[Album of Chinese watercolors of Asian fruits]

Title Variants

Alternative: Asian fruits

Alternative: Chinese drawings, flowers

Alternative: Chinese watercolors of Asian fruits

Related Titles

Series: Dumbarton Oaks Digitization Project, Garden and Landscape Studies

By

Type

Book

Material

Archival material

Publication info

[between 1798 and 1810?]

Notes

Devised title.

Watercolor paintings of fruits of Asia. The first 12 watercolors depict elaborate arrangements of several fruits, some showing the fruit at various stages of its life cycle, and some fruits peeled, segmented, or cut to reveal their form, surrounded by flowers and foliage. The next 10 watercolors show just one fruit per painting, with its flower, foliage, and seed.

Twenty-two watercolor paintings are painted on sheets measuring 40 x 51 cm and are mounted onto the heavier stock paper of album pages.

Forty-eight hand-painted labels, each measuring approximately 8 x 16.5 cm, are mounted eight to a sheet on six sheets following the full-page watercolors. The labels identify the various fruits depicted in the preceding 22 watercolor paintings. Each label bears a small painting of a fruit or flower to the left with its name written in Arabic script (possibly Malay?) at right. Faintly visible above the Arabic script appears the name of the fruit in in Roman script, possibly some form of Dutch(?).

Leaf versos blank.

Bill Archer and his wife Mildred, an English art historian who specialized in 18th- and 19th-century art in British India, curator of Prints and Drawings at the India Office Library from 1954 to 1980, viewed this album of watercolors at Dumbarton Oaks around 1958 and determined from their style and coloring that the album was most likely painted by a Chinese artist, probably in Malaysia or Sumatra. Archer dated the manuscript to between 1798 and 1810.

Catalog by Mildred Archer (Natural history drawings in the India Office Library. London : Published for the Commonwealth Relations Office by H.M. Stationery Off., 1962) includes a “Chinese drawing” of a watermelon that is nearly identical to plate 15 in the Dumbarton Oaks album of 22 watercolor plates. The paintings in the Dumbarton Oaks album appear to be in two styles. Twelve plates include elaborate arrangements of multiple fruits, such as cacao, breadfruit, and pineapple, entwined by foliage and flowers. Another 10 plates are in a simpler style, showing just one fruit accompanied by its own cross section, foliage, flowers, and one of its seeds. (The watermelon image is in this second style.).

On Mildred Barnes Bliss label: "Manuscript, 1790-1820. A manuscript painted by Indian artists under the British influence which contains twenty-two colored plates of exotic flowers and fruits, with an interesting index."

On Dumbarton Oaks Research Libray shelflist card: "Drawn by Indian artists under English influence: probably done in India but has no relation to Chinese artists - check where Chinese were working at this time in India or possibly in Indo-China. Indian artists started this vogue of drawing. Writing is perhaps Malaysian."

Subjects

Asia , Botanical illustration , Flowers , Fruit , Identification , Pictorial works , Watercolor painting , Watercolor painting, Chinese

Language

Undetermined

Identifiers

OCLC: 1158416001