The Rijksmuseum Bulletin, volume 66 (2018), issue 2

CONTENTS AND ABSTRACTS

True Identity: Reconsidering a Fourteenth-Century Buddhist Painting of the Water-Moon Avalokiteśvara in the Rijksmuseum
CHING-LING WANG

In the Rijksmuseum collection there is a painting depicting the Buddhist deity Water-Moon Avalokiteśvara. The identification and dating of this painting are complex. It had long been considered to be a Chinese work of the Song Dynasty and dated to the twelfth century; later it was regarded as a Chinese work from the Yuan Dynasty and dated to the fourteenth century; more recently opinion shifted and it was seen as a Korean Buddhist painting from the Goryeo Dynasty and dated to the first half of the fourteenth century. This essay aims to serve as a fundamental research by examining the iconography and style of this painting in detail. The author argues on the basis of style that this painting is a late fourteenth-century Japanese hybrid creation that combines both Chinese iconography and the colouring of Chinese Song Buddhist painting with decorative elements of Korean Goryeo Buddhist painting. In light of the recent research into the inter-regional connection of East Asian Buddhist image production, the Rijksmuseum Water-Moon Avalokiteśvara provides an example of the artistic interactions between China, Korea and Japan in the fourteenth century.

‘Partly Copies from European Prints’: Johannes Kip and the Invention of Export Landscape Painting in Eighteenth-Century Canton
KEE IL CHOI JR.

This paper introduces the way Johannes Kip’s A Prospect of Westminster & A Prospect of the City of London (c. 1720) furnished the design for a handscroll of the River Thames enamelled on the rim of a renowned armorial porcelain service made around 1730-40. Having thus situated an important exemplar of northern European landscape art in China by 1750, it further suggests that Kip’s topographic print may well have played an influential, not to say seminal role in the conceptualization of monumental, panoramic handscrolls of the foreign factories from which ultimately the iconic landscape genre emerged. Descriptive of the site of both commerce and aesthetic exchange, these export paintings have exercised a lasting hold on the historical imagination. In as much as export porcelain signified the China trade for Westerners, export paintings came to represent Canton, if not the whole of China for a global audience.

Joseph Berres’s Phototyp: Printing Photography in the Service of Science
MARTIN JÜRGENS, IOANNIS VASALLOS, LÉNIA FERNANDES

Following Alfred Donné in Paris, the Austrian Joseph Berres was the second person in history to convert unique daguerreotypes into intaglio printing plates by etching them in acid and then printing them in ink on paper. Berres’s experiments culminated in the booklet Phototyp nach der Erfindung des Professors Berres in Wien (1840), which is considered the first photomechanically illustrated publication. Today, Phototyp is recognized as a key work in the pioneering combination of photography and traditional printmaking as a means of disseminating visual information in the mid-nineteenth century. In this study, the four prints in the Rijksmuseum’s copy of Phototyp, one of only three known remaining copies worldwide, were compared to prints found in other collections. The survey revealed that far fewer prints exist today than were originally produced. The Rijksmuseum prints were also analysed by microscopy and both X-ray and Infrared Spectroscopy. These findings were helpful in the ensuing re-creation of Berres’s process using newly made daguerreotypes. In practical terms, Berres’s process turned out to be far more complex to carry out than his recipes implied. Nevertheless, this endeavour resulted in a better understanding of the materials and methods involved, knowledge that may help in identifying more Berres prints in other collections in the future.

Acquisitions: Twentieth-Century Drawings
ALIED OTTEVANGER

Acquisitions: Dutch Counter Culture 1960-70
HARM STEVENS