Thijs Weststeijn

294 Thijs Weststeijn Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 06:37:02PM via free access 295 ‘Intoxicated, we listened to warblers and swallows chattering in the spring wind’ Art in the friendship between François de Rougemont and Wu Li Thijs Weststeijn They are esteemed to the extent that they are very helpful to pro- Detail fig. 2 cure the favor of friends: pictures of all kind, not only painted with a brush, but also those etched in bronze plates (…). What I am look- ing for above all and in a large number are: emblems, such as those of which numerous specimens are hanging in the corridors of our colleges; new and old alike, all these pictures are pleasing here in a wondrous way. This was written by Christian Herdtrich, a Jesuit priest stationed in the Chi- nese port city of Guangzhou, in a detailed account of objects he needed from Europe in 1670.1 His request illustrates how European missionaries used the visual arts to solidify social relationships in China, recognizing that the Confucian literati fostered friendships on the basis of the ‘culture of the brush’: poetry, calligraphy, and painting. Relations documented between Chinese and Europeans in the seven- teenth century that can rightly be called ‘friendships’ – other than asso- ciations of patronage or master versus disciple – were rare, but certainly possible. Best-known is the bond between the founding father of the Chi- na mission, Matteo Ricci, and the eminent scholar Xu Guangqi, who converted to Christianity in 1603 (fig. 1). Later in the century his granddaughter Candida Xu arrived on friendly terms with Philippe Couplet, a missionary from the Southern Netherlands who wrote her biography. This essay will ex- plore a third friendship that is little known but no less extraordinary: that between a Chinese painter of landscapes, Wu Li (1631-1718), and an enthu- siastic patron of the arts born in Maastricht, François de Rougemont (1624- 1676), also a Jesuit. Their intimacy, which seems to have resulted in the first Chinese painting partly dedicated to a European, evidences the role of the visual arts as social lubricant, for which the missionaries expressly imported engravings, mostly produced in the Netherlands. As Noël Golvers argues in his monumental study of Jesuit scholarship in China, images, as part of a ‘culture of attraction and a policy of self-promotion towards the Chinese’, would ‘compensate to an important extent for the linguistic threshold’.2 Rougemont was based in an outpost of the mission, in Changshu near Suzhou (close to present-day Shanghai). As his surviving account books for the years 1674-1676 reveal, he decorated his residence with images for public display and also used artworks as gifts. These included engravings made in the Netherlands, works produced in China, and Sino-European co-productions. His friendship with Wu Li illustrates aspects of patronage Hfdst. 11 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 06:37:02PM @ Thijs Weststeijn, 2020 | https://doi.org/10.1163/22145966-07001013 via free access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. 296 Thijs Weststeijn 1 Matteo Ricci and Xu Guangqi, engraving, 18 x 27.9 cm, Athanasius Kircher, Toonneel van China (Amsterdam 1667) of Christian art in provincial China of the early Qing period and, conversely, the Chinese view towards European art. In light of Herdtrich’s remark that artworks are so ‘very helpful to pro- cure the favor of friends’, a painting worthy of note is Wu Li’s A lake in spring (fig. 2). A lake’s expanse allows our gaze to trail the flight of birds, from the foreground’s forked trees towards a walking path in the back that leads to hazy but colorful mountains. The empty sky in the top right, characteristic of Chinese art, contains an inscription and two poems. ‘Mr Lu from the Far West’ probably refers to Lu Riman, Rougemont’s Chinese name. The work Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 06:37:02PM via free access ‘Intoxicated, we listened to warblers and swallows chattering in the spring wind’ 297 was made to commemorate a day of drinking and writing poetry, seeming- ly enjoyed by the painter, the missionary, and a certain Mr. Chaohan: Accompanied by Mr. Lu from the far West I went to this gentleman’s [Mr. Chaohan] house in the spring of the chen year [1676]. We drank wine and wrote poems the whole day, thereby emulating the spirit and manner of Beihai [the poet Kong Rong, 153-208 CE]. The following day at daybreak I braved the rain and set out for home (…). So I, out of grat- itude for his kindness, wrote two poems in seven-character line and painted this picture after Zhao Danian’s [c. 1080-1100] Spring lake and sky. About Mr. Chaohan nothing else is known, but like his drinking compan- ion he may have been a Christian convert. The subsequent lines