At ‘The Royal College of Surgeons of England’, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, there is an oil on canvas painting. It is a three-quarter-length portrait and is attributed to the renowned eighteenth century British figure and landscape painter John Hamilton Mortimer ARA. The portrait was executed sometime between 1770 and 1701, and is of a man who is obviously Chinese, clothed in his traditional national dress. The painting is titled ‘Chinese Mandarin’.
Chitqua, who was born in Amoy, Canton (modern day Guangzhou), China, in 1728, was the sitter for the ‘Chinese Mandarin’, and is the first ‘recorded’ Chinese artist to have visited Britain. According to various sources of the time, Chitqua was a very successful ‘unfired’ clay modeller in his own country. London’s monthly magazine ‘The Gentleman’s Magazine’ (1771, p238) had this to say about him…
‘He is remarkably ingenious in forming small busts with a sort of China earth, many of which carry a striking likeness of the person they are designed to represent. He steals a likeness, and forms the busts from his memory.’
It is reputed, that while in London, Chitqua charged the not insubstantial sum of ten guineas for a small painted clay bust, and fifteen for a whole-length figure, indicating his quick ascendancy into monied London society.
In his short stay in London, Chitqua quickly began to move in rarefied circles. He became acquainted with Queen Charlotte (Queen of the United Kingdom and Hanover) a known lover of the arts, as well as the biographer, diarist, and Scottish lawyer James Boswell, and Josiah Wedgwood (potter and founder of the Wedgwood company), and many other British notables.
Chitqua’s status is further confirmed by his being painted as a ‘non-academician’ into Johann Zoffany’s canvas ‘Portraits of the Academicians of the Royal Academy’ (a group portrait of the, essentially but not exclusively, founding members of the Royal Academy, which was established in 1768). This epic painting is now in the Royal Collection.
This esteemed work by Zoffany, of selected Royal Academicians, was exhibited at London’s Royal Academy in 1772. Zoffany himself had painted Britain’s Queen Charlotte with her two Eldest Sons and George III, Queen Charlotte and their six eldest children, and had been inducted into the Royal Academy by King George III, in 1769. Zoffany had exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1770 to 1800.
Standing in front of Johann Zoffany’s large canvas (39.8 in × 58.1 in), to the left, near the back and on a line of heads (and entrapped by two gentlemen wearing grey wigs) separating the bottom two thirds from the top third of the canvas, is an obvious Chinese head wearing a Chinese headpiece similar to that witnessed in Mortimer’s portrait (‘Chinese Mandarin’) round about the same time as this canvas by Zoffany.
In eighteenth century London, the ‘small bust’ Chinese gentleman artist, featured in Zoffany’s array and Mortimer’s portrait was known by many names. He was Tan Che Qua and described as having a bald head except for a long (Chinese style) ponytail. He was
“…. a middle-aged man, of proper stature; his face and hands of a copperish colour; is elegantly clothes in silk robes, after the fashion of his country.”
The Leeds Intelligencer and Yorkshire General Advertiser, 29 Aug 1769, Page 3.
Whereas Richard Gough (China tradesman, antiquarian and topographer) remarks of Chitqua...
“He wears the dress of his own country, a pointed stiff cap, with a border turned up of quilted silk, an under vest like a banian ( a kind of loose fitting dressing gown-like robe) of green silk, with a lining; his upper vest a kind of mantelet [cloak]; his drawers the same as his under vest; and his slippers yellow.”
Chitqua often signed his figurine work as ‘Amoy Chitqua’ or, variously, ‘Tan Chitqua’ or ‘Tan Chetqua’, ‘Chitqua’ (with variant Romanisation of ‘Chit-qua’, ‘Chit Qua’, ‘Chet-qua’, and ‘Che Qua’) and was considered exceptional in his ability to model accurate clay (portrait) likenesses.
In the 1700s, when Chitqua arrived, England was already in the throes of Chinoiserie (‘chinois’ from the French for Chinese) which was a European middle class stylistic fad. The Victoria & Albert Museum suggests that …
“Chinoiserie is characterised by a number of frequently occurring motifs. In 18th-century Britain, China seemed a mysterious, faraway place. Although trade between the two countries had increased over the 17th and 18th centuries, access to China was still restricted and there were few first-hand experiences of the country. Chinoiserie drew on these exotic, mysterious preconceptions.”
The notoriety of items resembling Chinese artifacts became enormously popular with companies such as the Chelsea Porcelain Factory and others, manufacturing faux Chinese figurines, such as ‘Chinese Musicians‘ by Joseph Willems (1755) and ‘Five Senses’ by Agostino Carlini made by the Derby Porcelain Factory (1752 – 55). The stage, it seems, had been set for the acceptance of this Chinese maker of small clay portraits.
Back in Canton, China, ‘Chitqua’ had had a store in one of the Chinese areas of Canton which foreigners had been restricted to. Gough (again), had said this about Chitqua in a letter of 3 August 1770 (according to the Whitley Papers in the British Museum, Prints and Drawings Room),that Chitqua was
“...well known to our people who have been to Canton, where he keeps a shop for making figures”.
Chitqua had developed a unique business making portrait figurine ‘sculptures’ of and for foreign traders, merchants and ship’s officers. It was ultimately through these contacts that this Chinese artist was later able to find his way to London accompanied by a Mr John Walton, on the East Indiaman ship (the Horsendon) captained by one Captain Alexander Jameson, on 19th August 1769.
The 18th century (Manchu Qing dynasty) Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95) had restricted China’s interaction between foreigners and Chinese subjects, as well as restricting the travel of Chinese subjects. This was why, to reach the West, Chitqua obtained travel documents to what was then Batavia in the Dutch East Indies (Jakarta, Indonesia), which had a history of Chinese immigration, but travelled instead to England, taking with him a quantity of Chinese clay to continue his modelling there. Chitqua remained in England until 1772 with a hatter, one Mr Marr, who resided at the corner of Norfolk Street (which then ran from the Strand in the north to the River Thames), London.
Chitqua returned to China in 1772 and died in 1796.
This article will appear in The Blue Lotus magazine (issue 49) with s greater selection of images.
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