Two Collectors: Emperor and Baronet

By Rosemary E. Scott

Hongli (Qianlong) at leisure Probably Yongzheng period (1723-35) Ink and colour on silk Diameter 106.5 cm Palace Museum, Beijing

In amassing what is generally acknowledged to be the finest collection of Chinese ceramics outside China itself, and giving it over to public view, Sir Percival David (1892-1964) (Fig. 1) earned not only the admiration and gratitude of generations of students, scholars and connoisseurs, but also a significant place in the history of collecting. It has often been stated that in deciding on the scope of his collection, Sir Percival was greatly influenced by the Chinese imperial collections of the eighteenth century. Significantly, this included the reigns of the three greatest Qing emperors: Kangxi (1662-1722), Yongzheng (1723-35) and Qianlong (1736-95). The Qianlong emperor (Fig. 2) took the keenest interest in the imperial collection, and it was through his enthusiasm that it was most dramatically expanded and recorded. Chang Lin-sheng, formerly deputy director of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, has said of Qianlong: `The imperial collection reached its zenith during the Ch'ien-lung period. The imperial workshops at court and at various other centers of production produced myriad art objects, both decorative and utilitarian. The tribute presented at court by foreign emissaries, the gifts of Chinese officials, and the acquisitions made by the emperor all contributed to the growth of the imperial collection, both in contemporary art and in ancient art treasures' (Chang, p. 22). In his turn, Sir Harry Garner said of David that `[he] will be remembered as the greatest connoisseur and collector of Chinese art in our time. He had an approach to Chinese art very close to that of the great Chinese connoisseurs and we witnessed, during his lifetime, the transfer of interest in western countries from the decorative arts of China which had dominated Europe and America for centuries to the more refined and intimate works of art which were admired and collected by Chinese literati and connoisseurs themselves. Sir Percival played a leading part in this transformation' (Garner, p. xxi). It may thus be argued that the Qianlong emperor in the eighteenth century and Sir Percival David in the twentieth were the most important Chinese art collectors of their day, both for the collections they built up and the influence they had on the appreciation and collecting of others. The Qianlong emperor was, in addition, an avid composer of poetic comments on the works of art in his collection. These comments, as will be discussed below, were often inscribed upon the artworks themselves. Several of the ceramics purchased by David in the late 1920s, which had previously been in the imperial collection, bear inscriptions composed by the Qianlong emperor and incised into the glazes on his orders. They provide a tangible link between the two men, and provoke added curiosity about them as collectors. While it is not feasible properly to compare the personalities of the two men, it is possible to note certain similarities in their characters which affected many of their activities, including their approach to collecting. Both men were, for instance, exceptionally intelligent and gave full commitment to any task they embarked upon. David was educated at Elphinstone College and Bombay University, going on to Cambridge to read law. When he became interested in Chinese art, with his habitual intensity and dedication, he set about learning everything he could about China, its history, culture, and specifically its art. He also did something very rare for a Western collector in the early twentieth century - he learned to read Chinese. It was a task he undertook largely to allow him access to Chinese historical texts and thus further his scholarly endeavours. His subsequent writings, such as his seminal work on Ru ware, bear witness both to his thoroughness in researching Chinese texts and his ability to draw together the threads of his findings (David, 1936-37). In the case of Qianlong, it is likely that his unusual intelligence and diligence were partly responsible for his becoming emperor. It is recorded that when he was twelve years old, Qianlong (then Prince Hongli), was spending time at the imperial summer retreat in Jehol (modern Chengde, Hebei province) with his grandfather, the Kangxi emperor, when the latter asked him to recite from the Chinese classics. To his grandfather's amazement, Hongli's recitation was word-perfect. From then on, Kangxi greatly favoured him and ensured that Hongli lived in the palace and received intensive tuition from a succession of very able tutors, including the Hanlin academician Long Hanfu. Hongli was taught alongside his brother, but was so much more intelligent, and learned so quickly that Long had to give him extra work. When the Kangxi emperor knew he was dying, he named his fourth son, Yinzhen (Hongli's father), as his successor, at the same time stipulating that Hongli should be made the heir apparent (Chang, p. 16).

