aspect of technical knowledge. Along with established literati painting values, this scientific nature was likely an important part of what prevented its visual dialogue with Chinese painting in the seventeenth century,67 but also what made it attractive to the Qing court as part of new knowledge that supported Kangxi’s statecraft, and which he supported in turn by sponsoring a number of texts in both Chinese and Manchu on Western learning. Such study, patronage, and control of this technical knowledge was a dramatic departure from previous imperial and literati practices, which avoided direct engagement with such subjects, and has been interpreted as a means of demonstrating political authority by mastering knowledge not common among the literati scholar-officials who dominated the civil bureaucracy.68 The specialized knowledge Kangxi gained by studying mathematics, astronomy, and other subjects with the Jesuits was therefore an essential part of his statecraft, which positioned him as both a powerful ruler in full control of the empire and a teacher who embodied the Confucian ideal of the sage-ruler who was wiser than his subjects. Such a presentation was particularly important given that Kangxi had come to real power only by overthrowing his regents while still a young teenager, and had spent the first decades of his sixty-one-year reign brutally consolidating the Manchu-led empire against pro-Han Ming loyalist rebellions in southeastern China.
To help improve the Han majority’s perception of the Manchu Qing rule, establish support among the literati, and strengthen his self-presentation as a legitimate Confucian ruler, Kangxi followed an ancient precedent and undertook a series of imperial inspection tours.69 The most important were his six Southern Tours (Nanxun) through the Yangzi River delta, where Kangxi sought new officials from among the unparalleled
concentration of highly intelligent Han literati in order to bolster support in this very prosperous and powerful region, as well as to balance the Manchu political presence at court. After his Second Southern Tour in 1689, Wang Hui was appointed to direct a massive project to produce twelve monumental horizontal scrolls, the Southern Tour Paintings (Nanxuntu), depicting the most significant geographic areas and events of the journey.70 By giving the empire’s preeminent artist the first major Qing imperial commission, Kangxi appropriated Wang’s own Great Synthesis of historical painting styles, grounded in the literati lineage and ideals, as the foundation for the official Qing court painting style. Wang painted the all-important landscape that framed the tour in his trademark synthetic style, literally setting the events of the tour within the literati landscape, and directed trained professional painters in incorporating elements of detailed academic realism derived from Song pictorial and stylistic models in order to represent the diversity of architecture and figures.71 By appropriating the style that defined Chinese painting at the time, as well as the realism those literati often criticized, Kangxi patronized a syncretic style that unified all these divergent elements as part of the Qing imperial agenda.
As Wang Hui was completing the massive Southern Tour project, Kangxi also made the decision to appropriate European representational modes, although it is important to note that not all European painting found imperial acceptance. During his first meeting with Kangxi in 1690, Giandomenico Gabiani (Bi Jia, 1623–94), the Jesuit vice-provincial of China, presented the emperor with a repeater clock, a barometer, a thermometer, and a miniature of the Holy Mother. Kangxi kept the instruments, but returned the painting. Rather than a demonstration of anti-Catholic feeling, however, this public gesture reflected his targeted interest in how the Jesuits, their knowledge, and their objects could serve him—whereas Christianity did not.72 To the great disappointment of the Jesuits, Kangxi was unconcerned with Western religion, but deeply interested in the political potential of European representational styles and techniques. The first such commission occurred with Jiao Bingzhen (c. 1660–1726), a painter and the supervisor of the Five Offices (wuguanzheng) at the imperial astronomical observatory, where he may have learned perspective from Verbiest. In 1696 Jiao became the first Qing court retainer to work in European pictorial techniques under imperial sanction when he incorporated them into the Imperially Composed Pictures of Tilling and Weaving (Yuzhi gengzhitu, figure 1.7). Jiao initially created a unique album of paintings inspired by a Southern Song handscroll,73 but Kangxi so approved of Jiao’s album that he ordered it replicated in an album of woodblock prints to be distributed throughout the empire. The images depict various scenes in the processes of rice cultivation and sericulture, illustrating the technological practicalities of producing rice and silk (activities gendered male and female, respectively), and therefore also illustrating a well-ordered Chinese society. The illustrations are accompanied by an imperial preface as well as individual poems that demonstrate Kangxi’s personal interest in these depictions of Qing subjects, nature, and productive technology, all flourishing under his rule in overt images of good governance.74
1.7Jiao Bingzhen, Imperially Composed Pictures of Tilling and Weaving, 1696. Imperially commissioned polychrome woodblock prints after paintings. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2650-128)
In this representative image, several imported elements associated with linear perspective are incorporated to create the impression of space that recedes deeply away from the viewer: the deep distance visible along the river flowing away behind the rice paddy on the right side of the image; the dramatic diminution in size of the trees and figures relative to those in the foreground; the recession of the architecture along the sharply oblique
orthogonal of the bank to terminate at the small structure in the distance below the poem; and the visible horizon line, which also serves to leave the top right corner of the image blank to accommodate the original Southern Song poem within the image (the imperial poem is inscribed at the top, outside the image). The hand-tinted figures are slightly modeled through postprinting hand coloring, with darker, more saturated pigments in the same tone applied to folds in robes and darker flesh tones at the edges of faces, arms, and other body parts, leaving the rounded parts closest to the viewer only lightly or even entirely uncolored to create the impression of a highlight by modeling with color rather than line. None of the individual images in the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving employ a central vanishing point, relying instead on diagonal recession and size constancy to create their sense of depth. However, when two prints that recede in opposite directions are paired in the album, as happens in several instances (including this image and the one that follows it), the effect created by the pair is startlingly similar to a single central vanishing point located along the center binding of the album.
Jiao’s use of European pictorial techniques has sometimes been linked with the possibility that he converted to Christianity,75 although the case of Wu Li demonstrates that conversion was not necessarily accompanied by wholesale acceptance of foreign representational methods. Naturally, Jiao also incorporated Chinese pictorial elements into the print series: in this image, the ground plane tilts distinctly upward to occupy the vast majority of the picture plane; neither cast shadows nor dark shading are used for modeling; the rock forms are given volume and mass through simplified versions of traditional landscape painting texture strokes; and the sharp diagonal recession off the side of the image recalls jiehua as much as perspectival painting. This earliest extant Qing court work employing both Chinese and European techniques does not privilege one over the other, but integrates the imported ideas with Chinese representational traditions into images with greater depth, detail, and realism that serve the Kangxi emperor’s self- presentation as a legitimate, powerful emperor controlling a prosperous, well-ordered empire. Not everyone was convinced by Jiao’s work, however, and responses to European styles continued to emphasize their commonalities with artisan painting, even in the case of artists who enjoyed court appointments. The literatus Zhang Geng (1685–1760) said that Jiao’s works did not “correspond to elegant taste. Connoisseurs [literally ‘those who admire antiquity’] do not accept it.”76
