Hybrid spaces of artistic collaboration: Revisiting the production, painting technique and style of Qianlong’s officer portraits

During the reign of the Qianlong emperor (1736-95), the Manchu government expanded its rule in Central Asia by a series of conquests, the Ten Glorious Campaigns. To celebrate the conquests and reward its outstanding participants, the Qianlong emperor commissioned astonishing quantities of officer portraits in various formats. In total four portrait cycles representing 280 officers were commissioned probably between 1760 and 1792, known as the East-Turkestan, Jinchuan, Taiwan and Gurkha series. The first two series have received continued scholarly attention because both are considered the collaborative work of Chinese court artists and European missionary-artists, such as Giuseppe Castiglione. Consequently, the portraits are regarded as a product of a unique moment of cultural exchange at the Qing court. These groups of artists had little in common since they were trained in settings with a distinct visual culture and artistic tradition. The Jesuit missionaries had been trained in the practice of oil painting with its visual modes of realism, and its distinctive techniques and styles of brushwork, which was considered the antithesis of Chinese painting. Significant challenges must have arisen from the collaboration as both groups of artists needed to absorb and bring together two different ways of painting.While being valued as an artistic co-production, we know little about what collaboration practices informed the portraits’ production. The reason is that information on theartists who made the portraits and, on their production, has been recorded sparingly in Jesuit accounts and imperial edicts. Yet, since the 1970s, historians and art historians have developed hypotheses based on the limited available sources to propose reconstructions of the collaborative making procedures of the officer portraits. Still,there remain ambiguities about how these portraits came about through their collaborative practices. The project aims to address these ambiguities by revisiting existing hypotheses using the interdisciplinary approach of technical art history. The material composition and the making procedures of a set of eight officer portraits heldin the R&J collection in Hong Kong (currently the largest collection of these portraits in China) will be examined by using natural science methods. The scientific data will be collected and contextualized by an interdisciplinary team of Western and Chinese art historians and conservation scientists. The main contribution to Chinese art history is further corroborating the hypotheses on artistic collaboration at the Qing court and to demonstrate in general how technical art history can be used to study Chinese painting.