Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves

by Jacqueline Yallop

  Bushell soon recognized a kindred spirit in Franks, and, as well as working for the South Kensington Museum, he also joined the international network of collectors serving the British Museum curator. He was not content, however, with just sending back ‘the commonest things’ and worked hard to find objects that would intrigue, delight and inform back in Britain. He began to establish, and study, a considerable library of books to help him in his search, and he gradually extended his network of local contacts. As time went on, he developed an astounding breadth of knowledgeable interests in his curiosity about all things Chinese. Scrambling up trees, climbing rocky slopes and sliding down riverbanks, he collected plant specimens and seeds for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, thinking nothing of wet feet, muddy knees and the bites of strange insects. He began to study a range of complex extinct Chinese scripts, coming to recognize the difficult characters and in some cases decipher them. He even led a small expedition to the sacred burial grounds of the Qing emperors in the mountains outside Peking so that he could capture rare monkeys that he had seen there, scampering around the ancient stonework. He successfully managed to lure a pair of young animals into his trap, before sending them back on the long journey to the Zoological Society in London.

  His correspondence with Philip Cunliffe-Owen and the staff at South Kensington became increasingly enthusiastic. In 1880, he sent a consignment of bronzes for display, followed a couple of years later by four pieces of carved and perforated stone that were traditionally used as weapons and which were, Bushell added proudly, ‘relatively rare in China’.16 Soon, he was given permission to buy officially on the museum’s behalf. Instead of financing everything personally, and loaning his own pieces back for display in London, Bushell was now given £250, with the understanding that he would act as an authorized agent and use his expertise to acquire 100 objects at around 50 shillings each. He was delighted. The arrangement gave him both extra funds to collect and the museum’s formal sanction for his activities. ‘The specimens will be collected gradually and sent to England when opportunities occur,’ he wrote cautiously in February 1882 when the agreement was first made, but such was his eagerness – and the richness of what was available – that by November he had already sent a range of objects to the museum, hoping, modestly, that they ‘may fill some gaps on the shelves’. By spring 1883, he had asked for, and was granted, another £250 to spend.17 Jars, cups and dishes; figures, bottles, bowls and bronzes; a sacrificial wine vessel in the form of a rhinoceros and an ivory lion, as well as three glorious examples of early Ming porcelain, all found their way from Peking to South Kensington under Bushell’s watchful connoisseurship. Perhaps more importantly, so too did at least some of his understanding of the culture from which they came. These were not objects from the dark, backward China of the Victorian imagination; they were the evidence of a precious past and of a country worthy of more positive attention. Bushell’s collecting was beginning to reveal the East in a new light.

  Despite what must have been frequent and lengthy absences from the compound, and a growing collection of lovely things adorning his home within it, Bushell’s enthusiastic activity in Peking was rarely remarked upon by his British contemporaries. Caught up in the day-to-day responsibilities of government administration, it seems that they were unaware of the progress he was making in China, or of his contribution back in London. Quiet and unassuming, looking every inch the respectable and uncontroversial Victorian doctor, with a neatly trimmed beard, erect, even slightly stiff, stance and earnest demeanour, Bushell was content to keep his achievements to himself, perhaps unaware of quite how much he was accomplishing. When people asked him about his research into Chinese art, or about his collection of objects, he was modest and self-effacing, keen, he said, to ‘disclaim any pretension to authority’.18 He had no desire to get caught up in the academic debates that were starting to erupt as the study of China, or sinology, became more widespread in Europe, and he was acutely aware that, however much he learned, there was always more out there waiting for him in such a vast, ancient and varied nation.

