Chinese export painting had a strong appeal to foreign powers active in China and neighbouring Asian countries in the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. As a result, today, Chinese export paintings can be found in eighteen public col- lections in the Netherlands. These collections have an historic, an artistic, and a material value and are closely related to the overseas historical China trade, either brought back by VOC employees, private merchants, diplomats or government workers. These integrated economic relations produced, among other things, integrated art objects such as paintings, which, as a result of their representative and social functions, over time formed a special artistic phenomenon, and a shared cultural visual repertoire with its own (EurAsian) character.
This article focuses on the social life of two coherent collections of reverse glass paintings from China in the collection of Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden, the Netherlands. The first set consists of 19 eighteenth-century ‘sensitive plates’ with an interesting provenance back to 1824, the year when they entered the collection of the Royal Cabinet of Rarities in The Hague. This set of oil paintings, probably produced between 1785-1790, contains elements suggesting a strong link with this period. Secondly, a set of three nineteenth-century ‘sentimental keepsakes’ with two harbour views and one interior-garden scene is treated. Van der Poel contacted one of the descendants of their first owner, whose narrative made it possible to compile a cultural biography of these private owned paintings until they were donated to the Leiden museum.
Having disentangled their provenance, Van der Poel draws some careful conclusions about the degree of importance and, consequently, the extent to which she notices any value accruement and value dwindle of these sets of artworks in their lengthy afterlife. It is clear that these commodified artworks with their cohesive values make this painting genre distinctive and a class in its own right.