China

Antique Views and Prints of China

This category brings together original antique views, engravings and illustrations of China produced by European publishers from the 17th through the 19th century. These works represent the sustained European fascination with Chinese civilisation — its cities, landscapes, people, customs and material culture — as communicated through the printed images that circulated among audiences who had no direct access to the country itself.

European knowledge of China was long mediated through a combination of Jesuit missionary accounts, diplomatic records and the reports of the East India trade, and it was from these sources that illustrators and engravers drew the material for the antique Chinese views that appeared in geographical compendia, travel narratives and illustrated encyclopaedias from the 17th century onwards. The Dutch East India Company’s engagement with the China trade generated a body of topographical imagery centred on the coastal ports and trading stations through which European commerce was conducted, while Jesuit missionaries contributed accounts of imperial architecture, court ceremonial and the landscapes of the Chinese interior.

The 18th century saw an intensification of European interest in China, partly driven by the vogue for chinoiserie that influenced European decorative arts across the period. Illustrated accounts of diplomatic embassies to the Chinese court — among them those of Lord Macartney in 1793 and Lord Amherst in 1816 — produced detailed records of the landscapes, cities, people and customs encountered on the journey to Beijing, subsequently engraved and published for a wide audience.

The 19th century, and particularly the period following the Opium Wars, opened China more fully to European access, and a new generation of artists and illustrators produced views of Canton, Shanghai, Hong Kong and the broader Chinese landscape that combined geographic observation with the picturesque conventions of Western topographical art. The Illustrated London News and comparable periodicals carried engraved views of Chinese subjects to mass audiences for the first time.

Antique prints of China are collected for their documentary interest, their rarity and the insight they provide into the complex encounter between European and Chinese civilisations across three centuries of intermittent but consequential contact.