'Sensitive plates' and 'sentimental keepsakes': the social life of reverse glass paintings: from Canton to Leiden

Abstract

Chinese export painting had a strong appeal to foreign powers active in China and neighbouring Asian countries in the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. As a result, today, Chinese export paintings can be found in eighteen public collections in the Netherlands. These collections have an historic, an artistic and a material value and are closely related tot the overseas historical China trade. These integrated economic relations produced, among other things, integrated art objects such as paintings, which, as a result of their representative and social functions, over time formed a special artistic phenomenon, an a shared cultural visual repertoire with its own (EurAsian) character.

This article focuses on the social life of two cohdrent collections of reverse glass paintings from China in the collection of Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden.

Having disentangled their provenance, Van der Poel draws some careful conclusions about the degree of importance and, consequently, the extent to which she notices any value accruement and value dwindle of these sets of artworks in their lenghty afterlife. It is clear that these commodified artworks with their cohesive values make this painting genre distinctive and a class in its own right.