Chinese painting on paper
Category
Architecture / Features & Decoration
Date
circa 1760 - circa 1780
Materials
Painted in watercolours on paper
Order this imageCollection
Erddig, Wrexham
NT 1153435.15
Summary
Chinese painting, ink and watercolour on paper, oval, depicting a garden courtyard with a woman holding a lute (pipa) being led by another woman towards a man seated in a pavilion, another man and a child standing next to him (see NT 1153435.7 for an English facsimile of this picture). It is part of a decorative scheme comprising thirteen Chinese paintings on paper, twelve oval and one rectangular, together with three oval English facsimiles, depicting scenes of rice cultivation, silk production and porcelain manufacture as well as garden scenes, edged by painted Chinese floral border papers, pasted onto plain English paper painted light pink, edged in turn by English block-printed floral border papers, in the Chinese Room, probably installed in the 1770s.
Full description
See Emile de Bruijn, Andrew Bush and Helen Clifford, Chinese Wallpaper in National Trust Houses, Swindon, 2014, cat. 16, pp. 24–5; Emile de Bruijn, Chinese Wallpaper in Britain and Ireland, London, Philip Wilson Publishers in collaboration with the National Trust, 2017, pp. 128–32.
Provenance
The scheme was probably created during the refurbishment of Erddig for Philip Yorke I (1743–1804) and his wife Elizabeth, née Cust (1750–79) in the 1770s, probably contemporary with the painted bird-and-flower wallpaper in the State Bedroom. It was acquired by the National Trust, along with Erddig and its contents, as a gift from Philip Yorke III (1905–78) in 1973. The scheme was removed, conserved and rehung by Graham Carr in 1981.