Highlights
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.
Discovering Chinese Art in Wroclaw—Insights from the Neisser and Nowicki Collections
In the 17th and 18th centuries, a fashion for Chinese and Japanese culture as well as for chinoiserie and japonaiserie appeared in European applied art. Remarkable collections of Chinese art that have yet to be studied in depth emerged in both German and Polish regions. This article will discuss two prominent collections of Chinese art in Wrocław (known as Breslau before 1945)—the Neissers and Nowicki collections. They are, respectively, representative collections of Chinese art in Central Europe at the turn of the 20th century and the second half of the 20th century.
For the Love of Broken Porcelain
In 1960, while planting a rose garden on the grounds of a 600-year-old palace in Delhi, members of the Horticulture Branch of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) dug up a large hoard of broken blue-and-white dishes and bowls. These ceramics were thought to be Mughal porcelains. While this was duly noted in a brief entry in the ASI’s journal, Indian Archaeology 1961–1962: A Review, the discovery was regarded at the time as unimportant. The porcelain was put into storage, and the exact location of its discovery was forgotten. However, the collection was and remains the world’s largest collection of Yuan dynasty (1260–1368) blue-and-white porcelain.
Buddhist Art Initiative: Connectivity as a Driver for Change
The creation of Buddhist sculptures, paintings, and ritual implements, and the use of a wide range of symbolic representations in Buddhist visual culture, served originally to support religious practice and lead believers to the Buddha’s teachings. Whether as a devotional object, a donation for merit making, a visualization tool used in ritual, or a vehicle for the path of meditation, Buddhist art fulfills its spiritual purpose all the more when it evokes transcendence of all form, the illusory realm of phenomena, and when it assists believers in attaining deeper levels of realization.