From the Summer Palace 1860: Provenance and Politics

From the Summer Palace 1860: Provenance and Politics

Date: 22 November 2013 (Friday)
Time: 3:30-4:30pm
Venue: Room 7.58, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus

The looting and destruction of parts of the Chinese Imperial Summer Palace complex by Anglo-French troops during the Second Opium War (1857-60), created a stir that has reverberated down the centuries. Today the incident remains a recurring issue of cultural patrimony for China and marks a particular low point in historical Sino-Franco-British relations. The sore is kept alive by the looted objects that were brought back by the French and British at the end of the campaign and which survive in public and private collections, some of which periodically appear for sale on the art market. At the time of their looting and in the decades immediately following, a provenance to the Summer Palace was in Europe a signifier of quality, rarity and political dominance. Now such a provenance is politically controversial but conductive for a high hammer price. But what is the true provenance of works of art designated as ‘From the Summer Palace’? How definitive is that provenance? This paper will look at the evidence through a number of case studies, revealing the difficulties involved in ‘placing’ many of the works of art that returned with the troops in the wake of the conflict.

Speaker: Nick Pearce

Prof. Pearce holds the Sir John Richmond Chair of Fine Art and is Head of the School of Culture and Creative Arts at the University of Glasgow, where he specializes in the arts of China. His career has spanned both museums and universities having held positions at the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Burrell Collection, in Glasgow and Durham and Edinburgh universities. His research focuses upon photographers and photography in late 19th century China and aspects of the collecting of Chinese art in the West during the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. His most recent publications include: (with Jason Steuber), Original Intentions: Essays on Production, Reproduction and Interpretation in the Arts of China, and ‘A Casualty of War: Laurence Binyon, Raphael Petrucci and Chinese Painting’, in Locating Italy: East and West in British-Italian Transactions.