Highlights
Henri Bertin and the Representation of China in Eighteenth-Century France
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, decadeslong 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.