of poetry express the artist’s appreciative mood: I recollect the first time I was wandering east of the Lou River, we met as if old friends and your manner was like Beihai’s. It was just the time when the silkworms were still sleeping, and the flowers had not yet fad- ed. Intoxicated, we listened to warblers and swallows chattering in the spring wind.3 Reflections on the pleasures of alcohol and enjoying nature in company were common in classical Chinese poetry. They were often of a performa- tive nature, as painted or written celebrations of friendship were intended as friendly gifts. Wu Li was a literatus-painter steeped in this tradition, as evidenced by the poems on A lake in spring and many others collected in his Mojingji (Ink well collection). 4 There are no records that reveal when Wu Li first met Rougemont. Yet he was born and raised in the immediate vicinity of the Jesuit church. By 1671 he had converted and, in Rougemont’s company, prepared as a cate- chist for his future religious life, which would culminate in his composition of a body of Christian poems; the painting may therefore have been a re- cord of an enduring friendship.5 For Rougemont, partaking in such drinking bouts may have been strategic as much as it was pleasurable. In his responsibility for the Christian community in Changshu of nearly 10,000 souls, he pursued the Jesuit top-down strategy: to first cozy up to the literati. Adopting this upper class’s dress, behavior, and cultural ideals allowed them to extend their message authoritatively to the common people. In so doing Rougemont followed in the footsteps of Ricci, whose experiences, first recounted in Latin in 1615, had become a best seller in Europe.6 They would have been mandatory reading for recruits for the China mission at the Jesuit college in Antwerp. Ricci had envisaged a network of trusted contacts in the Middle King- dom as the basis for his missionary activities, starting from the first text that he published in Chinese: Jiao you lun (Treatise on making friends, 1595). This collection of aphorisms from the European classics, devoted to the theme of friendship, was itself intended as a gift to his Chinese friends.7 Ricci had recognized that friendship was a complicated issue according Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 06:37:02PM via free access 298 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 06:37:02PM via free access ‘Intoxicated, we listened to warblers and swallows chattering in the spring wind’ 299 to the literati’s dominant ideology of Neo-Confucianism. The ‘five cardinal 2 human relationships’ (wu lun) were the five bonds that men were to fos- Wu Li, A lake in spring (1676), hanging ter: between husband and wife; with one’s parents; between brothers; be- scroll, ink and colors on paper, tween ruler and subject; and between friends. Of these five, friendship was 62.6 x 123.8 cm, Shanghai Museum unique, as the others were overtly concerned with the maintenance of the imperial social order (or guojia, literally the Chinese ‘state-family’). Friend- ship was the only bond that was freely chosen. It could transcend social hierarchies and, apparently, also bridge cultural distances.8 Unsurprisingly, the central text of Confucianism, the Analects, begins with a statement on friendship: Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and applica- tion? Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quar- ters? (…) If a man (…) in serving his parents, can exert his utmost strength; if, in serving his prince, he can devote his life; if, in his intercourse with his friends, his words are sincere: although men say that he has not learned, I will certainly say that he has.9 Sincere intercourse with friends could be established and maintained by gifts, which were, as such, all but mandatory among literati officials, under the rubric of yingchou (civilities).10 Wu Li’s practice of gifting artworks clearly stemmed from this ideological background; he made A lake in spring just after the death of his teacher Chen Hu, a well-known Neo-Confucian philosopher with whom he had studied intensively.11 It is worthy of note that while Wu Li was affected by Christianity, Rouge- mont, conversely, was acquainted with Confucianism: he was responsible, with Couplet and Herdtrich, for the first Latin translation of the Analects, eventually published in Paris in 1687. In his friendly relations with Wu Li and other literati, he clearly recognized the importance of gifts of Europe- an art. Using the Latin term munera (services, favors, gifts), he wrote that the mandarins ‘should not be visited without some splendor so as not to be repelled, nor without presents in order not to displease them’; in particu- lar ‘profane pictures of hunting scenes, battle fields etc.

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