In examining the collections of Qianlong and Percival David, we must, of course, take into account three major differentiating factors. Firstly the resources available to an eighteenth century Chinese emperor were infinitely greater than those available to a twentieth century British baronet, even one from a wealthy banking family. Secondly, it should be remembered that Qianlong inherited an already immense imperial collection, while the vast majority of the items in David's collection were purchased by him personally, and he did not start to acquire any of his Chinese art until he was an adult. Thirdly, the greatest proportion of Qianlong's collection was made up of art from his own culture, while most of David's was from a culture very distant from his own. However, one influence on their collections in which there is a link was the desire of other people to find exceptional pieces that would please them. In the case of the emperor, embassies presented objects for diplomatic reasons, while courtiers and officials sought to gain the emperor's favour through the presentation of works of art. In the case of Sir Percival, Lady David noted (in discussion with the author) that dealers kept a lookout for particularly rare or fine items in his areas of interest because he was known to pay `top dollar' for pieces he really wanted. Both the Qianlong emperor and Percival David were fascinated by epigraphy, and each went to great pains to have the inscriptions on their pieces properly studied and recorded. On a high stand on the left-hand side of a painting showing Qianlong appreciating antiques is a bronze measure made during the Wang Mang Interregnum (CE 9-23) and dated to CE 9 (Fig. 3). This is an important object which provides five standard measures in one vessel and has a long inscription establishing the value of standard inches and feet; is also provides a method of calculating volume using a figure remarkably close to the modern standard ?. The emperor commanded Zhang Ruo'ai (1713-46) to copy the inscription on this vessel and add an explanation of its meaning. This was written in gold on dark blue paper and bound into an album, which was kept in one of the drawers of the stand on which the measure was displayed. David also placed great emphasis on epigraphy, and his collection probably had a greater number of inscribed wares than any other private collection. The inscriptions he valued were of various kinds. There were those applied at the time the piece was made, and giving information such as date or place of manufacture, name of the commissioning patron and occasion or recipient of the commissioned piece, name of the craftsman or workshop who made the object, the size of the piece, or merely an auspicious or poetic inscription integral to the design. Other inscriptions were applied after the piece was made. Some of these simply gave the family name of a previous owner. In the case of those pieces purchased from the Imperial collection, however, the inscription might give the name of the palace hall for which the object was intended, or might have been applied on the orders of the Qianlong emperor giving his comments on the piece as well as the date on which it was inscribed. One piece in the David collection bearing a Qianlong inscription of this type is a beautiful ruyi-shaped Jun ware pillow (Fig. 4). Into the unglazed base of the pillow is incised an inscription which may be translated:

Its colour is the blue of the sky after rain, just as it was described by the ancient Ba jian. The shape of the ruyi pillow gives much pleasure whether one is asleep or awake. There will always be much discussion [of a work of art], but the thing one must guard against is the temptation to sleep late. Pre-eminently [the pillow] demonstrates the genius of the potter in producing such an artistic design and in controlling the firing so successfully. Composed by Qianlong in the [cyclical year] xinchou [1781] and inscribed by Imperial Order.

