John Reeves by ACC Art Books

JOHN REEVES

For three years Kate stalked Reeves in libraries, museums and auction houses while at the same time drawing on her own childhood memories of Singapore and Hong Kong in the early 1950s. A post-doctoral year at the V&A followed, working on a collaborative project into the pigments found on Chinese export paintings using the Reeves pictures for comparison. Then came a request for a book to bring the work of a modest, dedicated East India Company tea inspector and his band of skilful Chinese painters to a wider audience. Kate continues to research, write and lecture on Reeves and related artbotanical subjects.

Kate Bailey

The Royal Horticultural Society is the UK’s leading gardening charity dedicated to advancing horticulture and promoting good gardening. Its charitable work includes providing expert advice and information, training the next generation of gardeners, creating handson opportunities for children to grow plants and conducting research into plants, pests and environmental issues affecting gardeners.

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The resulting Reeves Collection of botanical art is held at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley Library in Vincent Square, London. It is a magnificent achievement, gathering together 877 paintings. Not only are the pictures accurate and richly coloured portraits of plants then unknown in the West, but they stand as a record of plants being cultivated in nineteenth-century Canton and Macau. A significant project to conserve, document and digitise the RHS Reeves Collection is underway. To date, the Lindley Library has been able to treat three-quarters of the works. The Library is seeking funding to conserve the final two albums and complete the digitisation of the associated images. The Library plans to share the collections online for researchers worldwide.

JOHN REEVES

In John Reeves: Pioneering Collector of Chinese Plants and Botanical Art, Kate Bailey reveals Reeves’ life as an East India Company tea inspector in nineteenth-century China, telling the story of one man’s singleminded dedication to commissioning pictures and gathering plants for the Horticultural Society of London.

Pioneering Collector of Chinese Plants and Botanical Art

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John Reeves went to China as an East India Company tea inspector in 1812 and immediately on arrival started sending back snippets of information about manufactures, plants and poetry, goods, gods and tea to Sir Joseph Banks. Slightly later, he also started collecting for the Horticultural Society of London. He dedicated himself to years of work collecting, labelling and packing plants and organising a team of Chinese artists to paint botanical illustrations.

Pioneering Collector of Chinese Plants and Botanical Art

Kate Bailey started working life as a reluctant solicitor. At the age of fiftyfour, on the strength of nothing more than a magazine article about a paper conservator, she abandoned the law and enrolled at Camberwell College of Arts for a degree in paper conservation.

ISBN: 978-1-78884-031-6

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www.rhs.org.uk Royalties from the sale of this book are paid to RHS Enterprises which covenants all of its profits to support the work of the RHS, promoting horticulture and helping gardeners.

Kate Bailey

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Contents

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Letter to the Reader

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1. Mr Reevesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Drawings

CHAPTER 2. Mr Reeves Sails to China

CHAPTER 3. Mr Reeves Arrives in Canton

CHAPTER 4. Mr Reeves Writes to Sir Joseph Banks

CHAPTER 5. Mr Reeves Goes Plant Hunting in Macao

CHAPTER 6. Mr Reeves Commissions Drawings

107

CHAPTER 7. Mr Reeves Collects Plants

121

CHAPTER 8. Mr Reeves Creates a Collection

133

Endnotes

145

Index of Plants

152

General Index

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Letter to the Reader

hen I saw some of the Reeves pictures at the Royal Horticultural Societyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Lindley Library for the first time in 2007, I was amazed that so little was known about such a hauntingly beautiful collection of Chinese botanical artwork. As a conservation researcher, I started to investigate the physical properties of the pictures, the papers and media, but rapidly became interested in John Reeves, their original collector. I wanted to discover what his life must have been like as an East India Company tea inspector in early nineteenth-century China and to understand how he managed to collect and document thousands of Chinese natural history drawings, far more than anyone else at the time. I have now read so many accounts of Canton and Macao that it sometimes feels as though in a previous life I might have sauntered down China Street,

bartering with the shopkeepers for jades, silks and ricepaper pictures. I, too, may have been welcomed into Thomas Bealeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s famous garden at Macao to admire his collection of plants, discuss chrysanthemumgrowing with his gardener and peer into his aviary at the trilling, chattering occupants. What good fortune to be invited to a hong merchantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mansion for a jolly chop-stick dinner, to eat and drink from his delicately painted china, watch a Chinese opera and wander through his fantastical garden; a confection of artificial lakes spanned by graceful bridges, jade-green and vermilion pavilions, outcrops of rock, sweeping willows and stately magnolias, sweet orange trees, azaleas, chrysanthemums, wisterias and much, much more to please the eye and the nose. No such luck, but John Reeves certainly enjoyed these pleasures.

