Collecting Chinese Flora

Ming Qing Yanjiu 24 (2020) 209–244

brill.com/mqyj

Collecting Chinese Flora: Eighteenth- to Nineteenth-Century Sino-British Scientific and Cultural Exchanges as Seen through British Collections of China Trade Botanical Paintings

Josepha Richard University of Bristol, UK [email protected]

Abstract

In the eighteenth to nineteenth century, British botanists collected thousands of Chinese plants to advance their knowledge of natural history. John Bradby Blake was the first British botanist to systematically collect Chinese plants in the 1770s, a time when foreigners could only access Guangzhou (Canton). This article demonstrates that Blake’s Chinese flora project heavily relied on the work of Chinese ‘go-betweens’, notably painter Mak Sau, who painted Chinese plants in a scientifically accurate manner. The genre of Canton Trade botanical paintings is a hybrid between European botanical tradition and Chinese bird-and-flower paintings that had previously been difficult to analyse owing to the lack of chronological evidence. Thanks to new data uncovered in different Blake collections, this article begins to untangle the chronology of these botanical paintings, and in the process uncovers the untold agency of Chinese ‘go-betweens’ in early Sino-Western scientific and cultural exchanges.

Keywords

Chinese export art – natural history – history of collections – Canton System – China Trade – botany – botanical illustrations

During the Canton System period (1757–1842), Western European and North American visitors to China could only visit Guangzhou and Macao. This restric- tion did not reduce the volume in tea trade, but it did have an impact on the

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/24684791-12340049Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 10:23:39PM via free access 210 Richard sort of Chinese art that was brought back to Europe. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, a large quantity of paintings and decorative art pieces ei- ther made in Guangzhou, or other parts of China and transiting through the city, were brought back to Western Europe and North America by the traders engaged in the China Trade. These Chinese artworks were no longer only made for Chinese tastes: there started to be artworks purposefully made for the Western market. China Trade art (sometimes called ‘export art’) is character- ized by the fact that it was meant for sale to foreigners: some Chinese artists exclusively worked for the Western European and North American market specifically, and their artworks were literally ‘made for trade’.1 Some of these artworks the foreign visitors intended to sell once back home, and many ended up in the collections of European gentry. Parts of the artworks were meant as me- mentos to remember the traders’ time in China and display in their home—in time most of these too found their way to the auction houses. When looking for new information on Chinese cultural history, China Trade art might not appear as the most evident source of enquiry, since its purpose was to please a non-Chinese audience. Despite some undeniable pressure to conform to the orientalist expecta- tions of their intended audience, and adoption of certain techniques such as Western perspective, scholars have shown that China Trade paintings can make for surprisingly reliable historical evidence. Lawrence Wu demonstrated that mid-nineteenth-century China Trade watercolours made in Ningbo and now kept in the Brooklyn Museum accurately represented Chinese trades such as street food vendors by contrasting them with early photographs.2 Kee Il Choi Jr. has elucidated the origins of several frequently represented land- scapes and cityscapes in and around Guangzhou.3 Economic historian Paul van Dyke and art historian Maria Mok have more recently used a series of cityscapes to document the architectural history of the Factories, a row of buildings where Western European and North American merchants lived and traded in Guangzhou during the period of the Canton System.4 China Trade paintings were also shown to be realistic depictions of Chinese merchants’ gardens at the same period, down to the very potted plants whose species could be identified.5 The present article focuses on China Trade botanical paintings

1 Hence the title of Rosalien van der Poel’s Made for Trade, Made in China: Chinese Export Paintings in Dutch Collections (2016). 2 Lawrence Wu 1989: 63. 3 Kee Il Choi 1997, 1998, 1999. 4 Van Dyke and Mok 2015. 5 Richard and Woudstra 2018.

Ming Qing YanjiuDownloaded 24 from (2020) Brill.com10/03/2021 209–244 10:23:39PM via free access Collecting Chinese Flora 211 made in Guangzhou under the Canton System. Carl Crossman agreed with Craig Clunas that among China Trade paintings, “botanical subjects were some of the very few which grew out of a native Chinese tradition”.6 Indeed when Western European botanists asked the employees of maritime enterprises to gather Chinese flora in the eighteenth century, they found that Chinese painters with an already extant tradition of painting naturalistic plants were ideally suited to produce scientifically accurate botanical paintings to accompany live specimen. The Song Academic School of painting in particular is known for its naturalistic style of ‘birds and flowers’ genre.7 The fact that foreign naturalists commissioned botanical paintings for scientific purposes means that the agency of the Chinese painters, as well as that of other Chinese contributors that helped collect the plants represented, was often forgotten. At some point in time China Trade painters modified botanical paintings meant as scientific tools to sell the latter in decorative albums to their foreign customers. The chronology of this transition has not so far been studied in detail, in large part due to the vast numbers of albums that such research entails, and their dispersion across the globe. This paper is an attempt to establish such a chronology, by using collections that are largely kept outside of China. Although foreign commissioners, customers, and collectors amount to a large part of this story, the aim of the paper is to reinstate some of the agency for the creation of both types of China Trade botanical paintings to multiple hidden Chinese contributors. As such the topic is firmly grounded in the late Qing dynasty history of collections.

1 Dating British Collections of China Trade Botanical Art

Although it is slowly becoming part of ‘mainstream’ Chinese art history, ex- pertise in China Trade art has long lied within the exclusive realm of enlightened collectors. Whether descendants of their original owners or acquirers through auction houses, a large debt is owed to worldwide collectors in dating and attributing China Trade artworks. Crossman acknowledged as much in the foreword to the updated edition of Decorative Art of the China Trade in 1991, which is still the uncontested reference book in the field. One of the earliest enlightened collectors of China Trade paintings was American trader Nathan Dunn (1782–1844), whose Chinese Museum opened in Philadelphia

6 Clunas 1984: 82; Crossman 1991: 182. 7 Hulton and Smith 1979: 3–7.

Ming Qing Yanjiu 24 (2020) 209–244 Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 10:23:39PM via free access 212 Richard in 1838, was briefly exhibited in 1840–1850s England, and was consequently dispersed through auction sale.8 The contemporary reception of the artworks was far from warm, despite Dunn’s praise for the artists’ realistic skills. The mass-produced nature of the great part of the artworks, and at times failed attempts to conform to Western taste when it came to the use of perspective, were common criticisms of China Trade artworks.9 The largest single collection worldwide likely remains that of the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts, founded in 1799 by families involved in the China Trade. Since the British generated the most volume of trade among foreigners in nineteenth-century Guangzhou, it is unsurprising that the United Kingdom holds numerous private and public collections of China Trade art. The latter were little known until the important works of Patrick Conner and Craig Clunas were published in the 1990s.10 Since the 2000s, scholars are progressively rediscovering China Trade artworks long held in European and North American museums, encountering issues such as uncertain dating and attribution. In La Rochelle in France, several genre paintings by Youqua had simply been forgotten under a table in the museum’s reserve until they were rediscovered by Genevieve Lacambre in 2005.11 Since then, the oil paintings have been restored and exhibited successfully. For museums, acquiring China Trade artworks constitutes a safe investment, as the artworks were usually legally acquired, contrarily to other Chinese artworks whose provenance might not be as clear. In response to more frequent exhibitions and new publications, the value of China Trade art has risen in auction houses across the world. As such, China Trade art makes for an ideal and contemporarily relevant topic when it comes to the history of collecting, collections, and collectors in the context of late imperial China and its global connections. Botanical paintings are especially interesting since their interconnection with the Chinese tradition of bird and flower paintings and Western naturalist endeavours allows us to query the motivations of both artists and customers across the span of roughly a century of global connections in Guangzhou. At the origin of my interest in dating China Trade botanical paintings is an album kept in the British Museum. Combining three different genres including Chinese flora, costumes, and boats from the late eighteenth century, the

8 Jane C. Ju 2014: 62. 9 Maria Mok 2014: 32. 10 Clunas 1987; Conner 1996. 11 Moreau and Musée des beaux-arts de La Rochelle 2015: 13.

