Chinese School, 19th century

A fine large view of the garden of the richest of the early 19th century Hong merchants at Canton (Guangzhou). Howqua’s fabulous garden at Honam, on the south side of the Pearl River, directly opposite the Hongs at Canton, was visited by western traders and gave them a rare glimpse of the Chinese way of life and the domestic environment they were barred from accessing at Canton. The papers of the Massachusetts supercargo Bryant P. Tilden (at the Peabody Essex Museum) include extensive descriptions of the traders’ visits to these Chinese gardens. Paintings of the Hong merchants’ gardens were produced by Tingqua, Youqua, and other Cantonese export artists and their workshops for the western traders as souvenirs of their visits in the second quarter of the 19th century. These were the first Chinese gardens to be visited by Westerners and paintings of the gardens were amongst the first documents to inform western taste of Chinese domestic style, the gardens with their distinctive pavilions, pools and gazebos seen here, as well as the horticulture, feeding a craze for all things Chinese in the west in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Nothing has remained of the gardens at Honam so these Chinese export paintings remain an unique and important pictorial record.