Painted by fire: Jean Theodore Royer's Chinese enameled plaques - Collection from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam - Critical Essay

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2004 by Jan Van Campen

Part I: The porcelain plaques

In the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is a group of eighteen very unusual eighteenth-century Chinese painted plaques. This little collection comprises ten porcelain and eight copper examples, all very carefully painted in polychrome enamels, sepia, and encre de Chine.

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The decoration on some of the plaques follows Western models, others Chinese. All retain their original Chinese frames. Very few similar plaques are known, (1) and so their rarity alone justifies an examination of the Rijksmuseum group. However, their importance is greatly increased by their provenance. The whole ensemble came from the collection of Jean Theodore Royer (1737-1807), a lawyer from The Hague (2) who was the most important sinologist in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century and an assiduous collector of Chinese objects. This article will examine the porcelain plaques; next month, part two will treat the copper ones.

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In the spirit of his time, Royer endeavored to collect reliable and verifiable knowledge about China. He mistrusted European publications about China, and therefore tried to learn Chinese himself, so that he could refer to Chinese written sources. He collected objects for the same reason: for him they represented sources of information about the life of prosperous Chinese people, received straight from China and therefore entirely trustworthy. At the end of his life his total collection consisted of around three thousand album leaves and other paintings and about two thousand three-dimensional objects.

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Royer himself never traveled to China. As a scholar and collector he built up a network of contacts who could help him with his language studies and collecting. These contacts worked through friendly high-ranking representatives of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, hereafter VOC) based in Canton (now called Guangzhou), and these representatives, in turn, used their connections with European and Chinese interpreters and Chinese traders--the people who were actually in a position to obtain interesting objects for Royer. The most important of these interpreters was Carolus Wang, a Chinese man who had trained as a priest for eight years in Naples, and could therefore correspond directly with Royer in Latin. He worked in the 1770s as an interpreter and small-scale trader in Canton and hoped that through the mediation of Royer he might be able to sell large consignments of tea to the VOC. (3)

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The Royer provenance lends the ensemble a greater cohesion than could have been attained on purely stylistic or technical grounds. It appears from Royer's correspondence that his contacts were made in the beginning of the 1770s and were flourishing in 1775. By 1790 none of his VOC friends were still active in Canton. Thus, the plaques must all date between 1770 and 1790, which accords well with the style of painting on them, and there is reason to put the group at the very beginning of this period. Royer's contacts bought objects in Canton, and so it seems likely that the whole group was made there. Although this last observation may seem unnecessary--all such export pieces came after all from Canton--it provides a welcome starting point.

The ten porcelain plaques consist for the most part of pairs, although there is one set of four. They are discussed here in an order chosen by me, not one based on any historical source.

The designs in encre de Chine on the first two plaques (Pls. II, III) are exact copies of popular eighteenth-century English prints. One (Pl. II) follows The Death of the Fox, a mezzotint by Thomas Burford (Fig. 1), published in 1766, after a painting by James Seymour. (4) The painting belongs to a series, and various different engravers made prints after them. The second plaque seems to have been made after a print of In Full Chase, another painting from the series. I can only find a print based on this painting engraved by James Roberts (1725-1799), but the manner in which the trees are painted onto the porcelain surface suggests that a print by Burford was used for this image as well.

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Both The Death of the Fox and In Full Chase are painted in mirror image on the plaques. It is probable that the prints were duplicated in Canton by tracing over the outlines of the image, for instance with chalk, and then making a print from this onto another sheet. (5) Such copying enabled more porcelain painters to work at the same time using one image. Since hunting scenes after Seymour's paintings are well known on Chinese punch bowls and other crockery (most often not in mirror image), the need for variations is understandable. (6) I know of only one other Chinese porcelain plaque with a hunting scene; however, there are a number of smaller oval Staffordshire porcelain examples recorded. (7)

The second Royer pair is painted in a particularly detailed and painstaking way in sepia and gold (Pls. IV, V). In contrast to the first pair, the images are entirely Chinese, depicting scenes from The Western Wing (sometimes translated as The West Chamber), a thirteenth-century play that was extraordinarily popular in China, even into the eighteenth century. Published versions of the play were often illustrated, and the Chinese painter who decorated these plaques would certainly have been able to use a Chinese woodblock print as a source. Depictions of scenes from The Western Wing were frequently used on porcelain during the Kangxi period (1662-1722), but they became infrequent during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. (8)