Ming Qing YanjiuDownloaded 24 from (2020) Brill.com10/03/2021 209–244 10:23:39PM via free access Collecting Chinese Flora 213 paintings are not in a silk binding and were probably combined in a leather album after leaving China. From as early as the first two pages, difficulties arise: the exact owner was difficult to identify, as several possibilities marked in pencil and stricken through seem to indicate, including prestigious British noble- men such as Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) and Lord Bute (1713–1792). The final identification appears to be ‘Ms.Lansd. Num. 1242’: this abbreviation stands for the collection of William Petty, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne (1737–1805).12 While it is not yet certain when Lord Lansdowne acquired the China Trade paintings and other various Chinese items in his collection, his death provides a terminus ante quem date of 1805. Purchased with a parliamentary grant in 1807 and first hosted in the British Museum, the Lansdowne collection was moved to the British Library where it is now most famous for its illuminated medieval manuscripts.13 In 1928 and 1973 respectively, two sets of China Trade paintings were sent back to the British Museum, this back and forth explain- ing why scholars have not yet paid attention to the “Lansdowne 1242”, which was returned the latest. While trying to determine why such paintings would feature in the collection of a British noble at the turn of the nineteenth century, I turned to the other two potential noble owners abovementioned. Both Sir Hans Sloane and John Stuart, 3rd Lord Bute shared a strong interest in the science of botany, yet in that regard the “Lansdowne 1242” album would have hardly been of interest to them, as it only contains ‘decorative’ botanical paintings, by contrast with the realistic botanical drawings with magnified parts and cut fruits or seeds favoured by European botanists of the time. Among the Chinese ornamentals represented, several seemed familiar, notably individual leaves representing a begonia and a peony. These leaves appear to be close copies from earlier album leaves located in other collections of Chinese botanical paintings kept in several institutions worldwide. When it came to watercolours and gouache, Canton Trade painters often used a pattern book to mass-produce albums of landscape, botanical, or genre paintings featuring Chinese flora, ships, or costumes, which were popular among Western visitors. Clunas has described how the Canton Trade artists could obtain copies of a scene by using heavily inked originals.14 A chronological approach is not best suited to uncover the agency of Chinese contributors behind Western plant collection and commission of botanical paintings in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The interconnections between high

12 Ellis and Douce 1819. 13 “Lansdowne Manuscripts”, British Library. 14 Clunas 1984: 75.

Ming Qing Yanjiu 24 (2020) 209–244 Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 10:23:39PM via free access 214 Richard quality commissions on one hand and ready-made ‘floral paintings’ that could be purchased in the China Trade studios by any customer on the other makes the task difficult. The materiality of the botanical albums itself yields most of the reliable information available, as the life and death of their latest owners, be it British nobles or American wealthy families, are often recorded and can help us untangle the copies from the originals. As such it is very likely that the paintings brought together in the Lansdowne album, perhaps purchased individually by the Marquess himself, have come from several artists. The collections formed by British nobility remind us that of European princes’ accu- mulation of precious prints and paintings as a display of their taste in the early modern period.15 The begonia in the Lansdowne album (Figure 2) is a decorative copy of two 1770–1773 paintings in the collection of John Bradby Blake kept in the Natural History Museum (NHM) and the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) in London (Figure 1). A British botanist and supercargo for the British East India Company (EIC), Blake is the earliest commissioner of China Trade botanical paintings in Guangzhou and initially intended the painting as a scientific tool.16 In the Lansdowne album, the begonia has lost its black frame, its Chinese name, part of a leaf lost to imaginary decay, and therefore some of its realistic crispness, but in exchange it gained a few flowers and leaves on the right side of the stem, as well as a pink hue for increased decorative appeal. Such decorative quality could correspond with the collection of the second earliest commissioner of China Trade botanical paintings, Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest (1739–1801), second in command of the 1794–1795 Dutch embassy to Beijing. Born Dutch, Van Braam Houckgeest later became an American citizen and is most famous for the lavish collection of Chinese artwork he brought back to Philadelphia in 1796.17 The thousands of China Trade watercolours he commissioned from two unnamed Chinese artists in Guangzhou in 1790–1795 were later dispersed so completely that scholars are still trying to trace them all. The largest part was sold in 1799 at Christie’s in London when Van Braam Houckgeest ran into debts and returned to Europe, but a part of the collection was kept by his American family, and another by the Dutch side in Amsterdam.18 Among the watercolours, botanical topics were a minority, and have not yet been discussed much. The numerous landscape paintings have been most discussed as

15 Fitzner 2019: 65. 16 See the special edition (43.4) of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine on John Bradby Blake, starting with the introduction (Crane and Loehle 2017). 17 Carpenter 1974: 340. 18 Carpenter 1974: 341.

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figure 1 Left: Begonia, Blake collection, NHM, London. Right: Begonia, Blake collection, RCP, London

figure 2 Begonia, “Lansdowne 1242” album, British Museum they include views of the Yuanmingyuan, whose design has held a fascinating appeal since its destruction in 1860. Kee Il Choi has located a large part of the landscape paintings in the PEM, and Bruce MacLaren mentions that several other smaller parts are located in Florence, Paris, and Amsterdam.19 Most interestingly, MacLaren demonstrates that two albums of fifty landscape paintings

19 Kee Il Choi 1998: 437; MacLaren n.d.

Ming Qing Yanjiu 24 (2020) 209–244 Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 10:23:39PM via free access 216 Richard kept in the British Museum are almost identical with the PEM set, pointing to Kee Il Choi’s earlier article. Choi described a “similar set of paintings from the Lansdowne Collection” that corresponds with the China Trade paintings returned from the British Library to the British Museum in 1928, and described in the Lansdowne catalogue as “Lansdowne 1243. One hundred views of the in- terior of China in two volumes”.20 If Choi and MacLaren’s identification of the PEM paintings and the Lansdowne 1243 as part of Van Braam Houckgeest’s collection is correct, then “Lansdowne 1242” might also have been part of the Van Braam collection and was probably acquired by the Marquess of Lansdowne in the 1799 Christie’s sale. It would be logical for 1790s painters to have seen the paintings made for John Bradby Blake, or for one of the painters to be one and the same with Blake’s artists, Mak Sau, who was a middle-aged man in the 1770s.21 The only certified part of the botanical paintings from Van Braam’s collection so far consist of the thirty hand-coloured plates reproduced in 1821 by Charles Henry Bellenden Ker in Icones Plantarum sponte China nascentium; e Bibliotheca Braamiana excerptae.22 Ker was allowed to copy an album owned by British merchant and orchid enthusiast William Cattley (1788–1835), suppos- edly part of Van Braam’s collection.23 The plants described in Icones Plantarum are familiar with other albums but the stylized aspect of the engravings make it difficult to clearly match them with specific copies. This question of attribution is rendered rather thorny by the Lansdowne peony, which appears like a very close copy of a leaf from Alexander Duncan’s 1794–1796 “Chinese Flowers” album currently kept in the Royal Botanical Garden of Edinburgh (RBGE) on behalf of the Duncan family (Figure 3). A surgeon for the EIC that also collected plants for Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820), president of the Kew Royal Gardens, Duncan would have been aware that his album was decorative rather than scientific in description. Although doubt remains as to which peony came first between the Lansdowne and the Duncan, the composition was probably inspired by one of You Shouping 惲壽平 (1633–1690)’s peony paintings, or the closer contemporary Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766)’s painting at the Qing court.24 To my knowledge it was Charlotte Brooks of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) in London that first noticed that the peonies in Canton Trade botanical watercolours tended to share the same composition.

