Chinese painting on paper
Category
Architecture / Features & Decoration
Date
circa 1660 - circa 1780
Materials
Painted in watercolours on paper
Order this imageCollection
Erddig, Wrexham
NT 1153435.9
Summary
Chinese painting, ink and watercolour on paper, oval, depicting a group of figures outside a pavilion separating the chaff from the rice kernels, with a lake and hills beyond. 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
The British taste for using various types of Chinese paintings and prints as wall decoration goes back to the late seventeenth century, but from about 1760 certain Chinese painting workshops started to produce coordinated sets of paintings on paper for the European market, generally depicting aspects of agriculture and manufacturing or garden scenes. Similar decorative schemes using sets of Chinese paintings on paper have been recorded at Clifton Hall, Northamptonshire (probably installed during the last quarter of the eighteenth century); Fawley Court, Buckinghamshire (1771); Heanton Satchville, Devon (c. 1800); Kilnwick Hall, East Yorkshire (1753); Mawley Hall, Shropshire (c. 1770); Newbridge House, Co. Dublin, Ireland (1770s); and Stoneleigh Abbey, Warwickshire (1765). The paper-hanging firms of Bromwich and Leigh and Crompton and Spinnage are known to have installed such sets of pictures, but it is not known who installed this one at Erddig. This practice appears to have influenced (or be related to) the British taste for ‘print rooms’ decorated with European prints, which developed during the second half of the eighteenth century. 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.