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Chapter 1

Mr Reeves’ Drawings

ohn Reeves’ story is also the story of a collection, the Reeves Collection, which came about as a result of one man’s single-minded dedication to gathering pictures, procuring plants and collecting diverse snippets of information to send back to his fortunate correspondents in England. The first of these was Sir Joseph Banks, who commissioned Reeves to glean whatever information he could from his Chinese contacts about manufactures and medicines, plants and poetry, gods, goods and tea. He was not disappointed. John Reeves sent him all these things including natural history specimens, live and preserved plants, drawings and diagrams, letters and notes. Another happy recipient was the Horticultural Society of London. Founded in 1804, the Society received its first Royal Charter in 1809, shortly before John Reeves went to China for the first time in 1812. From 1818 Reeves sent botanical illustrations and live and preserved plants to the Society up to and including his last voyage home early in 1831. Thereafter he continued to work voluntarily for the Society until the week before his death, almost twenty-five years later, in March 1856. The results of his endeavours are to be found in our gardens today, although for some inexplicable reason he has not enjoyed the same degree of recognition as other collectors in China, Robert Fortune or Clarke Abel, for example. This may be because both Abel and Fortune published fascinating and often amusing accounts of their travels whereas Reeves left no such written record of his life in China. By Abel and Fortune’s

standards, Reeves was restricted both geographically and in the time he could devote to his natural history work. In part, this was because he was stationed in China prior to the First Opium War of 1839–42, after which foreigners were permitted to trade from more treaty ports and a few found their way into the Chinese heartlands. He was also holding down a demanding job upon which the success of the East India Company’s tea trade largely depended. Miraculously, given their later peregrinations, Reeves’ botanical drawings remain in the care of the Royal Horticultural Society at its Lindley Library in Vincent Square, London. The Reeves Collection is a magnificent achievement. The pictures are wonderful portraits of richly coloured plants that were largely unknown in the West at the time. They also stand as a record of the plants being cultivated and introduced into the city known to Westerners as Canton (now Guangzhou), which lies on the south-east coast of China about seventy-four miles from Hong Kong as the Chinese crow flies. Almost as a by-product, the Collection represents a fine example of British and Chinese collaboration conducted at a time when political and economic relations between the two countries were often difficult, as a few of Reeves’ letters home made clear. The pictures were painted in Canton and Macao by Chinese artists under Reeves’ supervision. Some of the plants were taken from the wild; others were brought down from the hills above Canton by Chinese plant collectors, or given as gifts by Chinese merchants. Many were purchased from Chinese markets and nurseries or started life as cuttings from private

Figure 1. Paeonia moutan var. papaveraceae ‘Pak Mou Tan’ (current botanical name Paeonia suffruticosa). RHS Lindley Collections/A/REE/ LgV3/16 11

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of plants listed above, the Small Volumes contain pictures of a huge variety of flowers and fruits, and interspersed throughout are exquisite little pictures of plants delicately painted on fine, crystal-white Chinese papers. These are understood to depict wild flowers. Although distinction has been made between the two types of volumes, an on-going conservation project has meant that many of the pictures have been carefully removed from their bindings, mounted individually on board and placed within purpose-made boxes. This will afford better protection for the pictures and will permit them to be individually framed and exhibited without further unnecessary handling. These disbound pictures are now referenced by plate numbers rather than page numbers but they are stored in their original page order, volume by volume. In accordance with good conservation practice the leather bookboards are being retained since, although they are not Chinese, the pictures having been originally sent back as individual sheets, they are nevertheless part of the Collection’s history.