20 Ellis and Douce 1819: 303. 21 Discussed further in Section 2. 22 Ker 1821. 23 Sotheby’s 2014. 24 Kristen Chiem 2017: 88–102.

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figure 3 Left: White peony, “Lansdowne 1242” album, British Museum. Right: White peony, Duncan’s “Chinese Flowers” album, RGBE

figure 4 Left: Magnolia, Duncan’s “Chinese Flowers” album, RBGE. Centre: White magnolia, 13th Earl of Derby’s Chinese album, Liverpool World Museum. Right: White magnolia, Farquhar album, PEM

Other plants represented in the Duncan album also feature in several other collections in museums in the US and UK. To pick but one example of the white magnolia (Figure 4), in the UK its close copy is found in yet another British noble’s collection, that of the 13th Earl of Derby. His Chinese album is now kept in Liverpool World Museum.25 In the United States, the most

25 Chinese album in the collection of the 13th Earl of Derby, Liverpool World Museum. See Fisher 2002: 162.

Ming Qing Yanjiu 24 (2020) 209–244 Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 10:23:39PM via free access 218 Richard interesting match is perhaps the Farquhar collection in the PEM: Sir Robert Townsend Farquhar and his wife received this album in 1823 when leaving the island of Mauritius where Farquhar had served as governor. In all likeliness it was made by a Canton Trade artist, although it is unknown whether the artist lived in Mauritius or if the album was previously brought there in unknown circumstances.26 Although the above-mentioned correspondences between leaves in Canton Trade decorative botanical albums helps us reconstruct some of the overall chronology, it is necessary to turn next to commissioned botanical paintings to elucidate the presence of the Blake ‘begonia’ in the Lansdowne collection.

2 Hidden Contributors Behind Western ‘Exploration’ of Chinese Flora

In eighteenth-century Europe, the Linnaean system of plant classification (1735) made the science of botany more generally available to amateurs, where it previously had been a specialized field of knowledge.27 Combined with ever- growing access to foreign plants, in large part supported by imperial and commercial maritime powers, the wealthy and middle classes of France and Britain started to pursue their passion for botany outside of albums by growing real specimen: this dedication was aptly nicknamed ‘Botanomania’. With interest in new plants to grow at home came the development of commercial nurseries, which in turn required new specimen to satisfy an avid clientele. However, Carl Linnaeus can be credited for more than the invention of the binomial nomenclature. He also pioneered a ‘cameralist’ agenda in northern Europe; in other words, a research for economically valuable natural resources to support one’s state. Efforts were made to naturalize important plants such as the tea (Camellia sinensis) that was acquired at great cost through the China Trade. Such an interest was mirrored elsewhere in the world by Spanish imperial botanical expeditions in Latin America.28 Similarly, the Japanese re- viewed their own flora to provide for famine relief and medical uses under the Tokugawa Shogunate.29 In the British Empire, new plants were required for several reasons, for example for feeding the American colonies or

26 Corrigan 2014: 97. 27 Easterby‐Smith 2017: 282. 28 Bleichmar 2017: 131. 29 Noltie 2017: 430.

Ming Qing YanjiuDownloaded 24 from (2020) Brill.com10/03/2021 209–244 10:23:39PM via free access Collecting Chinese Flora 219 improving medical knowledge.30 As such, it is hardly surprising that British naturalists turned, among other places, to the Qing empire in their quest for plants: European readers had long been told of the vegetal wonders of Chinese gardens by the likes of Marco Polo or, more recently and convincingly, by Jesuit missionaries. If the European fascination for Chinese culture was often mired in orientalist inaccuracies, when collecting plants there were practical issues to confront. Western European naturalists were ready to face numerous difficulties in bringing back live plants during a six-month journey, all for the promise of exotic new plants to introduce in Europe. The British were particularly interested in Chinese flora, “since much of China laid in the temperate climate zone, it presumably meant that its plants would do well in Britain”.31 Jesuit naturalists such as French Pierre le Chéron d’Incarville (1706–1757) already worked in Beijing in the late Qing period, and shared their findings with correspondents in Europe.32 However, this was the realm of religious networks, and in contrast not every European nation could deploy trained naturalists for plant collections abroad. As a result, botanical research relied increasingly on the employees of the maritime commercial companies, for example the EIC. The employees of the maritime enterprises, which were already travelling across the world, took an essential role in the history of collecting global natural history until the end of the eighteenth century, when expeditions were organized especially to gather new specimen.33 During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, botanical collecting was often conducted by medically trained surgeons working for maritime institutions, but other officers also participated in gathering plants and information, particularly when it came to Indian and Chinese flora. In the field of history of science, the British endeavours have been described as ‘Company Science’, because the EIC first and foremost promoted the interest of the British Empire, to the det- riment of local agency or by erasing the local names.34 In India in particular, EIC-related botanists tended to institutionalize a “hierarchy of knowledge in which indigenous plant lore and illustrative skill were subordinated to Western science”.35 In both India and China, the British naturalists relied heavily on local ‘go-betweens’ to collect plants, appropriate knowledge, and commission botanical paintings. If British botanical collection in China cannot be entirely

30 Batsaki, Cahalan, and Tchikine 2016: 4. 31 Fa-ti Fan 2003: 65. 32 Genest 1997: 34. 33 Fa-ti Fan 2004: 12. 34 Baber 1996: 157. 35 Arnold 2008: 899.

Ming Qing Yanjiu 24 (2020) 209–244 Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 10:23:39PM via free access 220 Richard understood outside of colonial history, until 1842 the EIC employees operated in very different terms with the Chinese empire than they did in India, since the Canton System prevented access to most of the Chinese territory. It was Scottish EIC surgeon James Cuninghame that made the first recorded British attempt to obtain a comprehensive view of Chinese flora, and this before the Linnaean system had been established. Cuninghame travelled to Amoy (Xiamen) and Chusan in 1697–1699 and not only sent back hundreds of Chinese plant specimen (seeds and herbarium), but also several hundred Chinese paintings representing a range of Chinese plants.36 Cuninghame’s early plant specimen and paintings were asked for and received eagerly by the Royal Society’s James Petiver (1665–1718), and became part of Sir Hans Sloane’s collection in the British Museum. Some of the seeds, such as those of the tallow tree, were grown successfully in England, and many of the plants were subsequently discussed in scientific papers. Although Cuninghame is sup- posed to have commissioned the botanical paintings from local Chinese artists, the great variations in the quality and composition of the paintings now kept in the British Library is important to note.37 Jane Kilpatrick has suggested that there were at least three different artists’ work represented among the Cuninghame collection, and that some of the paintings were ‘floral pictures’; in other words, flower paintings bought directly from the Chinese artists and painted for decorative purpose without a foreigner’s directions.38 It is not surprising that Cuninghame, arriving in a foreign city without much in the way of personal connections, could not find Chinese artists that were trained in the finest tradition of bird and flower painting. Nonetheless, the painters were able to produce a satisfactory likeness of local plants, even without training in export art: they likely had acquired knowledge of how to represent plants from the legacy of Song painters’ botanical paintings, or awareness of Chinese compendium of materia medica.39 As a result, rather than accurate depictions allowing for scientific identification and in-depth understanding of the plant, Petiver and Sloane were able to peruse what amounts to a decorative catalogue of the plants available in China. The decorative value of the paintings did not prevent an unknown person from cutting the latter in irregular ways and then fixing them into albums of Western make, on much larger pages. The resulting

36 Jarvis and Oswald 2015: 136. 37 Cuninghame, “Drawings of Chinese Flowers”, British Library. Recently digitized with funding from the OSGF. 38 Kilpatrick and Crawley 2007: 37. 39 Clunas 1984: 84.