Several insights into the Qianlong emperor as an art connoisseur and collector can be gleaned from this inscription. The most important characteristics displayed in the inscription are the emperor's interest in and knowledge of ancient texts, his acceptance that there may be several views of a work of art, his appreciation of both beauty and technological perfection, and his desire to avoid wasting precious time. These were all characteristics shared by Sir Percival David, who continued to research, write and travel, despite debilitating illness, to the end of his life. Perhaps the strongest link between the two men was their passion for the study of antiques, inscriptions and ancient texts. David expended great energy on such studies, and published many scholarly articles based upon them, as well as his most famous work on the 1388 text Gegu yaolun (The Essential Criteria of Antiquities), which was published posthumously (David, 1971). It is also significant that of the more than twenty items in Percival David's collection bearing Qianlong inscriptions, about seventy per cent refer to an aspect of ancient ceramics, while another fifteen per cent make reference to some other aspect of antiquity. The Qianlong emperor was also happy to append his own compositions to items already bearing historical inscriptions. A classic case is the qin sold by Christie's Hong Kong in April 1998 (Fig. 5). This magnificent instrument bears an inscription on its interior indicating that it was made as an official order for the Chenghua emperor (r. 1465-87) in 1485. It bears further inscriptions, by the Chongzhen emperor (r. 1628-44), dated 1638, and on its presentation to a loyal imperial servant. Qianlong added his own poem entitled `On Listening to Qin Music Played by Tang Kan', which, together with his other inscriptions, is recorded in Qianlong yuzhi shiji (Imperial Compositions of Qianlong). Qianlong's love of music was a further facet of his character that was shared with David. In the emperor's case, however, he carried it through to another activity. Qianlong loved calligraphy and practised assiduously, achieving considerable competency in this difficult art. He was thus able not only to order his poetic compositions on the subject of music to be inscribed on objects such as the qin, but to produce calligraphic works of his own (Fig. 6). The scroll poem `Listening to Instrumental Music' was written by Qianlong when he was 51. The emperor could therefore be said also to have created his own works of art, which in their turn entered the imperial collection. In order to write his poetry, the emperor was able to commission any tools he required. A fine example can be seen in the elegantly carved lacquer cabinet containing five sliding trays of writing brushes, which were made for him in the imperial workshops (Fig. 7). The cabinet, which is still preserved in the Palace Museum, Beijing, contains fifty rabbit-hair brushes used by Qianlong for writing poetry. Here, then, are two ways in which he differed from David þ in the personal creation of works of art, and in the commissioning of enormous numbers of works of art. Sir Percival did occasionally commission items, such as the Lalique glass table he ordered with a special Chinese motif on the border, but he could not compete with an emperor, who could call upon the resources of an extensive treasury and imperial workshops, and had numerous palaces in which to house vast numbers of works of art. In David's collection is a finely enamelled porcelain hanging vase, which clearly emphasizes the advantages of imperial commissioning (Fig. 8). This vase was made to hang in an imperial sedan chair, and bears as the focus of its design an inscription composed by the Qianlong emperor in 1742. The vase was formerly in the possession of Guo Baochang, who in a letter to David stated that the vase had been made under imperial edict by the famous Tang Ying (1682-1756). Existing palace records contain a memorial dated the 17th day of the 11th month of the seventh year of the Qianlong reign (1742). It seems that Tang Ying had been given the poem with instructions from the emperor that it should be inscribed on a sedan chair vase. Tang Ying's memorial notes: `Your obedient servant has had the poem inscribed in four different styles of calligraphy on vases of four appropriately different shapes so as to avoid duplication. A preliminary batch of six pairs is respectfully submitted for Your Majesty's viewing' (Yang, p. 78). It seems almost certain that the vase in Percival David's collection is one of these. Others are preserved in the Tianminlou collection and the Nanjing Museum. Although primarily collectors of Chinese art, both Sir Percival David and the Qianlong emperor collected other things. David was