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Article

Addis, Sir John M(ansfield)  

Margaret Medley

(b London, June 11, 1914; d Pembury, Kent, July 31, 1983).

English diplomat, collector and art historian. In 1947, as a member of the British Diplomatic Service, he was posted to Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, then the capital of the Nationalist Chinese government. He became interested in Chinese art and history and began a collection of porcelain, furniture and textiles at a time of political and economic uncertainty, when Chinese collectors were forced to sell. When he moved to the British embassy in Beijing in 1954 he continued his research into Chinese ceramic history with the help of specialists from the Palace Museum. In 1963 he became British ambassador to the Philippines and was largely responsible for organizing the Manila Trade Pottery Seminar (1968), to which he also contributed five of the nine discussion monographs. From 1972 to 1974, as British ambassador to China, he played an important part in promoting the Chinese archaeological exhibition The Genius of China, held in London at the Royal Academy in ...

Article

Art-related finance  

Christophe Spaenjers

Set of financial methods, instruments, and business models that are used in the Art market. Important developments since the 1960s include the spreading availability and use of art price information and price indexes (see Art index), the emergence of loans collateralized by artworks, repeated efforts to create art investment structures, and a strong growth in art market advisory services provided by wealth managers and new entrepreneurs (see also Investment).

The first major development has been the spread of art price information and art price indexes over the last half-century. After a few difficult decades, art price levels and public interest in the art market were going up again in the 1950s and 1960s. A number of books on the history of the art market and on art investment that were published around that time—Le Vie Etrange des Objets (1959) by Maurice Rheims, Art as an Investment...

Article

Ashikaga family  

Ken Brown and Karen L. Brock

Shogunal dynasty that ruled Japan during the Muromachi period (1333–1568). According to the anonymous Taiheiki (‘Chronicle of great peace’; ?1370–71), Ashikaga, the name of a town in Shimotsuke Province (now Tochigi Prefect.), was taken as a family name by a branch of the military Minamoto family. The Ashikaga came to power when the first Ashikaga shogun, Takauji (1305–58), overthrew the Hōjō regents in Kamakura and installed the ambitious Emperor GoDaigo (reg 1318–39) in Kyoto. When GoDaigo refused to name Takauji as shogun, the latter deposed him and replaced him by his own candidate. GoDaigo fled to Yoshino (Nara Prefect.), where he set up a rival court. The schism continued during the early Muromachi period, which is also known as the Nanbokuchō (‘Northern and Southern Courts’; 1336–92) period. Takauji and his son, the second shogun Ashikaga Yoshiakira (1330–67), paid respect to the old aristocracy in Kyoto, but the third shogun, ...

Article

Asian American Arts Centre  

Matico Josephson

American multi-ethnic arts organization based in New York’s Chinatown. The Asian American Arts Centre (AAAC) and its predecessors, the Asian American Dance Theatre (1974–93) and the Asian Arts Institute (1981–8), emerged from the milieu of the Basement Workshop, the first working group of the Asian American Movement on the East Coast, whose mouthpiece was the journal Bridge (1970–81). After the closing of the Basement Workshop in 1987, the Dance Theatre and the Asian Arts Institute were consolidated as the AAAC.

Directed by Eleanor S. Yung, the Dance Theatre was at the core of the organization’s activities from the 1970s through the early 1990s, performing traditional dances from several Asian cultures alongside modern and postmodern forms. In the early 1980s, the Asian Arts Institute began to hold exhibitions and collect slides of artists’ work and documentation of their activities, working primarily with artists involved in the downtown art scene. Early programs included open studio events for artists working in Chinatown and exhibitions of the work of Arlan Huang (...

Article

Barlow, Sir (James) Alan  

S. J. Vernoit

(Noel)

(b London, Dec 25, 1881; d Wendover, Bucks, Feb 28, 1968).

English civil servant and collector of Islamic and Chinese art. The eldest son of Sir Thomas Barlow, royal physician and president of the Royal College of Physicians, he was educated at Marlborough and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1906 he was appointed to a clerkship in the House of Commons, by 1933 he was principal private secretary to the Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, and from 1934 to 1948 he served at the Treasury. He began collecting Oriental ceramics in 1900 and started acquiring Islamic pottery five years later, amassing a comprehensive collection with a special emphasis on Ottoman and Iranian items within 20 years. He built up his collection of Chinese art in the early 1920s, when several British collectors led by George Eumorfopoulos acquired objects excavated in China. Barlow preferred early austere Chinese pottery with little polychrome decoration. During the 1920s and 1930s he also continued to acquire Islamic items, and some of his pieces were shown in ...

