Wallis Simpson by Cecil Beaton for Vogue – Chinese style came to define her “look” – note her chignon hairstyle with twist and Chinoiserie collar adornment…
Interestingly Beaton must have had that wire, string or whatever it is hanging around in his studio as it seems to feature in his portrait of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas…
Visited the Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines exhibition at the gallery at Charleston at Firle in East Sussex (the old home of Vanessa and Julian Bell). It’s on till February 25 2025. The two artists founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in 1937, first in Dedham and then at Benton End, Suffolk. Morris (1889-1982) was also a keen portrait painter (as well as his better known flower paintings) and the exhibition features a range of his portrait work. Lett-Haines was more of a surrealist.
Among the various Morris painted portraits is one dated as 1922 (which may or may not be correct) and said to be of “Ivy Ichaloy”. It is a portrait of a Chinese woman in a cheongsam-style dress from the upper body up. It is noted that the portrait is on loan to Charleston fromGainsborough’sHouse, the birthplace of the English painter Thomas Gainsborough and now a museum and gallery in Sudbury, Suffolk.
However, the name “Ichaloy” is misleading and this appears to be a woman actually called Ivy Achoy. Wherw “Ichaloy” comes from I do not know.
Which leads us to who was Ivy Achoy? Well, she was a Trinidadian Chinese, born and raised in Port of Spain before coming to London. Her full name was Ivy Achlan Achoy. In Trinidad she was an artist and art critic involved (and perhaps an original founder) of the influential Port of Spain-based “Society of Trinidad Independents”. The group also included Amy Leong Pang (like Ivy a Trinidadian-Chinese, who had studied painting in China), Hugh Stollmeyer (an Englishman from a colonial family who studied art in New York), Alice Pashley (an Englishwoman who painted batiks), and Alfred Menzies (an artist I believe).
The Society was a modernist grouping, looking to “shock the bourgeoise”, discussing racism, sexism, capitalism and homophobia. In 1931 one member, Albert Gomes, founded their journal The Beacon which also involved the (now very well known) writer and historian CLR James. The group disbanded in 1938 after being accused by the colonial government of being “Bohemian” for trying to exhibit a series of Russian-painted nudes. Now scholars generally see the Society as intellectually important in Trinidad and Tobago.
I’m afraid I don’t know any more about Ivy – why she was in London, or how the portrait came to painted by Morris? So any additional information most welcome?
A brief “interest piece” that ran in US newspapers in December 1924 – “Flappers in China”. Right around the time Wallis was in town and wearing her rather conservative version of flapper-inspired 1920s styles. Here she is at the White Dagoba (Pagoda) in Peking’s Beihai Park in December 1924. By the spring of 1925 she was wearing less conventional clothing and embracing Chinese-inspired dresses, silk kinonos etc in what would become her lifelong signature style.
Though long a fan of his previous books I was distinctly unimpressed with his latest novel Shanghai– and quite where he got some of his notions of the place from? Ha! what can you do, the old town will always be a City of Devils. See my review, and thoughts on writing about Old Shanghai in fiction and creative/literary non-fiction in the China Books Reviewhere…
Every couple of months I write a column for Macau Closer magazine on representations of Macao in popular culture. This time the story of a man stuck forever sailing between Hong Kong and Macao.
Published in 1957 Simon Kent’s Ferry to Hong Kong is a novel almost unique in its simplicity, though it could perhaps be better named Ferry to Macau. Let me explain…. Clarry Mercer is a troubled and washed up American in Hong Kong who, after a bar fight, is expelled from the British colony. The cops escort aboard the Fa Tsan, better known as the “Fat Annie”, a Victorian-era paddle steamer that provides a cheap, but slow, ferry between Kowloon and Macau. Arriving at the ‘drugged, stucco sprawl of Macau’, the Portuguese authorities deem his papers invalid and refuse him permission to enter. He then becomes a virtual captive aboard the Fat Annie, seemingly doomed to repeatedly make the crossing between Macau and Kowloon forever.
The book was a bestseller – did everyone feel somewhat adrift, unable to settle in the post-war 1950s? Britain’s Rank film studios made a movie version in 1959. Mercer became an Austrian called Hart (played by Curt Jürgens), Herzl was played by a suitably corpulent Orson Welles, and the dark Latin beauty Anna became a prim, blonde English governess played by Sylvia Syms.
Wellington Street, Hong Kong, c.1850 by Count Manó Andrássy (1821-1891) & featured in Reise des Graf en Emanuel Andrasy in Ostindien Ceylon, Java, China und Bengalen (Budapest, 1859) which includes a depiction of Hong Kong.
This book provides a comprehensive overview of the dispersal of Chinese cultural relics from the late 19th to the early 20th century. Following the Opium Wars, there was a surge of Western interest in uncovering treasures in China, leading to the removal of countless artifacts by foreign explorers and antique dealers. These national treasures were lost overseas, making their return to China nearly impossible. Beginning with the exploits of China’s Western explorers, such as Sven Hedin, the book unfolds in eleven chapters, detailing the adventures of figures like Stein, von Le Coq, Otani Kozui, and others in locations such as Lop Nur, Dunhuang, and the Blackwater City. It chronicles their plundering of precious cultural relics, including the Berzic Caves wall paintings, Han Dynasty documents, Dunhuang documents, and numerous other valuable artifacts. Filled with meticulously researched historical details, this book serves as both a lament and a commemoration of a century of Chinese cultural relics dispersed worldwide.