gardens. Chinese gardeners propagated and nurtured them, Chinese carpenters built cases for them and flower pots were purchased from Chinese sources. East India Company personnel were also vital to the endeavour. The Company’s doctor, John Livingstone, who, like Reeves, was a Corresponding Member of the Society, was the first to take John Reeves plant hunting in the hills near Macao. The Company’s rented residence in Macao (called Casa Garden) was a source of new plants and the Company’s ships’ captains delivered plants, specimens and pictures to the docks in Blackwall, from where Reeves’ trusted friend and colleague Henry Goodhall ensured that they reached their intended destinations. Non-company men also gave valuable assistance. The private trader Thomas Beale made his Macao garden and gardener available and the first Protestant missionary in China, Robert Morrison, author of the first comprehensive Chinese–English dictionary, helped with translation and either lent or gave Reeves wooden printing blocks of Chinese characters which he used in the notes he sent back to Banks. Until very recently all the pictures were bound into eight leather-backed volumes. The pages within the three larger volumes, half-bound in brown leather and bearing the title ‘Chinese Drawings’, measure approximately 38 × 48 cm (15 × 18⅞ in). For clarity, these will be referred to as the ‘Large Volumes’ and together they contain approximately 136 drawings on thick, cream, wove English art papers. Each page portrays a single Chinese plant, a chrysanthemum, peony or camellia, but a few pages contain more than one flower. The image of two varieties of Chrysanthemum indicum (Figure 2), a purple double and a lilac double, is a good example of the pictures from these albums. The five smaller albums are half-bound in green morocco leather with the words ‘Chinese Drawings of Plants’ in gold lettering impressed on the leather. For ease of distinguishing this set from the Large Volumes, they will be referred to as the ‘Small Volumes’, although this description is not altogether accurate; they are still substantial albums with similar-sized pages measuring approximately 36 × 48 cm (14¼ × 18⅞ in). These volumes contain approximately 630 drawings on the same kind of English papers as the Large Volumes. However, whereas the Large Volumes concentrate almost exclusively on the three types

The English Papers Looking at the Collection as a whole, most of the pictures were painted on sheets of English art paper, predominantly from the Whatman paper mills, with watermarks dating the papers to 1794, 1804, 1805, 1817 and 1826. It is hardly surprising to find them. At different times, the East India Company was criticised for its nepotism, outsiders perceiving that sons frequently followed in their fathers’ footsteps to gain lucrative positions. The Reeves family itself was no exception, John Russell Reeves similarly following his father to China as a tea inspector in 1824. The use of Whatman papers may have been due to their superior quality but it is perhaps not insignificant that for a number of years there was a family connection between the Company and the Whatman family. The Turkey Mill at Boxley near Maidstone (possibly so called on account of the Turkey red dye used at the mill when it was employed for fulling cloth) came into the hands of James Whatman the elder in 1740 and passed to his son, James Whatman the younger, when he attained the age of majority in 1762. It is thought that the younger Whatman started to produce highquality drawing paper in about 1770. In 1775 his first

Figure 2. Chrysanthemum indicum, purple double and lilac double. RHS Lindley Collections/A/REE/LgV2/30

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unusual for a Chinese painter to include them. The drawing of Eleocharis dulcis (Figure 5) exceptionally shows details of stems, corms and a root system. For the Chinese, the plum represents perseverance and reliability because it is one of the first plants to flower after winter and is brought into Chinese homes at New Year. It has been said by the Chinese that they have been cultivating the tree for at least 3,000 years. Prunus blossom was, and still is, one of the favourite plant subjects for Chinese artists and images of it appear on ceramics, postage stamps, coins and screens as well as fans, paper-cuts, pictures and scrolls. The Collection includes several pictures of the genus including one called ‘Jiangnan hong mei’ which has been translated as ‘red Japanese apricot from the Jiangnan area’ (see Figure 6). This has been painted in the traditional Chinese manner which emphasises the strength and wayward angularity of its branches in contrast with the orderly arrangement of the delicate pink blossom along the stems. The purpose of the Reeves drawing, however, appears to be to demonstrate grafting or training methods, since it incorporates a band tied around the main branch placed centrally in the picture with graphite ruled lines across the image which may indicate where cuts were to be made. The drawing is unusual in this respect although we know from diaries kept by two of the Society’s gardeners, John Potts and John Damper Parks who visited China in the 1820s, that there was great interest in Chinese propagation and grafting methods. Similarly, there was a great deal of curiosity about bonsai topiary and this may account for an unusual picture of a topiary deer, on which brushed brown paint lines have been superimposed to indicate the points of attachment of strings to achieve the desired shape (Figure 7). In the same volume, a plant which has not been securely identified but which may be the tassel fern, Huperzia, is shown growing in a portable wooden container (Figure 8). It is the box, rather than the plant, which is of interest here, partly because this is the only drawing of a Chinese wooden plant container in the Collection, but primarily because it reveals the Chinese artist’s struggle to adapt to Western techniques for demonstrating a