  Bushell also knew that he was not alone in his collecting. As Mary Crawford Fraser admitted, ‘Of course everybody collected. Half the time there was nothing else to do.’ Whiling away a long morning perusing the artefacts ‘artistically spread out for inspection’, or indulging in ‘everlasting bargaining’, was just part of the ‘native’ entertainment of living abroad.19 During the Peking winter, from November to March, the British delegation was virtually cut off. All provisions had to be brought from Shanghai before the weather closed in and blocked trade routes, and the highlight of the year was provided by a delivery from London, from the Civil Service Stores or the Army and Navy store, once communications reopened. Collecting was a diversion from the enclosed monotony of life, a common talking point. Perhaps this explains why Bushell’s activity went largely unnoticed by his colleagues. But, unlike the dilettante souvenir hunter, he was not simply killing time with a hobby. What set him apart was his knowledge and perseverance, his consistent attention to detail and his willingness to dedicate long hours to the study of the pieces he found. In many ways, he was the archetypal scholar, collecting for his own pleasure and to further his own knowledge, happy to share what he knew through the objects he sent back to London, and utterly devoted to his subject.

  In time, Bushell collected his knowledge into an authoritative publication, Chinese Art, a pioneering study of oriental objects and the culture from which they emerged. He chose to end the first volume with a description of a white agate vase. It was elegant and graceful, a fine example of craftsmanship and a rare piece. And, like so many of Bushell’s objects, it was intricately entwined with a story, the fable of the successful scholar. The vase, Bushell noted, was carved with three fishes, animated and lithe, captured in the act of springing into the air and becoming dragons. Only after a fish had managed to overcome the rapids and waterfalls of the Yellow River, after long perseverance and much noble effort, was it worthy of such a transformation. Bushell explained that the fish carved into the vase represented the triumphant scholar who, after arduous study, finally managed to have his name added to what the Chinese called the ‘dragon list’ – the first step on the ladder of official rank. Poring over the complexities of the Chinese script and overwhelmed by the variety of objects around him, Bushell may well have felt that he was still swimming hard in the river currents. But his collecting increasingly demonstrated an understanding of the combination of material, technique and symbolism, of tangible object and enigmatic myth; showing just how well he was coming to know China, and how close he was to taking the leap as a dragon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Collecting Without Boundaries

  Magic Chinese bronze mirrors had first been seen in Europe in the early nineteenth century, when distinguished scientists had tried to explain how they worked. When Bushell saw one for the first time, with the sounds of Peking city life buzzing outside, he was enchanted and mystified. It did not seem possible. The front of the mirror was simply a highly polished bronze disc, slightly convex, its surface acting like an ordinary mirror and reflecting the image of anyone looking into it. The reverse was elaborately moulded with mythological figures, animals and birds, and floral scrolls in strong relief. The magic happened when the polished face of the mirror was held up to catch the sun streaming in through the window. Then, on the wall opposite, Bushell saw an exact image of the raised decoration on the back of the mirror. There was still nothing on the face except the glare of the sun, but it was as if the light was passing straight through, as though the mirror had become transparent, a thing no longer of solid metal but of air and light.

  Bushell never tired of seeing the ‘trick’ repeated but it was not long before he found a logical explanation. It was, he concluded, ‘an accidental effect’, a dramatic but explicable phenomenon caused by ‘irregularities on the reflecting surface as a result of uneven pressure in polishing’.1 But this hardly seemed to spoil the
spectacle. It remained special, made even more so by the rarity of the mirrors, and Bushell’s knowledge that he was privileged to see in action objects that had been a source of pride to emperors as far back as the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 24). Memories of the mirrors’ translucence stayed with him, and, when he came to write up his experiences of Chinese art many years later, he relived the moment, bringing to life once again the mystery of the magic mirrors, not as a bizarre party trick for the Victorian parlour, but as evidence of Chinese tradition and ingenuity.

  Bushell was always careful to see beyond the enigma of the mirrors, noting how beautifully they were designed and crafted, each a masterpiece of bronze metalworking and finishing, and evidence of the refinement of ancient techniques. With a collector’s appreciation of fine workmanship, Bushell emphasized the skill of the decorative moulding and the quality of the materials, as much as the spectacle of illusion. This was what always drew him back to Chinese art: ‘The connoisseur always looks at the intrinsic properties of the medium, and its effects in bringing out the skill of the craftsman which ennobles it.’2

