Henri Bertin and the Representation of China in Eighteenth-Century France
Henri Bertin and the Representation of China in Eighteenth-Century France by John Finlay
Routledge, 2020, 196 pages, 14 colour and 29 black-and-white illustrations
John Finlay’s long-anticipated book highlights a sizeable number of understudied Chinese objects in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. They are part of the legacy of Henri Léonard Jean Baptiste Bertin (1720–92), a French statesman who maintained an extensive, decades-long correspondence with the Jesuit missionaries in Beijing. Known as the cabinet de curiosités chinoises, Bertin’s collection comprised several hundreds of paintings, books, and artefacts of various kinds that he received from Beijing. Embedded in the concept of the cabinet was an astounding vision: The objects were to be made available to ‘the Savants and Artists who hope to take away some practical value from examining them’ (Finlay, p. 132). A comparable collection or museum was not known elsewhere in Europe until the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) was established more than half a century later in London.
Behind Bertin’s exceptional passion was his Enlightenment thinking that France could profit from knowledge of China in the perfection of science and the arts. Benefiting from the first-hand materials, he succeeded in publishing the Mémoires concernant l’histoire, les sciences, les arts, les moeurs, les usages des chinois (1776–91) with his Jesuit agents in Beijing. Well-supplied with images, these volumes were considered the most comprehensive, source-based encyclopaedia on China after the Description de la Chine (1736) by Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, SJ (1674– 1743).
What distinguished Bertin from Du Halde and other encyclopaedists was his emphasis on the role of images, as he often exhorted his readers to ‘see the paintings’ (‘voyez les peintures’, Finlay, p. 25). Departing from this, Finlay manages to narrate an intriguing history of how European knowledge of China was generated, from Bertin’s earliest contact with China to his unfinished garden project at Chatou. Finlay’s book, in its reach and ambition, combines a vigorous attention to the surviving objects in the Bibliothèque Nationale with a broad awareness of cultural context. Most significantly, it touches upon the complicated issues of network, agency, and patterns of interconnectedness that constituted the art of the 18th-century globalized world. Consisting of four main chapters, Finlay’s narration follows a roughly chronological order. Chapter One outlines the education of Aloys Ko (Gao Leisi, 1732–90) and Étienne Yang (Yang Dewang, 1733–98). Having received training in France, these two Chinese priests facilitated Bertin’s correspondence with Beijing and, as Finlay implies, were also involved in supplying Bertin with materials after their return to China. Following their patron’s instructions, Ko and Yang observed various types of European manufacturing and craft techniques in Lyon and were further trained in drawing and etching. Accompanied with gifts and sets of Bertin’s specific questions that covered a spectrum of fields, from Chinese agriculture to arts and crafts, they returned to China in 1765.
Although Danielle Elisseeff-Poisle thinks that ‘these men were ill prepared to foster real intellectual exchange between the two civilizations’, as they were in no position to approach Chinese literati, the results at both European and Chinese courts were fruitful (Elisseeff-Poisle, 1991, p. 159). As Finlay points out, that the Royal Porcelain Manufactory at Sèvres was able to produce a vase japon, echoing an ancient ritual bronze from the Qing imperial collection, was undoubtedly thanks to this unprecedented exchange. Although Ko and Yang were not specifically mentioned, their contributions were self evident, given their training in Lyon. Among the gifts brought by Ko and Yang, furthermore, a set of six Beauvais tapestries was believed to have stimulated a new wave of imperial building projects. The gift presented to the emperor Qianlong (r. 1735–96), for proving ‘what the taste of the Emperor might be for the objects from our manufactures and the products of our arts’ (Finlay, p. 21), soon resulted in the construction of a sizeable palace called Yuanying Guan 遠瀛觀 (‘view of the distant sea’) supervised by Ko’s and Yang’s Jesuit mentor, Michel Benoist (1715– 74), who was also involved in compiling Bertin’s Mémoires.
Bertin’s interest in China was inseparable from his Enlightenment thinking. As Chapters Two and Three demonstrate, Bertin stressed the utility of Chinese handicrafts and the arts and developed a keen interest in Chinese gardening and architecture.
To what extent did Bertin’s images fulfill his wish for an ‘accurate China’? In Chapter Two, this question is challenged by Finlay’s close reading of three albums of the Qing imperial garden, known as the Forty Views of the Yuanming Yuan (Yuanming yuan sishi jing tu 圓明園四十景圖): while the first version was rendered with a closer point of view, in a hybrid Chinese-European style, the second was a faithful copy of the 1745 Qing imperial woodblock prints. It is worth noting that the first hybrid-style version, as Finlay suggests, seemingly connects to five large-scale album paintings owned by Bertin, which exhibit additional, somewhat fanciful elements that are not seen in the Qing imperial originals. These details lead Finlay to argue, as the title of Chapter One suggests, for a ‘landscape of fact and phantasy’.