a keen researcher on the subject of the Chinese internal and external mail services, and a collector of Chinese stamps. He also collected early eighteenth century English silver and furniture. Besides Chinese art, the Qianlong emperor collected certain items of Western art as well as mechanical objects, and these European pieces spurred the fashion for exotic Western-style items during his reign. His commissioning of Western-style paintings and other works was greatly aided by the European Jesuit missionary artists and scientists that he employed in the palace ateliers. One of the lesser known areas of collecting embraced by Qianlong and Percival David was that of clocks and watches. Qianlong's ancestors, the Shunzhi (r. 1644-61) and Kangxi emperors, had also found clocks fascinating. The former was so impressed by a small French chiming clock, given to him in 1653, that he took it with him everywhere, and when he was later given a larger clock he had a copy manufactured in China. Outwardly this replica resembled the original, but the mechanism was not as well made and it kept poor time. Having set up imperial ateliers in the palace, Shunzhi's successor, the Kangxi emperor, insisted that the Chinese craftsmen there learn the finer points of clockmaking from Western experts, and thus they were able to make large numbers of accurate timepieces during his reign. Undoubtedly the Qianlong emperor learned his love of such mechanical things from his grandfather. Members of European embassies were aware of his interest and presented him with a wide range of clocks and watches. These were mainly of British or French origin and ranged from huge, elaborate clocks with automata to fob watches and small watches set into personal items such as hand mirrors (see for example Wan Yi et al. [Rosemary Scott and Erica Shipley, trans.], Daily Life in the Forbidden City, Harmondsworth and New York, 1985, p. 147). During Qianlong's reign, the Jiaotaidian (Hall of Union) housed not only the 25 imperial seals, but also clepsydras and some of his chiming clocks. A number of the clocks and watches made for or collected by Qianlong and other Qing emperors today form part of an impressive special display in the Palace Museum, Beijing (see Qing gong zhongbiao zhencang, Hong Kong, 1995), while some of the smaller ones were incorporated into Qianlong's ingenious `treasure boxes', now in the National Palace Museum, Taipei. David, too, was fascinated with clocks and watches. In particular, he was a great admirer of the work of Abraham Louis Breguet (1748-1823) an eminent Swiss watchmaker. Breguet moved from his native Neuchƒtel to Paris in 1762, and there established a business making fine watches, clocks and marine chronometers. He was known as a perfectionist and an important inventor in the field of precision watches. His inventions included the tourbillon, parachute, and overcoil balance-spring, as well as the automatic winding he used in his montres perpetuelles. David owned two of Breguet's watches, including the first example of a perpetuelle. Neither the emperor nor David were merely interested in the business of collecting: both took considerable interest in the arrangement and publication of their collections. After the Agreement with the University of London had been signed in 1950, and it had been decided that the Percival David Foundation should initially be established in a handsome nineteenth century town house in central London, Sir Percival was much concerned with the display of the collection. Indeed, while in the United States for medical treatment, he sent to the university detailed instructions for the custom-built cases in the galleries, and was not at all pleased when some of these specifications were not met. Sir Percival also insisted on choosing the first curator of the collection, Sheila Yorke Hardy (later to become Lady David), and worked closely with her on the organization of the displays in the galleries. Percival David was also greatly involved in the publication of catalogues of his collection. The first of these was published by R.L. Hobson in 1934. In his foreword to the catalogue, Hobson pays tribute to David's work:

...not only has Sir Percival David provided a feast of many delightful and intriguing objects to satisfy the appetite of the collector, but his researches have supplied what was needed to assimilate them. He has hunted up all the relevant references in published works, he has traced the past history of his specimens as far as recent ownership extends, he has had the inscriptions read and he has edited the translation of them, in short he has got together all the available materials for the compilation of this Catalogue. The task of the compiler has been merely to sift the information so accumulated...