  Close inspection and detailed study became the hallmarks of Bushell’s approach. Every style, skill and material came in for rigorous scrutiny. Ivory appealed to him, particularly Canton ivory, because ‘there is no material more satisfying to a delicate and refined taste’, and he spent long hours in the hot, close Peking summers learning the feel of the bone in his hand, studying the intricacies of the carving and examining the patina of the vessels in the dusty alleys along the city walls.3 He became an expert in Chinese glazes, watching modern craftsmen at work as well as studying the techniques of the past, and he discovered that it was the addition of lime to the glaze that gave the familiar lustre to Chinese ceramics, creating ‘a characteristic tinge of green or blue’ as well as ‘a brilliancy of surface and a pellucid depth’.4 He investigated the methods for working jade, and he familiarized himself with the complex practice of lacquering, prizing in particular the elegance and delicacy of Foochow lacquer.5 All around him was the evidence of unique and historic skills, luring him away from the aches and pains of the British officials and their wives, and into the bustle of the city markets.

  Architectural detail, too, fascinated Bushell. He observed many of the same materials and techniques employed on a larger scale, to create ingenious buildings and stunning decorative effects. At the ChangLing Tomb, the best preserved of the thirteen Ming Tombs in Peking, he admired ‘sunken panels worked in relief and lacquered with dragons’ and in the Imperial Summer Palace, seven miles outside Peking, he loitered on the Pavilion Bridge, ‘hung with bronze bells which tinkle softly in the breeze’, and clambered over the steps of the Pavilion of Precious Clouds, ‘piled with bricks and bushes to keep off pilferers’, to get close to a building that was made entirely of cast bronze, shimmering blue in the light.6 As with the smaller objects he took home to study, Bushell investigated details of construction and decoration techniques, exploring the intricacies of large-scale design with the same precision he applied to smaller pieces of art. Walking through the trees to discover the turreted pagoda in the Changchunyuan, or Garden of Everlasting Spring, in the Imperial Summer Palace, for example, he was struck by its distinctive colour and form, and went to great efforts to describe the ways in which these effects were achieved. ‘The glazes used in the decoration of this pagoda are five in number; a deep purplish blue derived from a compound of cobalt and manganese silicates, a rich green from copper silicates, a yellow, approaching the tint of a yolk of an egg, from antimony, a sang de boeuf red from copper mixed with deoxidising flux, and a charming turquoise blue derived from copper combined with nitre,’ he explained, with the scientific eye of a doctor, before adding a note with the enthusiasm of the collector: ‘The fivefold combination is intended to suggest the five jewels of the Buddhist paradise.’7

  But, even in the 1870s and 1880s, the objects of Bushell’s admiration were not untouched. The ruins of the Imperial Summer Palace were not the result of centuries of natural decay and degradation, but of attack by British and French troops in 1860, after the end of the Second Opium War. In a retaliatory operation under the command of James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin, whose father had ‘collected’ the Elgin marbles, 3,500 British soldiers set the buildings alight in a fire that lasted three days. Only thirteen buildings in the enormous complex of palaces remained intact, mostly in remote areas, and the elaborate gardens were destroyed. There was widespread and chaotic looting. Over subsequent years, a variety of important pieces were sold to eager collectors by profiteering soldiers and local adventurers: embroidered robes, sculptures and carvings, furniture, paintings and porcelain. It is estimated that one and a half million relics eventually found their way into more than 2,000 museums in forty-seven countries, while many thousands more ended up in private collections.8 At the British Museum, Augustus Franks negotiated directly with the military to acquire a pair of ancient vases and some glazed architectural roof tiles – similar to the ones Bushell so admired – which were taken as souvenirs by Captain de Negroni, a French officer. Plenty more ceramic pieces were donated by returning soldiers. All over Britain, the growing fashion for things Chinese was swelled by the looted treasures; collectors were anxious to profit from the sudden arrival of so many interesting objects and the market flourished. Back in Peking, amid the ruins of the Summer Palace, Bushell could only go so far with his studies. Ironically, many of the objects that would have most illuminated his work were now scattered across the world.

