NHD52-57

NHD52-57

Six volumes of plant illustrations comprising 309 watercolour drawings of Chinese plants, mostly flowering shoots natural size, sometimes with fruits, and usually with floral dissections drawn natural size and coloured.

By Chinese artists c.1800.

On quarto-size sheets, mostly about 13" by 10"-12", of four sorts of paper. The majority are on paper watermarked Whatman 1794, a few on paper watermarked 1794 I. Taylor, some are on a cartridge type paper and a very few on a thin paper. Some drawings are on larger sheets, variously folded to the quarto size.

Received from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office 1975

NOTE: The drawing and colouring appear to be accurate, and the artistic standard is good, though sometimes the work is stylised, notably in the double flowers. Commonly the floral dissections are drawn in a line with every floral member shown, so that in double flowers there is a multiplicity of petals, and where there are numerous stamens, all will be shown. This recalls the practice in the in the Chinese Drawings from the East India Company and those from "Bibl. Hook." which are in the Kew Collection. The present drawings, however, are most reminiscent of those collected by van Braan (1794) , reproductions of which were published in 1818 and 1821.

Many of the plates have Chinese characters very neatly inscribed in ink, usually in the lower right hand corner. Often the Chinese name of the plant is written in pencil in European script on the back of the plate. 100 of the plates have Latin names (at least to genus) in pencil. Of the 309 plates, 153 are inscribed "W.Ch." and 126 "H.Sh." in ink, usually in the lower left-hand corner; the writing appears to be European. 30 plates lack initials. These initials may denote the artists, or could be the supervisors indicating that these drawings were approved for payment. They have not yet been traced, although H.Sh. might be the same as the Chinese artist whose work is attributed to "Han Sham Flower Painter".

Among the drawings is a sheet of paper with meteorological data, headed "Monthly account of the fall of rain at Macao & Canton in China, from September 1807 to July 1809". This is in ink in a European hand and the measurements are in inches. One drawing is annotated "Pentandria morogyria" indicating that the work was done while the Linnaean classification was still in use, which agrees with the dates suggested.

Most of the plates represent different species or varieties, but one or two duplicates are present. Many of the paintings are of plants known to have been cultivated by the Chinese, and it is possible that all the material came from Chinese gardens or nurseries.