Collecting the 'Summer Palace' (Yuanmingyuan) in 19th-Century Britain / / 2:00 - 3:55pm Friday, 27th November, 2020

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10 Collecting the 'Summer Palace' (Yuanmingyuan) in 19th-century Britain

Title

Collecting the 'Summer Palace' (Yuanmingyuan) in 19th-century Britain

Session Chair

Professor Louise Tythacott University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom Dr Stacey Pierson SOAS, University of London, London, United Kingdom

First Session Chair short biography

Louise Tythacott is the Woon Tai Jee Professor of Asian Art at the University of Northumbria. She was formerly Pratapaditya Pal Senior Lecturer, then Professor, in Curating and Museology of Asian Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London (2014-20); Lecturer in Museology at the University of Manchester (2003-14); and Curator of Asian Collections at National Museums Liverpool (1996-2003). She was the lead curator for the World Cultures gallery at World Museum Liverpool, with specific responsibilities for the Asia and Buddhism displays. Louise has worked as a Managing Editor of the peer-reviewed journal, Museum and Society, and continues to develop museum projects and curate exhibitions. From 2017-2018, she secured a major philanthropic donation to undertake research on the histories of artefacts from China’s Yuanmingyuan - or old ‘Summer Palace’ - in British and French museum collections, and is presently completing a monograph on the ‘Summer Palace Diaspora’. Her publications include, The Lives of Chinese Objects: Buddhism, Imperialism and Display (Berghahn, 2011), Museums and Restitution: New Practices, New Approaches (Ashgate, 2014, co-edited with Kostas Arvanitis), Collecting and Displaying China’s ‘Summer Palace’ in the West: The Yuanmingyuan in Britain and France (Routledge, 2017) and Returning Southeast Asia’s Past: Objects, Museums, and Restitution (NUS Press, 2020 co-edited with Panggah Ardiyansyah).

Second Session Chair short biography

Stacey Pierson is Reader in the History of Chinese Ceramics at SOAS, University of London. In addition to teaching and supervising research students in the School of Arts, she is editor of the Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society (London) and series editor for the Routledge series Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1550-1950. Previously, from 1995 – 2007, she was Curator of the Percival David Foundation of Chinese art, also at the University of London, which housed the world-renowned David collection of Chinese ceramics. She has published widely on aspects of Chinese ceramics and the history of collecting and exhibitions. In 2007 she published Collectors, Collections and Museums: the Field of Chinese Ceramics in Britain: 1560-1960 (Peter Lang), followed by Chinese Ceramics: a Design History (V&A Publications) in 2009 and ‘The Movement of Chinese Ceramics: Appropriation in Global History’, Journal of World History 23, no. 1, (2012). In 2013 she published From Object to Concept: Global Consumption and the Transformation of Ming Porcelain (Hong Kong University Press) and her most recent book is Private Collecting, Exhibitions and the Shaping of Art History in London: the Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1866-1950 (Routledge, 2017) which examines an influential art collecting group in London that played a key role in the intellectual development of Chinese ceramics and other collecting fields through display. She is currently preparing a monograph on the archaeology of porcelain, which will include a chapter on tiles from the Yuanmingyuan.

Session Abstract

This session will analyse the collections of imperial Chinese Yuanmingyuan, or ‘Summer Palace’, objects formed in the UK in the 19th century. It will focus on military officers involved in the looting of the Yuanmingyuan in Beijing in October 1860, at the end of the Second Opium War – men such as Elgin, Grant, Gordon, Wolseley, Crealock and Negroni - and will document the trajectories of the material they brought back with them to Britain. Some of the pieces were displayed at major public exhibitions (the 1862 International Exhibition and the Crystal Palace in London), while other artefacts were donated or bequeathed to museums in the late 19th-early 20th century. The session will also explore the role of the art market - especially Christie’s and Sotheby’s, but also smaller provincial auction houses - in promoting the collecting of ‘Summer Palace’ loot, and the shifting interpretations given to this material from the mid-late 19th century. Once relocated to the UK, ‘Summer Palace’ material was transformed and reformed to fit the aesthetics and tastes of the time, and the session thus explores the distinctive meanings and values attributed to Yuanmingyuan artefacts by a range of British collectors.

