Special to Times
The Boston Athenaeum’s newest installation, ‘Exhibiting China,’ will reunite, for the first time in 175 years, five portraits by Chinese artist Lamqua that were a part of the Athenaeum’s first exhibition at its historic 10½ Beacon St. building in 1850.
Pictured are three of the five Lamqua portraits from the Boston Athenaeum’s Exhibiting China installation.
On display in the Gordon Room through Nov. 1, the exhibition is curated by Astrid Tvetenstrand, the Athenaeum’s Polly Thayer Starr Curatorial Fellow in American Art. The installation will include portraits and paintings originally displayed at the Athenaeum in 1850, including five Western-style portraits by Lamqua (1801-1860).
“Exhibiting China provides us the opportunity to reflect on Boston’s rich cultural and mercantile history, while celebrating the Boston Athenaeum’s robust and diverse exhibition and collection history,” Tvetenstrand said in a press release. “Displayed together, these objects offer a powerful understanding of the people, customs, and values that facilitated the China Trade in the 19th century, and I am honored to reunite these items to revisit their context and connect them with modern-day conversations about commerce, culture, and power.”
Lamqua specialized in Western-style portraits for European and American clients. He was one of the first Chinese portrait painters exhibited in the West.
The five Lamqua portraits on display at the Athenaeum include: Keying, ca. 1835-1840, oil on canvas (on loan from the Union Club of Boston); portrait of Wu Tianxian, also known as Samqua, before 1850, oil on canvas (on loan from Peabody Essex Museum, Museum purchase from the estate of John Heard, Augustine Heard Collection, 1931); Lin Chong, ca. 1835-1840, oil on canvas, (on loan from Union Club of Boston); Cumwa, ca. 1835-1840, oil on canvas (on loan from Ipswich Public Library); and Houqua, ca. 1835-1840, oil on canvas, (also on loan from Ipswich Public Library).
In 1850, a year after opening its new building at 10½ Beacon St., the Athenaeum hosted a landmark exhibition in its new gallery. Among the 268 paintings featured were five portraits by Lamqua, depicting five Chinese businesspeople who facilitated trade for Americans in China during the nineteenth century; the works were owned by prominent China Trade merchant and Athenaeum proprietor Augustine Heard (1785–1868).
Thanks to generous loans from the museums and organizations that now own them, this installation reunites these portraits for the first time in 175 years alongside a curated selection of other works originally shown in the landmark 1850 exhibition, highlighting the artistic and cultural dialogues of the period. Other items in the installation feature the print, landscape, porcelain, and cloisonné art of that time period and their connection to Boston’s mercantile history, including Flora’s Dictionary, Elizabeth Washington Wirt (American, 1784–1857); The Costume of China, George Henry Mason (British, 1770–1851);
Athenaeum Plate, Beauties of America Series, J. & W. Ridgeway (British, 19th century); and Cloisonné Duck (Chinese, 1735–1796).
Learn more at bostonathenaeum.org.