The Imperial Patronage of Labor Genre Paintings in Eighteenth-Century China

Roslyn Lee Hammers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367335687
• eBook ISBN: 9781000339888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

This book examines the agrarian labor genre paintings based on the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving that were commissioned by successive Chinese emperors.

Furthermore, this book analyzes the genre's imagery as well as the poems in their historical context and explains how the paintings contributed to distinctively cosmopolitan Qing imagery that also drew upon European visual styles. Roslyn Lee Hammers contends that technologically-informed imagery was not merely didactic imagery to teach viewers how to grow rice or produce silk. The Qing emperors invested in paintings of labor to substantiate the permanence of the dynasty and to promote the well-being of the people under Manchu governance. The book includes English translations of the poems of the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving as well as other documents that have not been brought together in translation.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Chinese history, Chinese studies, history of science and technology, book history, labor history, and Qing history.

1 The Kangxi Emperor Reworks the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving

By 1696, the Kangxi emperor had commissioned both paintings and prints for his imperial version of the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving referred to as the Imperially Commissioned Pictures of Tilling and Weaving (Yuzhi Gengzhitu 御製耕織圖) (Figs. 1.1 and 1.2).¹ These actions revitalized the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving, a genre of painting and poetry that had been inaugurated around 1145 in the Southern Song Dynasty. The Pictures of Tilling and Weaving were created as a series of images depicting the procedures involved with the harvesting of rice and the manufacturing of silk fabric. Furthermore, a poem accompanies each step.

Figure 1.1 Zhu Gui after Jiao Bingzhen, Scene of “Entering the Granary”, of Imperially Commissioned Pictures of Tilling and Weaving. 1696. Woodblock Print on Paper. 35 × 26 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Figure 1.2 Zhu Gui after Jiao Bingzhen, Scene of “Selecting Cocoons” of Imperially Commissioned Pictures of Tilling and Weaving. 1696. Woodblock Print on Paper. 35 × 26 cm. The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei.

During his reign, Kangxi completed tours in the southern part of the empire as a means to announce and consolidate his claims to the territories of China.² During the Second Tour to the South in 1689, he was presented with an earlier, purportedly Song, edition of the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving that mostly probably did not have imagery but was a textual record of the original poems.³ Kangxi was quite taken by the poems of the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving and commissioned the court astronomer and artist Jiao Bingzhen 焦秉貞 (act. 1680–1720) to provide imagery for these, presumably in an album leaf format in which one scene would be regarded sequentially after the other. These paintings are lost.⁴ Fortunately, however, Kangxi requested in 1696 that Jiao’s images be replicated in the form of woodblock prints with the carving executed by Zhu Gui 朱圭 (ca. 1644–1717).⁵ These printed versions were able to survive.

The Iconography of the Kangxi Version and a Ming-Era Farmers’ Almanac

As we will discuss in Chapter 4, the Song iconography was recovered during the reign of Kangxi’s grandson, Qianlong, through a painting regarded as a Yuan copy. Apparently, Jiao and Kangxi did not obtain direct access to the original Song iconography or to a reliable copy of it. However, from the Song Dynasty to the end of the Yuan Dynasty, the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving were immensely popular and, according to Yuan archivist and scholar Tao Zongyi 陶宗儀 (act. 1360–1368), imagery related to agricultural and sericultural production was one of the 13 themes prevalent in contemporary paintings. The genre lost its appeal in the Ming Dynasty and was no longer the subject matter for ambitious painters, but the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving nevertheless endured in circulating in the lesser realm of print culture until late in the Ming Dynasty.⁶ By around this time, the Song-Dynasty Pictures of Tilling and Weaving were reconfigured through the production of a new suite of poems, which were more folksy in terms of tone.

They were featured as woodblock prints in a Farmers’-Almanac type of publication entitled Bian Min Tu Zuan 便民圖纂 (An Illustrated Epitome to Benefit the People) (hereafter referred to as Epitome).⁷ The final scene of the Song-Dynasty Pictures of Tilling and Weaving is the “Ru Cang 入倉” or “Entering the Granary” scene and was included in the 1593 printed version of the Illustrated Epitome (Fig. 1.3), albeit with a different label of “Shang Cang 上倉” or “To the Granary”. This scene demonstrates the step, in which after laboring for an entire season, the farmer’s final duty is to hand over his harvested rice as his payment of taxes to the clerk who works in the government granary. The revised Ming-Dynasty poem, discussed below, is placed above the scene. This imagery from the printed Illustrated Epitome version provides an example of the visual material associated with the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving that was fairly and readily known during Kangxi’s reign.

Figure 1.3 Scene of “To the Granary” of An Illustrated Epitome to Benefit the People. 1593. Woodblock Print on Paper. The Collection of the National Library of China, Beijing.

Judging from the compositions, Jiao drew upon the imagery of the Illustrated Epitome in his series.⁸ In each print, men are depicted as bringing rice to a granary; these are figures shouldering two balanced yet burgeoning bushels of rice slung along a pole. Other men deliver rice to a man inside the granary. In the Imperially Commissioned Pictures of Tilling, the rustic yet prosperous village setting is given greater attention, as the granary is located among grass-thatched cottages and pens. Kangxi’s granary blends into the village architecture with a thatched-grass roof. In the background and behind the wall of the compound that houses the local granary, we are able to observe pens with cattle in them. Proceeding further back into the scene, we encounter a woman with a broom hoisted over her back as well as a child in tow. Men gather in the country lane and around a pot of tea or a jug of water, sitting comfortably on the ground or casually leaning against the wall of a cottage as they make idle conversation.

