A RARE PANORAMIC EXPORT PAINTING OF DOMESTIC SCENES ON A RIVER Canton, circa 1770-1780PROPERTY OF ANOTHER OWNERA RARE PANORAMIC EXPORT PAINTING OF DOMESTIC SCENES ON A RIVERCanton, circa 1770-1780Gouache on silk, framed; depicting a continuous scene of life on a riverbank, with fishermen and pleasure boats on the waterway, women, men, and children strolling near pavilions and along riverside paths, the landscape with lush foliage growing from rocky promontories and distant hills. 36 1/4 x 165.5 x 3in (91.4 x 395.2 x 7.6cm)1770-1780 年前後 河岸市井外銷畫Provenance:Fibiger Collection, Copenhagen, circa 1945Canadian Private CollectionExport views of life in Chinese villages of the eighteenth century were in great demand by Western merchants. Scroll paintings on silk featuring images of Canton (Guangzhou) were among the earliest paintings of Canton for the Western market. Among those is the 1772 Alexander Hume scroll painting, now in the Hong Kong Museum of Art (coll. no. HKMM2015.0020.0001). As with the current lot, that scroll is 36 inches tall. Another (36 x 109.8 in.), ca. 1770, was on the market in 2014. The height of these scrolls was dictated by the width of a loom, which averaged 29 to 36 inches. Painted silk scrolls of landscapes and city views were a long-held tradition in Chinese art, though generally more complex in execution for the domestic market than for international clientele. Painted silks for export were not unusual, and could be used for clothing, bed hangings, wall coverings, and as window shades.Comparing wallpapers featuring views of Canton, and the dates in which they were executed, the present example appears to date to 1770-1780.Individual scenes found on this scroll are similar to those on eighteenth century porcelains and on panoramic wallpapers. In merging a multitude of scenes into a composite landscape, the artist created a bucolic, but fictional, image of China for Western consumption. Scenic wall coverings, generally painted in gouache on paper, were most commonly illustrated in multiple horizontal registers to convey a sense of distance, with the most distant landscape painted as the top section and inevitably showing a range of mountain peaks, as here. Similar scenes are found in the top registers of wallpapers at Harewood House, near Leeds, hung by Thomas Chippendale in 1769; in the Chinese Room at Westport House, County Mayo, probably hung in the 1770s or 1780s; and in the room of papers of about 1800-1803 from Strathallan Castle, Perthshire, now in the Peabody Essex Museum. See another silk painting of Canton in the Goteborgs Stadsmuseum (coll. no. CM13,239) measuring 32.6 x 308.2in, published in Gotesborgs Stadsmuseum, Ostindiska Commpagniet, 2000, p. 18-19. -