29 ‘The love of gain is most contagious…’ (Robert Swinhoe, 1861): The story of ‘China Jim’ and the lust for Summer Palace gold (R)

Professor Nick Pearce University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom

Paper abstract

In his Narrative of the North China Campaign of 1860, Robert Swinhoe writes: ‘The Fifteenth Punjaubees, who had the destruction of this garden [referring to the burning of Yuanmingyuan], fell in with large quantities of gold, one officer alone managing to appropriate to himself as much as 9,000l’ (London, 1861, p.331). The visibility of the looting undertaken by Indian troops reoccurs in most accounts of the sacking of Yuanmingyuan, not surprising as of the 10,000 soldiers that made up the British expeditionary force some 4,000 were from India. It was the Sikh Irregular cavalry, Fane and Probyn’s Horse, that were in the vanguard of the looting, but other Indian regiments, including the 15th Punjab Native Infantry fresh from the spoils of the Mutiny, joined with the looting when the palace complex was torched. Swinhoe was not alone in noting the large amounts of gold taken by officers from the Indian regiments, with at least one chronicler, John Hart Dunne, naming the officer who acquired the notably large quantity of gold: ‘Harris, of the Punjaubees, has brought in 300lbs. weight of gold, valued at something like £12,000’ (Dunne, From Calcutta to Pekin, London, 1861, p.143). The officer was Lt. J. T. Harris, whose legendary haul of gold will be discussed in this paper. What was it, how and from where was it taken, and did it ever enter the auction market?

30 Trophies from Paradise: Artifacts from the Yuanming Yuan as Memorials of Victory (R)

Katrina Hill College of Arts, University of Glasgow, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

Paper abstract

Trophies have been a part of war since prehistoric times. Human remains, weapons and other artifacts, taken from sites of conflict as signs of victory, are all part of this history. In the Age of Empire, British forces brought to the United Kingdom a wealth of objects which they presented to the sovereign and the public as tokens of British military power and cultural supremacy. Among these were numerous treasures from the Yuanming Yuan, which are recorded in period texts as “trophies”. But are all of these objects really trophies or is their materiality unsettled? What does their semiological status tell us about the sacking or Britain’s wider relationship to China? This lecture grapples with these issues through close study of documented trophies from the 1860 war: their selection, display and significance within the wider group of spoils from the estate.

31 From Yuanmingyuan to Fonthill: the Transformative Collection of Alfred Morrison (1821-97) (R)

Dr Stacey Pierson SOAS, University of London, London, United Kingdom

Paper abstract

In the 1860s, the art patron and collector Alfred Morrison began to build up one of the most important art collections in 19th-century Britain. Among his numerous masterpieces were several hundred Chinese objects, many of which were bought in quantity directly or indirectly from H. B. Loch (1827-1900), Elgin’s private secretary. Loch was present during the looting of the Yuanmingyuan in 1860 and acquired a large number of objects for himself at that time. After their acquisition, Morrison displayed his Chinese treasures in both of his residences, a London house in Carlton House Terrace, famously decorated by Owen Jones, and his country estate in Wiltshire, Fonthill House, which he inherited from his father James in 1857 and then commissioned Jones to design a special room just for the Chinese objects. Importantly, it was here that all of his collections were catalogued and then passed down in the family as the Fonthill collection. The inclusion of the Yuanmingyuan objects in this category gave the objects a new identity that became a highly desirable provenance in the art market, more attractive than their original Chinese imperial origins. Auction sales of these artworks and objects, now identified as from Fonthill, began in 1965 and have continued into the present century. These sales present an opportunity to explore the impact that collecting and classification can have on provenance, which is implicitly understood as a developmental process in the lifecycle of an object, but is less often considered as a consequence of collecting and object management. This paper will examine critically the trajectory of the Yuanmingyuan objects that entered the Fonthill collection and their transformation from Chinese imperial luxury goods to artworks associated with a famous British collector.

32 Auctions and Displays of Elgin’s and Negroni’s Summer Palace Collections in 1860s London

Professor Louise Tythacott University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Paper abstract

This talk will examine the circulation and commodification of Summer Palace objects taken from China in October 1860 by two soldiers in the Anglo-French armies – James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin (1811-1863) and Captain Jean-Louis de Negroni (b.1820). Both men displayed their collections before auctioning them – the former in the prestigious South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) in 1862, in advance of a sale at Christie’s (1864); the latter in a well-known exhibitionary site, the Crystal Palace (1865), the year before being auctioned at Foster’s. While the auction house and exhibition were two key sites of visibility for such collections at this time, there was a wider system of circulation and consumption as objects moved from public display, to auctioneer, through the hands of art dealers and on to museums. We also see here the significance of the cultural terrain of London as a site of imperial trade, for many of the dealers who acquired Summer Palace material at these auctions were based in the heart of the art market in the West End. Looted Summer Palace objects became incorporated into these new contexts in 1860s London – commodified and attributed new values – which only served to embed them more deeply into the structures and cultural meanings of the West.