The hybrid style embedded with exaggerated elements and imagination is particularly meaningful, as Cheng-hua Wang observes that it testifies ‘to the widespread presence of European stylistic elements in China’; they are not just technical drawings or epistemic images in a broader sense but also artworks and valuable examples of 18th-century global art (Wang, 2014, p. 391). Bertin’s considerable holding of such paintings further unveils a large existing body of professional painters beyond the imperial court. As we can tell from the versions of the Forty Views that varied in style, aesthetic, and format, these painters were skilled in European painting techniques, were close to missionaries, and thus shared pictorial subjects from the court. In the National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg, more than 300 Chinese paintings of this kind that were brought by the tenth Russian Ecclesiastical Mission testify to the survival of these painters into the 19th century (Alferova and Tarasenko, 2015).
There is no doubt that the success of Bertin’s Mémoires benefitted from the works of those professional painters. The album Serres chinoises (1777) with superbly painted views of a Chinese greenhouse, for instance—which corresponds to the third volume of a 1778 report written by Pierre- Martial Cibot, SJ (1727–80), one of Bertin’s informants in Beijing—was exemplary of this kind of painting. Based on this album, Cibot managed to elucidate how the greenhouse functioned and implied that ‘French building techniques could be used to construct such greenhouses, and they would be improved by the incorporation of Chinese technical details’ (Finlay, p. 69).
Closely related to Bertin’s garden paintings was his interest in Chinese architecture. As an example of what Finlay in Chapter Three suggests that a ‘project for a broad study of Chinese architecture had been planned’ (p. 70), readers are directed to three sets of albums: the Arcs de triomphe et berceaux chinois (ca. 1772), the Essai sur l’architecture chinoise (1773), and the Plafonds chinois (1773). On the one hand, their multiple sources prove the close collaboration between the professional painters and the Jesuit missionaries. On the other hand, a highly selective ‘Jesuit eye’ behind the commission of these albums is suggested.
While the Arcs de triomphe et berceaux chinois incorporates the temporary constructions that lined the routes of the imperial birthday parades (in which the Jesuit artists were also involved), a certain number of the illustrations from Essai sur l’architecture chinoise are believed to echo the Chinese imperial buildings, and they reflect, as Finlay argues, ‘the French Jesuit missionaries’ position within the Qing imperial court’ (p. 95). Finlay’s assumption here—that the 1734 Gongbu gongcheng zuofa 工部工程做法 (Imperially commissioned building methods of the Board of Works), with a fair amount of technical details and measurements, was one of the sources for this album—is both convincing and inspiring.
Most significant was the painters’ access to Jesuit materials. Exemplary for the Essai sur l’architecture chinoise, for example, might have been Vitruvius’s treaties, which put emphasis on the constructions of the ancient Greek and Roman elite. This assumption is of particular interest, as copies were only available in the Jesuit libraries in Beijing and not distributed elsewhere. The album entitled Plafonds chinois, which exhibits rare examples of European perspective ceilings, existed beyond the court and, as Finlay argues, documents ‘a remarkable, complex, and curious episode in 18th-century intercultural encounters’ (p. 98). Painted for an unknown Chinese prime minister’s palace, one of the views is believed to correspond to Plate 88 from Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum by Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709), of which two volumes (1693 and 1700, respectively) were kept in the Jesuit libraries.
Chapter Four concerns the larger context of Bertin’s extensive image search. Finlay thinks that Bertin’s envisioned Chinese cabinet—which was begun as early as 1774 in his garden at Chatou and echoed many of the garden paintings and the essays published in his Mémoires—‘manifested in many ways as self-styling as a Confucian scholar in Enlightenment France’ (p. 107). Behind this was another ‘Beijing informant’, Joseph Marie Amiot, SJ (1718–93), who sought to position Bertin as the equivalent of a Confucian scholar and thus supplied him with Confucius’s biography and one hundred plates taken from trustworthy Chinese sources. Due to the delayed arrival of these materials, Bertin’s cabinet was not fulfilled in the envisioned ‘authentic Chinese way’. In 1795, unexpectedly, a Chinese house that was built in Oranienbaum on behalf of the Prince Leopold III, Duke of Anhalt-Dessau (r. 1758–1817), echoed the Confucian idea that Amiot attributed to Bertin. Its splendid murals with scenes from Confucius’s life were based precisely on the engravings taken from Amiot’s drawings, which passed through Bertin’s hands (Schaab-Hanke, 2020).
Some readers may expect an appendix with detailed references to Bertin’s collection kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale, but the lack of this should by no means detract from the insightfulness and inquisitiveness of this volume. Well-structured and sharply argued, Finlay’s penetrating book greatly deepens our understanding of the 18th-century Sino-European exchanges, including the Jesuit agency, interpersonal networks, and intricate relations between Chinese sources and European reproductions. Although Bertin’s desire for an ‘authentic China’ was never satisfactorily achieved, readers will gain the most accurate image of Bertin to date through Finlay’s source-based, concise, and thoughtful writing.
Lianming Wang is an assistant professor at the Institute of East Asian Art History, Heidelberg University.
Orientations May/June 2021, pp 102-104
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