Article

Bi Long  

Chinese, 18th century, male.

Active during the reign of the Qing Emperor Qianlong (1736-1796).

Born in Taicang (Jiangsu).

Painter.

Bi Long was a painter of bamboos and landscapes and a disciple of Cao Zhibo. He was also a poet and a famous collector of calligraphy and paintings....

Article

Bing, S(iegfried)  

Gabriel P. Weisberg

(b Hamburg, Feb 26, 1838; d Vaucresson, nr Paris, Sept 6, 1905).

French art dealer, critic and patron, of German birth. Often misnamed Samuel, he was a major promoter of Japanese art and Art Nouveau. From a wealthy, entrepreneurial Hamburg family, he trained as an industrial decorator for ceramics under the guidance of his father and independently in Paris during the Second Empire (1852–70). After the Franco-Prussian War (which he spent in Belgium) Bing established a thriving Oriental trading business, primarily of Japanese arts, the success of which permitted the opening of his Oriental crafts shop in Paris in the late 1870s. Following a trip to Japan, he expanded the business in the 1880s, selling both contemporary and ancient Japanese objects, to meet the demand for Oriental merchandise. At the end of the 1880s, as Japonisme developed, Bing founded a monthly periodical, Le Japon artistique (pubd simultaneously in Eng., Fr. and Ger., 1888–91), and organized a series of exhibitions of rare Japanese art, featuring ceramics and ...

Article

Chen [Ch’en] dynasty  

Carol Michaelson

Chinese dynasty that ruled in southern China between 557 and 589 ce. It was the last of the so-called Six Dynasties (222–589), who were the “legitimate” successors to the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce) and made Jiankang (now Nanjing) their capital.

In 557 Chen Baxian (later Emperor Wudi; reg 557–559) deposed the Liang (502–557) emperor and established the Chen dynasty. The government attempted to resuscitate the economy but the area under its rule was the smallest of the southern dynasties, with fewer territories than its predecessors and a northern border reaching only to the southern bank of the Yangzi River. The Chen government was strong enough initially to resist incursions by the Northern Qi (550–577) and Northern Zhou (557–581) but was not in a position to take advantage of the divisions in the north.

Jiankang continued to be a cultural and political center to which merchants and Buddhist missionaries came from Southeast Asia and India, and it became one of the world’s greatest cities. The capital was also a major Buddhist center; several Buddhist temples, many of them caves or niches, had been constructed in the preceding Liang period. To the northeast of the city lay an imperial burial ground, notable for its carved tomb guardians in the form of chimeras (...

Article

Chikuto  

Japanese, 18th – 19th century, male.

Born 1776; died 1853.

Painter. Landscapes, animals.

Nanga (literati) school.

Chikuto was the son of a doctor in Nagoya. At the age of 15, he became the protégé of the rich businessman and collector Kamiya Ten’yu, who was also from Nagoya and through whom he met many artists and studied Chinese pictorial techniques. It was through Tenyu that Chikuto made the acquaintance of the painter Yamamoto Baiitsu (...

Article

China: Collectors and collections  

Michel Beurdeley

revised by Jason Steuber

Collectors and collections of art throughout Chinese history have served to reflect both domestic and international economic, political, and social needs of its peoples and governments. Among early Chinese art collectors buying was virtually non-existent. Thus, the Northern Song (960–1127) painter Mi Fu, in his History of Painting (Hua shi; c. 1100) rarely used the word mai (“to purchase,” preferring shou (“to receive, to put away in a safe place”). Collectors generally bartered but sometimes adopted more extreme methods. Mi Fu, for example, when once at a riverside monastery during a tour of inspection, seized a small plaque on which a famous poem was engraved and made off with it in his boat, with the abbot of the monastery in hot pursuit. The emperor Taizong (reg 626–649 ce) loved calligraphy so passionately that he did not hesitate to become involved in actual theft when a famous manuscript, the ...

Article

China: Exhibitions  

Basil Gray

revised by Doris Sung

See also China.

Before c. 1910, exhibitions in the West in which Chinese art was included (see, for example, 1895 exh. cat.) only responded to the decorative vogue for blue-and-white porcelain favored by, among others, James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1910 interest in the archaeology of China coincided with the widening of taste to include the primitive and exotic, as for early Chinese pottery and porcelain shown at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, London (see 1910 exh. cat.). In Paris before 1914, earlier Chinese art was only seen at the galleries of the dealers Mme Langweil and Charles Vignier, but these created a notable stir in art circles there. Both in London and Paris the first fruits of unscientific excavation in China were exhibited, mainly tomb finds encountered during railway construction, consisting of glazed and unglazed figures of the Wei (386–556 ce) to Tang (...

