Daumier’s China revisited (with editing)
“Arrival of the American ambassador in Peking”
The terrific Daumier Register recently issued an alert about a small but dazzling online collection of drawings of China by old Honoré with incisive commentary by a Chinese collector, and by “incisive”, I mean biting.
Montreal physician Pei-Yuan Han reckoned something else could be added to the typically dusty captions on Daumier’s series “En Chine”, published between 1848 and 1860. Dr Han’s website appends a choice line or two putting the drawing in a clear historical context.
“What are the others saying, that this pigtail of the Chinese serves no purpose? For swimming lessons, it’s invaluable.”
Daumier made fun of everyone involved in those greedy colonial days, the British, French Americans and the Chinese too.
Han also provides a link to a jolting letter that Victor Hugo wrote in late 1861 to a Captain Butler regarding the destruction of the Summer Palace in Peking by troops jointly serving Queen Victoria and the Emperor Napoleon.
Butler had asked for the author’s opinion and he got it: the sack of the palace, “a wonder of the world”, was hardly a “glorious victory” for the Europeans. Hugo had his own skewed perspective, but he was mostly right.
“Art has two principles, the Idea, which produces European art, and the Chimera, which produces oriental art. The Summer Palace was to chimerical art what the Parthenon is to ideal art …
“Imagine some inexpressible construction, something like a lunar building, and you will have the Summer Palace. Build a dream with marble, jade, bronze and porcelain, frame it with cedar wood, cover it with precious stones, drape it with silk, make it here a sanctuary, there a harem, elsewhere a citadel, put gods there, and monsters, varnish it, enamel it, gild it, paint it, have architects who are poets build the thousand and one dreams of the thousand and one nights, add gardens, basins, gushing water and foam, swans, ibis, peacocks, suppose in a word a sort of dazzling cavern of human fantasy with the face of a temple and palace, such was this building …
“Artists, poets and philosophers knew the Summer Palace; Voltaire talks of it. People spoke of the Parthenon in Greece, the pyramids in Egypt, the Coliseum in Rome, Notre-Dame in Paris, the Summer Palace in the Orient. If people did not see it they imagined it … This wonder has disappeared …
“The devastation of the Summer Palace was accomplished by the two victors acting jointly. Mixed up in all this is the name of Elgin, which inevitably calls to mind the Parthenon. What was done to the Parthenon was done to the Summer Palace, more thoroughly and better, so that nothing of it should be left.
“All the treasures of all our cathedrals put together could not equal this formidable and splendid museum of the Orient. It contained not only masterpieces of art, but masses of jewelry. What a great exploit, what a windfall! One of the two victors filled his pockets; when the other saw this he filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away. Such is the story of the two bandits.
“We Europeans are the civilised ones, and for us the Chinese are the barbarians. This is what civilisation has done to barbarism.
“Meanwhile, there is a theft and two thieves. I take note. This, Sir, is how much approval I give to the China expedition.”
Daumier at Dali House: It’s been a wonderful year