The only good evidence of the existence of …varieties [of Moutans or Tree peonies], must be derived from original Chinese drawings; but these are usually so inaccurately executed, and the artists who prepare them are so little to be trusted, that much caution must be used…In most instances, and especially in the collections of drawings sold to traders and other visitors at Canton, the plants are imaginary.3 To enhance their visual appeal, export flower painters sometimes embellished their pictures with insects, real and imaginary. It need hardly be said that there are no instances of imaginary plants in the Reeves Collection, nor indeed are there any fanciful butterflies flitting about Reeves’ flowers. A fairly typical example of a Reeves drawing is the painting of Syzygium aqueum (Figure 4). Apart from demonstrating the stages in the plant’s life, the plant parts and fruit have been dissected and shown separately to provide information about the plant’s morphology. This is very much in the Western scientific tradition. The Chinese contribution to this arrangement is the inclusion of a yellowing leaf, which is partly missing, and the views of the undersides of leaves. These two details consistently feature throughout the Collection and are a hallmark of Chinese flower painting. Root systems are rarely shown, probably because they were of little interest to the Society and it would have been

Figure 7. Platycladus orientalis and Cryptomeria japonica, penjing or tray topiary scene. RHS Lindley Collections/A/REE/SmV4/137 Figure 8. Huperzia in a transportation box. RHS Lindley Collections/A/REE/SmV4/144

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form and shape was either by applying highlights to stem areas, as appears in the picture of the Prunus (Figure 6), or by the judicious application of varying shades of the same ground pigment. This is most frequently seen in the way green malachite has been applied to the leaf areas. This pigment, in common with blue azurite and other mineral colours used by Chinese artists, was ground down from the stone to varying degrees of coarseness. The larger the particles the darker the colour, so that it was possible to show the curl of a leaf, for example, by applying a series of ever darker greens to the upper surfaces and corresponding layers of lighter greens to indicate the backs of the leaves. The beauty of the method was that a huge variety of greens could be prepared from the same stone. Although it is unlikely that Reeves’ painters had even heard of The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, let alone read it, its recommended method for colouring leaves was well tried and tested by Chinese scholar painters and later adopted by export artists. The authors were unequivocal in their advice to novice painters,

stems. There are also instances of superfluous stems being removed. Exceptionally, on the drawing of a plant now identified as Ricinus communis, shadows have been portrayed on one side of the fruit (see Figure 11). Shadows were never painted by traditional Chinese artists; they considered them transitory and not real. Suggestions of light or darkness were introduced through the subject-matter of the picture, the moon or a lantern, for example. Export artists, on the other hand, did start to incorporate shadows into their pictures, particularly behind images of people and furniture legs. The results sometimes suggest a number of competing light sources, the overall effect appearing both charmingly naïve and distinctly odd at the same time. Reeves’ illustrations, on the other hand, display a pleasing harmony of Chinese and Western painting methods. Reeves commissioned these pictures between 1818 and 1831, nearly a hundred years after Linnaeus had published his new taxonomic system in Systema Naturae (1735), Species Plantarum (1753) and the fifth edition of Genera Plantarum (1754). Linnaeus divided plant genera into twenty-four classes, firstly according to the numbers of stamens followed by a tally of the female flower parts. Accurate classification depended upon the specimen or drawing clearly and accurately depicting the flowering parts. Botanical illustrators rose to the challenge by either turning the flower head towards the viewer where practicable, or drawing out the flower parts separately, usually along the bottom edge of the page. Both methods were adopted in the Reeves drawings. The page depicting Hemerocallis fulva (Figure 12) is unusual in that it comprises two pictures; the drawing of the whole plant is drawn on Western paper, taking up most of the page, and a separate drawing of the partially dissected flowerhead painted on a Chinese paper which has been adhered. Showing as it does all the sexual organs, while the flower heads portrayed in the main picture do not, this is confirmation, if any were needed, of the information the Society required for accurate identification.

