A set of 12 Qianlong or Jiaqing period export pictures, $95,000 (£70,100) at Nadeau’s.
The dozen gilt-framed images, each painted in gouache on sheets of European paper measuring 18 x 21in (45 x 52cm), date to c.1800.
Estimated at $15,000-25,000, they sold via the LiveAuctioneers bidding platform at $95,000 (£70,100), plus 25% buyer’s premium.
The booming China trade in tea, porcelain and silk in the 18th century fed a curiosity about life in the exotic east. Sets of romanticised images such as this, based on didactic albums known as gengzhi tu first produced in the Kangxi period, were commissioned from Anglo-Chinese painting studios in the commercial hub of Canton (Guangdong).
An example from a set of 12 Qianlong or Jiaqing period export pictures depicting the manufacture and distribution of porcelain, $95,000 (£70,100) at Nadeau’s.
Sets detailing traditional Chinese porcelain-production techniques are of particular interest to ceramicists.
Most are ultimately based on a set of illustrations made in the Qianlong reign and annotated by Tang Ying, the superintendent of imperial porcelain production.
The cycles begin with the sourcing, processing and transportation of raw materials (porcelain stone and kaolin clay) in Jingdezhen and end with the trading of finished wares in the porcelain shops of Canton. The painting is a deliberate blend of Chinese and Western styles.
The Victoria and Albert Museum has a set of 24 paintings. The group in the Hong Kong Maritime Museum, bequeathed by collector Susan Chen Hardy, numbers 34 images.
Nadeau’s set of 12 offered at its New Year’s Day sale had a provenance back to William Wyndham Grenville (1759-1834), the Pittite politician who was briefly Prime Minister from 1806-07. They were formerly part of a larger leather-bound album of gengzhi tu paintings inscribed and dated Lord Grenville, Chinese Drawings ft. 1803 sold in London in the early 1990s.
An example from a set of 12 Qianlong or Jiaqing period export pictures depicting the manufacture and distribution of porcelain, $95,000 (£70,100) at Nadeau’s.
They had been included in The Luxury of Tea & Coffee – An Exhibition of Chinese Export Porcelain from a Private Collection held at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2011-12. After the exhibition they were sold by London dealership Thomas Coulborn & Sons to furnish a Manhattan townhouse decorated by Cullman and Kravis. A sale receipt of £110,000 was included in the lot.
In October last year, Asian works of art specialist Alistair Gibson completed the private treaty sale of a set of 24 Qianlong gouache scenes depicting tea cultivation and production c.1780. The so-called Hubert Givenchy tea production paintings were bought by ‘an important south-east Asian museum’ for a six-figure sum.
