The Scottish artist Anna Mary Hotchkis was from Kirkudbright lived and work in China for most of the years between 1922 and 1937 when she left due to the Japanese invasion. She had studied at Glasgow School of Art and in Munich. She was a long time member of of the Dumfries and Galloway Fine Art Society. She spent much of her time in Peking and painted many of the temples of the Western Hills. Here is her (undated) picture of the Tan Che Ssu (temple). It was exhibitied in Scotland by the Scotish Societyof Women Artists…
1947, and the final bloody chapters of the Chinese Civil War unleash a tidal wave of Red across the nation. Qi Jing and his Communist 9th Brigade are given a near-impossible mission: ford the mighty Yellow River and cut a swathe south through the Nationalist-held Dabie mountains, regardless of cost.
As the disciplinarian Qi leads his soldiers through wretched conditions, he comes to rely on the enigmatic Wang Keyu to shore up flagging morale through education and propaganda. Amid desolate bluffs and ridges, she proves to be a beacon to the peasant warriors, especially Cao Shui’er, the commander’s bodyguard.As the campaign splinters and the fighting devolves into a hand-to-hand struggle against reluctant countrymen. Cao and an injured Wang find themselves stranded at the entrance to an ethereal network of caves. Can they find their way back through this labyrinth? Or will the walls close in on them?
Attributing works to George Chinnery and not his ‘school’ – Lamqua etc – is a minefield. Interestingly this painting of a Sampan Girl, c.1850, came up for auction recently in London. At first glance it appeared to be the same as the one that is in the collection at HKMOA, the Hong Kong Museum of Art (thanks to Peter Gordon in HK for spotting that).
I queried it with the auction house who noted that ‘Chinnery did a number of versions and this one (with fire ll) is also by Chinnery.’ And, yes on closer inspection you can see that in this pictture there is a fire of some sort in the background making it subtly different. So too the montains behind (Lapa/Wanzai?). and the scarf too – from yellow to red.
So, are either or both Chinnery? are either of both Lamqua or another member of the Chinnery Studio? Is the fire added to differentiate the painting for some reason? Is either one more desirable or valuable than the other? Are there any more?
And, of course, we should never forget that Chinnery was a lovable rogue and appreciated a bit of obfuscation…
Chinnery, Sampan Girl from the collection of HKMOA
The great publishing house of Kelly and Walsh had branches in Yokohama, Shanghai, Hong Kong & Singapore and published (and of course sold) books in all those locations. Here is a fairly rare crepe cloth book, A Short Account of The Forty-Seven Ronins, published c.1893 by their Yokohama branch (then a treaty port)…
The colledction of essays Chiang Yee and His Circle: Chinese Artistic and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1930–1950 was published by Hong Kong University Press a couple of years ago. I contributed an essay Chiang Yee and his wwartime work. There are other essays by Paul Bavan, Ke Ren, Frances Wood, Anne Witchard, Sarah Chang, Tessa Thorniley, Diana Yeh, Craig Clunas and Da Zhang. And now a Chinese translation is out this month.
Kassia St Clair’s The Race to the Future about the 1907 Peking to Paris car race is a terrific read…
10 June 1907, Peking. Five cars set off in a desperate race across two continents on the verge of revolution.
An Italian prince and his chauffeur, a French racing driver, a conman and various journalists battle over steep mountain ranges and across the arid vastness of the Gobi Desert. The contestants need teams of helpers to drag their primitive cars up narrow gorges, lift them over rough terrain and float them across rivers. Petrol is almost impossible to find, there are barely any roads, armed bandits and wolves lurk in the forests. Updates on their progress, sent by telegram, are eagerly devoured by millions in one of the first ever global news stories. Their destination: Paris.
More than its many adventures, the Peking-to-Paris provided the impetus for profound change. The world of 1907 is poised between the old and the new: communist regimes will replace imperial ones in China and Russia; the telegraph is transforming modern communication and the car will soon displace the horse. In this book bestselling author Kassia St Clair traces the fascinating stories of two interlocking races – setting the derring-do (and sometimes cheating) of one of the world’s first car races against the backdrop of a larger geopolitical and technological rush to the future, as the rivalry grows between countries and empires, building up to the cataclysmic event that changed everything – the First World War.
The Race to the Future is the incredible true story of the quest against the odds that shaped the world we live in today.
An oil on unstretched canvas ‘Shanghai, St Nicholas Church’, indistinctly signed and dated 1940. St Nicholas Church was a Russian Orthodox Church (and still stands though is no longer used as a church) in the former French Concession of Shanghai at 16 rue Corneille, now known as Gaolan Lu.
My thanks to Katya Knyazeva, a great historian of old Shanghai, who reminded me that of course this picture shows St Nicholas with its original blue domes – something you don’t always think about when you see the black and white photos of the church and have been reapinted now for many years in nouveau riche gold a la 1990s Shanghai style. It went through a period as the Ashanti Dome restaurant (famously with the nipples on the angels in the ceiling frescoes paintined over) and then a cafe for retired cadres. Not sure what it is now.
In Rickshaw Boy, Lao She offers vivid descriptions of Republican-Era Beijing while crafting a timeless story about the vicissitudes of a worker’s life. In this weeks The China Project Ultimate China Bookshelf entry we revisit this proletarian classic: click here
Illustration for The China Project by Alex Santafé
It also became a movie in 1982 when adapted by director Ling Zifeng…
