Late Qing Paintings of Beijing Life and Customs in Russian Collections: Provenance and Key Characteristics.

• In Event: “New Sinology” before the “New Sinology”: Four Case Studies

Abstract

In the collections of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (RAS), the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (RAS) and the Library of St. Petersburg State University there are a number of albums of paintings by the Chinese artist Zhou Peichun (dates unknown), whose creative period lasted from the late 1880s until the early period of the Republic of China. Selection of subjects for these paintings is based on foreigners’ interest in Chinese daily life, including scenes of Beijing street trade and crafts, life and customs, shop signs, pictures of citizens and legendary beauties. Comparative analysis both of the subject matter, artistic features, and composition of these pictures, as well as of the history of how they were collected, allows approximate dating and helps to arrange the painting collections in chronological order according to the time of their composition. Influence of early Chinese export paintings from the southern regions of China is clearly visible on these works. Additionally, some of the paintings have, both compositionally and stylistically, much in common with the pictures of the eighteenth century, which previously were the property of Henri Léonard Jean-Baptiste Bertin’s (1720-1792) private collection (now held in the National Library of France). This paper introduces the history of how the Zhou Peichun paintings were collected and how Russian sinologists used this illustrative material in their research. Albums of the Zhou Peichun paintings provide invaluable materials for the study of the Beijing daily life in the Late Qing period.

Author

• Polina Rud, Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, RAS