Click here to access the RUTHERFORD RESERVES
Click here to access the RESOURCES/COURSE BIBLIOGRAPHY PAGE
Keep in mind that there are extensive online resources that are linked to Lisa Claypool's website under MUSEUMS & GARDENS, MODERN CHINA, and the links to these pages also are listed on the REQUIREMENTS page.
Anonymous. Insect album (30 paintings). ca. 1810. Album imported paper; overall dimensions1.6 cm x 44.6 cm x 36.5 cm. Mactaggart Art Collection 2004.19.3.
The Bruce Peel Special Collections in Rutherford Library has 800 or so rare books on insects! Search the library catalogue for books on butterflies, for instance (limit your search to books in the Special Collections) and then make an appointment to see the book in person!
Think about including a robe or textile object embroidered with butterflies or other insects from the Mactaggart Art Collection. To get a better idea of the kinds of embroidered robes and textiles in the collection, look at two catalogues of the collection on reserve:
Vollmer, John. Emblems of empire: selections from the Mactaggart Art Collection. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2009. N 7343.5 V89 2009
Vollmer, John. Dressed to rule: 18th century court attire in the Mactaggart art collection. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2009. GT 1755 C5 M15 2007
Since this album was made in Canton (Guangzhou City) where many pictures and things were made for export to Europe and North America, you are very welcome to look into export arts that were sent to Paris, London, Salem, and Philadelphia, especially, thinking about the relationship of "scientific" representations of butterflies to decorative arts. For example, you might want to compare a robe or dress embroidered with insects with one of Owen Jones' silk designs (or with any exported silks from China, for that matter) as well as the insect album. Look at the course syllabus and consult the RESOURCES bibliography under "export painting" for books on export arts. A museum that has an excellent collection of export arts is the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA.
You might think about the entomology collection at the University of Alberta Museums to look at butterfly specimens. Does the size of the pictured insect match the size of the specimen? Why might that be significant?
Texts that will be especially relevant to you:
Ball, George. The Art of Insect Illustration. Edmonton: Bruce Peel Special Collections, 2004. You may consult this book for information, but Ball is not visually oriented, and his analysis falls short. This book is available in Special Collections, QL 462.5 B35 2005. Lisa Claypool also has a personal copy.
Claypool, Lisa. "Beggars, Black Bears, and Butterflies: The Scientific Gaze and Ink Painting in Modern China"
Neri, Janice. The insect and the image: visualizing nature in early modern Europe, 1500-1700. Minneapolist: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. N 7668 I56 N47 2011 ON RESERVE
Anonymous court workshop. Battlescene from the Nian Rebellion. Late 1870s. Tieluo, Ink and colours on paper; 137.8 cm x 305.6 cm. Mactaggart Art Collection 2004.19.49
Consider including a map! Map of the Nian rebellion, dated to 1858-1860. University of Cambridge. What makes a Chinese map a map? Look at the RESOURCES page under cartography for books about Chinese maps. Lisa also has two good picture books of maps in her office.
You might want to relate the battle scene to earlier representations of battle scenes made at the court in the 18th century, also in the Mactaggart Art Collection. 2004.19.68.1 See the books and articles listed in the RESOURCES page under On Guiseppe Castiglione, the Jesuits, and print culture relating to this folio of copperplate engravings.
You could also include a few objects pictured in the battlescene painting in your exhibition as a way of showing how the picture is convincing as a "really real" representation of the scene, which may (or may not) link to conceptions of what maps are and what maps are supposed to do.
Texts that will be especially relevant to you:
Zhang, Hongxing, "Studies in Late Qing Dynasty Battle Paintings." Artibus Asiae 60, no. 2 (2000): 265-296. (JSTOR)
Claypool, Lisa, ed. China's imperial modern: the painter's craft = Zhongguo hua jia de ji yi : di guo shi dai de xian dai xing. Edmonton: University of Alberta Museums, 2012. ND 1045 C45 2012 ON RESERVE See the section on the 18th-century copperplate engravings of battle scenes.
Zhang Chong, Goose. 1641. Hanging scroll, ink and colour on paper; 121.1 cm x 44.9 cm. Mactaggart Art Collection 2004.19.33 Title slip written by the artist Wu Hufan 吳湖帆 (1894-1968).
You might consider including another painting from the Mactaggart Art Collection:
Li Yuankai 李元開. Hanging scroll depicting birds, flowers, and insects [untitled]. Hanging scroll, ink and colour on paper; 124.2 x 36 cm. Mactaggart Art Collection 2004.19.81
What about illustrations of geese in children's textbooks on science or on art making? See Don Cohn, Virtue by Design (Lisa has a copy of this book).
Wallpaper! Look into export wallpapers that were decorated with birds. Search the Victoria & Albert Museum database.
See also illustrations of birds in books by naturalists in China in the early 20th century in the UA Rutherford Library (Roy Chapman Andrews, Arthur Sowerby, Robert Clark). You can search the catalogue by author and then pull them off the shelf. And look at books on birds in the online Biodiversity Library. Use the search term "birds, China"
Did Wu Hufan paint geese? What did they look like?
Texts that will be especially relevant to you:
Lai, Yu-chih. "Images, Knowledge and Empire: Depicting Cassowaries in the Qing Court."
Roberts, Jennifer. Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014, "Audubon's Burden: Materiality and Transmission in The Birds of America" pp. 69-115. (PDF, we're reading this one in class)
Von Spee, Clarissa. Wu Hufan: a twentieth century art connoisseur in Shanghai. Berlin: Reimer, 2008. ND 1040 V58 2008 ON RESERVE
Be sure to look at the bibliography about birds on the RESOURCES page.