Article

China: Museums  

Jessica Harrison-Hall

revised by Yunchiahn Sena

Examples of Chinese art and material culture abound in museums, galleries, and private collections around the world. This article refers only to major public collections. For further information on museum holdings in specific fields see China: Sculpture, §4; China: Calligraphy, §4; China: Painting collections; China: Bronzes, §5; and China: Textiles and dress, §4.

See also China.

In China, the Palace Museum, Beijing, housed in the historical site of the Forbidden City, inherited from the Qing dynasty the outstanding imperial collection of more than one million works, which represent art and luxurious material culture from China’s imperial past. The recently renovated National Museum of China, located on the east side of the Tiananmen Square, holds an impressive collection of 1,300,000 archaeological and historical works. Its permanent exhibitions illustrate Chinese history from prehistory to the modern times with excellent archaeological findings and historical artifacts. Major public museums outside Beijing include the Nanjing Museum, ...

Article

China: Patronage  

De-nin D. Lee and Jin Xu

See also China.

Without the patronage of art, the religious traditions that emerged over the long course of Chinese history would have looked very different. When people seek to trade material wealth for divine intervention, they have always used art as their primary means of carrying out such transactions, whether in the form of a temple, a statue, a painting, a piece of calligraphy, or a vessel. The patrons of religious art in China were individuals and groups from different social backgrounds; they could be ordinary families and local communities as well as imperial courts. While dynastic histories and archives shed light on the patronage of officials and courts, we have evidence for other types of sponsorship in the dedicatory inscriptions that accompany commissioned artworks. These inscriptions contain much information about the nature and circumstances of such patronage practices, including the patrons’ identities, motivations, and sometimes even the amounts of money they donated....

Article

Chosŏn dynasty  

Junghee Lee

[Yi]

Korean dynasty that ruled the Korean peninsula from 1392 to 1910. The founder of the dynasty, Yi Sŏng-gye, posthumously known as King T’aejo (reg 1392–8), established Neo-Confucianism as the official ideology, encouraging a modest and practical lifestyle. Thus the patronage of extravagant art was discouraged, and the status of the artist was reduced. Buddhism was often zealously suppressed but remained the private religion of the palace women, the common people and even some kings. T’aejo, for example, built Sŏgwang Temple in north-eastern Korea, the area of his origin; King Sejo (reg 1455–68) built the marble pagoda of the Wŏngak Temple in Seoul in 1466; and the Dowager Queen Munjŏng patronized painters (see Korea: Painting) and supported temple constructions during the reign of King Myŏngjong (reg 1545–67).

With the establishment of the capital at Hanyang (now Seoul), T’aejo built the Kyŏngbok and Ch’angdŏk palaces and city walls in ...

Article

Cixi, Empress Dowager  

Ying-chen Peng

(b Beijing, Nov 29, 1835; d Beijing, Nov 15, 1908).

Chinese ruler, art patron, calligrapher, and painter. She was born into the Manchu Yehenara clan and became an imperial consort in 1852. Her five-year-old son (and the only male imperial heir), Zaichun, ascended the throne as Emperor Tongzhi (1856–1875) in 1861 in the midst of the Taiping Rebellion in the south and the Second Opium War in the north. During this tumultuous time Empress Dowager Cixi embarked on her regency and ruled the Qing Empire for forty-eight years. China recovered from economic and political woes and saw the twilight of modernization in the first decades of her regency. When Tongzhi died heirless in 1875, Cixi seized unchallengeable control of the court by appointing her toddler nephew, Emperor Guangxu (1871–1908). However, after Guangxu began personal rule in 1888, his radical and wide-ranging modernization policies clashed with the gradual and limited approaches Cixi had endorsed, resulting in the eradication of his short-lived Hundred Days Reform (...

Article

Clark, Robert Sterling  

David S. Brooke

(b New York, June 25, 1877; d Williamstown, MA, Dec 29, 1956).

American collector. Clark was educated at Sheffield Scientific School, Yale University, and served in the US Army from 1899 to 1905. He led an expedition to northern China in 1908–9 and published an account of it, Through Shen Kan, with Arthur Sowerby in 1912. He settled in Paris in 1912 and married Francine Clary in 1919. After 1920 the couple lived mainly in New York, with residences in Cooperstown, NY (until 1933), Upperville, VA, and Paris. Using Clark’s inherited fortune, they founded and endowed the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (opened 1955) in Williamstown, MA, to house Clark’s collection.