  Looting was just one more way of getting objects on the move. In an age of international collecting, neither collectors nor objects seemed confined by national boundaries. The aristocratic atmosphere and dignified dining of the Fine Arts Club might have made it seem a quintessentially English organization, busying itself with London affairs and serving the needs of British collectors. In fact, it reflected the expanding world of collecting: truly international in scope and aspiration, it was in contact with collectors and connoisseurs from far and wide. It was not just that some members acquired a taste for things Chinese or Indian, for exotic objects from faraway nations. Nor was it that many members had trade interests that took them beyond Britain, making fortunes abroad that they could then spend at home on their collections. There was also a more far-reaching and fundamental internationalism, a growing recognition that collecting was a way of understanding, appreciating and managing the world, and that shrinking distances were allowing collectors from the furthest reaches of the Empire to meet together in London.

  In 1840, the sickly Charles Fortnum, already bored at the age of twenty with his family’s business interests, emigrated to Australia to develop land in New South Wales. He did not stay for long; five years later, he was back in London. But the trip had given him a taste for travel. He had discovered a new world whose natural history absorbed him, and a fascination with collecting that was to last a lifetime. Back in England, he married a wealthy cousin, who could fund his new enthusiasm, and immediately set off on buying trips; he began a long association with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the British and South Kensington Museums, developed an expertise in Early German prints and became a member of the Burlington Fine Arts Club. There he met an Australian, George Salting, who had grown up in Sydney. They had plenty to discuss. They knew the same places in the growing Australian city, the bizarre flora and fauna of its bay, and they shared experiences of the protracted sea voyage. They became friends, and, when, at the age of thirty, Salting was left the fortune his father had made in Australia’s sheep stations and sugar plantations, both men sat together exchanging collectors’ anecdotes and scouring the catalogues and sales bulletins for the furniture, jewellery, bronzes, medals, enamels, ceramics, ivories, glass, textiles, leatherwork, manuscripts and paintings that were to become part of Salting’s magnificent collection.9 It was a long way from the harsh open terrain of New South Wales and the undiscovered wilderness of nineteenth-century Australia; the Fine Arts Club provided a retr
eat for collectors, no matter how far they had come.

  Trends set by high-profile collectors like Salting were taken up all over the world, and particularly in America. Salting’s enthusiasm for Chinese porcelain, for example, was shared by men such as William Thompson Walters, a Baltimore liquor merchant and collector who had opened his house to the public (for a visiting fee of 50 cents) in the mid-1870s. There was nothing limited or introspective about this type of collecting. There were no boundaries, and distance was not an obstacle. If an object had to be shipped around the world from its place of origin, sold in one continent and displayed in another, then there were increasing numbers of people with the resources and dedication to make this happen.

  When William Thompson Walters developed an enthusiasm for Chinese porcelain and decided to assemble a significant collection, Stephen Wootton Bushell was by now the obvious man to guide such a project. By the 1880s, Walters’ fortune was vast. What had begun as a relatively modest grain and then liquor business had expanded to take in banking and railways, from Washington DC to Florida and Missouri. He was a director of every line of steamers between Baltimore and the Southern states; he bred horses, patronized local Maryland artists and had amassed more than 3,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain in forty years.10 All that remained was to record his achievements for posterity, and to find someone with the expertise to catalogue his pieces of oriental art. His first port of call was the British Museum, but staff there, aware of their own limitations, directed him instead to Peking where Bushell was continuing his studies. Without hesitation, Walters commissioned Bushell to write his catalogue, and in the late 1880s arranged for him to make the journey from China to see the pieces for himself.

  After long years in the low-lying streets of Peking, arrival in Baltimore’s busy port was something of a shock for Bushell. A smoggy industrial hub, the city echoed with the noise of shipbuilding and its skyline was already straining upwards, spiked with church spires and factory chimneys. Bushell was taken through the city to Walters’ home in Mount Vernon Place, where the imposing townhouses with their European architecture and the neatly laid park around the Washington memorial column brought home to him again how far he had travelled. This bold American grandeur seemed like a different world. But, before too long, Bushell found himself surrounded by familiar objects, by forms and designs and colours that he had seen so many times before in Peking houses and market stalls, and the alarming size of the globe contracted to a room filled with China.