Chinnery and Houqua: Questions of Attribution

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeChinnery and Houqua: Questions of AttributionJosephine C. DobkinJosephine C. DobkinResearch Assistant, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreA small, full-length portrait of an elderly Chinese gentleman in the robes of a public official, seated with crossed legs on a red divan, was bequeathed to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1941 by the architect and collector W. Gedney Beatty (1869–1941) (Figure 1). The balance of his bequest, 366 books by or on Vitruvius, went to the Department of Prints.1 The lone painting, then titled A Chinese Merchant and thought to be by the English artist George Chinnery (1774–1852), was assigned to the American Wing.2 Undoubtedly this was done because of the strong American interest in Chinese goods, for which, from the early days of the China trade until the Civil War, New York had been the principal port of entry.3 The sitter for the portrait was later identified as Houqua II (Wu Bingjian, 1769–1843),4 also spelled Hoqua or Howqua5 (the syllable “qua” was added to Chinese names as a mark of respect by Europeans in Canton).6 While the identification of the sitter is correct, the Museum’s painting cannot be accepted as the work of Chinnery.71. Style of George Chinnery (English, 1774–1852), possibly by Esther Speakman (American, 1823–1875). Houqua. If by Speakman, the painting would date to 1843. Oil on canvas, 25 × 18⅝ in. (63.5 × 47.3 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of W. Gedney Beatty, 1941 (41.160.405). Photograph: Juan Trujillo, The Photograph Studio, MMARevered for his honesty by British and American businessmen in the China trade, the melancholy-looking Houqua was not just a hong merchant; he was the leader of the cohong, the powerful guild of Chinese traders authorized by their government to oversee the business dealings of Western merchants at Canton (Guangzhou), the only port open to foreigners after 1757 until the opening of the treaty ports in 1842.8 Hong merchants paid large sums for the privilege of selling silk and tea to Westerners in exchange for opium from India and Turkey. They controlled all foreign trade with the port, earning millions of dollars in revenue annually.9 In 1834 Houqua’s personal wealth was estimated at twenty-six million dollars, and his villa and gardens were famous for their beauty. A staff member of the British embassy recalled a visit to his mansion in 1817: “Howqua’s house, though not yet finished, was on a scale of magnificence worthy of his fortune.”10The Western traders believed Houqua to be fair, friendly, intelligent, and generous.11 He offered assistance to the foreign merchants who “found themselves financially embarrassed.”12 In 1839, when the emperor ordered trade halted and opium destroyed during the first Opium War (1839–42), Houqua was put in charge of the burning and was held in chains by the Chinese authorities until the Westerners destroyed their stocks.13 He paid a fine out of his own pocket to save Canton from bombardment by the British.14 After Houqua’s death in 1843, a clipper ship was named after him; a relative of the China trader Benjamin R. C. Low composed a memorial poem dedicated to him;15 and his wax effigy was displayed for years at Madame Tussaud’s in London.16 Houqua’s appearance is further documented by a small watercolor-on-ivory portrait head in the Museum’s collection signed by the Chinese artist Tingqua (Guan Lianchang, born ca. 1809; active 1840–70) (Figure 2).2. Tingqua (Chinese, born ca. 1809; active 1840–70). Portrait of Houqua, signed, ca. 1840. Watercolor on ivory, 6¾ × 4½ in. (17.1 × 11.4 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. John de Peyster Douw, 1966 (66.109). Photograph: Juan Trujillo, The Photograph Studio, MMAThe oil painting of Houqua is traditionally associated with Chinnery, who was born in London and was the son of an amateur artist. In 1791, when he was seventeen, he first exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts with Portrait of His Father and continued to show portrait miniatures, small whole-lengths and portraits in oil and crayon as well as in pencil, and finally watercolors and landscapes, until 1846. In 1797 he moved to Dublin, where he gained Irish patrons and married Marianne Vigne. When the marriage proved too constraining for Chinnery, a colorful and eccentric character, he abandoned his wife and two children and sailed for Madras (Chennai) in 1802.17 Sketching and painting vibrant scenes of the people and country, he remained in India until 1825, when he fled to escape not only his creditors but also his wife and family, who had joined him when he moved later from Madras to Calcutta (Kolkata). He then left for Macao, just downriver from the major trading center of Canton.18 He lived there until his death in 1852 but paid no visits to Canton after 1832.19 Given his propensity for accurate likenesses and his quick wit, Chinnery