Chinese Album from Paris in the National Library of Russia

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This article deals with the album of Chinese drawings produced for export in the late 18th early 19th cc. Originating from Guangzhou, 84 color pictures represent craftsmen, petty traders and street actors. Sixteen of them concur by subject and composition with the engravings published by G.H. Mason who named Pu Qwa as an artist of the originals. Similar drawings can be found in the album of stasiatiska Museet in Stockholm; other ones, close to ours in style, have been included into the album of Capitan Lisianskii. The Parisian album was compiled and bound in Paris; it was on sale in the Dondey-Dupr bookshop, and in 1828 Heinrich Julius Klaproth inscribed it with his hand certifying the fact that the drawings had been produced by a Chinese painter (what was probably doubted). It is still unclear how the album reached the Imperial Public library (National library of Russia of today) in Saint-Petersburg. However, it had happened before 1852 when the academician Bernhard Dorn published his catalogue in which the album was described under the number 798.