The enigma of Spoilum and the origins of China trade portraiture

Magazine Antiques, March, 1998 by Patrick Conner

There is also a sense of detachment, of irony perhaps, and above all of ambiguity in the image of Lieutenant Watts. As portrayed by the Chinese artist Spoilum in 1794, Watts's character is open to various interpretations. We may see him as confident and optimistic - a rising officer in the Royal Navy due to be promoted the following year to the rank of commander. Or we may see him as a firm disciplinarian, who, as captain of the Osprey, lashed his sailors for minor offenses, as his logbook records. Or again we may detect a certain melancholy, arising perhaps from his experience as a young midshipman on board the Resolution during the last of Captain James Cook's voyages of discovery, when he witnessed Cook's tragic death in Hawaii in 1779.(1)

The sense of ambivalence pervades many of Spoilum's portraits. The effect of his confident modeling of the face and his characteristic mannerisms - a pursing of the corners of the mouth and a slight raising of the eyebrows - is to enable the sitter to distance himself from the spectator and maintain his dignity and sense of self. Whereas Chinese ancestor portraits traditionally confront the viewer full face, Spoilum's subjects present the oblique body angle and quizzicality of expression that seem to have an enduring appeal to the Western spectator. The effect is the more remarkable since, in all probability, Spoilum never traveled outside his native China and never met a professional artist from the West.

Spoilum's career is as enigmatic as his portraits. We have no more than a handful of inscriptions and brief accounts to document his work, although these have sufficed to provoke a rash of speculation about his possible achievements.(2) How, for example, did he come by his curious name? At first one is tempted to regard it as a nickname in the venerable tradition of a Thwackum, the tutor in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), and the legendary launderers Rippem and Tearem. In fact the word, spoilem did have a place in the pidgin spoken by the Chinese "linguists" attached to the Western merchants in Canton. In a military context, at least, it meant "killed" (or at least "injured"). The Salem-based merchant William Henry Low was told by a Chinese informant that in a naval battle during the first Opium War as many as a hundred people were "all spoilem."(3)

It seems more likely that the name Spoilum, or at least the second syllable, "lum," is directly related to the artist's family name. The most celebrated China trade painter of the next generation was known as Lamqua (qua being an honorific suffix). The "lam" (or "lum") component could well signal a family connection, although the precise relationship is still unknown.(4)

In Spoilum's time Canton (now Guangzhou) was the only Chinese port at which Westerners were allowed to trade. The city had a long history of exporting artifacts adapted to foreign tastes, particularly porcelain. Spoilum's work falls directly into this category, and he is the earliest identifiable Chinese artist who worked in oil on canvas for the Western market, apparently beginning to paint in this manner in the 1780s. There were earlier pictures produced in Canton for the export market, including topographical scenes (often in a format derived from the horizontal hand scroll), botanical studies, and series of costumed figures, but they were in the traditional Chinese medium of waterbased paint.

The techniques of painting in offs were familiar to the imperial court in Peking from the early years of the eighteenth century, having been introduced by the Jesuit fathers and lay brothers in the emperor's service.(5) The missionaries and their Chinese pupils painted in oils on various surfaces, including canvas, and Chinese records show that several "foreign oil paintings" were sent from Canton to Peking between 1728 and 1735 and later.(6) However, painting in this medium had no significant impact on the mainstream of Chinese art.

The one form of oil painting that seems to have found favor in the imperial circle at the time, as a curiosity at least, was painting on sheets of glass. According to his own account the lay brother Jean Denis Attiret (1702-1768) introduced the techniques of reverse painting on glass to China. It seems that he began to paint on glass in 1740, shortly after his arrival in Peking. He wrote in a letter dated November 4, 1741:

For more than a year I have been doing nothing else but paint on glass. There are brought from Europe a quantity of large and beautiful mirrors, which the Mandarins of Canton purchase from off the merchant vessels, and present to the Emperor.(7)

Reverse painting on glass had been practiced in Europe since the Middle Ages, and it was adopted and skillfully developed by Cantonese artists, who worked both for Western visitors to Canton and for the imperial court in Peking. Indeed, the Cantonese painters may have anticipated Attiret, since the lists of tribute items sent from Canton to Peking in 1733 include "glass mirror[s] with floral pattern, 2 pieces."(8) Moreover, in 1739 Captain Bootle of the East India Company ship London brought back from Canton for his own account "6 Glass Pictures."(9)