became friends with American and British traders. According to a contemporary, “at Canton he became a general favorite, his anecdotes of Indian life, his powers of description, his eccentricities, made him a much-sought-for guest.”20There is only one painting of Houqua that is assuredly by Chinnery, and it belongs to the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) (Figure 3). The portrait, with that of another merchant, Mouqua (Figure 4), was commissioned about 1827 by W. H. Chicheley Plowden, president of the East India Company in Canton, who first returned to England in 1830, presumably taking the pictures with him.21 The date of Plowden’s portrait of Houqua can be construed from a preliminary drawing on which Chinnery inscribed in shorthand “December 26th [18]27. Canton”22 (Figure 5). Chinnery’s oil shows a Chinese man of indeterminate age. He has a wistful expression, high, wide forehead, and wispy mustache and is seated with legs crossed in a Western pose, slightly turned toward the viewer. On the right is a column with a decorated base. The furnishings and accoutrements are those of a wealthy Chinese man: elegant tables, a tasseled hanging lantern, a delicate porcelain teacup, a spittoon, and on the high table at his elbow a red silk hat with a finial of opaque lapis lazuli denoting a public official of the fourth grade.23 Through the tall window or door behind Houqua is a glimpse of his gardens with a distant temple set against a stormy sky. The picture is atmospherically lit so that the head, fur edgings of the sleeves and robe, soles of the shoes, spittoon, teacup, and sunset emerge from the shadows. Houqua wears a calf-length surcoat of blue-black satin lined with white fur and with an embroidered phoenix rank badge on the chest, light blue satin trousers, and black satin boots with white felted paper soles.24 Houqua, with elegantly attenuated wrists, is fingering a necklace of semiprecious stones.3. George Chinnery. Houqua, ca. 1828. Oil on canvas, 24½ × 18¾ in. (62.2 × 47.6 cm). Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Ltd. Photograph: Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Ltd.4. George Chinnery. Mouqua, ca. 1828. Oil on canvas, 24½ × 18¾ in. (62.2 × 47.6 cm). Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Ltd. Photograph: Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Ltd.5. George Chinnery. Houqua, 1827. Pen and ink on paper, dimensions unknown. Location unknownThe Metropolitan Museum’s Houqua (Figure 1) is one of many variants of a different composition held in museums and private collections in the eastern United States, Great Britain, and Ireland. They were brought home as souvenirs of their association with the great merchant by traders such as John Perkins Cushing, Nathan Dunn, John M. and Robert Bennet Forbes, Augustine Heard, Samuel Wadsworth Russell, and Benjamin Chew Wilcocks, many of whom made fortunes in the opium trade.25 The versions and copies, all showing a frontal figure and virtually identical in size, differ significantly in quality and detail from the Hong Kong picture (see appendix). On examination of the originals or photographs of eight such paintings, none contains the fine highlights or painterly treatment of the fur edging of the robe and soles of the shoes found in the HSBC work; the superbly painted teacup is not in evidence, and the pose is less refined.26 In these iterations, including the one owned by the Metropolitan, Houqua is seated on a red divan rather than a wood armchair and is framed by an octagonal window. A pilaster is in the background, and a small, low table perches on the divan. An incense burner not present in the Hong Kong picture sits on a pedestal behind him. He wears striped rather than plain trousers and more strings of beads. Not all of the faces resemble the Hong Kong Houqua; in some cases he has acquired a faint beard and has aged significantly. Given the wide variation, it is unlikely that all of his portraits were created during his lifetime.27Most of the small, frontal full-lengths were assumed to be by Chinnery in the mid-nineteenth century, but the twentieth century has seen much conjecture about their authorship. Chinnery did not replicate his work. He rarely signed his paintings, though some of his pen-and-ink and pencil sketches are initialed and dated.28 He was apt to add notes to his drawings in his own complicated shorthand, which has stood in for a signature.29 The full-lengths of Houqua are all about 25 by 18⅝ inches. In writing about them, Chinnery expert Patrick Conner explains that “problems of attribution become acute. The once-cherished notion that Chinnery’s portraits are to be distinguished from Chinese work on grounds of ‘quality’ is inadequate, for the latter is often highly accomplished by any standards.”30 For Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, writing in 1953, “few of these paintings would seem to be done in Chinnery’s characteristic style.” He concluded that “almost all of them would appear to