While Jiao incorporated iconography from the Epitome, he also made modifications. The Ming-Dynasty Epitome print situates the grain repository in a setting that is separate from the village and is surrounded by a wall that has fitted stone for its foundation and is surmounted by a tiled roof. A man, most likely a government clerk, stands with scales to measure the weight of the grain in the government granary.⁹ In Jiao’s version, this clerk is missing, and the wall that surrounds the granary has weeds growing out of its top with plaster broken away at the base to reveal humble bricks. This represents a simple storehouse in a village. Kangxi was concerned with the distribution and maintenance of the reserves of rice. In 1680, he proclaimed that the grain stored in government granaries could only be distributed in the county in which it was located.¹⁰ Concerned that some local communities might not have government storage facilities, he recast his father’s earlier orders to create additional granaries in 1690. We might consider that the storehouse Jiao depicted in this scene is a Qing government-sponsored chang ping cang 常平倉 or an “ever-normal granary” – a structure constructed to stabilize grain prices and to prepare reserves of it for times of famine.

Western Perspective in the Imperially Commissioned Pictures of Tilling and Weaving

The art historian John R. Finlay has proposed that the Kangxi Pictures of Tilling and Weaving are the first sustained and “most important” application of linear perspective in an imperial court commission.¹¹ Focusing on the Ming and Qing-Dynasty prints, a comparison between the versions of the “Storing the Grain” scene indicates that the formal qualities of Kangxi’s Pictures of Tilling and Weaving apply a more appealing hybridized form of linear or geometric perspective (Figs. 1.4 and 1.5).¹² In contrast, the Ming-Dynasty imagery deploys an axonometric perspective in which the lines that recede diagonally to form an illusion of space remain somewhat parallel. This is visible in the lines that define the floor tiles. Moreover, certain diagonal lines detailing the stone and stucco wall of the structure are not parallel, but are rather set at random angles to signal spatial recession.

Figure 1.4 Orthogonal Lines of Linear Perspective Imposed on Zhu Gui after Jiao Bingzhen, Scene of “Entering the Granary” in Imperially Commissioned Pictures of Tilling and Weaving.

Figure 1.5 Axonometric-Like Perspective Lines Imposed on the Scene of “To the Granary” of An Illustrated Epitome to Benefit the People.

Contemporaries regarded the Imperially Commissioned Pictures of Tilling and Weaving as characterizing the Western style (Xi yang fa 西洋法) of painting.¹³ In Jiao Bingzhen’s image, the diagonal lines, which are more correctly referred to as orthogonals, converge on a single point which is, more or less, outside of the image and towards the viewer’s right, thus exhibiting the artist’s mastery of a one-point linear perspective.¹⁴ The usage of this type of geometric perspective wherein the vanishing point is external to image employs a hybridized form of perspective. This modification was most likely more satisfying to viewers who preferred styles that evoked an axonometric format typical of early modes of representation in Chinese visual culture.¹⁵

Both contemporaneous Chinese scholars and modern scholars have traced the introduction of linear perspective to the late Ming Dynasty around the time when the European Jesuit missionaries brought this to the court.¹⁶ Again, we find that perspective as a practice for creating imagery is associated with the “West” (Xi yang 西洋).¹⁷ The art historians, Michael Sullivan and James F. Cahill, have pioneered research to demonstrate the impact of the European modes of image-making in Chinese art.¹⁸ Examples of geometric perspective were accessible through the Jesuit mission that Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) (Ma Lidou 利瑪竇) established in China in 1582. Unsurprisingly, a significant amount, though not all, of the content of such imagery that incorporated perspectival handling – either of European or Chinese and Japanese origin – pictured Christian subject matter.¹⁹

In all likelihood, Jiao Bingzhen was mentored by Father Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688) (Nan Huairen 南懷仁), the great Jesuit mathematician and astronomer at the Manchu court who also personally tutored the emperor.²⁰ Jiao Bingzhen was a court astronomer, and, thus, was in a position to gain direct access to European theories of geometric perspective in seventeenth-century China.²¹ Presumably, the Kangxi emperor emboldened Jiao’s studies of perspective. Jiao Bingzhen may have converted to Christianity, suggesting that he personally may probably have been greatly impressed by the formal qualities exhibited in European imagery.²² Apparently, Kangxi was intrigued by perspective and was keen to have a European expert specializing on this at court.²³ The Italian artist, Giovanni Gherardini (1665–1728), was appointed along with other Jesuits in the first French embassy and arrived in Beijing in February 1700,²⁴ four years after the printed versions of Jiao Bingzhen’s Pictures of Tilling and Weaving were produced.

Given this background, Jiao Bingzhen’s version of the Imperially Commissioned Pictures of Tilling and Weaving and their prints must have been beheld as extremely novel. They drew upon Western stylistic features, but were not overtly representing Christian content; rather, they expressed imagery associated with the Song Dynasty. Kangxi’s Imperially Commissioned Pictures of Tilling and Weaving were a project of the Qing court that incorporated a Chinese genre and assimilated it with a westernizing style. As such, the paintings declared that Kangxi was an innovative patron of the arts with cosmopolitan tastes that expanded beyond traditional Chinese visual culture.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Ennobling Agrarian Work of the Qing Emperors
• 1 The Kangxi Emperor Reworks the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving
• 2 The Noble Labors of the Yongzheng Emperor
• 3 The Preoccupations of the Qianlong Emperor
• 4 The Sagacious Vocation of the Qianlong Emperor
• Epilogue: Working Toward Closure, the Jiaqing Emperor Reforming Imperial Labor
• Appendix A: Imperially Commissioned Poems to the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving
• Appendix B: Primary Documents Related to the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving and Agrarian Labor
• Selected Bibliography
• Index