Lay’s The Chinese as They Are (1841) as an Excellent Example Illustrating the Importance of Studying Art Reception in Art History

Abstract

This paper illustrates in what ways writings in travel books or other written forms are similar to art works, and are worth studying, and challenges the dominant methodology of studying art works/images in art history. It is to emphasize that studying both image making history and image reading history is to make our understanding of art history complete, otherwise, we would miss out half of the art history because it takes both art creation and art reception to complete the whole existence of art. It is thus very important for art historians to research on art reception embedded in writings about art, and to investigate into art creation or production which embodied in art works/images. George Lay’s The Chinese as They Are (1841) is an excellent example demonstrating a very high level of receptive creativity in the entire period of my research (1600-1860). Lay’s ground-breaking discussion of painting and calligraphy pushed the level of European understanding to the highest ever. He evaluates Chinese painting based on Chinese aesthetics like the use of line, and particular canons and rules for learning painting. All these are elements constituting Chinese artistic values with which pictorial features function very differently from the European ones. Lay’s evaluation indicates that he makes a paradigm shift because his judgment, unlike others, is not based on European standards. Not being bounded by the European standards, Lay pays attention to many visual qualities, sees another kind of realism conveyed by lines and curves, appreciates ways of rigorously studying the depicted subjects; and recognizes the portrayal of the subjects’ (humans, plants, and birds) internal emotion and attitude, which they are not found in European painting. On calligraphy, his understanding of calligraphy is exceptional and extremely profound in the history of the European reception of Chinese calligraphy. In the whole period of the present study he was the first and only one to identify four types of script, to appreciate Chinese writing as an independent art form, and to evaluate this art based on Chinese aesthetics and artistic principles. Lay’s high level of receptive creativity in understanding Chinese art was extraordinary and unprecedented. It thus exemplifies and illustrates that it is very essential for art historians to research on written texts in order to study art reception which constitutes half of art appreciation.