artworks offered people in Britain and Europe a rare glimpse into China’s landscapes and people’s way of life. Alexander later became a keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum.
Now, seven etchings and one watercolor from Alexander’s body of works are being shown in Beijing for the first time. And they provide a visual observation of China from a Western perspective.
The display includes a portrait of a seated Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) emperor Qianlong who received the Macartney embassy and summarily rejected all of Britain’s requests. There is also a landscape that depicts people sailing boats on lake inside Yuanmingyuan, or the Old Summer Palace, which was burned down by British and French troops in 1860.
This collection of artworks not only bears witness to the historic mission made by the Macartney embassy and 18th-century China. They also stand as testaments to a period during which British print culture flourished and elevated British art to new levels.
They are on show among dozens of British prints exhibited at From Hogarth to Turner, now on at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University.
The Beijing exhibition introduces major artists from the golden age of British art that began in the 18th century and lasted through the 19th century. During that time, the widely-spread application of printing technology helped transform the country into a “predominant cultural and political center of the Western world”, says Donald Stone, 74, who has taught at Peking University’s English department since 2006.
Stone is a retired professor from Queens College at the City University of New York. He has been an avid art collector for nearly six decades, with a particular interest in English drawings.
The works on display were largely donated by him to the Sackler museum, and some were bought by him on commission from the museum to enrich its collection.
The exhibition features 15 works by William Hogarth, the earliestborn artist (1697-1764) at the exhibition and the most important painter of his generation. The mass production of engravings of Hogarth’s paintings bolstered his popularity.
A set of four engravings Hogarth made in 1738, titled The Four Times of Day, depicts famous locations in London seen at day and night, including Covent Garden, the Poets’ Church and Sadler’s Wells Theater. And each of them tells a story “with the use of lively details” revealing common people’s everyday lives, says Stone.
For instance, the third plate titled Evening depicts in the center a woman and her husband walking along a street. The man holds a girl in his arms while strangely, he has a pair of horns grown out of his head which, Stone says, indicates that his wife has betrayed him by being pregnant with another man.
An increasing number of English painters after Hogarth followed his practice to extend their market influence by reproducing their paintings as prints.
“Only one person could own a painting, but the print of the painting could be owned by many people, thereby increasing that author’s reputation,” says Stone.
The works of some influential artists are on display, including Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), who was the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and his great rival Thomas Gainsborough whose portrait of Prince of Wales, later King George IV, is exhibited.
Stone says Paris had been the center of the print market until the mid-1750s, but thanks to the success of Hogarth and subsequent British artists, London became the center of printmaking.
“By the 1770s, French were buying English prints, whereas early in the 18th century, the English were buying French prints,” he says.
“Quite a few of the prints in the exhibition were bought by me from a Paris art dealer. These English prints had been enjoyed by French art collectors for over 200 years.”
The last — but by no means least — artists on show include John Constable (1776-1837) and William Turner (1775-1851) whose works show that “by the 19th century, British printmakers were the best in Europe”, says Stone.