Five Rediscovered Ming-Qing Paintings in the University of Pennsylvania Museum
The strengths of the University of Pennsylvania Museum in works of Chinese art are usually considered, and rightly so, to lie elsewhere than in painting. Just what these strengths are is revealed in other articles in this special issue. Good and important Chinese paintings in the collection are not, however, quite so few as has been thought. This brief piece will introduce five that merit attention and publication, out of about a dozen paintings worthy of note that I saw in a viewing in the Museum’s storage room in April of last year (see Appendix.) The viewing was undertaken without high hopes, in the face of reports of earlier visits by specialists in the field who had gone through the same works and found nothing of interest. I did not by any means see all the Chinese paintings in the collection, and further “rediscoveries” are presumably still to be made. I am grateful to Professor Nancy Steinhardt and to the Keeper of the Asian Collection, Jennifer Lane White, for their help in arranging the viewing and for furnishing me with information afterwards.
The five paintings to be discussed came to the museum in two group purchases in 1915 and 1916. The first (C94), by the Ming master Wang E, and the second (C91), with an old attribution to the Song artist Jiang Shen, were part of a 1915 purchase of eight paintings from the New York dealer C. T. Loo; these two, and probably others of the group, had been owned by the great Shanghai collector Pang Yuanji (1864-1949). The other three were part of a 1916 purchase of thirty paintings from another New York dealer, M. Knoedler & Co., and again were from a Shanghai collection, that of John C. Ferguson.
The paintings all belong, then, to a large and loosely definable category of works that entered collections in the U.S. (and Europe) in the first two decades of the twentieth century through a particular route: from some Shanghai dealer or collector-dealer, sometimes by way of a U.S. dealer who acted as agent, to the American (or European) museum or private collector. The Shanghai sources included, besides John C. Ferguson and Pang Yuanji, the dealer E. A. Strehlneek, whose two catalogs of Chinese paintings, one published in 1914 and the other undated but later (published for an auction of his holding held in Tokyo), contain quite a few fine works that have since turned up in U.S. collections. The paintings that came through this route mostly have in common two sets of characteristics: they are impressive enough in their finished styles and seeming age, and appealing enough in their subjects, to be attractive to foreign collectors of that time; and they do not belong to the kinds of paintings that would have been prestigious acquisitions for Chinese collectors, who on the whole followed the admonitions of traditionally-minded critics about what were “good” paintings and what were “bad.” The paintings were thus of small value in China, but were acceptable to foreign buyers who had not yet absorbed enough of Chinese tastes to pursue “better” pieces (on Chinese terms), and were not yet sure enough in their judgments to pay the higher prices that such works commanded. The paintings, moreover, mostly carried false attributions, often supported with “signatures,” to famous early masters, or claims of early date (“unknown artist of the Song period” is typical.) And in the case of figure paintings, they are frequently misrepresented in subject as well: a generic beautiful-woman (meiren) painting will be called a portrait of some famous woman of antiquity; a generic picture of a scholarly gathering is said to represent the court of the Tang Emperor Xuanzong (as is the case with two of the University of Pennsylvania Museum paintings, C116, discussed below as a work by Yuan Jiang, and C114, see Appendix.) Good Chinese connoisseurs could see through these deceptions, and consigned the works to the category of “forgeries,” not worthy of inclusion in any serious collection.
One might predict, as the outcome of such a situation, the acquisition of lots of junky paintings by foreign buyers with under-developed eyes. But one would be wrong. Freer’s eye, by the time he was collecting Chinese paintings seriously, was quite highly developed, even though, like others of his time, he knew next to nothing about the history of Chinese painting and could not have distinguished a genuine Dong Qichang from a fake, or appreciated a good one if he had seen it. The paintings that the foreign buyers were offered and purchased were in the more conservative, representational styles, in which individual hands were not the chief desiderata; the values they recognized and pursued were not seriously diminished by misattributions and misdatings. The paintings they collected included Ming academy and Zhe-school works ascribed to Song masters, figural and functional works of kinds considered low-class in China, and other rejected categories--which would be much more poorly represented today among the extant body of works if they had not been thus “rescued.” For a parallel, we can think of so-called Chan or Zen painting, a major category for us but one that was not valued by Chinese collectors, and that would be all but lost today if it were not for the fortunate chance of its preservation in Japan. (The parallel is of course imperfect: many works of the types acquired by pioneer western collectors are preserved also, similarly misattributed, in the National Palace Museum collection in Taiwan, and many more no doubt remain in China, unpublished because they are ignored by Chinese scholars who go through collections there separating “authentic works” from those they judge to be “fakes” or insignificant. But the foreign holdings are still a major source for them, especially for figure paintings of “vulgar” kinds.)
It has been the task, still far from finished, of scholars of my generation and later ones to re-assess and sometimes reattribute these paintings, an exciting project that can sometimes have the effect of adding a first-class piece to the collection. I was myself engaged in it during my years at the Freer, in the fifties and early sixties, and others have been doing valuable work of this kind more recently, notably Richard Barnhart with his discoveries in the DuBois Schanck Morris Collection at Princeton and elsewhere. (For an account of this project, see Barnhart’s “The Archaeology of Early Ming Painting,” in Barnhart et. al., Painters of the Great Ming: The Imperial Court and the Zhe School, Dallas, 1993, pp. 5-18.) The book I am presently writing (Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Urban Studio Artists in High Qing China) depends in large part on many such rediscoveries and reattributions of paintings in old collections outside China. The viewing at the University of Pennsylvania Museum last year was undertaken in the hope of finding more paintings useful to this project. In that respect it was a disappointment, but not in others; the five paintings introduced here will attest to that.
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