Property from a West Country manor house
A set of six Chinese Export painted tôle and pewter figures of Europeans, Qing dynasty, early 19th century
Lot Closed
June 9, 01:19 PM GMT
Estimate
50,000 - 80,000 GBP
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Description
comprising four single figures and one pair, all dressed in European fashions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century including top hats, curled hair worn without powder, overcoats with waistcoats, breeches, stockings and buckled shoes, with two single figures holding a baluster-form vase, the other two single figures holding a faceted vase with gilt handles and the pair both supporting a large gilt-metal censer, each on a lead plinth of deliberately distorted design
each approx. 45cm high; 17 ¾ in.
Collection of George C. Frelinghuysen;
Sotheby's Los Angeles, 21-5 April 1974, lot 424;
Sotheby's New York, 13 October 1990, lot 65a ($52,500).
C. L. Crossman, The Decorative Arts of the China Trade, Woodbridge, 1991, pl. 125, p.369.
"This is the most elaborate and fancily executed of the known figures of this type"
- Carl Crossman1
This highly unusual group of pewter figures depicts Western gentlemen holding aloft Chinese works of decorative art, and are probably depictions of the merchants who exported such porcelain and metalwork to an eager international collector's market. There is precedent for this type of figure earlier in the eighteenth century, though chiefly in clay. A very early example of a European merchant figure from the 1710s is in the V&A (FE.32 to B-1981), and there are numerous examples from the sculptor Tan Chitqua (c.1728–1796) from the second half of the century. Chitqua, who often depicted merchants in Canton such as the example now in the Rijksmuseum (BK-1976-49), travelled to London from 1769 to 1771, where he dined with the royal family and exhibited his work at the Royal Academy in 1770. His portrait of Anthony Askew (1722–1774), created during this visit, is in the collection of the Royal College of Physicians (X302).
Chitqua's clay portrait figures survive in numbers large enough to give us a sense of a tradition of Westerner figures created for export, but he worked in an entirely different medium. Figures by pewtersmiths are far rarer, and the key comparable examples tend to have hollow top hats to allow them to be used as candlesticks. These examples, which are seen both in scholarly literature and on the auction market,2 hold aloft Chinese vessels much like the present examples. However, none seem to have the deliberately skewed bases that add a ludic, satirical note to the characterisation of the present figures. While not in pewter, a notable group of eight ivory, cloisonné and painted wood figures of Westerners holding Buddhist emblems was formerly in the collection of Queen Mary and has since been dispersed,3 presenting us with another curious variation on this topos in Chinese sculpture.
1 C. L. Crossman, The Decorative Arts of the China Trade, Woodbridge, 1991, p.369.
2 See D. Howard and J. Ayers, China for the West, London, 1978, vol II, p.672, fig.694, Christie's London, 11th July 2006, lot 163 and Christie's London, 11th November 2003, lot 115 (though this example does not wear a top hat and the figure's hexagonal vase holds the candle).
3 Queen Mary owned all eight; of the six later owned by Mildred and Rafi Mottahedeh, one pair sold Sotheby's New York, 19 October 2000, lot 460 and another at Sotheby's Paris, Collection de monsieur et madame Luigi Anton Laura, 27 June 2001, lot 322. See also Howard and Ayers, ibid., pp.663-665, fig.688.