RARE QIANLONG Qing Chinese Pith Paintings,19th c Complete and original Album 12

Description

A CHINESE ALBUM DEPICTING TWELVE FIGURES, gouache on rice paper with blue borders.
Pith comes from the central column of spongy cellular tissue in the stem of a small tree called Tetrapanax Papyrifera,
native to south-west China. It has had a variety of uses, some going back many centuries.
At the imperial court both men and women wore coloured flowers made from pith in their hair.
It has been used to produce toys for children and in craftwork. It is still sold as Chinese medicine to make a diuretic infusion.
For use in painting, it is cut by hand with a knife into thin sheets from short lengths of the spongy tissue
Some European museums claim that their paintings on pith (often erroneously called “rice paper” or “mulberry pith”) come from the end of the eighteenth century
but there do not seem to be any dateable examples that are so early.
There is a record of the Kaiser Franz of Austria buying some albums from an English Consul-General Watts in 1826.
We know of an Italian Count who visited Canton in 1828 and had over 350 paintings on pith in his baggage when he died in Ambon two years later.
In the British Library there is a scrap-book containing six pith paintings and a journal entry by a serving British officer who sent them home from India in 1829.
These examples and contemporary accounts by visitors to Canton suggest that there was a flourishing trade in pith paintings by the early 1830s.
Each approx. 15cm by 11cm
provenance: Bought from Uk