[A Group of 6 Watercolours of Courtly Ladies at Leisure].

£6,000 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books · No longer available

An exquisite group of interior scenes, exclusively of noblewomen and ladies in waiting, engaging in various genteel activities, such as flower arranging, painting, poetry reading and writing, surrounded by elegant Qing dynasty furniture and ornaments, including unusual asymmetrical display cabinets, exotic bird swings, and porcelain vases, all standing or sitting on elaborately patterned silk carpets. Pith seems not to have been adopted for painting until about 1820. Some European museums claim that their paintings on pith (often erroneously called 'rice paper' or 'mulberry pith') come from the end of the eighteenth century but there do not seem to be any dateable examples that are so early. There is a record of the Kaiser Franz of Austria buying some albums from an English Consul-General Watts in 1826. We know of an Italian Count who visited Canton in 1828 and had over 350 paintings on pith in his baggage when he died in Ambon two years later. In the British Library there is a scrap-book containing six pith paintings and a journal entry by a serving British officer who sent them home from India in 1829. These examples and contemporary accounts by visitors to Canton suggest that there was a flourishing trade in pith paintings by the early 1830s. Pith presumably came into use for painting to satisfy the increasing demand for small, inexpensive and easily transported souvenirs, following the massive growth in the China Trade in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Paint

• Binding: Hardcover

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