1.6Detail of Yuan Jiang,
The Penglai Isle of the Immortals,
1708. Hanging scroll, ink
and color on silk, 160 × 97 cm.
Palace Museum, Beijing,
Gu187505.
a literatus). Perhaps the religious subject matter of this painting also diminished Jiang’s assessment of its quality: a religious work would have been produced by professional painter as a functional devotional image for public consumption, much as a Buddhist or Daoist mural would have been.
Between the use of established literati painting discourse to criticize Western painting and the dominant position that orthodox landscape painting held in the seventeenth century, European representational modes might well have failed to produce any effect whatsoever on Chinese painting. However, with the Kangxi emperor’s appropriation of orthodox, Northern Song, and Western painting elements, all in the service of statecraft, an entirely new synthesis of previously disparate pictorial elements was born. Kangxi established not only the precedent for imperial commissions that blended Chinese and European styles, but also the presence of trained European artists at the High Qing court—and with them, the use of deceptive illusionistic painting to advance the Qing imperial agenda.
Appropriating Western Painting at the Kangxi Court
Johann Adam Schall von Bell, S.J. (Tang Ruowang, 1591–1666), was just beginning to use a combination of Western art and science to make inroads at the Ming court when that dynasty fell in 1644 due to an internal rebellion. The rebellion was subsequently quelled with assistance from the Manchu Qing dynasty, which had established itself well north of the Great Wall in 1636, but the Qing then succeeded the Ming to become the new foreign rulers of China. Beginning his work anew with the Shunzhi emperor (r. 1644–61), Schall von Bell became first a scientific advisor and later a personal mentor to the young ruler, thereby succeeding in establishing the Jesuits as both scientific advisors and imperial teachers of Western learning (Xixue). Shunzhi’s heir Kangxi demonstrated deep interest in the various branches of European knowledge that made up the Renaissance scholastic quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. (Nan Huairen, 1623–88), who assisted and later succeeded Schall von Bell as the director of Beijing’s astronomical observatory in 1669, noted that linear perspective played a key role in the mathematical sciences taught at the Qing court.66 Although a painting technique, linear perspective was introduced as part of geometry and therefore was presented less as an art than as an aspect of technical knowledge. Along with established literati painting values, this scientific nature was likely an important part of what prevented its visual dialogue with Chinese painting in the seventeenth century,67 but also what made it attractive to the Qing court as part of new knowledge that supported Kangxi’s statecraft, and which he supported in turn by sponsoring a number of texts in both Chinese and Manchu on Western learning. Such study, patronage, and control of this technical knowledge was a dramatic departure from previous imperial and literati practices, which avoided direct engagement with such subjects, and has been interpreted as a means of demonstrating political authority by mastering knowledge not common among the literati scholar-officials who dominated the civil bureaucracy.68 The specialized knowledge Kangxi gained by studying mathematics, astronomy, and other subjects with the Jesuits was therefore an essential part of his statecraft, which positioned him as both a powerful ruler in full control of the empire and a teacher who embodied the Confucian ideal of the sage-ruler who was wiser than his subjects. Such a presentation was particularly important given that Kangxi had come to real power only by overthrowing his regents while still a young teenager, and had spent the first decades of his sixty-one-year reign brutally consolidating the Manchu-led empire against pro-Han Ming loyalist rebellions in southeastern China.
To help improve the Han majority’s perception of the Manchu Qing rule, establish support among the literati, and strengthen his self-presentation as a legitimate Confucian ruler, Kangxi followed an ancient precedent and undertook a series of imperial inspection tours.69 The most important were his six Southern Tours (Nanxun) through the Yangzi River delta, where Kangxi sought new officials from among the unparalleled
concentration of highly intelligent Han literati in order to bolster support in this very prosperous and powerful region, as well as to balance the Manchu political presence at court. After his Second Southern Tour in 1689, Wang Hui was appointed to direct a massive project to produce twelve monumental horizontal scrolls, the Southern Tour Paintings (Nanxuntu), depicting the most significant geographic areas and events of the journey.70 By giving the empire’s preeminent artist the first major Qing imperial commission, Kangxi appropriated Wang’s own Great Synthesis of historical painting styles, grounded in the literati lineage and ideals, as the foundation for the official Qing court painting style. Wang painted the all-important landscape that framed the tour in his trademark synthetic style, literally setting the events of the tour within the literati landscape, and directed trained professional painters in incorporating elements of detailed academic realism derived from Song pictorial and stylistic models in order to represent the diversity of architecture and figures.71 By appropriating the style that defined Chinese painting at the time, as well as the realism those literati often criticized, Kangxi patronized a syncretic style that unified all these divergent elements as part of the Qing imperial agenda.
As Wang Hui was completing the massive Southern Tour project, Kangxi also made the decision to appropriate European representational modes, although it is important to note that not all European painting found imperial acceptance. During his first meeting with Kangxi in 1690, Giandomenico Gabiani (Bi Jia, 1623–94), the Jesuit vice-provincial of China, presented the emperor with a repeater clock, a barometer, a thermometer, and a miniature of the Holy Mother. Kangxi kept the instruments, but returned the painting. Rather than a demonstration of anti-Catholic feeling, however, this public gesture reflected his targeted interest in how the Jesuits, their knowledge, and their objects could serve him—whereas Christianity did not.72 To the great disappointment of the Jesuits, Kangxi was unconcerned with Western religion, but deeply interested in the political potential of European representational styles and techniques. The first such commission occurred with Jiao Bingzhen (c. 1660–1726), a painter and the supervisor of the Five Offices (wuguanzheng) at the imperial astronomical observatory, where he may have learned perspective from Verbiest. In 1696 Jiao became the first Qing court retainer to work in European pictorial techniques under imperial sanction when he incorporated them into the Imperially Composed Pictures of Tilling and Weaving (Yuzhi gengzhitu, figure 1.7). Jiao initially created a unique album of paintings inspired by a Southern Song handscroll,73 but Kangxi so approved of Jiao’s album that he ordered it replicated in an album of woodblock prints to be distributed throughout the empire. The images depict various scenes in the processes of rice cultivation and sericulture, illustrating the technological practicalities of producing rice and silk (activities gendered male and female, respectively), and therefore also illustrating a well-ordered Chinese society. The illustrations are accompanied by an imperial preface as well as individual poems that demonstrate Kangxi’s personal interest in these depictions of Qing subjects, nature, and productive technology, all flourishing under his rule in overt images of good governance.74
1.7Jiao Bingzhen, Imperially Composed Pictures of Tilling and Weaving, 1696. Imperially commissioned polychrome woodblock prints after paintings. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2650-128)
In this representative