M. Jourdain & R. Soame Jenyns, Chinese Export Art in the Eighteenth Century (London: 1950)
T. Audric, Chinese reverse glass painting: An artistic meeting between China and the West (Publications du Vitrocentre Romont: 2020)
F. Giese, H. B. Thomsen, E. Ambrosio, A. Martimyanova (eds.), China and the West: Reconsidering Chinese Reverse Glass Painting, Volume 1 (Publications du Vitrocentre Romont: 2023)
A very fine and large-sized pair of eighteenth-century Chinese export reverse-painted mirrors, depicting ladies and a gentleman sitting amongst nature, in fine costume and playing flutes, in eighteenth-century giltwood frames.
During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, England was fascinated with the Orient. A mood of optimism following the Restoration in 1660 and the increase in imports of Chinese goods following the 1663 Bullion Act started a craze for all things Oriental. A booming export trade in China, supported by the East India Company, supplied an abundance of goods for English consumers desiring a taste of the Orient.
Amongst the myriad of export wares such as lacquer and porcelain, Chinese mirror paintings, imported into England from the late 1730s until about 1800, were some of the most highly prized pieces of Chinese export art. Their brilliant colours enlivened Western interiors and their depictions of mystical scenes of pagodas and exotic animals and flora provided both an outlet for fantasy and relief to the rigidness of classical design.
The exceptional, fine quality of the painting also accounted for their prestige. The present pair is a fine example of a characteristic feature of the genre, the richly detailed costume, a feature the architect Sir William Chambers employed Siou Sing Saang, the “celebrated Chinese master” and one of the only two known Canton glass painters, to depict in a series of glass paintings that served as inspiration for the costume plates in his famous 1757 publication Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils. Depicting three ladies and a gentleman, the present pair features intricate sheer lace, headdresses, gold brocade and embroidered hemming, flowing skirts with folds and jewellery, all rendered in fine detail.
Subjects depicted in this manner were a primary attraction for English buyers. Groups of well-dressed well-to-do men attending court or elegant ladies sitting in lavish pavilions conveyed all the aristocratic ease and grace that appealed to English buyers’ noble sensibility. In the case of the present pair, finely dressed ladies and a gentleman sitting beside rams and the water evoke a pastoral idyll.
The plate glass of the present paintings, like that of all reverse-painted mirrors of the period, was imported into China from Europe before being decorated by Chinese artists and then re-exported. Glass plate began to be manufactured in China in about 1700, but for the duration of the eighteenth century remained inferior in quality to that produced in England and Europe, being used primarily for lamps and windowpanes rather than artworks.
Depicting two ladies playing flutes, the present paintings can be associated with the music-poetry workshop, probably active between 1750 and 1770, leading examples from which are in the collection of Drottningholm Palace, Stockholm. The large giltwood overmantel mirror in the Pavilion’s south drawing room containing five pairs of painted mirrors features a single large glass poetry painting at the base, the pair to the music painting in the Pavilion library. T. Audric discusses this in Chinese Reverse Glass Painting (2020) (pp. 120-121) where he provides further closely related examples featuring ladies and gentlemen playing the lyre and flute amongst nature, as in the present pictures. The seated gentleman in the present paintings also, incidentally, holds a manuscript, possibly a book of poems.