Face-making

Abstract

This article explores emotional and gendered meanings of a series of Chinese clay portrait figures produced in Guangzhou during the 18th century for men associated with the Danish Asiatic Company. It investigates the presentation of emotions and corporate masculine hierarchies in these individual full-length and bust portraits, which combined emotional ideas and repertoires of performance of both Chinese craftsmen and the Company men who commissioned them. These portraits are contextualized with a range of examples made for the English and Dutch East India Company to understand performances of European emotions and masculinities surrounding consumption and display, and to assess them in relation to contemporary Chinese examples to distinguish specifically European sensibilities and cultural codes. It then explores how, on their return to Europe, these portraits enacted emotional and gendered meanings as objects of personal, familial and corporate value that were differently distributed and gifted. The essay concludes that these portraits were calculated investments that employed ‘face-making’; that is, a range of different tropes and traditions of emotional display both within and through these material objects, to differentiate hierarchies of power and modes of strategic action for Company men both individually and corporately.

Keywords:

• emotions
• gender
• masculinity
• material culture
• portraiture
• Danish Asiatic Company
• overseas trade
• China

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (project number CE110001011).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Kirksbæk, ‘When Denmark Discovered China’; Clemmensen and Mackeprang, Kina og Danmark, 23–34, 35–70; Willerslev, ‘Danmarks første Akteiselskab’; Olsen, ‘Dansk Ostindien 1616–1732’, 33–169; Feldbæk, ‘The Organization and Structure’.

2 Bramsen, Peace and Friendship, 10.

3 The specific charters and conventions associated with these Companies are reproduced by Feldbæk in Danske Handelskompagnier 1616–1843, 59–132.

4 Clemmensen and Mackeprang, Kina og Danmark, 106.

5 Ibid., 105–16; Huusman, a priest on board the Cron prins Christian, En kort Beskrivelse over Skibets Cron-Printz Christians; Zimmer, Av Viceadmiral Frederik Zimmers Optegnelser; that of cadet and fourth mate Tobias Wigandt, see Grove, ‘En dagbog ført paa en Kinafarer, 1730–32’.

6 Lauring, ‘The Danish Asiatisk Kompagni’, 90.

7 Lee, ‘China Trade Painting: 1750s to 1880s’, 41, fn. 18.

8 Osbeck, A Voyage to China, 220–1 (italics in the original).

9 See Butler, Gender Trouble; Barad, ‘Posthuman Performativity’; Frost, ‘The Implications of the New Materialisms for Feminist Epistemology’.

10 Reddy, ‘Against Constructionism’; Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice’.

11 Clemmensen and Mackeprang, Kina og Danmark, 110.

12 Kamma Struwe, ‘Dansk Ostindien, 1732–1776’, 21.

13 Lauring, ‘The Danish Asiatisk Kompagni’, 80, citing Giessing, Nye Sammling, 142.

14 Clemmensen and Mackeprang, Kina og Danmark, 113.

15 Ibid., 120.

16 The clay figure depicting Guillaume de Brouwer is now held in a private collection in Belgium. The figure is shown in Clemmensen and Mackeprang, Kina og Danmark, 120, figure 69.

17 Clemmensen and Mackeprang, Kina og Danmark, 134; see also Kirksbæk, ‘The Voyage of the Dronningen af Danmark to China in 1742’, 21–47.

18 Clemmensen and Mackeprang, Kina og Danmark, 186.

19 Stevens, ‘Portrait and Ancestral Images’, 136.

20 On Chitqua, see Toppin, ‘Chitqua, The Chinese Modeller’, 148–52; Clarke, ‘Chitqua: A Chinese Artist in Eighteenth-Century London’, Chinese Art, 15–84.

21 See Clarke, Chinese Art, 69–71.

22 Gøbel, ‘Asiatisk Kompagnis Kinafarter 1732–1772’, 7–46.

23 See grouped images and analysis of them by Lubberhuizen-Van Gelder, ‘De Factorijen te Canton’, 162–71; Schokkenbroek, ‘Versteend verleden’, 2–13; Clarke, Chinese Art.

24 ‘Forferdiget udi Canton in China Ao 1731’, cited in Clemmensen and Mackeprang, Kina og Danmark, 111.

25 ‘Commandeur Capitain Tønders Portrait, hvilken som commanderende Chef haver ført des første kongelige danske Skip til China, samme er en liden Figur, siddende paa en Stoel i en rød Klaedning, meget proper og med saerdeles Fliid af fiin Indiansk Jord eller Ler Posseret af en Chinesisk Kunstner i Canton.’ Cited in Wirgin, Från Kina till Europa, 208.

26 ‘en Cassa med Portrait’ in Zimmer, Av Viceadmiral, 57.

27 Léon Douxchamps and Yves de Brouwer, De Familia de Brouwer, 19. Schokkenbroek instead suggests 1731.

28 Clemmensen and Mackeprang, Kina og Danmark, 186.

29 Indeed, Clemmensen and Mackeprang place its manufacture between 1731 and 1737 but Schokkenbroek lists it as 1731.

30 Kirksbæk, ‘The Voyage of the Dronningen af Danmark’, 26.

31 Ibid., 25.

32 Ibid., 40–1.

33 Clemmensen and Mackeprang, Kina og Danmark, 110.

34 Ibid., 159.

35 Henningsen for example attributes this figure to 1731. See Henningsen, ‘Kineske “ansigtsmagere” og deres figurer’, 131–45.

