From Lion to ‘Idol’: An Early Reception of Chinese Sculpture in America

Quite possibly one of the earliest Chinese stone lions to reach the United States can be found in the permanent collection of Union College in Schenectady, New York (Fig. 1). It was gifted to the college in 1874 by John Marshall Willoughby Farnham (1829–1917), a Union alumnus and Presbyterian minister who dedicated his life to missionary and humanitarian work in China. Farnham acquired the lion sometime between 1860 and 1862, when it was unearthed during the construction of fortifications against the Taiping rebels in the vicinity of his school for boys, which was located near the south gate to the city of Shanghai. He installed the lion in front of his school for some years before sending it to Union College. Reified as a guardian figure by Farnham, the sculpture would be received in a most unconventional manner after crossing the globe. From its initial installation on Union’s campus in the spring of 1876, the work became the object of student rituals and class rivalry, which were centred principally on painting the sculpture. For nearly a century and a half, this stone lion has been covered with layer upon layer of coloured paint (Fig. 2). Its identity has been veiled, and its significance to Chinese culture has long been lost.

Fig. 1 Stone lion, Union College,

1880 

Courtesy Union College Special Collections

Fig. 2 ‘The Idol’, spring 2021 

Photograph: Sheri A. Lullo

In the present day, efforts have begun to redress this history by prohibiting further painting and exploring options for conservation. This process has entailed careful research into the biography of the sculpture, including the history and significance of leonine sculptures in China, the reception of the gift at Union College, and the broader context of Chinese art in the United States during the last decades of the 19th century. This brief article summarizes the story of this stone lion with particular attention to the early timing of the gift in relation to the introduction of Chinese sculpture to American collections.

In the photograph from 1880, Union’s stone lion squats upright, resting on its hind legs with its head tilted downward and framed by a mane of large, stylized whorls. It is the female lion of the customary male-female pair. Her face features bulging eyes, a large nose, and a wide, gaping mouth with a slightly protruding, curled tongue. With her forepaws, she cradles a young lion cub, who clambers up her chest with arms outstretched and feet resting on a spherical object, possibly attached to the knotted, cloud-like ribbon beneath. The two animals rest on a tall plinth with ornamental carvings. There is no definitive date for this sculpture, but its stylized form can be viewed as the culmination of centuries of development of the leonine motif, beginning as early as the 2nd century CE, when stone carvings of lions began to appear in China as guardian figures.

It is difficult to identify lions with certainty in the visual record before the late or Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE). Texts, however, do point to its appearance on Chinese territory as early as the first centuries of the Han (206 BCE–220 CE). Lions, not indigenous to China, are mentioned in the Hanshu (‘History of the Han’), as inhabitants of the far western regions. Along with other curiosities such as rhinoceros horn, ivory, luminous pearls, blood-sweating horses, and elephants, lions characterized the riches of the imperial court in an era of peace during the reigns of the emperors Wen and Jing (2nd century BCE) (Hanshu, vol. 8, 96.3928 [Xiyu zhuan xia 西域傳下]). Regions west of the Han empire were little-explored and imbued with a hint of the extramundane. To be sure, the appearance of unfamiliar flora, fauna, and other products from these and other regions surrounding the Han was regarded as a good omen or signs of Heaven’s blessing. In the Hou Hanshu (‘History of the Later Han’), lions are more specifically listed among tribute items from the Central Asian Yuezhi and the Parthians (Hou Hanshu, vol. 1, 3.158 [Suzong Xiaozhang Di ji 肅宗孝章帝紀]; vol. 1, 4.168 [Xiaohe Xiaoshang Di ji 孝和孝殤帝紀]). Lions would continue to be gifted to the Chinese by Central Asian neighbours into the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). 

As tribute from semi-mythologized regions to China’s west, lions were received as revered creatures and charged with political value. Thus, in the second century CE, their image was carved in stone and they were deployed as spiritual guardians of the dead (Fig. 3). Many early guardian lions have wings and are found in pairs in Chinese mortuary contexts. Along with other monuments, they mark the spirit path (shen dao) to the grave (Paludan, 1991). These stone sculptures represented the status of the deceased and served to stand guard over the vulnerable spatial juncture between worlds of the living and the dead.