Leaves should be dark and the flowers light; the dotting of the heart should be dark and the sheath of the stem light. This is a fixed rule. If colour is used, dark tones should be used on the face of the leaves and light on the back, dark tones for leaves in front and light for those in the back. This rule should be thoroughly absorbed.5 Western techniques in botanical illustration were incorporated as a result of John Reeves’ instructions. At least some of the drawings appear to have been sketched out with graphite pencil. Fine, grey shiny lines are visible to the naked eye around the edges of some of the leaves and on one sheet the outline of a parrot has been drawn in pencil on the verso (back), the paper evidently having been intended for use in a collection of bird and animal pictures which Reeves was supervising at the same time. Chinese painters traditionally used watered-down ink for the preliminary under-drawing of a picture, never lead pencils. Another feature of these pictures, which runs contrary to the Chinese principle of painting plants to appear as though they were alive, is the application of grey-white or brown-white highlights to ligneous

The Inscriptions Typically each drawing is inscribed with Chinese characters in black, slightly shiny, Chinese ink called mo. This was made by burning wood (often pine) and collecting the resulting soot from the chimney. Mixed with animal glue, this could be formed into hard sticks

Figure 10. Plumeria rubra f. acutifolia. RHS Lindley Collections/A/REE/SmV4/121

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Figure 11. Ricinus communis. RHS Lindley Collections/A/REE/SmV4/130

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Figure 12. Hemerocallis fulva. RHS Lindley Collections/A/REE/SmV5/8

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They do not appear to bear any relation to the number of the painted specimen; they might indicate where Reeves intended to add Chinese characters but in reality, their purpose remains a mystery. Finally, these are the only pages to have paper tabs, inscribed with Chinese characters, adhered to them.

A8- a small bulbous rooted plant with 2 or 3 round fleshy leaves…11 Some of the drawings referred to in that letter remain in the Collection. Their identity has not been confirmed but they were given provisional names when they were listed. Drawing A2 was listed as Cinnamomum parthenoxylon; A2 appears as Eriocaulon, which is not an orchid; A8 was listed as Vitex trifolia; and B9 was thought to be Caryopteris incana f. candida with the word ‘Barbula’ appearing alongside. A few pictures of fruits are included in this little collection. These are found in the wild and include Garcinia bancana whose fruits are edible, Castanopsis concinna, a native of Guangdong and Guanxi, and two pictures of Salacia sp., used for medicinal purposes in China, Korea and Japan. Along the top of a picture of a dissected Salacia fruit displaying its pulpy flesh and four seeds, there is a pencilled note, unlikely to be in Reeves’ handwriting, ‘Fruit at Casa Garden’ – a garden in Macao from which Reeves collected plants. The Society’s Minutes record that there were originally at least 280 of these smaller pictures, but there are now only about 150 in the Collection. The inscriptions on the remaining pictures indicate that Reeves adopted at least eight separate referencing systems for these drawings, as follows: 1, 2, 3; aa, dd, gg; B2, C2, E2; 2a, 2c, 2e; a, b, c; C, E, F; A2, A4, A7; and B2, B3, B5. There are numerous gaps in the sequences which, again, confirm that most of these pictures have been lost. There are indications in the Society’s Minutes that the ‘Miscellaneous Drawings’ were sent on approval which is probably why Reeves did not print the ‘HS’ mark on them. There is no indication that any were rejected (quite the contrary) so it would seem that at some point a large number of the pages of these drawings were removed from the Small Volumes. The delicately drawn picture of Salacia, ‘Fruit at Casa Garden’ (Figure 17), is a fine example of this type of drawing, showing the thin white paper and the translucent watercolour. The paper and painting method are appreciably different from that of the large pictures. The most commonly found papers measure 12.5 × 18.5 cm (4⅞ × 7¼ in), which may suggest that these were originally pages taken from an album. There are also some

