What is Export Art?
Export art refers to objects that were designed and produced in China specifically for overseas buyers, often from Europe, rather than for a domestic audience. These objects might include luxuries like porcelain, paintings, lacquer and textiles, which were designed to suit foreign tastes and expectations. In the case of Chinese watercolours like those on display at in the Harley Foundation’s museum, artisans created albums which illustrated lucrative Chinese industries – creating portable souvenirs for curious Western consumers.
These pictures often combined elements of traditional Chinese painting with borrowed Western techniques. This created a hybrid style that remained novel and ‘exotic’ while emulating some familiar traits for their intended viewers.
Export art developed through the established eighteenth-century trade networks that linked Britain with China’s port towns. British East India Company ships would travel from Britain, sail around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, cross the Indian Ocean, and dock at Canton (present-day Guangzhou), the main port where Europeans were permitted to trade with China.
While Western merchants and aristocrats wanted to purchase physical Chinese goods, such as porcelain vases and tableware, they also desired to capture the process and labour practices of these industries. The owners of such collections could then demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of ‘far-away’ customs, at once proving their artistic taste alongside their elite education. Ultimately, export art was another way of demonstrating wealth, knowledge, and curiosity.
Joan W, Unsplash, 2023.
This topic has captured the attention of many writers and scholars. Clare Le Corbeiller, author of China Trade Porcelain: Patterns of Exchange, writes that European East India Company agents would supply Canton artisans with models ‘reflective to their own tastes’, who then commissioned Jingdezhen porcelain workshops to reproduce these designs with ‘segments of European culture’. Craig Clunas similarly writes on this subject. He articulates that even though the paintings are produced by Chinese artisans, they owe little to Chinese culture – they are paintings of fantasy rather than depictions of reality.
A Brief History of Chinese Porcelain and Global Trade
One common theme of industrial export art is the porcelain trade.
Long before British households laid their ‘fine china’ for dinner, Chinese potters had been firing porcelain for export to Asia and the Islamic world; by the fourteenth century, the kilns of Jingdezhen had become China’s undisputed porcelain capital.
Centred around rich deposits of kaolin clay from the nearby Gaoligong mountains, the city of Jingdezhen developed a highly specialised workshop system operating within different stages of clay preparation.
Different stages include the throwing, trimming, painting, glazing, and firing of the clay, all undertaken within the industrial landscape of kilns, smoke, and heat.
In reality, most of these plain porcelain objects left Jingdezhen undecorated before travelling to Guangzhou (also known as Canton), where workshops added overglaze enamels and armorial designs tailored to European tastes. The goods would then be finally shipped to ports like London.
These serene images of orderly labour thus sit atop a vast trading network: from imperial and private kilns in inland Jiangxi, down the river systems to Canton’s foreign factories, and out across the seas to aristocratic households, such as this series found in the Portland Collection.
Aestheticised Labour
The four watercolours on display compress these complicated stages into a smooth visual sequence that glamourises this somewhat gruelling process. Although the general gist of the process is indeed accurate, such as the inclusion of the water-powered trip hammer crushing the porcelain stone, the scene has been undeniably sanitised and romanticised.
As shown in the watercolour above, the workers are carrying the clay deposits next to the Gaoligong mountains with a serene backdrop of a flowing river and rolling hills – all bathed in golden sunrise light. This picturesque pastoral setting echoes Western artistic ideals of the countryside, emulating glamourised, adapted aspects of a Claude Lorrain landscape, for example.
Jingdezhen’s industrial reality, though, would be something grittier with the smoke and heat, and therefore would be less likely to be put in pride of place above the fireplace. Emre Ozemili writes that ‘the everyday setting of Jingdezhen was one of noise, dust, and strict enforcement. Therefore, it is important that we not glorify Jingdezhen as a site of creative labour, but more so as a deliberately managed imperial ecosystem that manufactured a façade of beauty.’
So, although export art aestheticised the labour of porcelain production for European consumers, the Qing dynasty also used Jingdezhen’s carefully controlled production to project an image of China as a powerful and technically accomplished nation.
Claude Lorrain, ‘Pastoral Landscape with a Herdsman and Woman at Sunset’, c. 1660, oil on canvas.
The rise of Romanticism in eighteenth-century England celebrated nature’s sublimity, alongside the ‘exotic’ East as a site of intrigue and pre-industrial virtue. Aristocrats craved not wholly accurate depictions for their private collections, but were interested in owning charming vignettes that aestheticised the supply chain of their ‘white gold’ commodities.
Why Export Art, and Why Now?
The Harley Foundation’s exhibition, The World’s Mine Oyster: Art, Nature, and Collecting the Globe, explores how the Cavendish family and their descendants saw and used the natural world through the lens of Empire. These watercolours are just some of the objects that were collected from across the world, leaving a mark on the lands and peoples whose crafts and resources they exploited.
By omitting the grittier aspects of porcelain production and trade, the exported watercolours erase the very real human efforts behind the process. By sanitising their portrayal and reducing the process to a decorative object, the landscapes render the craftspeople invisible. Recognising that these watercolours don’t tell the full story is the first step in letting us appreciate these skilled craftspeople and their efforts in Jingdezhen and Canton.