Fig. 3 Lions fronting the tomb of Gao Yi 

China, Sichuan province; Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE), 209 CE

With the entrance of Buddhism from India in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, and its more intense adoption from the 4th to the 6th century under rulers in the north, the image of the lion gradually lost its wings and, while still physically formidable, was transformed into a more peaceful guardian of the dharma at tomb sites and Buddhist grottoes. In many contexts of the Tang dynasty (618–907), the lion began to appear upright, seated on its hind legs. Tang lions are truer to form, possibly because artisans had more opportunities to view real specimens in this moment of foreign contact and exchange along the Silk Roads. Like examples at the Qianling mausoleum in Shaanxi province, Tang lions feature large open eyes, wide mouths, straight teeth, and manes of interlacing whorls (Fig. 4). By the Song dynasty (960–1279), their usage had expanded to more diverse yet still sacred contexts: they were placed in front of temples, ancestral halls, and gardens, activating Daoist yin-yang balance as a female-male pair. Across the Song and Yuan (1272–1368) periods, the lion was further Sinicized and tamed (Yu, 2016, p. 238). It was festooned with bells and ribbons and was less fierce in demeanor. Into the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing periods, while monumental lion sculptures continued to guard mausolea, palaces, and temples, the lion motif also entered into popular culture as a folk symbol. Lions fronted the homes of non-elite citizens and appeared in a larger range of material forms. They are slightly more playful and gentler in these contexts and stylistically more decorative (Zhu, 1996, pp. 17–19) (Fig. 5). 

Fig. 4 Stone lion at Qianling mausoleum 

China, Shaanxi province; Tang dynasty (618–907)

Fig. 5 Lions along the Marco Polo Bridge, Beijing, China

It is with these final phases of the lion sculpture’s development that Union College’s work resonates most closely. The work is highly stylized, bearing very few features natural to the lion. Perceptual focus lies in the relationship between mother and cub, and dimensions of guardianship or protection are conveyed principally through this maternal bond. Lacking archaeological context, Union’s lion can be understood for the meanings it gathered throughout China’s history. The lion itself was a prestige item, and its image was adopted and employed to safeguard, for the dead and the living, liminal spaces of passage. It was also an adaptable symbol: lion images grew to bridge elite and popular cultures and were continuously shaped and reshaped to align with a multiplicity of Chinese beliefs, values, and needs (Young, 2009).

The Reverend Farnham’s stone lion was installed in the backyard of the president’s house on Union’s campus in the spring of 1876. That very first night, four students stole some pots of paint and brushes and painted the sculpture. They coloured the base black and the body white and added some red to the inside of the lion’s mouth. They then posted a sign on the bulletin board outside of the college chapel that read: ‘Prexy’s Little God has Changed its Color’. 

Union’s ‘Prexy’, or president, at the time was Eliphalet Nott Potter (1836–1901; president 1871–84). Potter clashed with faculty during his term as president and in some instances also drew the ire of students. As the lion was installed in association with his residence, vandalism of the work was a rebellious message directed at Potter. He was aghast upon beholding the painted statue the next morning and subsequently gave a lecture in the college chapel, titled, ‘The Vandalism of College Students’. This rebuke effectively inspired further defacement of the work and is the best evidence of why a tradition of painting began. By 1894, the work seems to have long been known as ‘The Idol’, as evidenced by a poem in the student newspaper, the Concordiensis (10 October 1894), titled, ‘The Lament of the Idol’. In the poem, written from the perspective of the Idol—and whose refrain is ‘Oh! Tell me, muse, hast known in history / a god to suffer such indignity?’—a freshman brings a lady friend to the statue and boasts of his exploits: ‘’Tis on this spot great honors I have gained; while scrapping for my class, I’m not ashamed of scars in combat won’. 