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figure 5 Flowering peach tree, Cuninghame’s “Drawing of Chinese Flowers” collection, British Library, folio 10 albums can no longer be understood as a ‘series’, since the original material was severely altered in its form and order (Figure 5). Despite the aforementioned lack of coherence, to this day the paintings are referred to as ‘Cuninghame’s collection’, which also ignores the possible agency of the Chinese painters in choosing the plants and painting composition. In the early eighteenth century, the difficulties of transporting live mate- rials over long distances and lengths of time had not yet been satisfactorily solved—prompting further attempts to obtain a comprehensive understanding of Chinese flora and seeds to be naturalized on British soil. The most well known of these further British attempts were all orchestrated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century under the aegis of one man, Sir Joseph Banks, president of the British Royal Society, “whose position epitomised the continuing hold of London over Company patronage and decision making” in botanical collection from the mid-1770s.40 Perhaps best considered as one of the fathers of British ‘Company Science’, Banks made full use of the EIC to further a cameralist agenda in service of the British Empire. Organizing and taking part in several infamous expedition such as the first Endeavour expedition (1768–1771) under Captain James Cook, Banks is famous for having used his wide network of trained and amateurs naturalists across the world to en- rich the Royal British gardens with exotic specimen. Following the Linnaean tradition, the plants were sometimes named according to their origin, but as often according to which foreigner ‘discovered’ them.41 A series of men helped

40 Arnold 2008: 905. 41 Cook 2010.

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Banks collect Chinese plants from China, from the narrow territories opened to foreigners under the Canton System in Guangzhou and Macao. Alexander Duncan, Clarke Abel, William Kerr, and John Reeves are the main surgeons and botanists that brought or sent plants back to Banks.42 William Kerr and John Reeves in particular were sent by Banks and asked to collect plants systematically, as well as commissioning corresponding botanical paintings from local artists. The latter were scientifically accurate ‘plant portraits’ meant to be realistic enough for botanists back in Britain to identify them. Future plant collectors had to be able to use the paintings as visual references, and as such they are often annotated with Chinese names, the latter’s transcription from Cantonese, and sometimes corresponding Latin names. Reeves worked on behalf of the EIC and the RHS: the part of his collection kept in the RHS has recently benefitted from a detailed work by Kate Bailey in John Reeves, Pioneering Collector of Chinese Plants and Botanical Art. Bailey offers in-depth understanding on the context behind the Reeves collection, which was commissioned from 1817 to 1830 and represents thousands of paintings. Her research on the materiality of the paintings is an important addition to the knowledge of Canton Trade botanical paintings, as few institutions have been so far able to have the paper and pigments analysed.43 The Reeves extensive collection is split among several large institutions in the UK and US, such as the NHM in London and the Harvard Arboretum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet recent findings suggest that Reeves cannot be fully credited as ‘pioneering’, at least when it comes to his approach to commissioning botanical paintings. Reeves is linked with the EIC and Banks and, as such, part of the ‘Company Science’ that tended to develop by absorbing local knowledge of flora and publishing it under British names. In the light of the comparisons uncovered in the previous section, 1817–1830 is a late period for Canton Trade botanical paintings, and it is likely that some paintings attributed as ‘Reeves’ were in fact copied from earlier patterns. Despite the long Chinese tradition of grafting trees and cataloguing Chinese medicinal plants, at the turn of the nineteenth century, as Sino-Western tensions rose and the Chinese empire was perceived as morally corrupt and immobile, Western naturalists such as John Livingstone, a surgeon for the EIC in post in Guangzhou, felt justified to dismiss completely Chinese horticultural knowledge when addressing the RHS.44 Western travellers similarly changed their reception of Chinese gardens

42 Fa-ti Fan 2004: 20. 43 Haida Liang et al. 2014. 44 Livingstone 1820: 422.

Ming Qing YanjiuDownloaded 24 from (2020) Brill.com10/03/2021 209–244 10:23:39PM via free access Collecting Chinese Flora 223 from natural-looking to grotesque and artificial.45 Despite ideological rejection of Chinese intellectual prowess, in reality British naturalists borrowed from Chinese materia medica thanks to Chinese translators, and hired a range of Chinese go-betweens to facilitate their appropriation of Chinese flora. The importance of Chinese contributors is made most evident through the manuscript papers of British trader and botanist John Bradby Blake, which preceded John Reeves in Guangzhou by several decades. Although mentioned in passing by previous scholars, until 2018 the importance of Blake’s Chinese botanical paintings collection had largely been ignored: as with many other collections, it was split into several archives, and the largest part had long stayed unknown in private collections. The last owner, the late Rachel Mellon, turned her collection into the philanthropic Oak Spring Garden Foundation (OSGF) in Virginia, United States, allowing scholars access to a large amount of manuscript papers in addition to four albums of paintings. Upon examining his archives in a comprehensive way, it becomes clear that Blake, operating in 1760–1770s Guangzhou, can be credited as the first actual commissioner of hybrid Sino-Western botanical paintings, and that he initiated a tradition that was later continued by Banks’s collectors in China.46 The most important aspect of Blake’s writings however lays in how much of the hidden side of the collection done in China is revealed, with clear references to cooperation between British naturalists and Chinese contributors at an earlier time than was previously thought. While it is true that the British EIC created opportunities for individuals to collect plants and related knowledge across global maritime networks, the Blakes’ botanical endeavour was initiated as an individual family for their own intellectual and economic gain. The Blakes combined a genuine interest in botany with the pursuit of material gain and intellectual clout, while using the power of the EIC and catering to British commercial nurseries, elite garden owners, and royal gardeners, as well as colonial interests in British America. English-born John Bradby Blake (1745–1773) trained himself as a botanist during his youth, before following in the steps of his father, Captain John Blake, a captain for the EIC. When the younger Blake applied to become a supercargo for the EIC, it was specifically to obtain an appointment in China, which was granted in 1766.47 Father and son had evidently set a personal goal for this appointment, which was for young Blake to hone his naturalist skills in a land

