A Court Painter’s View Through Western Eyes
Jiao Bingzhen (焦秉贞; born in Jining (济宁), Shandong (山东); 1689-1726) was a noted painter and astronomer.
He is regarded as one of the first Qing dynasty painters to be influenced by the Jesuits at the Directorate of Astronomy. Later he became a Roman Catholic. His favourite subjects were portraits, whole figures, landscapes and buildings.
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The Imperial Board of Astronomy
Jiao Bingzhen served at the Imperial Board of Astronomy, where he studied Western perspective under the European missionary artists who also worked there. He became one of the first Chinese court painters to apply this technique to his own work, doing so even before the arrival in China of the better known missionary painter Giuseppe Castiglione, known by his Chinese name Lang Shining (郎世寧), in 1715.
The Gengzhi Tu
Jiao Bingzhen’s best known work is the Gengzhi Tu (耕織圖), “Pictures of Tilling and Weaving,” commissioned by the Kangxi Emperor in the thirty-fifth year of his reign, 1696. The album consists of 46 illustrations, 23 depicting rice cultivation and 23 depicting silk production, each accompanied by a short poem attributed to the Emperor himself, though later scholarship suggests the poems were likely composed by court scholars writing in imitation of his hand. Jiao based his compositions on an earlier version of the same subject painted in the Southern Song dynasty by the artist Lou Shu, adapting them with his own technique. The work was reproduced as woodblock prints, cut by the engraver Zhu Gui, and copies from this 1696 edition survive today in institutions including the British Museum and the Library of Congress.
Related articles: The Jesuits at the Chinese Imperial Court, The Amazing Art of Giuseppe Castiglione at the Chinese Imperial Court
Source: wikimedia , wellcomecollection
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