Ritual painting of the Idol as an expression of student class identity came to be a principal form of ‘scraps’ or class fights between the freshmen and sophomores. Idol fights occurred each fall term with the inauguration of a new incoming class of freshmen. Sophomores kidnapped the freshmen and forced them to paint the statue green, the sophomore colour. Freshmen would then retaliate to change the hue to red, their own class colour. Defenders would link arms around the lion, and conflicts often led to wrestling matches with intermittent painting. In the end, the victor was determined by the most prominently displayed colour. Such traditions culminated at the end of the school year with a ceremonial collective painting of the statue, as is described in one account of Moving Up Day (as reported in the Concordiensis, 22 May 1909): ‘After the Chapel exercises were completed, all marched to the Idol, which was given its annual coat of white, signifying that all hostile relations between the two under-classes were abandoned. A very pleasant half hour was spent here, each class cheering and all singing the old songs’.

Over time, other campus social groups joined in, and throughout the decades of the 20th century, the stone lion suffered many indignities beyond its coats of paint. Parts have been chiseled off, it has been toppled a few times, and it has been set on fire. Today, such raucous activity has not been carried forward, yet students continue to cover the work in a spectrum of colour and display messages of group identity. Throughout the past century, there have been periodic musings in the student newspaper about the work’s identity and story; however, in general, information of its history and significance to Chinese culture are largely unknown among the campus community. Thus, this lack of proper knowledge combined with the force of tradition account for the painting of the work today, but a question remains: why did the students who originally encountered the work in the late 19th century fail to recognize its value and status as art?

Consideration of the broader status of Chinese art in the United States at the time the stone lion arrived at Union reveals that there was as yet little context for understanding this type of work. To begin, although museums of Chinese culture were open to the public for some years in the late 1830s and 1840s, in the decades that followed, interest in China and Chinese art were quickly overshadowed by a growing enthusiasm for the material culture and art of Japan. This was the result of budding economic relations between the US and Japan following Commodore Matthew Perry’s expeditions there in the 1850s, and subsequently, the first Japanese embassy in the US in 1860. A new, civilized, and progressive picture of Japan began to develop as it embraced Western industry and technology. China, meanwhile, was viewed as lethargic, unresponsive to progress, and mired by civil strife (Metrick-Chen, 2012). Such attitudes towards the Chinese were further bound up in animosities for immigrant workers in the western US, the resultant racial tensions of which eventually led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, signed by then President Chester A. Arthur (1829–86), a Union College alumnus. A general reluctance to accept the merits of China and its culture would endure into the 1890s (Metrick-Chen, 2012).

It is possible that when the Reverend Farnham decided to send the Chinese stone lion to Union College in 1874, he was doing so to help elevate perceptions of China by sharing a cultural product of its history, though he never explicitly notes this in his correspondence. The issue with the Chinese stone lion was likely a matter of timing: Farnham was quite forward-thinking in his gift, even when the interests of early enthusiasts of Chinese fine art are considered.

What Warren I. Cohen has called the ‘golden age of East Asian collecting’ (from 1893 to 1919) did not truly gain ground until the after the turn of the century when collectors such as Charles Lang Freer and John C. Ferguson chose to appreciate Chinese art on its own terms rather than set it against Western ideals from the Greco-Roman tradition (Cohen, 1992). While arts from Japan were established at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, by the 1890s, large collections of art from China would not be accessible to an American public until the opening of the Freer Gallery of Art in 1919 in Washington, DC. Moreover, it is necessary to consider more carefully the categories of objects that came to be included within these museum collections. Porcelains and jades, followed by bronzes and paintings, dominated in the early years of collecting and acquisition (St. Clair, 2016). Across the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there lingered a belief that China lacked sculptural traditions akin to those in the West. This began to change only in the early 1900s when the first publications on sculpture in China were introduced to the West: Edouard Chavannes’s Mission archéologique dans la Chine septentrionale (Paris: Leroux, 1909), and later, Osvald Sirén’s Chinese Sculpture from the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century (London: Benn, 1925). In fact, Chavannes’s seminal text inspired collectors such as Freer to increase his purchases of Buddhist sculptures. As noted by Stanley K. Abe, it was not until the second decade of the 20th century that Chinese sculpture joined other categories of art in major collections (Abe, 2009, p. 433). Indeed, to this author’s knowledge, aside from Union’s sculpture, which arrived in 1876, the next earliest stone lions to enter a collection are a Ming-dynasty set purchased by the Penn Museum in Philadelphia from Yamanaka and Company in 1915.

