A Brief Introduction to the Historical Process of Western Painting Introduced into China

Western oil paintings in Ming and Qing Dynasties were introduced to China for study. 1768 After Wang Zhicheng's death, Emperor Qianlong recruited Italian painter Joseph Panzi to enter the palace. When Pan Shi entered the palace, he was just catching up with the victory of the battle of Ganlong Erjinchuan and commending the meritorious soldiers. The painter of Qianlong imperial edict painted portraits of these heroes and hung them in Ziguangge. The paintings of Yamanthal, A Zhongbao, Jia Mucan and Torteau, the protagonists of "Pacify Jinchuan", are now collected by the National Folk Museum in Berlin, Germany, all from Joseph Panzi. These works are similar to Wang Zhicheng's "Mongolian Elut Leaders' Map". Although the brushwork is rough and the technique is obviously immature, it is an oil painting of the emperor China "from portrait to shadow", which has the characteristics of the integration of Chinese and Western paintings and the mutual rubbing of Chinese and Western aesthetic interests. From the decoration of palace gardens to the achievements of emperor Wenwu, from Emperor Kangxi's "aversion to portrait" to Emperor Qianlong's love for western oil painting Portrait and Shadow, from the appearance of missionary oil painters to the appearance of China court oil painters, the spread of oil painting in northern towns of China is all due to the artistic sponsorship of Emperor China, and the most prominent thing is that the art of oil painting portrait has been greatly developed. Until the end of the Qing Dynasty, there were still famous works such as the old woman with banners, the man and the beauty. Third, the economic and cultural exchanges between China and the West, the spread and development of western immigrant painters and oil paintings in the southern trading port of Qing Dynasty "While missionary oil painters were busy painting glass oil paintings to decorate the palace in Beijing, the oil painters in Guangzhou, the southern trading port of China, were also tirelessly painting glass oil paintings. The difference is that they are made for the economic and cultural exchanges between China and the West. Margaret Jordan, a British scholar, pointed out in her book "China Export Art in the18th Century": "In the cultural exchange between Europe and the East, many China exports were influenced by the West, including Jesus porcelain and mirror paintings, both of which were painted for export, and to a great extent, their decoration was based on European copperplate prints. "Mirror painting is glass painting. As far as the cultural exchange between China and the West is concerned, the creative feeling from western copperplate prints and temporary paintings is the root of the rise of oil painting in southern trading ports in Qing Dynasty. The most convincing one is a watercolor painting of China in about 1790' s, which depicts a China oil painter sitting at a painting table and copying a European colored copperplate. From the spare pieces of paper on the table and the crepe paper ball used to wipe the pen, you can know that he is painting oil paintings. The glass oil painting "Normandy Seascape" collected by Swiss collector Reise and his wife is a colored glass oil painting with French black and white copper plate as the background. The Lady on the Spinning Wheel, Dress of Venus, Shepherdess, Jianghu Doctor and Country Barber collected by the Reiser couple are all oil painting reproductions of European copperplate prints. Therefore, British traveler Barlow described his experience in Guangzhou in Travel Notes of China published in 1804. He said, "The European color prints introduced into Guangzhou have been reproduced very realistically." Although pro-imitation was the early way of oil painting development in southern trading ports in Qing Dynasty, the oil painting created on this basis laid the foundation for the prosperity of oil painting in southern China. The portraits of China ladies collected by the Reiser couple show the world the ability of China oil painters to create portraits in the late18th century, and the oil painter who represents this achievement is Shi Beilin, who first made a name for himself by painting portraits on glass. The earliest existing portrait of his glass oil painting is inscribed in English: "Shi Beilin was painted in China in 1774 and 10. According to the research of western scholars, this painting depicts the British captain Thomas Frey. In other words, China oil painters began to sketch for foreign navigators in China, marking the establishment of the relationship between China oil painting art and art patrons. Since then, there have been more than a dozen oil painting portraits inscribed by him, and oil painting portraits paid by other painters have also emerged constantly, which just shows the close relationship between the rise of Guangzhou oil painting in Qing Dynasty and the economic and cultural exchanges between China and the West. The significance of sperling is not only reflected in the first appearance of glass oil painting, but also in many of his oil paintings on canvas. In other words, he was an important representative painter who changed from glass oil painting to canvas oil painting in the Qing Dynasty, which meant that southern oil painting entered the stage of easel oil painting in the Qing Dynasty, thus greatly accelerating the historical process of the development and