The Chinese original drawings which served as model for Amiot’s Vie de Confucius

[Amiot, Joseph-Marie: Vie de Confucius] - Anonymous Chinese artist. Album of 107 brush drawings, collected by Amiot in China and partly used as models for the copperplate illustrations of his "Vie de Confucius" (1785).

€ 250,000.00

The original, long-lost Chinese drawings last seen by Cordier, the visual source for one of the most influential Enlightenment biographies of Confucius. Comprising 105 narrative scenes augmented by two portraits, the present album preserves the complete Chinese pictorial cycle after which Amiot prepared the reduced set of drawings which were used for the 24 engravings published in 1785, and subsequently for Helman’s further reduced plates in 1788. Helman’s engraved suite announces that it was executed "d'après des dessins originaux de la Chine envoyés à Paris par le père Amiot", and further situates these models within the papers preserved in the archives of Henri-Léonard Bertin (now in the Bibliothèque nationale, see below). The French Jesuit Joseph-Marie Amiot (1718-93), missionary, translator and musicologist at the Imperial Court in Beijing, must have commissioned or collected them in Beijing and then sent them on to the French Foreign Minister Bertin, with whom he was in correspondence for more than twenty years.

Cordier records having seen, in a private collection, a complete album of 105 Confucius drawings, accompanied by two portraits of the sage, and he appears to have been the last recorded eyewitness to this album before its present reappearance, providing the documentary bridge between the missionary transmission and the later engraved reductions. Cordier’s testimony is copy-defining: the 'Vie de Confucius' “renfermait … 105 dessins que j’ai vus … dans une collection particulière”, a count that matches the present album’s 105 scenes and explains how a complete Chinese cycle could underlie, and be excerpted into, the familiar European sets.

Copy-specific materials prove the manufacture of these drawings in China, while the later European binding situates the album within western custodianship and the long trajectory through private hands that made this cycle vanish from view for more than a century. A microscopic paper analysis compiled in 2024 establishes that the paper used for all the drawings is high-grade xuan paper of white or brown type, consistently made up of blue sandalwood (seitan, i.e. Pteroceltis tatarinowii) fibers, similar to mulberry but finer, such as are mainly produced in China's Anhui province. The high quality of the paper suggests that it was produced for calligraphic court use; similarly, the meticulously detailed and expressive quality of the drawings themselves is "comparable to works by artists in the lineage of court painters of the time", possibly the work of two or more trained artists. The endpapers preserve some of the original bamboo paper wrappers, with additional Western endpapers made of 18th century European linen stock.

Produced within the Franco-Chinese sphere of knowledge exchange fostered by the Jesuit mission and the circle of Bertin, the album stands as a material witness to the mechanisms by which Chinese moral philosophy and its iconography entered the European Republic of Letters.