Moreover, sculpture in the realist tradition was most appealing to those interested in Chinese art (Paludan, 1991, p. 3). This was principally in the form of visually coherent, organic forms, such as anthropomorphic Buddhist figures.

Union College’s stone lion, in appearance, departs significantly from an organic or naturalistic image of a lion. The mane of Union’s lion is cropped into an expanse of stylized whorls, a feature first detected on Tang-dynasty lions and inspired by the arrangement of hair on Buddha figures, which at the time was a visual tradition largely unknown in the US. The snout of Union’s lion is rather flat, and its mouth features a broad expanse of tiny teeth. This, combined with the bell and tassels around her neck, makes her appear less like a fearsome beast and more like a domesticated pet. In fact, this more docile form of the lion follows iterations that grew to popularity in folk traditions of the Ming and Qing dynasties, what later became known as the fu-dog, or foo-dog, to Westerners (Young, 2009). In its early history at Union College, the work was often described as ugly and vulgar, terms that align with the sentiments of the American sculptor William Ordway Partridge (1861–1930) as recorded in 1895: ‘The sculpture of China and Japan need hardly be considered. It is mostly of a mythological character, with monstrous combinations of human and brute forms, repulsive in their ugliness and in outrageous defiance of rule and possibility’ (quoted in St. Clair, 2016, p. 184).

These ideas demonstrate the limitations of understanding a complex tradition of Chinese sculpture in the years before Asian art was introduced to American collections, which may have been at play in the minds of the Union College students who first splashed paint on the newly gifted stone lion. While in no way condoning the actions of those students against an authentic work of Chinese art, it is important to consider, from multiple perspectives, the historical and social contexts in which they were living. Those students encountered a Chinese stone lion on their campus before even the most passionate American admirers of Chinese art were amassing their collections.

Today, conservation of the work is a prudent first step in finally recognizing and honoring this sculpture as a work of Chinese cultural heritage.

Sheri Lullo is Associate Professor of Asian Art History, Visual Arts Departmen, Asian Studies Program, Union College, Schenectady, NY.

Selected bibliography
Stanley K. Abe, ‘Collecting Chinese Sculpture: Paris, New York, Boston’, in Alan Chong and Noriko Murai, eds, Journeys East: Isabella
Stewart Gardner and Asia, Boston, 2009, pp. 432–42.
Warren I. Cohen, East Asian Art and American Culture: A Study in International Relations, New York, 1992.
Hanshu [Book of Han; 漢書], compiled by Ban Gu (32–92 CE), 8 vols, Hong Kong, 1970.
Hou Hanshu [Book of Later Han; 後漢書], compiled by Fan Ye (398–445 CE), 10 vols, Hong Kong, 1971Lenore Metrick-Chen, Collecting Objects/Excluding People: Chinese Subjects and American Visual Culture, 1830-1900, New York, 2012.
Ann Paludan, The Chinese Spirit Road: the Classical Tradition of Stone Tomb Statuary, New Haven, 1991.
Michael St. Clair, The Great Chinese Art Transfer: How So Much of China’s Art Came to America, Madison and Teaneck, NJ, 2016.
Min-Chia Young, ‘The Lion in Chinese Space and Social Life’, PhD thesis, New South Wales, 2009.
Chao Yu 于超, ‘Carved Lions of China: A primary analysis’ [Tanxi Zhongguo shizi diaoke yishu 浅析中国狮子雕刻艺术], Journal of Chifeng
University, (Social Science edition) 37, no. 5 (May 2016): 236–39
Guorong Zhu 朱國榮, The Art of China’s Carved Stone Lions [Zhongguo shizi diaosu yishu 中國獅子雕塑藝術], Shanghai, 1996.

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