The Chinese Rotunda Turns 100

By Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt

Anyone who has set foot in the Harrison Rotunda of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (UPM) cannot forget the experience. Conceived at the turn of the twentieth century as the westernmost of three rotundas that would house the university's collections of Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek and Roman objects, it was completed in 1915. However, in the period from the First World War to the Great Depression, changes in leadership at the museum and university along with the slow process of fund-raising and construction led to new designs. In the end there would be only one rotunda. It became a landmark for the campus and the city.

Inaugural exhibition in the Harrison rotunda at the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

The rotunda houses a permanent collection of Chinese art which is unique for its quality (especially considering its size). It is also a uniquely distinctive space in which to display Buddhist statuary, wall paintings and some minor arts. Named for Charles Curtis Harrison (1844-1927), university provost from 1894 to 1911 and vice-president and then president of the museum's Board of Managers from 1911 to 1916 and 1917 to 1929 respectively, the rotunda is an ambitious and amazing structure: 27 metres in diameter and masonry from floor to ceiling except for the tiled dome. The weight of the dome and walls are supported by eight engaged piers. Each pair of piers brackets an arch with three windows. The rotunda, however, is only half of the architectural achievement. Directly below it is a domed auditorium with 800 seats. Both levels had state-of-the-art systems for air purification and circulation at the time of construction. Now they are 85 years old and climate control is one of the challenging priorities of the current renovations and additions as the museum moves into the 21st century. It was to be a legacy of George Byron Gordon (1870-1927), an archaeologist of prehistoric America and the museum's second director (1910-27), that in spite of the original intentions, nothing but Chinese art has ever been exhibited in the Harrison Rotunda.

The photograph opposite, believed to have been taken when the rotunda opened, shows its inaugural exhibition. Porcelain was on loan from the J.P. Morgan Collection, `Oriental art' (unspecified) from Duveen Brothers in London, jade and sculpture from the German-owned Worch Company in Paris, and paintings and relief sculpture from the renowned dealer C.T. Loo (1880-1957), whose expert eye and talent for acquiring objects for sale outside China were responsible for most of the masterpieces in the University Museum and other museums buying East Asian art in the the 1910s and 20s. The Chinese ceramics in the photograph were on loan for the opening. Gordon convinced patrons to purchase some of them for the permanent collection.

It was during Gordon's period of service that the important works featured in the articles in this issue entered the museum. The luohan sculpture discussed by Richard Smithies was bought from Edgar Worch in 1914. This purchase heralded the standards of artistic quality and significance in the Chinese art field that would characterize each subsequent major purchase for the next two decades. The statues from Southern Xiangtang Shan which are the focus of Angela Howard's article were acquired in 1916. The next year, a Maitreya sculpture dated by inscription to 516 was purchased from C.T. Loo (see the essay by Dorothy C. Wong). Two more Buddhist sculptures, a Shakyamuni, illustrated on the cover of this issue and a gilt-bronze bodhisattva, the subject of Marilyn Gridley's article, came to the museum in 1921 and 1925 respectively; the former through Loo once again, and the latter from Worch.

The six-year journey that brought our most famous Chinese sculptures, the bas-reliefs of imperial steeds from the tomb of the Tang emperor Taizong (r. 626-49) to the museum, began the year the rotunda opened to the public. That story, including the involvement of C.T. Loo and possibly the government of China at the time, is told in full here by Zhou Xiuqin. Loo was also responsible for our ownership of a Zhou dynasty inlaid fanghu, whose 2,300 years of history prior to arriving at the museum may have included handling by Mencius himself an association explained in the note by Gilbert Mattos and Yang Hua.

It has often been commented upon that the only decent paintings in the museum are wall paintings and The Journey of Tang Emperor Minghuang to Shu, whose proposed dates have ranged from the Tang (618-906) to the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). The wall paintings include several with Tang or Song period (960-1279) dates, and an enormous pair of paintings from the Front Hall of Guangsheng Lower Monastery, currently believed to date from the early Ming period. Two years ago, James Cahill proved to us that our non-mural paintings might not be as pedestrian as had been thought. The day he and Tsao Hsing-yuan spent investigating works in storage turned up about a dozen Ming and Qing period (1644-1911) paintings of some historic or aesthetic value, many believed to be by painters whose names will be recognized by readers here. Less than a year later, Roderick Whitfield spent a day looking through the stored paintings, and discovered yet another work of superior quality, a painting of the bird-and-flower genre. All these paintings, acquired in the second decade of the twentieth century, are discussed in the articles by Cahill and Whitfield.

During the museum's first decade of feverish acquisition and the subsequent twenty years, Carl Whiting Bishop (1881-1942), Helen Fernald, and Horace Jayne, all luminaries in the Chinese art field, held positions there. Hired as an assistant curator in 1914, Bishop's agenda was the same as that of most curators at the museum during that period: to secure excavation rights or a comparable research project in China that might bring more objects to the museum. Most of Bishop's tenure was spent in China seeking such an opportunity. Gordon, it seems from correspondence between the two, did not fully understand the impossibilities of a team headed by his museum or even a joint expedition, and the civil unrest in China at the time did not help Bishop's cause.

Bishop returned to Philadelphia in 1918 and was hired by the Freer Gallery of Art the same year. Jayne had accompanied Langdon Warner (1881-1955) of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard, on an expedition that left Xi'an for Dunhuang in September 1923. They reached Karakhoto in 1924. Stricken with frostbite in the Gobi desert, Jayne was forced to turn back, while Warner continued on the journey that was to bring the kneeling bodhisattva and nine wall-painting fragments to Harvard. Jayne was director of the museum from 1929 to 1940. His years of leadership overlapped with Fernald's as a curator, 1925 to 1935.

As it turned out, the museum never was to sponsor an excavation in China; nor, of course, would any museum or research group in the United States do so for most of the twentieth century. Thus, unlike many of the museum's collections, which are the results of nearly a century or more of Penn-sponsored excavations or research on every continent, most of the Chinese collection entered the museum through purchase or donation prior to 1930. It is thus all the more remarkable that so many of the Chinese Buddhist objects are considered to be on a par with the spectacular quality of our holdings from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Oceania, Africa and the Americas. Our new name, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, reflects the character of the museum's ongoing research in all these areas, among others. Holdings in the China area, on the other hand, have been added only occasionally in the last seventy years. Indeed, the objects discussed in the pages that follow, in addition to several later examples of Buddhist sculpture and a few pieces of funerary sculpture from the early centuries of the Common Era, are testaments to George Byron Gordon's vision of the museum as a repository of objects that would represent the highest achievements of all ancient civilizations. The rotunda which houses the Chinese collection remains an architectural showcase, intimately and historically linked to a period of extraordinary optimism and intense activity during which the museum defined its place internationally. Eighty-five years have passed since the rotunda opened its doors to the public; sixty since the cream of the Chinese collection was published by Horace Jayne. It is thus a most welcome and appreciated opportunity for the museum that this issue of Orientations is dedicated to the collection and marks our centenary.