Sunqua China Trade Pith Paper Paintings, Set of Six Still Lifes of Fruit, Vegetables and Flowers

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Sunqua China Trade Pith Paper Paintings, Set of Six Still Lifes of Fruit, Vegetables and Flowers
Chinese, Canton, Mid-19th Century

… Read more Sunqua China Trade Pith Paper Paintings, Set of Six Still Lifes of Fruit, Vegetables and Flowers
Chinese, Canton, Mid-19th Century

This set of six China Trade paintings in gouache on pith paper, each signed SUNQUA, presents a different still life of the fruit, vegetables and flowers of southern China, massed across the sheet in the manner of the Canton export botanical albums. The fruit subject combines a russet Asian pear, whole and halved oranges with a spray of orange blossom, a peeled mandarin with loose segments, a pair of red chili peppers, ripe and unripe persimmons and, at the lower right, small ribbed red fruits that appear to be tomatoes. A second sheet gathers tiger lilies, deep blue bell-shaped blooms, pink and white blossoms with stippled centers, a pink umbel of star-shaped flowers and the orange trumpets of a climber among feathery foliage; a third sets a double white bloom and a crimson flower among pink begonias, their lopsided leaves carefully observed, with yellow blossoms and purple asters.

The remaining three sheets turn to the kitchen garden and the market. One is built around a large brown tuber, probably taro, and a knobbed ginger root, one end cut to show the pale flesh, surrounded by wild pink roses, rose hips, a white flower with yellow florets, purple chrysanthemums and blue daisy-form asters; another around bamboo shoots in their brown, finely haired husks, with raspberries, clusters of purple berries, pink blossom and white three-petaled flowers; and the last around double pink camellias with finely fluted petals, red azaleas, white trumpet flowers and yellow-orange lily-form blooms among broad ivy-shaped leaves.

The painting is of a high order. Fine stippling and hatching render the pitted skin of the citrus, the speckled bloom of the pear and the veining of every leaf, and the pith support gives the colors a soft, velvety luminosity. Each composition carries the name SUNQUA in small Roman capitals worked into the design, on a leaf or at the foot of the group. The paintings are presented in ivory silk mats with a green line and a black fillet at the sight edge, in gilt frames with a rope-twist outer molding, and are glazed with Tru Vue conservation glass.

Hung as a group in two rows of three, the set suits a dining room, breakfast room or garden room, and the ivory silk mats and gilt frames sit comfortably in traditional and transitional interiors alike. The paintings may also be divided into pairs or threes to flank a doorway, window or chimneypiece.

Dimensions (each)
Frame height: 10 3/4 inches (27.3 cm)
Frame width: 14 3/4 inches (37.5 cm)
Frame depth: 3/4 inch (1.9 cm)
Sight height: 7 1/2 inches (19.1 cm)
Sight width: 11 inches (27.9 cm)

Marks
Each signed SUNQUA in small Roman capitals within the composition.

Provenance
Private collection
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition
The set is in excellent antique condition, with the gouache pigments retaining their original depth and vibrant polychrome saturation. The fragile pith paper supports are remarkably stable across all six paintings, showing no significant signs of the typical splitting or water-induced distortion common to the medium. The gilt frames are structurally sound and exhibit only light, age-appropriate wear to the finishes.

References
Carl L. Crossman, The Decorative Arts of the China Trade: Paintings, Furnishings and Exotic Curiosities (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1991).
Craig Clunas, Chinese Export Watercolours (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1984).
Mark Nesbitt, Ruth Prosser and Ingrid Williams, “Rice-Paper Plant – Tetrapanax papyrifer,” Curtis’s Botanical Magazine 27, no. 1 (2010), pp. 71–92.

Historical Context
Sunqua (active circa 1830–1870) was among the best known of the Chinese painters working for the Western market. From premises in China Street, Canton, and a studio in Macao, he produced large oil paintings of the ports and their shipping, while his studio also turned out flower and trade albums in full-bodied color on pith; in 1837 the Chinese Repository singled out his pith series tracing the decline of an opium smoker, painted after Hogarth, and he was afterward called the “Chinese Hogarth.” As in other export studios, much of the work was carried out by trained assistants under the master’s name.

Pith, sold in the West as “rice paper,” is not paper at all but the pith of Tetrapanax papyrifer, a shrub native to Taiwan and southern China: the core of the stem was rolled against a knife blade to pare off a thin, ivory-white sheet, and Western botanists did not identify the plant until a living specimen reached Kew in 1852. From about the 1820s it became the favored support of the Canton studios, its open cellular surface holding the gouache so that the color stands with a velvety, almost raised brilliance that European papers could not match. The same structure makes it brittle and sensitive to humidity, and matched sets of this quality are correspondingly scarce.

(Ref: NY9310-CNIM) See less