45 Clunas 1997. 46 Goodman and Jarvis 2017: 263. 47 Goodman and Crane 2017: 235.

Ming Qing Yanjiu 24 (2020) 209–244 Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 10:23:39PM via free access 224 Richard where new plants were available and to use this opportunity to cultivate a social network at home. Before embarking for China, Blake had met in London with eminent naturalists such as Linnaeus’s apostle Daniel Solander (1733–1782), and John Ellis FRS (1710–1776) who was then the Royal Agent for West Florida and later for Dominica. Both were keen on obtaining previously unknown Chinese plants and advised Blake on practical matters involved in plant collection. While benefitting from the British EIC infrastructure, Blake’s project was not commissioned by the company, and he went to China on his and his father’s own initiative. Crucially, despite working with men such as Ellis and Solander, who were part of Joseph Banks’s close network, Blake was never directly in contact with Joseph Banks, contrarily to later plant collectors in China such as Duncan, Kerr, and Reeves. On the contrary, there is reason to believe that Blake’s commissioned paintings were used by Banks as guidance for plant collectors in China after his death in 1773.48 Since the project remained unfinished, Captain Blake at first tried to complete the project with the help of a Chinese translator, Whang At Tong 黄遇東, who visited England in 1775.49 Large parts of the Blake archive feature mentions of Whang At Tong, who acted as an advisor to Captain Blake regarding the names and function of Chinese plants, and even mentioned whether they were already growing somewhere in England. The Blake collection of painting is also to be partially credited to Blake’s hired painter Mak Sau, with whom he worked closely in Guangzhou.50 This project can rightfully be considered cross-cultural, and the richness of the manuscript papers allows us to identify a range of contributors that might otherwise have remained hidden. Blake’s botanical ambitions were especially challenging to put in practice in the contemporary context of the Canton System. In 1768 Blake became one of the resident British supercargo that supervised the tea trade in the Factories in Guangzhou, but he was effectively only allowed access to a very restricted part of the Chinese territory.51 In Guangzhou, Western traders had to live and trade in the Factories or Hong, a row of warehouse-like buildings located on a strip of land bordering the Pearl River, well outside the walled city of Guangzhou proper, where foreigners were not allowed to enter.52 The Factories were not

48 Goodman and Crane 2017: 235. 49 May-Bo Ching 2017: 299. 50 Batchelor 2017: 406. 51 India Office Records, British Library. 52 Fa-ti Fan 2004: 26.

Ming Qing YanjiuDownloaded 24 from (2020) Brill.com10/03/2021 209–244 10:23:39PM via free access Collecting Chinese Flora 225 an ideal location to set up a plant collecting endeavour, as space was limited and largely dedicated to trade. Nonetheless, Blake used his spare time to collect and experiment on any Chinese plants that he could find, many of which were little known in Europe at that time, and to send the resulting seeds and knowledge back to his father in Britain. Around 1771, from the inside of the British Factory, Blake geared up for an even more ambitious project: to create a ‘Compleat Sinensis’, in other words a Chinese flora. Blake’s Chinese flora endeavour was one of the earliest systematic and scientific attempts to document the diversity of Chinese plants from a non-Chinese. To put Blake’s Chinese flora project into the context of British imperial scientific endeavour, in India the Scot James Kerr only started a similar attempt three years later in Bengal, where he stayed as a British EIC assistant surgeon. Be it for Blake or for Banks’s plant collectors in India or China, in order to produce a commissioned botanical painting that would satisfy the needs of a naturalist trained in Linnaean system, several contributors would have been necessary. The commissioner was of course the person that gave the impetus for the project, and their intentions would be important. However too often the head of such a project has been credited with the whole authorship, which is why botanical painting collections were later named after them: the Reeves collection is a case in point. In order to produce botanical paintings that could serve as scientific tools, there was often the need for the commissioner to be in consultation with more senior botanists: the latter were European and would typically have trained with Carl Linnaeus himself or his disciples, and as such, they are usually mentioned. There were however a range of hidden contributors that are more rarely mentioned, because they tended to be local infor- mants and go-betweens, and the European reliance on their knowledge is not often credited as it should be. It is enlightening to look into more detail into Blake’s modus operandi as his papers allow exceptional insight into this process. Even before arriving to China, Blake had likely visited the British Museum and consulted the Sloane collection of Chinese plants.53 Before starting to botanize, Blake had to document the plants he wished to include in his flora, and what was already known about East Asian plants as described in available Western botanical books. Blake had brought several key references with him to Guangzhou, including Engelbert Kaempfer’s Amoenitatum Exoticarum (1712), of which Blake’s original is now kept in the Linnaean Society’s library in London.54 In order to go

53 Goodman and Crane 2017: 234. 54 For the full list, see Goodman and Crane 2017: 239.

Ming Qing Yanjiu 24 (2020) 209–244 Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 10:23:39PM via free access 226 Richard further than his predecessors and ‘discover’ Chinese flora previously unknown to Europeans, or yet not naturalized in Europe, Blake relied on a range of contributors without whom his project would not have made much progress. After noticing a plant that he was interested in, Blake needed to learn its Chinese name to understand its use, how to procure seeds from it, and ensure other botanists after him could continue to obtain the plant if necessary. This meant that Blake needed to be able to look for information in Chinese books. Several dictionaries have surfaced recently in a previously unknown part of the Blake collection, in the archives of the Canterbury Cathedral, UK.55 The different handwritten dictionaries include Chinese medicinal plant names in Latin, Portuguese, Chinese (written and transcribed from Cantonese), English, and French. These dictionaries demonstrate that in order to triangulate information on a specific plant, Blake had to juggle several languages, and Chinese was not a language he spoke fluently. This is where Blake’s linguists became essential go-betweens. We know that Blake was associated with one particular Chinese linguist or translator, named Whang At Tong. Whang likely brought back Blake’s papers and paintings from China to London after his death in 1773. Whang was one of very few Chinese visitors in 1775 England, and was received by Sir Joseph Banks at the Royal Society at the same time as Omai the Tahitian, who arrived in London on James Cook’s expedition ship the same year.56 In his papers, it becomes clear that much of Blake’s botanical information actually came from Chinese botanical books such as the classic of medicinal plants, an undetermined edition of the Bencao Gangmu 《本草綱目》 (Compendium of materia medica) by Li Shizhen 李时珍 (1518–1593), but also its abridgement, the Bencao Beiyao 《本草备要》 (Practical Aspects of materia medica) edited by Wang Ang 汪昂 (1615–1694).57 One of the volumes of the OSGF manuscript is dedicated to the listing of plants that were potentially useful from an edition of the Bencao Beiyao in five volumes.58 His copy of the latter was found recently in Canterbury, with pencilled handwritten notes comparing plants with Western sources, but also numbering the illustrations and clearly marking with crosses which of the plants were of interest.59 Once the plant had been identified or selected from a Western or Chinese book, Blake

55 For example, Howley-Harrison, “MS Dictionary of Words”, Canterbury Cathedral Archives. 56 Goodman and Crane 2017: 247. 57 Batchelor 2017: 406. 58 Description of a Chinese Herbal in Five Volumes, in John Bradby Blake, Collection of Manuscripts and Illustrations (hereafter JBB Collection), OSGF. 59 Winnie Wong (University of Berkeley) found the volume in Canterbury Cathedral Archives among the Howley-Harrison Archive (“Chinese Herbal in Five Volumes”).

Ming Qing YanjiuDownloaded 24 from (2020) Brill.com10/03/2021 209–244 10:23:39PM via free access Collecting Chinese Flora 227 had to find a supply of the actual plant to be able to collect its seeds, and a specimen to paint. There is so far no clear evidence that Blake ever constituted an herbarium during his stay in Guangzhou. Blake corresponded with Jesuits in Beijing to obtain plants from other parts of China, and notably mentioned in December 1772 that Jesuit R. P. Cipolla sent him seeds from Beijing and the northern regions.60 At the time of his stay in Guangzhou, the main Hong merchant or intermediary for Western traders would have been Pan Zhencheng 潘振承 or Puan Khequa I (1714–1788), who had experience trading with Manila and likely would have been able to obtain plants from South East Asia.61 Once plants were obtained, in many cases there was still the need to understand what the plant was exactly, how it would grow, and what was its use. If the plant was local, the linguist could help discuss with Chinese gardeners for advice regarding its growth. If the plant was less common, Western traders could ask the Hong merchants for help, as they were the most likely to own expensive plants in their properties: for example, in 1791 Pan Zhencheng’s heir Pan Youdu 潘有度or Puan Khequa II (1755–1820) helped Duncan to obtain information on the moutan 牡丹peonies on behalf of Joseph Banks.62 Until the end of the First Opium War in 1842, Blake and others after him were confined to the Factories, a small part of the Chinese territory, and could not botanize freely. Some plants they found in local nurseries and plant mar- kets: the Huadi 花地 (Fa-tee) nurseries, located south of the Pearl River, were the most famous that Westerners could visit under the Canton System.63 When that was explored, the naturalists still needed to hire Chinese plant collectors that could reach parts of the countryside that were not open to foreigners to look for wild plants that might not have been of interest to Chinese nursery- men.64 Blake also gathered seeds and information from Chinese gardeners. The seeds were then planted in a small yard in the English Factory and Blake recorded their growth in a diligent and scientific manner.65 Although he does not usually name those go-betweens and sometimes does not explicitly say they are Chinese, their presence can be found in Blake’s notes through comments such as “I am informed that” followed by information

