China Trade Paintings on Glass

chapter 3 Copying in Reverse: China Trade Paintings on Glass

Maggie M. Cao

In 1802, Philadelphia painter Gilbert Stuart made the unfortunate discovery that his lucrative business in George Washington portraits—painted replicas of a 1796 original that he sold to patriotic Americans for $100 a piece (figure 3.1)— had been undercut by a local China trader. The culprit was John E. Sword, the captain of a merchant vessel recently returned from Canton, who was also sell- ing the familiar Washington portraits, though not in the American artist’s hand (figure 3.2). According to the lawsuit brought against him by Stuart, Sword had purchased an authenticated portrait the year before and taken it to China for the purpose of procuring “above one hundred copies … by Chinese artists” to sell for profit.1 Commodities made in China and consumed in the West (whether authentic or counterfeit) have become so ubiquitous in recent decades that it may be tempting to heap all the connotations of today’s “Made in China” moniker onto Sword’s surreptitiously obtained copies. However, such manufacturing prac- tices were only in their infancy in 1802, and personal entrepreneurial ventures like Sword’s never aspired to the scale of industrial production. Indeed, early American consumers largely viewed Chinese-made goods as markers of exoti- cism and worldly refinement. A decade earlier, George Washington himself had procured “a very genteel set” of porcelain from Canton: 302 pieces, each hand-painted with an emblem signifying a Revolutionary War fraternity (prob- ably copied from a bookplate or other printed matter).2

1 On the Stuart-Sword case, see E. P. Richardson, “Notes and Documents: China Trade Portraits of Washington after Stuart,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 94 (January 1970): 95–100; Winnie Wong, “After the Copy: Creativity, Originality and the Labor of Appro- priation: Dafen Village, Shenzhen, China (1989–2010)” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2010), 90–100; Egon Verheyen, “ ‘The most exact representation of the Original,’: Remarks on the Portraits of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart and Rembrandt Peale,” in Retaining the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies, and Reproductions Studies, ed. Kathleen Preciado (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 127–40; and Dorinda Evans, The Genius of Gilbert Stuart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 86, 148–49. 2 Henry Lee Jr. to George Washington, July 3, 1786, in The Papers of George Washington, Confed- eration Series, ed. W. W. Abbott, vol. 4, 2 April 1786–31 January 1787 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 147–49.

figure 3.1 Gilbert Stuart, George Washington, ca. 1803, oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of H. O. Havemeyer, 1888 (88.18)

Since copyright protection did not yet extend to images, Chinese copies of Western artworks were hardly limited to the Washington portrait.3 Stuart may have judged the practice as unethical (he would eventually win his case on a contract technicality that halted further circulation of the imported pictures), but at their site of production on the other side of the globe, the making of such pictures was much more than a simple case of forgery for profit. As net- works of capital and material exchange reshaped the maritime globe, what did Chinese craftsmen—the silent reproducers of artworks like the Washington portrait—understand about their role in imitating and redistributing the cul- tural products of the West?

3 Winnie Wong challenges the status of the Chinese paintings of Washington as “copies” and Stuart’s multiplies as “originals” in “After the Copy,” 90–100.