Two Chinese Painters in Edwardian London and Belle Époque Paris
The 2025 Annual Sonia Lightfoot Memorial Lecture on Paintings
Even before the end of the Qing dynasty, a very small number of Chinese intellectuals studied in Europe. This lecture will explore the experience in the West of Jin Cheng (1878-1926) and Jin Zhang (1884-1939), a brother and sister from a prosperous merchant family who both went on to have significant careers in the art world of Republican China.
What part did sojourns in London, Paris and other European cities, before the First World War, play in their formation as artists? What did they make of the art they saw there? The lecture will examine in particular the doubly-marginalised figure of Jin Zhang, as a Chinese woman intellectual, and consider what we can we learn about transnational artistic interactions more broadly from her writings and her art.
The lecture is sponsored by John Lightfoot.
The OCS is grateful for Woolley and Wallis for sponsoring the refreshments
Image: Jin Shaocheng 金绍城 (1876-1926), Imitating Shen Zhou 仿沈石田, leaf from the album Landscapes after Old Masters, 1905, ink on paper. Formerly Richard Fabian Collection
Speaker
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Craig ClunasProfessor Emeritus of the History of Art, University of OxfordCraig Clunas, FBA retired in 2018 from the Professorship of Art History at Oxford, where he was the first holder of the chair to focus on the art of China. Prior to that, he had worked as a curator of Chinese art at the V&A Museum, before going on to teach at the University of Sussex and at SOAS. His first book, Chinese Export Watercolours, was published in 1994, and he has since then published numerous works, many of them on the art and culture of the Ming period. He continues to research and write; his most recent book, published bilingually in Beijing in 2024 is The Echo Chamber: Transnational Chinese Painting, 1897-1935.