60 List of Seeds and Plants Sent to England from China, pp. 7–8, List of Seeds Received from Pekin from R P. Cipolla, December 1772. In JBB Collection, OSGF. 61 Richard and Woudstra 2018: 477. 62 Joseph Banks, Letter from Alexander Duncan to Banks, 29 December 1791, British Library. 63 Richard and Woudstra 2018: 477. 64 Fa-ti Fan 2004: 26–28. 65 The notes associated with specific plants are mostly kept in the Index Volumes 1–3 of the JBB Collection, OSGF—although some notes are also dispersed in the other manuscripts.

Ming Qing Yanjiu 24 (2020) 209–244 Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 10:23:39PM via free access 228 Richard about where a plant grows and its uses. Writing about the flat peach, Blake unusually specified the nationality of his informant:

I am informed by a Chinese that the stone ought not to be planted above one inch and a half, or two inches (at most) deep in the Earth, that the spring is the properest [sic] time to plant them, & that they are twelve months, sometimes more, before they begin to appear.66

Blake otherwise diligently referenced Western written sources and Western in- formants by their full names, which suggests that despite not being an agent of ‘Company Science’, he still felt that his station allowed him to erase the names of some of the Chinese contributors to the project. In the Blake manuscripts there are no traces of animosity towards Chinese people in general, contrarily to what William Kerr would later in 1809 report to William Aiton, head gardener at Kew Royal Gardens, about a Chinese gardener. Kerr expressed his ex- asperation that a certain Mr A-hey was treated “much better than he deserved” and that when a Sino-British incident happened, the latter deserted his work in the service of the EIC in Macao before Chinese authorities had called for it, and encouraged other Chinese servants to do the same.67 Their difference in social status might explain Blake’s lack of interest in transcribing the Chinese gardeners’ names, while Kerr complained that he had to take on the work left by A-hey, and therefore was of a comparatively closer social status. Social status matters when it comes to the Blakes’s long-term purpose in making a Chinese flora and making the effort to distribute Chinese seeds across their personal network. For the Blakes, the Chinese flora project was an intellectual extension of their initial aim to collect live specimen, observe them as they grow, flower, and in some case give fruit. The plants’ seeds would be packaged carefully and sent to London where Captain Blake would then redis- tribute them to a range of privileged recipients across Britain and the British American colonies.68 Blake wrote to his father in 1773 to be careful that nobody published his findings before his return, as “I make no doubt the Royal Society will in a proper time if they are found accurate”.69 He was about to be granted a fellowship to the Royal Society in 1774 by none other than John Ellis, Daniel

66 Seeds and Plants, p. 37, JBB Collection, OSGF. Flat peach or Prunus dulcis. 67 William Kerr, Kew Royal Garden Archives, folios 6–7: Copy of Letter from Kerr to Aiton Esquire, 3 and 4 March 1809. 68 Easterby-Smith 2017: 290. 69 Descriptions of Plants and Autograph Letters, p. 38; John Bradby Blake to John Blake Esquire, dated November 1772. In JBB Collection, OSGF.

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Solander, and Sir Joseph Banks, whom had apparently become aware of Blake’s project by that time, when the news of his early demise reached London.70 Such ultimate reward would have singled out Blake as the main author of the Chinese flora, and should not distract us from the fact that, in more ways than one, the Blake project was a joint endeavour, an expression he uses himself to describe the paintings he commissioned from painter Mak Sau and on which they worked jointly.71

3 Canton Trade Painters’ Agency in Producing Botanical Paintings

Indeed, the artist was arguably the most important co-contributor to any flora, and close cooperation between the project leader and the illustrator was key to its success. However, in European art history, the artists that produced engravings from drawings were not always credited, and in the case of botanical art, the original artist was often bypassed and the botanist credited for both text and images. Blake was not recorded as a skilled drawer, and would have needed expert guidance to produce scientifically accurate drawings. His papers reveal that the Blakes were in correspondence with the Miller family: John Miller was the artist behind An Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus.72 Miller’s work was sponsored by the previously mentioned Lord Bute who directed Kew Royal Gardens before Joseph Banks.73 Initially the Sexual System was published in folio by instalments, and Blake appears on the list of subscribers.74 A letter sent after Blake’s death reveals that Captain Blake was regularly sending the latest of Miller’s engravings to his son in China, until he heard of his demise.75 In possession of the latest Western scientific botanical engravings, Blake was ready to commission a Chinese artist. Canton Trade painters frequently received detailed instructions from their clients for their commissioned work, and are known to have been able to copy Western prints to perfection,

70 Annual Records, Royal Society Library and Archives. 71 Plants and Autograph Letters, p. 37; John Bradby Blake to John Blake Esquire, dated November 1772. In JBB Collection, OSGF. 72 Miller 1779. 73 Noltie 2017: 435. 74 Noltie 2017: 432. 75 Seeds and Plants, pp. 48–49; Letter from John Blake to John Bradby Blake, 1774. In JBB Collection, OSGF.

Ming Qing Yanjiu 24 (2020) 209–244 Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 10:23:39PM via free access 230 Richard transforming them into fully coloured paintings.76 Blake hired such a painter for his exclusive use, from around 1770, as he wrote to his father:

I have been very lucky in finding a very ingenious Chinese who, tho [sic] he is not a botanist, is very capable of copying exactly from nature by my assistance. I have retained him (at no small expense) solely in my service, in which he has been employed upwards of two years, & I intend to continue him as long as I reside here. He is with me every day, from nine in the morning till six in the evening, and when my duty does not call me elsewhere, I sit at the same table with him in my apartment, where I generally pass about ten hours of the day, after the ships are dispatched, & before others of the ensuing season arrive.77

It is likely that Mak Sau, Blake’s painter, was a Canton Trade painter, although there are not many details about his past in the Blake papers. There are two passages that inform us a bit more about Mak Sau. His name is given in Chinese characters as 麥秀, with the Cantonese transcription ‘Mauk-Sow-U’, probably in Whang At Tong’s hand. Another hand, probably Captain Blake, added: “The name of Mr Blake’s Painter who went every day to Mr Blake’s Rooms—about 33 years of age, Middle Size, lives at Canton”.78 Another passage in Blake’s handwriting relates as an anecdote about a poisonous plant, which in all likeliness involves Mak Sau without naming him:

I am assured from good authority that a few years past this shrub was discovered to be of a very pernicious nature during a scarcity of rice […] upon which the principal Mandarins of Canton ordered some thou- sand paintings of them to be accurately drawn and dispersed in such places where they were known to grow signifying and making publicly known the cause of their so doing. A person of credit who was himself employed to draw near one hundred specimens acquainted me of this circumstances.79

76 Crossman 1991: 162. 77 Original emphasis. Plants and Autograph Letters, p. 36; John Bradby Blake to John Blake Esquire, dated November 1772. In JBB Collection, OSGF. 78 Chinese Herbal in Five Volumes, pp. 8–10, in JBB Collection, OSGF. 79 Index Volume 3, p. 39, note on the ‘Yea-ong Koke Tso’ or Strophanthus divaricatus, JBB Collection, OSGF.

