From Exotic Excitement to Cultural-Wealth Possession: Four Nineteenth-Century Chinese Paintings in Museu do Oriente – Lisbon

Chin-Chi Yang

Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, National Tsinghua University, Taiwan

This paper copes with three unsolved issues arising from four title-unidentified Chinese optic works in the Orient Museum of Lisbon. First, the author was not well studied. Following the inscription left on the paintings, four works were all created by Chen Zhenji 陳振基. However, there are relatively few available documents to personalize the painter. Second, a Chinese known as “brother Weiqiao 偉橋兄” probably patronized and owned these paintings. Why these art possessions of a Chinese patron eventually have settled down in a Portuguese museum? And what is the exactly drifting routes of these paintings to Europe? Third, from the Age of Navigation starting from the fifteenth century to the Colonial Era arising between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, how were the collection tastes of foreign art objects shaped? The research methods of bibliography, iconology, visual analysis and intertextuality between motif and inscription are employed in this paper to answer these questions. The painter Chen Zhenji was believed to be also known as Chen Tao 陳 燾 (active in Tongzhi 同治 reign, from 1862 to 1873), a native of Kunshan 崑山 in Jiangsue 江蘇 province. Furthermore, the painting genre and subject-matters of these works, covering the literature illustrations of the Garden of Peaches of Immortality by Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 in the Six Dynasty, the folk legend of the Eight Immortals and the historical figures of Seven Sages of Bamboo Forest, were clearly consistent with the nineteenth-century drawing characteristics and topics popular in the Suzhou 蘇州 city rather than in the Guangdong 廣東 regions that served as the most important exporting areas of art goods in that period. Thus, new visions on the commercial network and cultural exchange between China and Europe are then able to be re-depicted.

Chin-Chi Yang obtained her first doctoral degree in Chinese Literature from National Taiwan Normal University in 2006 and worked as an assistant professor at National Tsing Hwa University, Taiwan. In 2020, she was granted her second doctoral degree in Chinese Art by SOAS, University of London. She is currently an adjunct assistant professor at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, National Tsinghua University in Taiwan. Her research interests are art history of Chinese painting, visual analysis, art aesthetics and interdisciplinary study.