Russian Artists at the Russian Orthodox Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing in the 19th Century: Some Research Concerns

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In 1830, a Russian painter named Anton M. Legashov (1798–1865) went to Beijing as part of the Russian Orthodox Ecclesiastical Mission becoming the first professional Russian artist in China. In total, four Russian painters visited China being included in the mission: A. M. Legashov, K. I. Korsalin, I. I. Chmutov, and L. S. Igorev. In Beijing, the artists were supposed to paint portraits commissioned by the Chinese and thereby establish useful contacts with influential Chinese officials; in fact, the painters acted as diplomatic agents. At the same time, they had to fulfill the task of the Imperial Academy of Arts, St. Petersburg, which instructed them to collect visual evidence about the life, customs and views of the distant eastern country. Upon arrival in China, Russian painters were introduced to a unique artistic scene of the late Qing Dynasty, where Chinese, European and Occidental art interacted. Thanks to that, the work of Russian artists acquired a very distinctive look. However, nowadays the heritage of these painters is practically not studied due to several issues connected with a small number of their surviving works, questionable attribution, unclear provenance, insufficient study of neighboring artistic phenomena, such as Chinese export art or the art of the followers of Giuseppe Castiglione and other Jesuit artists at the Chinese imperial court. The article is thus devoted to the analysis of the difficulties regarding the study of the work of Russian artists at the Russian Orthodox mission in Beijing. The identification and analysis of these research concerns will allow to further develop methodology for studying the work of these painters, whose unique oeuvre remains a noticeable gap in Russian art history, while the history of the Russian Ecclesiastical mission itself or the art of Western missionaries in China have been deeply analyzed by both Russian and foreign scholars.