Yu Fei'an 于非闇 and Cao Kejia 曹克家. Hanging scroll depicting cats, lilies, and a butterfly [untitled]. First half 20th century. Hanging scroll, ink, colour; 98 x 32.7 cm. Mactaggart Art Collection 2004.19.89. Note that the name of the artist Cao Kejia in the Mactaggart image database is spelled incorrectly as "Zhao Kejia."
What is odd about this picture? Think about the stylistic gap between the representation of the flower and that of the cat. How would you describe the cat in comparison to the flower, in other words? Do a visual analysis of the cat.
This is a picture of a domestic animal, not a wild animal, so natural history specimens in museums will not be relevant here. Instead, you will want to look at other kinds of pictures of cats, in newspapers and possibly in calendar posters (yuefenpai 月份牌).
It may be fun to compare this cat with a far earlier picture of a cat, dating to the Song dynasty (960-1279), like this one. The brush-and-ink painters Li Di and Yi Yuanji both painted cats during the Song dynasty. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has an excellent collection of Song-dynasty paintings, as does the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.
There are also a number of cat paintings that were made in Shanghai around 1890-1910 by artists such as Ren Xun and Ren Yi (aka Ren Bonian). Search the Shanghai Museum collection.
But you will also want to think hard about why Cao's cat looks so peculiarly "scientific" in comparison to the earlier paintings.
Texts that will be especially relevant to you:
I have rush-ordered through ILL a copy of Cao Kejia's painting manual Zenyang hua mao 怎樣畫貓 (How to paint a cat). It could have some very cool prepatory drawings of cats in it, as well as information about the sources informing Cao's picturing practices.
Claypool, Lisa. "Beggars, Black Bears, and Butterflies: The Scientific Gaze and Ink Painting in Modern China" Look at the section on "Black Bears" and the animal painter Liu Kuiling 劉奎齡, who lived in Tianjin, a treaty port near to Beijing where Yu and Cao both lived.
Silbergeld, Jerome, and Eugene Wang, eds. The Zoomorphic Imagination in Chinese Art and Culture. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016. ONLINE RESOURCE through the UA Library.
There are no English-language articles or books on Cao Kejia, as far as I know.
Gao Jianfu 高劍父. Lilies. Hanging scroll, ink and colour on paper; 88 cm x 39.8 cm. Mactaggart Art Collection 2004.19.43
Gao Jianfu grew up in the city of Canton (Guangzhou City), where the export pictures like the Insect Album in this exhibition were produced. So pictures of plants that were painted there (and there were many), will be relevant to this curatorial project. You may want to look at lilies in the Reeves collection (Lisa has a photograph), consulting the book by Magee, below. We will be visiting the UA botany collection together, so you will be able to look at a specimen of a lily.
Look into genre paintings of flowers by artists in the imperial past who are famous precisely for their skill in rendering flowers, like Yun Shouping 惲壽平 (1633-1690) or perhaps think about including the Chen Zhuan (1678-1758) album in the Mactaggart Art Collection 2004.19.58.9
What about FAN paintings? What happens to a painting of a flower when it is on an object that moves back and forth and is held close to the body? See the Royal Ontario Museum collection of fans and ask Lisa to borrow a book that they published about their collection.
How are lilies represented in scientific texts? What makes them different from the Chinese genre paintings and fan paintings, for example? How is Gao's painting like scientific illustration? Or does it draw more closely to the genre paintings?
Books and articles that will be especially relevant to you:
Claypool, Lisa. "Beggars, Black Bears, and Butterflies: The Scientific Gaze and Ink Painting in Modern China" Look under the section about butterflies for information about Gao Jianfu.
Magee, Judith. Images of nature: Chinese art and the Reeves Collection. London: Natural History Museum, 2011.
See the list of books about Gao Jianfu on the RESOURCES page.
Liangyou 良友 [The Young Companion] ethnographic photographs.UA AP 95 C4 L33 folio Library has: no.1 (1926)-no.172 (1945)
Are these pictures erotic? Objectifying? How are we to understand them? What is it that gives them an "ethnographic" quality?
You might compare the "art" photographs with those by Heinz Von Perckhammer that were in the 1928 Edle Nacktheit in China AND in Liangyou. I have ordered the 1928 book through ILL for you. For digital images (not to be used in the exhibition, but just to give you a sense of what is in the book, click here).
You have access to hundreds of photographs dating to roughly the same era that are in online databases listed in the IMAGE ARCHIVES here.
Books and articles that will be especially relevant to you:
Claypool, Lisa. "Beggars, Black Bears, and Butterflies: The Scientific Gaze and Ink Painting in Modern China" Look under the section about beggars for information about ethnography.
Cody, Jeffrey W., et. al, eds. Brush and Shutter. Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2011. TR 101 B78 2011 ON RESERVE
Shen, Kuiyi, et. al., eds. Liangyou: kaleidoscopic modernity and the Shanghai global metropolis, 1926-1945. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Available ONLINE through Rutherford Library.
Wu, Hung. Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China. London: Reaktion Books, 2017. TR 101 W78 2016 ON RESERVE
Wu Hung and Katherine Tsiang, eds. Body and Face in Chinese Culture. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005. N 7574.5 C6 B63 2005 ON RESERVE
Wue, Roberta, and Luke Gartlan, eds. Portraiture and early studio photography in China and Japan. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017. TR 101 P67 2017 ON RESERVE