This four-leaf Coromandel lacquer screen was restored in our workshops and is now on display at the Musée de la East India Company in Lorient. This very rare example of a Dutch hunting scene has been thoroughly cleaned to restore them to their original colors.
Four-leaf screen representing Europeans on the hunt
South China, Qing dynasty, Kangxi reign (1662-1722), late 17th century for the four leaves. 19th century (?) For the framing. Polychrome and gilded lacquer. H. 148 cm, L. 196 cm. Inv. 2016.14.1.
Acquired with the help of the Heritage Fund by the Musée de la Compagnie des Indes de Lorient.
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During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Europeans were unwanted on Chinese soil. The empire protects itself from all foreign influence. Since their appearance on the Chinese coast in 1513, the Portuguese have been kept away on the island of Macao. Almost a century later, the Chinese government establishes a continental blockade, the Chinese can no longer go to sea. The "great disturbance", which aims to remove the populations from the coast to fight against piracy, is ordered. During the 17th century the Dutch unsuccessfully sent three embassies to the emperor in an attempt to obtain trade agreements.
The capture of Formosa in 1680 by the Chinese marked the end of the piracy against which the government had fought for years.
This is the start of unlocking China. Emperor Kangxi proclaimed the freedom of foreign trade in 1684. From then on, a few ports sporadically opened to the English Company, the East India Company (EIC). The Chinese goods that it buys are then redistributed in its Asian counters, those of Bengal and the Coromandel coast in India.
In these places of commerce, the EIC has warehouses where merchants from other nations come to supply themselves, in particular the French from the Compagnie des Indes, also located nearby. These indirect trade channels explain the origin of the name “screen of the Coromandel coast” because it is on this east coast of India that the French buy these objects even though they are made in China.
The first years of the 18th century saw the real start of trade relations with China, leading to the appearance of Europeans in some Chinese ports. The French reached it for the first time with the ship Amphitrite in 1699. The end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th centuries correspond to the moment of the meeting, the discovery of the other and the appropriation of his image that narrates this small screen. . This is what makes it exceptional because, until past years, the corpus of screens from the Coromandel coast representing Europeans was established, at the world level, at six; now seven with this one.
Two of these screens show what appears to be an embassy of Europeans in China, while the other four illustrate, with a few variations, the same hunting scene. This is inscribed, each time, between a fort on the right and two vessels of the European trading companies at anchor, on the left. Unfortunately, therefore, the leaf (or leaves) which presented the two vessels on the left are missing here. The fort clearly evokes those of the islets of the Pearl River, downstream from Canton.
The hunting scene is read from right to left. In a landscape of groves of trees and rocks, horsemen and infantrymen surround game trapped by the hunters. The latter are equipped with muskets, powder pears, bows, pikes and various polearms. Dressed in the West, their nose is prominent. These physical and clothing characteristics correspond to the conventions of representation of Europeans, by the Chinese, at the turn of the 17th century.
This screen, and the other six, can be compared to Japanese nanban byobu that show foreigners. Of Chinese origin, the term nanban is used in the 16th century in Japan, and refers to the peoples of southern Europe. Nanban-jin literally means "barbarians of the South". Nanban screens made in Japan show the arrival of the Portuguese (1543) and the Dutch (1609) on Japanese soil. They are composed of two main scenes: the embarkation and disembarkation of goods from a foreign vessel in an island near Nagasaki, on the one hand, and the procession of foreigners who bring and exchange goods with the Japanese, near to 'a palace, on the other hand.
These nanban are made for the Japanese and Chinese before
to be bought by a few Europeans; both of them, feeling a reciprocal fascination, which found its incarnation in these figurations. It is possible that the Japanese and Chinese gave symbolic value to thesearavents. Indeed, for Japanese or Chinese traders invested in trade with Europe, the arrival of Western vessels was synonymous with wealth. Japanese nanban are now national treasures that cannot be sold outside of Japan.
Thus, this small screen, incomplete certainly, but homogeneous, is one of the rare Chinese iconographies, which illustrate and crystallize the particular moment of the arrival of Europeans in China, at the end of the continental blockade, at the turn of the 17th century.
© B. Nicolas, Compagnie des Indes museum.