prosperity of oil painting in Guangzhou in the Qing Dynasty and playing a pioneering role in the emergence of easel painting and its painters in Guangzhou in the19th century. Painting portraits on canvas marks the formation and maturity of Shi Beilin's oil painting portrait art style. His earliest canvas oil painting depicts an unidentified British soldier. The label on the back of the oval painting clearly reads: "Works by sperling in Guangzhou, 1 786 65438+February1. "This work is painted with more authentic western classical oil painting portraits and transparent painting methods. Without the painter's label, it is hard for people to imagine that this oil painting was made by China oil painter Shi Beilin. Similar works include Portrait of Captain John Wyatt and Portrait of Staff of the British East India Company. Judging from the age development characteristics of Shi Beilin's existing works, his oil paintings are generally divided into two stages with 1786 as the boundary. Early oil paintings were related to his paintings on glass. His pen is stiff, smooth and decorative. From about 1786, painting on cloth was changed, and the technology improved rapidly. At this time, the oil painting style presents the characteristics of neoclassicism, and the expression of facial expressions and temperament of characters is paid attention to. This style of expression continued into the later years, and the expression technique was very skillful. When he painted Haskan's portrait, he got rid of the traces of people who used to line drawing in the East and reached a position where he was indistinguishable from western painters' works. Generally speaking, Shi Beilin's later portraits have a weak contrast between light and shade, but he pays attention to the description of facial anatomical structure. The background is mostly brownish gray or blue gray, and the portrait has a faint halo after the background light, which constitutes the style characteristics of his later portraits. This style of painting continued until the1820s, such as the portrait of Bernardo Fitch painted by some of his followers, the portrait of an unknown American painted by Xiao Donggua, the portrait of a sailor painted by Xing Gua, and the portrait of an unknown foreign man painted by Lin Gua. The expression techniques are all around Shi Beilin. Therefore, "Shi Beilin's Painting Style" is the early development stage of shelf oil painting in southern trading ports in Qing Dynasty. Since George Chenery, an English painter, settled in Macau in 1825, the oil painting in the southern trading port of China has entered a new period of development, which is embodied in 1. The artistic activities of Chenery and his China disciples in Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao have promoted the vigorous development of oil painting in Guangdong, forming a three-legged oil painting art pattern in Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macao. 2. Great changes have taken place not only in the style of oil painting portraits in Guangdong, but also in the style of landscape painting and figure painting. 3. Under the direct and indirect influence of Chenery's painting style, a new generation of oil painters in China grew up rapidly. Their artistic creation activities in other trading ports in southern China promoted the spread and development of oil painting in the southern coastal areas of Qing Dynasty. China in Chenery is called Lingua (known as Guan Qiaochang). 1825 In September, when Chenery set foot in Macau, his friend Longfei built a studio for him in his own garden, and equipped an assistant to clean and clean his painting tools. This assistant is Lin Gua (Lam Qua), a famous oil painter in Guangdong. Lin Gua himself claims to be "a student of this British painter". The positive result of Chenery's view that "teaching is the highest art" is that Lingua has matured under his influence, and the sketch portrait that Lingua drew for Chenery in 1820s is the best proof. Although this portrait is more formal, but because Lin Gua grasped the relationship between the character structure and temperament, the contrast between light and shade, the work is solid and vivid, with the style of Chenery's portrait, so Lin Gua can still grind out shine on you after more than ten years. When Cheney died at 1852, someone wrote a memorial service in the English "Guangdong Post", saying, "Cheney is no less than a portrait painter of Sir Thomas Lawrence. Chenery founded a modern painting school in Guangzhou, and his students, including Lingua and other China painters, are good at painting. "Lin Gua is indeed an oil painter with extraordinary painting skills. He calls himself "Sir Thomas Lawrence of China". He once imitated his teacher Chenery and sent his oil paintings to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, new york Apollo Club and Boston Library for exhibition. Among them, the oil paintings exhibited in Boston include Lin Zexu and Senior Citizen, which won international reputation. 