36 Clemmensen and Mackeprang, Kina og Danmark, 318, fn. 466.

37 ‘kom dend øverste Mandarin fra Canton her omborde, hafvde med sig 6 andre Mandariner fra andre stæder for at besee Flooden hwi hafvde beklæd Skiibet med Flager og Skantze Klæde, da hand kom og ligeledes da hand bort foer blew hwer gang skudt 15 Canonskud, bemeldte Mandarin sendte omborde førend hand kom, en present ag nogle Silche Stoffer, hwilket blev lagt paa et bord som de selv hafvde med sig’, Zimmer, Av Viceadmiral, 56. See, similarly, the journal entry of Wigandt about the onboard visits of ‘Mandarins’ in Grove, ‘En dagbog ført paa en Kinafarer, 1730–32’, 200.

38 For other examples of sites in which elite male status could be visualized, see Sherlock, ‘Militant Masculinity’, 131–52 and Protschky, ‘Between Corporate and Familial Responsibility’, 153–72.

39 Lee, ‘China Trade Painting’, 45.

40 On quanyi, see Shixiang and Evarts, Masterpieces from the Museum of Classical Chinese Furniture, 56; Shixiang, Connoisseurship of Chinese Furniture, 43–4. For examples, see Stevens, ‘Portrait and Ancestral Images’, 143, Figure 18 showing models of prefectural and sub-prefectural magistrates Yang, Ch’en and Ti seated in quanyi, at the T’ien Ho Temple, Ilan, Taiwan.

41 Lee, ‘China Trade Painting’, 44 cites the figure of Isaac Pyke, Commander in the English East India Company and governor of St Helena, c. 1716 (in the Copeland collection), and see also, Figure 16 here, of Dutch East India Company captain Jacob van Damme.

42 Both studied by Clarke, Chinese Art.

43 Clarke, Chinese Art, 45.

44 See examples in Stevens, ‘Portrait and Ancestral Images’.

45 Toppin, ‘Chitqua, The Chinese Modeller’, 150.

46 Examples shown in Clarke, Chinese Art, 53.

47 Geczy, Fashion and Orientalism, 50. See also Lemire, ‘Fashioning Global Trade’, 375–6.

48 Brame Fortune, Franklin and his Friends, 53.

49 Sonnerat, A Voyage to the East-Indies and China, 215.

50 Clarke, Chinese Art, 41.

51 The portrait of Guillaume de Brouwer is held in a private collection. It is depicted in Clemmensen and Mackeprang, Kina og Danmark, 140, figure 86. On facial expression, see Jones, The Smile Revolution, 129.

52 Percival, The Appearance of Character, 83. See also Walsh, ‘The Expressive Face’, 523–50.

53 Percival, ‘Weniger ist mehr’.

54 See Clunas, ‘Moulding a Physiognomy’, 46–51.

55 As Percival argues, portrait-painting was seen by contemporary portraitists as a social activity, requiring the artists to draw out the character of their subject. Percival, The Appearance of Character, 86. For condescending views of artistic originality (but not technical skill) of the Chinese, see assessments by Huusman, En kort Beskrivelse over Skibets Cron-Printz Christians, mirrored by Jens Boje, a priest on the 1742 Dronnigen af Danmark voyage, and Elisabeth Eide, ‘Skandinaviske Kina-bilder’, 28–32; Eide, Vårt skjeve blikk på kineserne, 59–68.

56 The Gentleman’s Magazine 41 (1771), 238.

57 Memoirs of William Hickey, 227.

58 Historians of emotions increasingly remind us that conceptualizations of emotion as well as emotion words, behaviours, practices and expressions are historically specific. See for example, Dixon, From Passions to Emotions; Rosenwein, ‘Emotion Words’, 93–106; White, ‘False Friends’, 286–99; Ogura, Words and Expressions of Emotion.

59 This concept of ‘affective archeology’ is developed in Broomhall, ‘Dirk Hartog’s Sea Chest’.

60 Gundestrup, ed., Det kongelige danske Kunstkammer 1737.

61 Classic scholarship remains important: Mauss, The Gift, but see also Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France; Algazi, Groebner and Jussen, eds., Negotiating the Gift; Thoen, Strategic Affection?

62 See, for example, Clemmensen and Mackeprang, Kina og Danmark, 71–103, and its continuation under Christian VI, 104–82; and Dam-Mikkelsen and Lundbæk, eds. Ethnographic Objects.

63 Clemmensen and Mackeprang, Kina og Danmark, 134.

64 Cited in Charleston, ‘Chinese Face-Makers’, 459.

65 This model is still held in a private Belgian collection. Douxchamps and Brouwer, De Familia de Brouwer, 21–3.

66 Clemmensen and Mackeprang, Kina og Danmark, 186, 159.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan Broomhall

Susan Broomhall is Professor of History at The University of Western Australia and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. She has published widely on gender and emotions in early modern Europe, most recently (with Jacqueline Van Gent) Dynastic Colonialism: Gender, Materiality and the early modern House of Orange-Nassau (Routledge, 2016) and is currently completing a monograph entitled Gender, Emotions and the Dutch East India Company (Amsterdam University Press).