Henri Bertin and the Representation of China in Eighteenth-Century France

John Finlay

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781315467351
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Art
• Sous-sujet: European Art

This is an in-depth study of the intellectual, technical, and artistic encounters between Europe and China in the late eighteenth century, focusing on the purposeful acquisition of information and images that characterized a direct engagement with the idea of "China."

The central figure in this story is Henri-Léonard Bertin (1720–1792), who served as a minister of state under Louis XV and, briefly, Louis XVI. Both his official position and personal passion for all things Chinese placed him at the center of intersecting networks of like-minded individuals who shared his ideal vision of China as a nation from which France had much to learn. John Finlay examines a fascinating episode in the rich history of cross-cultural exchange between China and Europe in the early modern period, and this book will be an important and timely contribution to a very current discussion about Sino-French cultural relations.

This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual culture, European and Chinese history.

1
Ko and Yang and the Mission Française de Pékin

Journeys Between France and China

Just after midnight on 17 January 1765, two hours before their departure from Paris for the port of Lorient, where they would board a ship of the Compagnie des Indes to return to China, two Chinese Christians, Aloys Ko and Étienne Yang, wrote a brief record of their lives and their travel to France.¹ Their text was intended to serve as the introduction to a work entitled Voyage et Séjour en France …, which would probably have described in detail their experiences in France, their education and ordination as Catholic priests, and their official relationship with Henri Bertin. Bertin’s crucial encounter with Ko and Yang would be instrumental in establishing direct contact between Bertin and the French Jesuit mission in Beijing.² Having enlisted them in what would become his lifelong project to secure accurate knowledge of China, Bertin sought to provide Ko and Yang with the training and education they would need to participate in this undertaking.

The French Jesuit mission in Beijing had its beginnings some 80 years earlier with the decision by Louis XIV in 1684 to send to China five Jesuits trained in the sciences, especially mathematics and astronomy, a group which was officially designated the Mathématiciens du Roi in letters patent issued by the king.³ Appointed correspondents of the Académie Royale des Sciences (Academy of sciences), the five missionaries left France in 1685 and finally reached China in 1688, where they were first attached to the Portuguese Jesuit Vice-Province of China, from which they became independent in 1700.⁴ After the final suppression of the Jesuit order by Pope Clement XIV in 1773 (the Papal Brief Dominus ac Redemptor reached Beijing in November 1775), the French Jesuit mission survived under royal patronage until the French Revolution in 1789. The mission was finally ceded to the Congrégation de la Mission in 1804, and, among the last of the former Jesuits, the Brother Coadjutor Giuseppe Panzi (b. 1734), who served as a painter, died in Beijing in 1811 or 1812; Father Louis Antoine de Poirot (b. 1735) died in 1813.⁵

From the beginning, the Jesuit mission was envisioned as a combination of Christian proselytizing in conjunction with careful observation and accurate reporting on China. The first Father Superior of the mission, Jean de Fontaney (1643–1710), wrote of the goals of the missionaries as he had discussed them, probably in 1681, with the minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), who had founded the Académie des Sciences in 1666.⁶ In a letter published in 1707, Fontaney recalled the occasion when Colbert told him that, if the missionaries were going to China, they should take advantage of the occasion and that “in the times when they were not so busy preaching the Gospel, that they should make a quantity of observations in the field, which we are lacking for the perfection of the sciences and the arts.”⁷ That France could profit from knowledge of China in the perfection of science and the arts—which in this context meant technology and the mechanical arts, especially advanced handi-craft skills, and the methods of production of all kinds—would be repeated in many succeeding statements about the objectives of the encounters with China.⁸ The Jesuits of the French mission dedicated their efforts to the production, transmission, and publication of accurate knowledge of China, an effort that would characterize Henri Bertin’s direct communications with the missionaries, which began with the arrival of Ko and Yang in China.⁹ By far the most comprehensive reports on China from the French mission appear in the 34 volumes of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, published in Paris from 1703 to 1776.¹⁰ Jean-Baptiste Du Halde (1674–1743), one of the editors of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, published his own highly successful and widely circulated Description de la Chine in 1735.¹¹ When the first missionaries departed for China, the members of the Académie des Sciences provided a detailed list of questions on a broad range of subjects, a strategy that would be employed in other official inquiries into the civilization of China, and one that would be repeated by Bertin as well.¹²

The French missionaries, who arrived in Beijing in February 1688, were accorded a certain protection by the Kangxi emperor (康熙, r. 1662–1722).¹³ Jesuit missionaries also served as artists in the Qing court workshops, in part reflecting parallel elements of the Christian proselytizing mission, to convince the emperor of China of the superiority of the European arts and sciences and thus the superiority of the Christian religion.¹⁴ Missionary-painters, the most famous being Giuseppe Castiglione (Lang Shining 郎世寧, 1688–1766, arr. in China 1715), trained court artists in addition to working alongside them in the production of all kinds of painting, and on occasion prints, for the court.¹⁵ A key element of this artistic interaction was the introduction of European linear perspective into the Qing court painting practice.¹⁶ For the Jesuit missionary-artists, single-point European linear perspective, which provided the visual structure for the majority of their paintings for the Qing court as well as the mural decorations the three main churches in the capital, also contained a Christian religious aspect.¹⁷ Many of these painters, especially Castiglione, had been trained in linear perspective specifically according to the instructions of the Jesuit lay brother Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709). Castiglione styled himself a “disciple” of Pozzo,¹⁸ and Pozzo’s widely circulated illustrated treatise on linear perspective, Perspectiva Pictorum et Architectorum, contained a key statement on its theological interpretation.¹⁹ As rendered in the English-language edition of his book, Andrea Pozzo had admonished his students:

Therefore, Reader, my Advice is that you cheerfully begin your Work, and with Resolution to draw all the Points thereof to that true Point, the Glory of God; and I dare predict, and promise you good Success in so honorable an Undertaking.²⁰

For the Jesuit missionaries, the viewer’s correct position in relation to the illusions created by linear perspective was analogous to the correct relation to the Christian religion.²¹ The present discussion only suggests the importance of the role of European painters—the Jesuit missionary-artists—in the Qing court and their effect on court painting. But as we shall see, early Qing court painting in hybrid Chinese-European styles had an impact beyond the imperial court and contributed directly to the format of paintings produced in Beijing to be sent to Henri Bertin in France.²²

An Education in France

According to the account in the Voyage et Séjour, Ko and Yang were the sons of Chinese Christian families.²³ As young men they were under the tutelage of the French Jesuit missionaries, who taught them Latin and provided additional instruction in the Christian religion. As a result, they were encouraged to go to France, ultimately for ordination as Roman Catholic priests, and they left China when Yang was 18 and Ko was 19 years old. They sailed on a ship of the Compagnie des Indes, the French East India Company, which left the port of Canton (Guangzhou 廣州) in January 1754 on a voyage that would last six months. They would spend nine and a half years under the auspices of the Jesuits in France, followed by another year and a half after the official suppression of the order; Yang would be 29 and Ko 30 years old when they finally returned to China. In 1762 the Paris Parliament ended the Jesuit jurisdiction over some 80 colleges, and Ko and Yang were admitted in March of that year to the Seminary of Saint-Firmin, maintained by Congrégation de la Mission, where they were ultimately ordained in 1763 as Lazarist fathers.²⁴ Hoping to return to China on a ship of the Compagnie des Indes, they were put in contact with Bertin, whose ministry at the time included the supervision of the French East India Company.²⁵ According to the Voyage et Séjour: “Monseigneur Bertin, Minister and Secretary of State, disposed in our favor, wanted to make us useful to France and, at the same time, to China; consequently, we were committed to delaying our voyage by one year.”²⁶ The king, on the recommendation of Bertin—surely at his instigation—ordered that Ko and Yang should visit various royal manufactures, the official studios and workshops in Paris, and the surrounding districts that produced goods for the court and the French state. Here they would learn what differences there might be between the arts, les arts, of France and China.²⁷ Then they would travel, principally to the regions around Lyon, where they would continue their observations of manufacturing, agriculture, and the production of silk, among other activities. As always, the goal was to observe a particular selection of technical and agricultural processes with the aim of preparing detailed reports to be sent from China on these and other manufacturing and craft techniques from which France could benefit. Ko and Yang agreed that they would follow the instructions of the king as presented to them by his minister Bertin.²⁸

Ko and Yang’s education in the arts and sciences was planned in great detail, documents specified what they should observe and study, and they reported at length on what they had seen in written “remarks” supplemented by their “reflections,” which consisted of notes on what they already knew about Chinese practice. Two members of the Royal Academy of Sciences were chosen to direct their instruction: Mathurin-Jacques Brisson (1723–1806), who would give lessons in physics and natural history, and Louis-Claude Cadet de Gassicourt (1731–1799), who gave lessons in chemistry.²⁹ In September of 1764, on their arrival in Lyon, Ko and Yang were welcomed by Bertin’s influential colleague and correspondent Pierre Poivre (1719–1786), who supervised much of their training and education there.³⁰ Characteristically, Bertin laid out instructions in great detail on what he wanted Ko and Yang to observe and where he arranged for them to travel in pursuit of their technical and scientific education.³¹ In his 1764 “Memoir on what the Chinese should see in France before returning to China,” Bertin specified that in their travel to Lyon and surrounding regions Ko and Yang should first study the manufacture of silk textiles.³² The instructions were based on—and concentrated on—European products. Since their journey coincided with the annual harvest of silkworm cocoons, they traveled in the Dauphiné region in southeastern France to observe the essential processes for producing silk thread. In addition to observations related to the textile industry, they were to examine the production of iron, steel, and copper and their use in various kinds of tools as well as the manufacture of arms.

One section of Bertin’s memoir is signaled as a “very important article.”³³ In the town of Annonay, south of Lyon, they were to carefully observe the four paper-making factories there, which were the largest and finest in France.³⁴ Bertin noted the extraordinary size of sheets of Chinese paper, which were not possible to produce with contemporary French manufacturing methods.³⁵ Ko and Yang should also familiarize themselves with the techniques of agriculture, mining, and the production of enamel and glass, ordinary ceramics and tiles, and even the science of chemistry in order to analyze what they might examine in China. Finally, Bertin noted the great importance of carefully observing the locks and their function along the Canal de Briare, one of the most important canals in France, which connects the Loire and the Seine valleys. Bertin remarked that Du Halde’s Description de la Chine included information on magnificent canals in China, and the subject was clearly something France should know more about.³⁶

Before their travel to Lyon at Bertin’s instruction, Ko and Yang’s practical training in the arts and sciences began with visits to the royal tapestry workshops of the Manufacture des Gobelins in Paris and included similarly instructive tours of the carpet manufactory of Savonnerie, als...