Clark purchased art between 1912 and 1954, principally from the firms of Colnaghi, Knoedler and Durand-Ruel. He began primarily with the Old Masters, acquiring paintings by Piero della Francesca, Hans Memling, Jan Gossart and Claude Lorrain, but after 1920 he concentrated on 19th-century French painting. He had several favourites: ...

Article

Clarke, Thomas B(enedict)  

Lillian B. Miller

(b New York, Dec 11, 1848; d New York, Jan 18, 1931).

American businessman, collector, patron and dealer. He began collecting art in 1869 with paintings by American Hudson River school artists and conventional European works, Chinese porcelain, antique pottery and 17th- and 18th-century English furniture. By 1883 his taste had focused entirely on American works, especially on paintings by George Inness and Winslow Homer. By dealing in such works and by giving frequent exhibitions, Clarke enhanced the popularity of these artists, while also realizing large profits for himself. His founding of Art House, New York, in 1890 confirms the profit motive behind his collecting practices. The most notable sale of his paintings took place in 1899, when he sold at auction 373 contemporary American works at a profit of between 60 and 70%. Four landscapes by Inness—Grey, Lowery Day (c. 1876–7; untraced), Delaware Valley (1865; New York, Met.), Clouded Sun (1891; Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mus. A.) and Wood Gatherers: Autumn Afternoon...

Article

Wu Dacheng  

Elizabeth F. Bennett

[Wu Ta-ch’engming Dashunzi Zhijing, Qingqinghao Hengxian, Kezhai]

(b Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, Jun 6, 1835; d Mar 6, 1902).

Chinese calligrapher, epigrapher, and collector. Born into a rich and cultured merchant family, he entered the district school at 16 and at 17 began to study seal script (zhuanshu) under Chen Huan (1786–1863). He received his jinshi degree in 1868 and became a scholar at the Hanlin Academy in Beijing, followed by two years at the Suzhou Provincial Printing Office. In succeeding years, he distinguished himself as an army officer, diplomat, and civil servant. He became Governor of Guangdong Province in 1887 and of Hunan in 1892, interrupted by a period as director-general of the conservancy of the Yellow River and the Grand Canal and followed by his directorship of the Longmen Academy in Shanghai in 1898.

Wu amassed a large collection of antiquities. He became renowned as an interpreter of written characters used before the Qin period (221–206 bce) and completed a dictionary of seal characters, the ...

Article

Zhang Daqian  

Sarah E. Fraser

[Chang Ta-ch’ienChang Dai–chienzhaihao Dafengtang]

(b Neijiang, Sichuan Province, May 10, 1899; d Taipei, Apr 2, 1983).

Chinese painter, calligrapher, collector, and accomplished forger. Born Zhang Zhengquan, he was from an artistic family and began to paint under the tutelage of his mother, Zeng Youzhen (1860–1936). In 1917, after passing through Shanghai, he joined his elder brother Zhang Shanzi (1882–1940) in Kyoto, where he learned textile dyeing and weaving.

In 1919 Zhang returned to Shanghai and studied with the calligrapher Zeng Xi (1861–1930), who gave him the name Zhang Yuan, as well as with the painter Li Ruiqing (1867–1920), a specialist in Shitao-style landscapes (1642–1707). Both are credited with cultivating Zhang’s distinctive calligraphic hand. Zhang’s intentionally splayed characters, combined with awkward elements such as leans in unexpected directions, have origins in antiquarian studies (jinshi xue), an element central to Zeng and Li’s practice. Li deployed a seal script (zhuanshu) based on bronzes and stone stele. In December ...

Article

David, Sir Percival  

S. J. Vernoit

(b Bombay, July 21, 1892; d London Oct 9, 1964).

English businessman, collector and connoisseur of Chinese art. He was educated at Elphinstone College, Bombay, and at the universities of Bombay and London. During several years in East Asia he studied the cultures and languages of China and Japan. From 1928 to 1929 he was honorary adviser to the Palace Museum, Beijing. He developed at an early date a knowledge of the imperial collections in Beijing unique in the West, and by the early 1930s he had formed an extremely important collection of Chinese ceramics, with a high number of dated and inscribed pieces, many of which are of historical value. From 1933 to 1938, and again from 1953 onwards, he was active as a member of the Council of the Oriental Ceramic Society in London, of which he became Honorary Vice-President in 1961. In 1935 he served as Director of the International Exhibition of Chinese Art held in London (...