The Drawings on the Chinese Papers From the outset, a distinction was made between the large commissioned pictures, almost always drawn on English papers, and a set of much smaller pictures painted on delicate Xuan papers. These form a collection within the Collection and are believed to portray wild flowers and fruits. These little pictures were almost certainly the ones referred to by Reeves in an undated letter, believed to have been written to John Lindley, Assistant Secretary to the Society, either in the autumn of 1842 or spring of the following year, when the Society was preparing to send Robert Fortune on his first trip to China: … look at the Drawings I sent home to the Society from China more particularly those upon the smaller sized papers - and see how many of the plants growing then near me at Macao & Canton are yet unknown at home - if theres [sic] many at hand almost all are still wanted … the factory returned to Macao for the summer months. However tho I saw the Flowers & had sketches made of several plants - I seldom or never could see the seeds: being then necessarily absent.10 It is not entirely clear, but he appeared to be suggesting that the pictures were of wild plants and that he had commissioned ‘sketches’ of them. These small pictures were being collected early on and were almost certainly the ones referred to in the Society’s Minutes as ‘Miscellaneous Drawings’. Reeves referred to them in a letter he wrote on 13 November 1820 to the botanist Robert Brown, who had been librarian to Sir Joseph Banks until Banks’ death in June of that year. Reeves wrote: Specimens of female plant of Drawing A2 also of A11 of Rhamnus A30 Barbula(Loureiro/B9). Some plants of two minute species of [orchids?] as A7. Cornutis Luinata / Lour / A29 Cornuta Pyramid

Figure 15. Lagerstroemia reginae ‘Lan ziwei’ (current botanical name Lagerstroemia speciosa). RHS Lindley Collections/A/REE/SmV3/26 (Following pages) Figure 16. Camellia japonica, four different cultivars. RHS Lindley Collections/A/REE/LgV2/5

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The Drawings as a Catalogue Why were these drawings commissioned by the Horticultural Society? One of the stated objectives of the Society was to introduce and distribute ornamental plants, and the Collection was made with this purpose in mind. The drawings were, in effect, a form of catalogue from which the Society could make requests for plants and seeds. This is supported by the fact that the pictures were put into guard books immediately on arrival, and that there is no record of them ever having been exhibited. Despite some unfortunate moisture damage to the Small Volumes when they were in private ownership, the colours are as bright in the twenty-first century as they were when they left China in the nineteenth.

There is no foreshortening, no painting of shadows or highlights, and rather fewer graduated tones than found on the larger pictures, which tends to give the images a somewhat ‘flat’ appearance. There are instances of lead-white base layers; all these pictures are in watercolour, with varying degrees of transparency, and none are in gouache. Surface glue, gum Arabic, or similar, has not been applied to leaf surfaces and with one or two exceptions the Chinese names for the plants are not given. In certain pictures, a grey wash has been added to the edges of white petals in the Chinese manner. This little collection of pictures is characterised by the fine detail and delicacy of the painting and the whiteness and transparency of the paper. 37

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‘If China may be considered as nearly a Terra Incognita to the European botanist, botany, as a science, is equally unknown to the Chinese.’ (LIVINGSTONE’S ‘OBSERVATIONS ON THE DIFFICULTIES WHICH HAVE EXISTED IN THE TRANSPORTATION OF PLANTS FROM CHINA TO ENGLAND, AND SUGGESTIONS FOR OBVIATING THEM’, TRANSACTIONS OF THE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY, VOL.III, 1820, P.421 ET SEQ.)

118

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JOHN REEVES

Kate Bailey

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JOHN REEVES

Pioneering Collector of Chinese Plants and Botanical Art

ACC ART BOOKS

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Pioneering Collector of Chinese Plants and Botanical Art

ISBN: 978-1-78884-031-6

ËxHSLHSIy840316zv;:;:!:!:! £35.00/$50.00

www.accartbooks.com

www.rhs.org.uk Royalties from the sale of this book are paid to RHS Enterprises which covenants all of its profits to support the work of the RHS, promoting horticulture and helping gardeners.

Kate Bailey

16/05/2019 10:24