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figure 6 A typical composition of a Blake commission kept in OSGF. Lychee Volume 1, No. 13

The passage above suggests that Mak Sau, if he is the “person of credit” mentioned, had prior experience in painting plants realistically enough to help local people recognize a plant and not poison themselves. Apart from these small clues, as with most of China Trade artists, we must resort to conjecture for most of Mak Sau’s background and training.80 That is not an easy task since, as with many scientifically accurate Canton Trade botanical paintings, the Blake commissions are clearly hybrid in style.81 Blake presented Mak Sau with Miller’s prints as guidelines to represent plants, especially when it came to adding magnified views of the seeds, fruit, or leaf. Together they produced realistic and scientifically accurate drawings of the plants Blake had selected, using what could only be described as a hybrid Sino-Western composition. A typical Blake commissioned painting such as the Litchi chinensis held in the OSGF (Figure 6), features the following elements: the name of the plant in Chinese characters, their Cantonese transliteration, the plant itself, and usually additional details such as the cut and magnification of the fruit, seed, and/or flower. Blake asked Mak Sau to complete the paintings progressively throughout the seasons, as the plants grew, so as to add the flowers and the fruits to the composition, and would write notes as completely as possible; for example, he discussed six different kinds of lychees, of which five different types were painted in 1771–1772.82 There are several stages of completion across the Blake commissions, of which Figure 6 represents the most complete. Blake regularly sent “duplicates of originals but not altogether so compleat [sic] as these that remain with

80 Crossman 1991: 9. 81 Mok 2014: 30. 82 Index Volume 1, pp. 27–30, JBB Collection, OSGF.

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figure 7 Left: Blake commission in a scientifically accurate style. Right: Decorative painting of a white magnolia. Both in “Fleurs de Chine” album, OSGF me” to Captain Blake, so as to obtain Solander’s and Ellis’s advice.83 There are several indications in the OSGF manuscripts of Solander making remarks on ‘Original’ and ‘Copies’ of paintings, which meant that he probably made comments on several stages of the same painting. A typical remark was “Botanicks to add”, to which a pencil annotation was sometimes added to signify it was “done”.84 Blake and Mak Sau’s paintings are kept in three main locations, one of which was only identified in 2018, and more of which could yet be found. The ‘final’ and most finished set of 194 paintings is kept in OSGF. These paintings are grouped in four volumes, with each leaf numbered carefully, and their current order corresponds with Blake’s manuscript notes on the corresponding plant, apart from the fourth volume where several plants were replaced by seventeen paintings of fish.85 In addition to this master set, OSGF keeps a single sheet of a Blake commission, at the very start of an album titled “Fleurs de Chine”, acquired much more recently (Figure 7).86 The other paintings in that set are decorative in nature, and the Blake commission stands out in terms

83 Plants and Autograph Letters, p. 37; John Bradby Blake to John Blake Esquire, dated November 1772. In JBB Collection, OSGF. 84 Index Volume 1, p. 8, Memorandums to Vol. 1st continued, JBB Collection, OSGF. 85 Crane and Loehle 2017: 216. 86 “Fleurs de Chine” album, p. 5, OSGF.

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figure 8 Left: Cotton tree or Bombax ceiba. Right: Coxcomb or Celosia. Both in Blake’s Album of Watercolours, RCP of quality and attention to detail. Interestingly, another close copy of the magnolia from “Lansdowne 1242” is also present in the “Fleurs de Chine” album.87 Apart from the OSGF, two other sets of Blake commissioned paintings are kept in England: the longest known set is in the NHM, where it was transferred to from the British Museum. The most recently found set is located in the RCP. It is difficult to blankly attribute the paintings in these two sets to Mak Sau’s hand. As with the Marquess of Lansdowne’s decorative botanical paintings, the collection appears to be a mixed album with leaves from different painters. After consideration, Jordan Goodman and Charles Jarvis have determined that the paintings presenting a distinctive black border should be considered as Blake’s commissions.88 When using this method, there are thirty-seven drawings in the NHM that are attributed to Blake and Mak Sau, among which features the aforementioned begonia. The remainder also represents plants with magnified cut fruits, so a definitive attribution would not only rely on the presence of the black border, but also on the aspect of the colours, and a stylistic comparison to the Blake commissions in OSGF. The paintings in the RCP album are much easier to differentiate, as several of the leaves are clearly decorative in purpose, and a background was also added (Figure 8). To produce a definitive attribution, it would perhaps be necessary to analyse the pigments and the paper of each painting. In general, both the RCP and NHM collections are considerably simpler in composition than the OSGF’s, and contain

87 “Fleurs de Chine” album, p. 20, OSGF. 88 Goodman and Jarvis 2017: 254.

Ming Qing Yanjiu 24 (2020) 209–244 Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 10:23:39PM via free access 234 Richard multiple copies. As such the paintings were probably early versions of each plant, sent to England in two sets for security, although there are no begonias in the OSGF set. The quality of Canton Trade botanical paintings is considered to have lessened with time, and Crossman in particular has linked their quality with their loss of accuracy and scientific importance, and regrets that “by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, botanical representations had de- scended to the level of strictly decorative”.89 Such a judgment of value explains perhaps the little space that Crossman allowed for botanical paintings in his volume, yet it contradicts his own argument that some painters could work on different media. Is it not then possible that the same artist would be able to work at different levels of botanical accuracy? The quality of the finished paintings in OSGF suggests that Mak Sau was likely trained in the Song dynasty Academic style. In an analysis of the Canton Trade botanical paintings kept in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Chen Ying concluded that the unnamed painters had been trained in the Song yuanti ‘Academy’ style of bird and flowers, using gongbi (fine line) painting. Chen also mentioned the tendency to ignore the Canton Trade painters’ agency to the profit of their commissioners and customers:

It has been suggested that Canton export artists owed their success to instructions from Westerners. It should be remembered, however, that the Canton artists were able to exploit Western techniques because they had already mastered all the basic skills and accumulated much experience. Since the Academy style placed great emphasis on xiesheng, meaning ‘true to life’, the traditionally trained Canton artists found it very easy to meet the ‘realism’ requirement that was vital to botanical illustrations.90

There are several instances in Blake’s commissioned paintings that Mak Sau’s painted plants in a less ‘accurate’ style: for example, in the OSGF, when it comes to painting the gardenia or Gardenia jasminoides, Mak Sau produced two very different paintings of two varieties of the plant (Figure 9). When painting the first gardenia in Volume 2, leaf no. 2, the white flowers attached to the plant are less crisply painted than in the magnified flowers presented at the bot- tom of the composition. Mak Sau also used a blue wash to make the contrast with the white flowers more vivid, which Bailey has identified as well in some

89 Crossman 1991: 183. 90 Chen and Ching 2003: 66.

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figure 9 Left: Gardenia, leaf no. 2. Right: Gardenia, leaf no. 3. Both from Illustrations, Volume 2, JBB Collection, OSGF later Reeves paintings.91 In the Volume 2, leaf no. 3 painting, the flowers of the gardenia are presented in almost strictly frontal and lateral views that remind us of Western European botanical illustrations, and which might have been borrowed from Miller’s engravings. Based on the juxtaposition of the two paintings, it seems that Mak Sau could perform with different levels of accuracy when it suited him. Just after Blake’s death, Dutch lawyer Jean Theodore Royer (1737–1807) commissioned a collection of Canton Trade paintings on several topics, including costumes and natural history. While Royer was based in the Netherlands, his Chinese agent Carolus Wang was based in Guangzhou and arranged for the making of the albums.92 The latter were made around 1773–1776 and are now kept in Volkenkunde Museum, Leiden, in their original silk binding, reversed to suit Western habit.93 The accuracy of the lychee, as exemplified here in Figure 10, is lesser than what Mak Sau could achieve at a similar time.94 It is likely that the Royer natural history paintings were based on Chinese materia medica illustrations, and this does not necessarily imply that the unknown painters could not perform in another, more scientifically accurate register.

