East meets west

Acollecting mania overtook America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Asian art played a significant part in it. Western interest in the Far East was spurred not only by the unfettered opening of China and then Japan to international trade in the middle of the 19th century, but also by Chinese and Japanese participation in the great world’s fairs. At the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, which saw more than 27 million visitors, Japan was accorded more space – and works of art – than any other nation. The displays evidently piqued the interest of many, given the thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of Chinese and Japanese works of art amassed in often epic quantities by US collectors during these decades.

It is no coincidence that this was the great period of American museum-building, too. By the 1880s, the fledgling Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago were beginning to receive collections from civic-minded supporters. A selection of works from the collections that were donated to The Met are now being offered in Bonhams’ no-reserve sale: Passion and Philanthropy: Chinese Art from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this March.

Whereas the antebellum collectors had been wealthy, those who benefited from the booming American industrial economy – not least railroad, mining and retail tycoons and financiers – now had colossal fortunes at their disposal. Europe, the Near and Far East were all, for different reasons, amenable to offers and duly offered up treasures.

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Some collectors, like the pioneering William Thompson Walters of Baltimore, conceived their private holdings of European and ‘Oriental’ art (embracing China, Japan and Korea) as ultimately for public view and edification. Beginning in 1862, he spent 30 years collecting more than 1,400 pieces, which were published in a scholarly, ten-volume catalogue in 1896, two years after his gallery had permanently opened to the public. He accomplished this with the assistance of Samuel Avery (1822-1904). A highly respected art advisor and dealer in New York, Avery’s access to knowledge of Chinese art connoisseurship was enhanced by his brother who became the U.S. Minister to China in 1874. A great advocate of art, Avery made sure that every public collection in the U.S. had Chinese ceramics. In 1879, he sold over 1,300 Chinese and Japanese porcelains to The Met, a selection of 82 of which are included in this sale.

Others, like J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), thought nothing of paying a king’s ransom – $600,000 – to secure the long-term loan of the James A. Garland Collection of more than 1,000 Chinese porcelains to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1902. A trustee of the museum at the time, and later its president, he went one step further in his commitment by instructing dealer Henry J. Duveen, who had sourced most of Garland’s porcelains, to “fill in the sequences” and make the collection complete. A room was allotted to them in the museum’s recently completed new wing.

As The New York Times gleefully reported in 1903, even before Morgan’s intervention, the Garland Collection had been the most valuable of its kind in the world. With the 100 additions by this great Maecenas of the modern world, it was “beyond eclipse”. Those purchases cost Morgan more than $200,000 – double what he had paid for Raphael’s Colonna Altarpiece, the last major altarpiece by the Renaissance master in private hands.

As a highly prized group, the Garland-Morgan collection offers a perfect exemplar of the prevailing taste of the day. It was not what we might expect. At its core were the porcelains made in the Qing dynasty late in the reign of the Kangxi Emperor (1662-1722). This period of stability saw the reopening of the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen, technical improvements, and a booming market for wares made specifically for export.

The lion’s share of the collection featured monochrome glazed wares, next came ‘blue and white’. The vivid, violet-blue achieved by the underglaze painting in cobalt-oxide in this period was particularly admired on both sides of the Atlantic – not least by the American expatriate artist and aesthete James McNeill Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and their friends in London, who did so much to promote this 19th-century revival of ‘china-mania’. Whistler described the “curious” paintings on them as “the finest specimens of Art”.

Most valuable of all, however, were the enamelled porcelains – famille rose, and particularly those with coloured grounds: famille verte and famille noire.

At the time, aesthetically and technically, these Kangxi wares were considered superior to the earlier Yuan and Ming dynasty porcelains. Moreover, no distinction wasdrawn, as it is today, between imperial porcelains and those made for the domestic market or export. To be fair, relatively few imperial pieces were known outside China until the mid-19th century. There were essentially no early wares, stoneware or any other pottery in Morgan’s collection.

This was in dramatic contrast to the holdings of his more independent-minded and less Eurocentric near-contemporary, Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919), who favoured Song dynasty and earlier ceramics. Freer was encouraged to collect by the success of the World’s Columbian Exposition. As one of the greatest and most highly respected collectors of the early 20th century, Freer and his Detroit home and later New York residence became a place of pilgrimage for collectors, museum curators and dealers. Freer had a particular interest in early jades at a time when little was known of Neolithic China’s jade outside the work of artist and scholar Wu Dacheng (1835-1902), whose illustrated work Guyu tukao contained line drawings of known jade types and information on their function based upon classical texts.

The connoisseur shared his interest, current knowledge and passion with his friend, Samuel T. Peters (1854-1921). Several hundred pieces of Chinese and Korean ceramics, plus some 400 early jades, were donated by Peters, a Trustee of The Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1914 until his death in 1921. Peters formed his own large collection of jade based on the standards of connoisseurship and knowledge of the day and donated it to The Met in three tranches between 1911 and 1916. As the Report of the Trustees, 1921, noted“no member of our Board guarded more jealously the high standard the Museum had set itself for the quality of its collections. In a word he loved the Museum and the Museum was richer for his love.”

More than 330 pieces from Peters’ donations are included in Bonhams’ auction – a remarkable collection that was recorded in Peters’ obituary by The New York Times as “a collection probably unsurpassed anywhere”.

While the majority of the objects offered in this important auction come from two donors, the other distinguished figures whose gifts complete the body of this sale include the giants in the history of American industry and philanthropy who contributed their knowledge, energy, passion and wealth during and after their lifetime to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This forthcoming auction in March is an opportunity to own a piece of history from this great American institution.

Susan Moore writes for the Financial Times.