The subsequent catalogues written by Sheila Yorke Hardy similarly acknowledged the important contribution made by Sir Percival to their content. The Qianlong emperor was equally interested in the display and cataloguing of his collection. As Chang Lin-sheng has noted: `The Ch'ien-lung emperor was highly energetic and made good use of his spare time, devoting much of it to arranging the imperial collection' (Chang, p. 16). The emperor was also determined that the collection should be properly catalogued. As early as 1743 he commanded that a catalogue be produced of the Buddhist and Daoist paintings and calligraphy in the imperial collection. A year later he commissioned the Shiqu baoji (Treasured Boxes of the Stony Moat). Dong Bangda (1699-1769), a senior official in the Ministry of Rites, and himself a talented calligrapher and painter, was one of those commissioned by Qianlong to catalogue some of the calligraphy, paintings and antiquities in the imperial collection. It may be a significant indication of the huge number of acquisitions made by Qianlong that this project initially took a year, but when the emperor ordered that an expanded catalogue be produced in 1791, to include all the additional material he had acquired between 1745 and 1791, the project took almost twice as long. The emperor was also influenced by the works of previous imperial collectors, and in 1749 commissioned a catalogue of 1,500 of his ancient bronzes based upon the Xuanhe bogu tu (Illustrated Catalogue of Xuanhe Antiquities), compiled at the command of the Northern Song emperor Huizong (r. 1101-25). This catalogue, entitled Xiqing gujian (Catalogue of Xiqing Antiquities), was completed in 1751. Another, entitled Ningshou jiangu (Catalogue of Ningshou Antiquities), was published in 1781. All these items were kept in the Forbidden City in Beijing. Between 1781 and 1793, more than 1,800 more bronzes were added to the collection, but were kept in the Shenyang palace or the imperial storehouses. Catalogues of these additional pieces were published on the orders of the emperor, who also commissioned catalogues of his inkstones, imperial ritual objects and ceramics. As an aid to study and research, both men collected significant libraries, which in David's case formed part of his gift to the University of London. Qianlong, following the example of his father and grandfather, ordered that a search for worthy ancient texts be made throughout the empire, and required that the Chinese classics and histories be re-edited. His most ambitious project was to have all the texts transcribed into 36,078 volumes known as the Siku quanshu (Comprehensive Library of the Four Treasures). Seven sets of this were made and stored in specially built libraries. In common with many collectors, Qianlong and Percival David liked to have pieces from their collections around them. For the emperor, this desire was able to take many forms. On the one hand, the casual enjoyment of pieces can be seen in informal portraits, such as Qianlong Celebrating the New Year with his Children by the Jesuit artist Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766) (Fig. 9). In this painting, a selection of porcelain, jade and other objects stands on three shelves to the emperor's right. They appear to have been momentarily forgotten by the emperor, while he plays with his children, but had undoubtedly been brought out earlier at the emperor's command. On the other hand, specific halls in the palace were given over to the display of Qianlong's treasures, and some palaces, such as those in European style in the Yuanmingyuan, were built with the intention that they should provide an exotic setting for the display of pieces from the imperial collection. Art from the collection was also, of course, placed in the audience halls and the imperial family's private apartments in the Forbidden City. The size of the imperial collection allowed Qianlong a huge number of pieces from which to choose in deciding what he wanted around him. Less than ten years into his long reign, more than 10,000 examples of calligraphy and paintings alone were in the imperial storehouses. Given the emperor's voracious collecting and his expressed intent that he should have an example of every kind of artwork in his collection, his choice became almost infinite. In comparison, Sir Percival David's collection was much smaller, fewer than 2,000 objects, and he was able to have the majority of them close to hand most of the time. Initially David was able to keep his collection with him at the Mayfair Hotel, but by 1931 it had outgrown the accommodation available there and he moved with it to the newly opened Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane. He was separated from the collection during the Second World War, when it was moved to his country home for safety. He was, of course, also separated from more than 300 of his works of art in 1935-36 when they were on exhibition in the `International Exhibition of Chinese Art', held at the Royal Academy, London (Fig. 10). However, as Sir Percival was the driving force behind the exhibition as well as its director, the separation could be said to be self-imposed. Even when the collection was given to the university, one of the terms of the Deed of Gift was that Sir Percival, who was by then confined to a wheelchair, should have as his residence the upper part of the house in which the collection was displayed, and would continue to `live with' his collection. It seems that both men had it in their minds that they were collecting for future generations. The difference came in the section of society that each envisaged inheriting their collections. In Qianlong's case it was his successors, future emperors and princes, who would enjoy the collection within the confines of the palaces, away from the proletarian gaze. In contrast, Sir Percival David intended his collection to be seen and enjoyed by the general public. He not only gave his collection to the University of London for the benefit of students and scholars, but also insisted that the whole collection should be on view in a museum open to anyone who wanted to see it.