1850 A Frenchman who visited his studio published an article in the American Art Association: "This summer, we saw an exhibition in the Boston Library, and four or five portraits of China politicians were painted by this painter. I hope this will not make skilled European painters fall out of favor. " In fact, Lin Gua's increasingly mature art is really "a shame to skilled European painters", that is, he has skillful oil painting techniques. Many of his oil paintings, including his two self-portraits, are of high artistic quality and can be compared with western oil painters. No wonder when describing Lin Shu, a British traveler said, "He was a student of money. Living in Macao and learning from money were enough to make him paint in full accordance with European style. ..... Most foreigners can afford to ask Lingua to paint their portraits, because they think it will be of great value to ask China people to paint their portraits and bring them back to the motherland. "In addition, Lin Gua is also good at art management, as the Englishman Fanny wrote in Travel Notes between China and India in 1848:" Lin Gua, a famous painter in South China, ... has a keen business vision. ..... I know he is a pretty good painter. He has not only Portuguese and local customers, but also European customers in Guangzhou and Hong Kong. "Lingua not only opened a painting shop in Guangzhou, but also opened a painting shop in Hong Kong on 1840s, attracting domestic and foreign customers with the brands of" Lingua, a painter from Britain and China "and" a beautiful portrait painter ",and having strong competitive strength in the art market, so it has European and American art consumers coming to China from Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao. It can be seen that the economic and cultural exchanges between China and the West not only promoted the consumption of China oil paintings by European and American art patrons, but also deepened Chenery's influence on Guangdong oil paintings, forming a new wave of oil painting art dominated by Qian painting style, which led to the rise of "Chenery Painting School" in China in the19th century and the change of oil painting style. Other painters influenced by Chenery's painting style include Xin Gua and Yu Gua. Xingua is a landscape painter who was active in the middle and late19th century. He likes to express the bright and smooth texture of water through the contrast between the light and shade of the close shot and the middle shot in landscape painting, so as to achieve the purpose of depicting the scenery in the middle shot with concentrated light. His early oil paintings Cynthia Leaving Lingdingyang and his later ones, Guangzhou Commercial Pavilion and Seascape of Renai Road in Rio, all used this form to deal with the pictures, which is similar to the expression of the fishing song on the Haojiang River by Chenery, and the color language is also similar to that of a fishing boat and a fishing girl on the scenery of the Haojiang River and Macau in the Mid-Levels by Chenery, although there is no document that Guangxin and Chenery have teachers. The material selection of Yugua oil painting is similar to that of Xinguao, with the port scenery of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao as the description object. In color design, jade melon and new melon are different. He often dyes clouds with Rayna Sue or blue-purple glaze, emphasizing their color tendency in different environments. For example, in Huangpu Wharf, the clouds are blue and purple, while in Guangzhou Commercial Pavilion and the scenery overlooking Victoria City, the clouds are yellow and purple. Compared with the new hexagrams, Yu hexagrams pay more attention to the visual impact brought by brush strokes and color effects. The surging clouds and waves in the sea are vivid with his flexible brushwork. This expression technique of attaching importance to the color, texture and rhyme of landscape is the same as that of Chenery, but Yu Gua's brushwork is more delicate and vivid than that of Chenery, so that western scholars think that Yu Gua's works can be comparable to those of European and American landscape paintings. If Chenery had obvious influence on Lin Gua, Xin Gua and Yu Gua, which led to the prosperity of Guangdong oil painting and the change of painting style, the influence on Nanchang Gua and Zhou Gua had been greatly attenuated by the middle and late19th century. Although the composition of Nanchang's oil painting "Huangpu Sail Shadow" is very similar to Chenery's oil painting "Huangpu Sail" at first glance, Nanchang likes to paint with high-purity colors, which is different from Qian's style. /kloc-in the late 20th century, influenced by western photography, the artistic quality of oil painting in China's southern trading port went from bad to worse. Zhou Gua's oil painting landscape represents this new trend. After trading with five ports, he went to Shanghai to develop and was the pioneer and pioneer of Shanghai oil painting. He painted a series of Huangpu River scenery, his masterpiece "Huangpu River Bund Scenery", which is close to Yu Gua and Xin Gua in style, and is characterized by broad and meticulous depiction of ships on the river. However, Zhou Gua obviously lacks the intriguing and fascinating scenery plots that are common in landscape paintings of Qiannali, Xingua and Yugua. He is keen on describing the scenery naturally, but ignores the expression of the artistic conception of the scenery, just like drawing a photo. This habit is a common problem in China's oil paintings in the late Qing Dynasty, such as Scenery of American Residential Areas in Shanghai and Scenery of Huangpu River Bund. Therefore, when a large number of western oil painters poured into the southern trading port of China, it was difficult for oil painters in the southern trading port of Qing Dynasty to compete with them, so oil paintings in the late Qing Dynasty were dying out.