91 Bailey 2010: 223. 92 Van Campen 2000. 93 Van der Poel 2016. 94 Royer, Collection of China Trade Artworks, Volkenkunde Museum.

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figure 10 Lychee, Royer Collection, Volkenkunde Museum

Since Mak Sau was thirty-three years old when he worked for Blake, it is possible that he went on to work for later commissioners of decorative botanical paintings, such as Van Braam or Duncan who were both buying such albums in the 1790s. In the case of Van Braam, his unnamed artists were commissioned for two years, which resembles Mak Sau’s exclusive contract with Blake. Duncan did not, as far as we know, commission painters, although he did send plants to Banks.95 Duncan was using a “Book of Chinese Plants” that Banks had lent him to facilitate his collection of plants.96 Goodman and Jarvis have implied that the book might have been an album compiling paintings from several origins, including some of Blake’s earlier versions and duplicates that would have joined Banks’s library after Blake’s death, probably in 1789.97 It could well be that the “Book of Chinese Plants” later became the Blake collection (“Album of Chinese Watercolours”) kept in the NHM. It is unclear whether Duncan’s “Chinese Flowers” album in the RBGE was related to Banks’s “Book of Chinese Plants”, although the connection with Van Braam’s collection which was pointed out in the first section suggests that an indirect lineage is possible. It is perhaps more productive to ponder whether the artists had seen

95 See chap. 4 (“The Brothers Duncan in Canton”) in Goodman 2020. 96 Banks and Chambers 2014: Volume 3, document 63, Letter from Duncan to Banks, 12 December 1789. 97 Goodman and Jarvis 2017: 261.

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Blake’s paintings and delivered their own decorative take on the hybrid botanical genre. The next botanist that Banks could rely on to reside in China was William Kerr, who borrowed the “Book of Chinese Plants” from 1803.98 Kerr hired an unnamed painter to produced scientifically accurate botanical paintings, which are now split between the Kew Royal Garden Archives and the RBGE. An unattributed set of albums kept in the British Library and containing 309 scientifically accurate botanical paintings might also be related to Kerr.99 One of the latter albums contains a page titled “Monthly account of the fall of rain at Macao & Canton in China, from September 1807 to July 1809” that seems to correspond with Kerr’s handwriting, but as the albums are currently being catalogued more information might soon be available. From 1817, Reeves would also commission a number of artists to work exclusively for him in Guangzhou, whom were probably Canton Trade painters. Reeves only recorded very familiar names for them, with no Chinese characters: Akam, Akut, Asung, Akew.100 Before hiring his own painters, Reeves had relied on a set of botanical paintings kept by the East India House Museum, probably the same “Book of Chinese Plants” that Duncan and Kerr had used before. Reeves asked the RHS to make copies of the paintings in 1816, but had to borrow them in 1817 when he ran out of time.101 In short, a new generation of Canton Trade painters were asked from 1790s onwards to conform to a tradition of scientifically accurate botanical drawings started by Blake and Mak Sau in 1770–1773. Mak Sau’s agency in the process cannot be ignored, as much as that of all the other painters whose identities usually remains a mystery. Apart from commissioning new paintings, it is known that Reeves also gathered a number of ‘ready-made’ botanical paintings from Canton Trade Studios, which Bailey and Brooks have found were often paintings of smaller size made on Chinese papers, whereas the Reeves commissions were usually made on larger Western paper.102 There seems to be a number of exceptions to that rule, with several paintings in the larger Western papers corresponding with leaves found in earlier decorative albums. A case in point is that of a white camellia in Duncan’s “Chinese Flowers” album in the RBGE whose copy can be found in the RHS Reeves collection inside the first volume of large drawings (Figure 11).103

98 Bailey and RHS 2019: 48. 99 “Six Volumes of Plant Illustrations …”, British Library. 100 Bailey and RHS 2019: 108. 101 Bailey and RHS 2019: 107. 102 Bailey and Brooks 2016: 124–125. 103 Large album no. 1, p. 33, Reeves Collection, RHS.

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figure 11 Left: White camellia, Duncan’s “Chinese Flowers” album, RBGE. Right: White camellia, Reeves large album no. 1, RHS

To my knowledge these copies have not yet been named as such, and the as- sumption is still that the ownership of these designs should be attributed to Reeves. This finding perhaps warrants closer scrutiny of the Reeves paintings, especially those that are presented in a vertical ‘portrait’ format without any magnifications of seeds or cut fruits.

4 Conclusion

During the period of the Canton System, because their access to the rest of the Chinese territory was restricted, British botanists that commissioned realistic botanical paintings of Chinese flora had to do so from a relatively narrow pool of Chinese artists all residing in Guangzhou. Simultaneously, it seems that Canton Trade painting studios started to mass-produce ‘ready-made’ decorative Chinese botanical paintings in a hybrid style aimed at foreigners. If it is not always possible to date the different collections of decorative and scientific Canton Trade botanical paintings, thanks to a number of close copies, it is already possible to deny Crossman’s assumptions that decorative botanical paintings’ represent a loss of quality associated with the late nineteenth century. The role of previously little-acknowledged Chinese contributors (artists and translators) needs to be reinstated in the history of British science in China. The foreign scientific commissions have been interpreted as improving

Ming Qing YanjiuDownloaded 24 from (2020) Brill.com10/03/2021 209–244 10:23:39PM via free access Collecting Chinese Flora 239 the quality of Canton Trade botanical paintings decorative paintings, and this despite scholars’ understanding of the Chinese artists’ training in the Chinese ‘birds and flowers’ tradition. By comparing several collections that sometimes appear a priori unconnected, unsuspected links were revealed between the two types of Canton Trade botanical paintings, disrupting previous interpreta- tions regarding the quality of decorative paintings, some inherited from the market price that their relative rarity would assign.104 Going forward, it would be useful to stop considering ‘decorative’ botanicals as fundamentally lesser in quality than the ‘scientific’ botanicals. Since the renewed scrutiny currently highlighting exceptional collections such as the Blake and Reeves commissions is bound to make ‘ready-made’ albums seem poorer in contrast, the comparison should only be attempted with caution. The dynamics of power between painter and commissioner should be taken into account, and the business acu- men of the Canton Trade studio painters should be recognized. It is unfortunately not yet possible to compare large amounts of drawings with each other, as different institutions are still cataloguing their Canton Trade botanical paintings and identifying the Chinese plants represented in the scientifically accurate collections. However, the ongoing effort of digitization at Kew Royal Garden Archives and British Library supported by the OSGF, as well as a similar initiative in Harvard Herbaria, suggests that soon it will be possible to complete a qualitative analysis of painting comparison to determine the recurrence of certain species of plants across different collections. Ultimately, a reassessment of the ownership and agency of Canton Trade painters upon their creations is necessary in the context of heightened Sino-British cultural exchanges during the Canton System period.

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