be painted by Chinese artists.”31Chinese painting for export was a particular genre developed to satisfy the taste of Westerners doing business in Canton in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as they experienced local life and customs.32 While Chinnery was deftly drawing street scenes, animals, and marine views as well as painting portraits, flourishing local artists provided him with competition. The principal Cantonese artist in these endeavors was Tingqua’s older brother Lamqua (Guan Zuolin, 1801–1860), who was active from 1825 to 1860, a period coinciding with Chinnery’s stay. He was reportedly a pupil of Chinnery’s though the latter emphatically denied the claim.33 Lamqua undercut Chinnery by charging much lower rates.34 It was not uncommon for a Western trader to have his portrait painted by Chinnery and then copied by Lamqua.35 A contemporary British account describes him: “There resides at Macao a singular character in the person of a portrait painter, a Chinese, of the name of Lamqua . . . he shews [sic] a wonderful degree of talent in his pictures, which are executed altogether after the European style.”36 Another author notes that the building in which he painted included a workshop on the first floor, where eight to ten assistants toiled, drawing Chinese landscapes, painting miniatures, and copying European prints. On the top floor was Lamqua’s studio, “a small unornamented room lighted by a skylight. . . . The whole wainscot is covered with the small portraits of the sitters.” The writer continues, “Although he has, in general, more portraits to paint than he can well accomplish, and finishes them with expedition, he is considered to make no more by his profession than about £500 a year.”37 Lamqua developed a fluent style and, like Chinnery, added vivid flashes of color at the final stages of his work.38Lamqua purportedly never left China but was represented at the Royal Academy in 1835 and 1845. He exhibited in New York in 1841 and in Philadelphia in 1851 and 1860. At the Boston Athenaeum in 1850,39 five Lamqua portraits of Chinese merchants, including one of Houqua, were displayed, all brought to New England by Augustine Heard (1785–1868).40 The Houqua portrait could be the waist-length likeness attributed to Lamqua that is in the Ipswich Public Library, Massachusetts.41 One expert effused that those five works were “some of the finest portraits ever done of the Chinese merchants who dealt with Westerners. The Houqua portrait is equal in quality to a portrait by the most academic American painter of the period.”42 Conner agrees that such portraits “attest to the remarkable talents of the Chinese artist in adopting not only Western techniques of manipulating paint, but also Western conventions.”43 Other works attributed to Lamqua are good copies of Chinnery’s Portrait of a Tanka Boatwoman and a half-length self-portrait of about 1850 (Figure 6) as well as a skillful version of Chinnery’s Mouqua (Figure 7), all of which may attest to his talent as a painter.44 It should be noted that versions of Houqua’s portrait have been attributed to Lamqua on limited, if any, evidence.6. Lamqua. George Chinnery, ca. 1850. Oil on canvas, 9¾ × 7½ in. (24.7 × 19 cm). Hong Kong Museum of Art Collection (AH 1991-0003). Photograph: Hong Kong Museum of Art7. Attributed to Lamqua (Chinese, 1801–1860). Mouqua, ca. 1828–40. Oil on canvas, 24 × 18⅝ in. (60.8 × 47.3 cm). Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts (M20450). Photograph: Peabody Essex MuseumIn order to have a standard against which to judge who may have painted those Houqua portraits, we examined the Metropolitan Museum’s Chinnery self-portrait from the collection of B. C. Wilcocks (1776–1845) (Figure 8).45 A Philadelphia trader who served as the United States consul in China in 1812, Wilcocks was a great friend of the artist’s in Canton, and Chinnery painted him in a splendid small full-length, signed and dated 1828 (Figure 9). The Museum’s Chinnery self-portrait underwent infrared reflectography prior to its publication in the 2009 catalogue of the Museum’s British paintings, and it was discovered that the artist made a careful preparatory pencil sketch on the canvas before applying paint.46 With the cooperation of the Department of Paintings Conservation, it was decided to submit the Metropolitan’s Houqua to X-radiography. Wilcocks also owned a Houqua portrait that remained in his immediate family until it was bequeathed to the Philadelphia Maritime Museum (Independence Seaport Museum) in 1988 (Figure 10). In light of the Wilcocks connection, this painting was X-rayed as well to find out if any of Chinnery’s trademark underdrawing might be discovered. The results were largely negative.8. George Chinnery. Self-Portrait, ca. 1828. Oil on canvas, 8⅝ × 7¼ in. (21.9 × 18.4 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1943 (43.132.4). Photograph: Juan Trujillo, The Photograph Studio, MMA9. George Chinnery. Benjamin Chew Wilcocks, 1828. Oil on canvas, 28 × 18½ in. (71.1 × 47 cm). Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Ltd. Photograph: Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Ltd.10. Style of Chinnery (possibly by him). Houqua, ca. 1825. Oil on canvas, 26 × 19 in. (66 × 48.3 cm). Independence Seaport Museum, Philadelphia (88.10). Photograph: Independence Seaport MuseumMetropolitan Museum conservator Dorothy Mahon shared her expertise in assessing these results.47 She observed that the canvas used for the Metropolitan’s painting is typical of an early nineteenth-century American prepared and stretched canvas. It bears a stencil on the back (Figure 11), indicating that it came from Philadelphia, with the initials ES in ink.48 The practice of stenciling the backs of canvases in the United States started in New York about 1830 and spread to Boston and Philadelphia.49 At the time there was an active trade in prepared canvases and pigments between England, the United States, and China.50 Completed canvases were sent to the United States for stretching and framing.11. Replica of canvas maker’s mark of Ashton & Browning on the back of Figure 112. In the X-ray of the Independence Seaport’s Houqua painting, Mahon perceived signs of underdrawing in the face, lips, and hands, with possible pencil lines on the left foot that were then thickly painted up. No hint of underdrawing was found in the Metropolitan’s painting, and only two minor adjustments to the head and vase were discovered. This version seems to be by a different hand, with less freedom, softness of modeling, and spontaneity than are evident in the Independence Seaport Museum’s portrait. After being X-rayed, Wilcocks’s Houqua portrait was examined at the Independence Seaport Museum.51 Supporting the earlier findings, it was judged to be with in the and all the versions and variants this one seems to be of the On a Houqua portrait at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Figure was found to be more to that of the Metropolitan, the portrait at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts (Figure attributed to a less version of the Independence Seaport’s canvas. the Independence Seaport Museum’s work to be painted by a more skillful than the Metropolitan Museum or the Philadelphia Museum On the back of the is a attribution to the American artist the this portrait with that of another Chinese merchant in his of works brought back from further the was commissioned to Wilcocks’s Houqua portrait, though his version has never been Wilcocks was a of the as well as a friend and of who had painted two portraits of his in On in his that Wilcocks had just returned from Canton with a for him from the and that Wilcocks on from On he Wilcocks left the whole of Houqua by Chinnery to be In his that he Chinnery’s Houqua from the and a on Wilcocks had copies made for business and of his family, it is in light of his to Chinnery, that he would have for his personal collection a portrait of the great Houqua by a Chinese the acquired portrait at the Philadelphia Museum, of that has that the painting may be by the Esther Speakman The work bears a stencil identical to the Metropolitan’s and the initials by the is of Speakman, who painted and copied canvases in for Wilcocks and In canvases to two at the Academy of the of them were owned by Wilcocks, including a portrait of Houqua after Chinnery. She exhibited there in the and the canvas maker’s mark on the back of the Metropolitan Museum’s as well as date of 1843, could be the seems that Chinnery’s portrait of Houqua in Hong Kong (see Figure is later than the of the divan portrait, as in the Metropolitan Museum Wilcocks returned to Philadelphia in the of 1828 with his Houqua (see Figure which included the red divan, and exhibited it in the Plowden, more Chinnery is owned by first returned to England from Canton in from a he returned in Chinnery have painted the portrait owned by The HSBC work is and more Western than the more and frontal to the of any of the could possibly be by Chinnery it is not that any of them are by him for that by or may the Chinnery, if only because so many of the pictures have been associated with his to for her and interest in this Dorothy Mahon her time and expertise in the of the to of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for her and toward and her the American would have been less to of the Independence Seaport Museum, and to H. and of the Peabody Essex was of assistance in also to Patrick and for their B. to 1953, H. H. at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, that the is and Museum’s attribution was to after and later to on the catalogue by 1953, or were of business on the in Canton from the Chinese by foreign merchants and used for as well as for and The American hong trading and the United States 1953, 1953, 1953, After the Chinese government foreigners because of the opium trade, and the traders to 1953, came back to Macao before to England in Conner The embroid

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.