Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (46 page)

Bushell never tired of seeing the ‘trick' repeated but it was not
long before he found a logical explanation. It was, he concluded, ‘an accidental effect', a dramatic but explicable phenomenon caused by ‘irregularities on the reflecting surface as a result of uneven pressure in polishing'.
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But this hardly seemed to spoil the spectacle. It remained special, made even more so by the rarity of the mirrors, and Bushell's knowledge that he was privileged to see in action objects that had been a source of pride to emperors as far back as the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 24). Memories of the mirrors' translucence stayed with him, and, when he came to write up his experiences of Chinese art many years later, he relived the moment, bringing to life once again the mystery of the magic mirrors, not as a bizarre party trick for the Victorian parlour, but as evidence of Chinese tradition and ingenuity.

Bushell was always careful to see beyond the enigma of the mirrors, noting how beautifully they were designed and crafted, each a masterpiece of bronze metalworking and finishing, and evidence of the refinement of ancient techniques. With a collector's appreciation of fine workmanship, Bushell emphasized the skill of the decorative moulding and the quality of the materials, as much as the spectacle of illusion. This was what always drew him back to Chinese art: ‘The connoisseur always looks at the intrinsic properties of the medium, and its effects in bringing out the skill of the craftsman which ennobles it.'
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Close inspection and detailed study became the hallmarks of Bushell's approach. Every style, skill and material came in for rigorous scrutiny. Ivory appealed to him, particularly Canton ivory, because ‘there is no material more satisfying to a delicate and refined taste', and he spent long hours in the hot, close Peking summers learning the feel of the bone in his hand, studying the intricacies of the carving and examining the patina of the vessels in the dusty alleys along the city walls.
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He became an expert in Chinese glazes, watching modern craftsmen at work as well as studying the techniques of the past, and he discovered that it was
the addition of lime to the glaze that gave the familiar lustre to Chinese ceramics, creating ‘a characteristic tinge of green or blue' as well as ‘a brilliancy of surface and a pellucid depth'.
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He investigated the methods for working jade, and he familiarized himself with the complex practice of lacquering, prizing in particular the elegance and delicacy of Foochow lacquer.
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All around him was the evidence of unique and historic skills, luring him away from the aches and pains of the British officials and their wives, and into the bustle of the city markets.

Architectural detail, too, fascinated Bushell. He observed many of the same materials and techniques employed on a larger scale, to create ingenious buildings and stunning decorative effects. At the ChangLing Tomb, the best preserved of the thirteen Ming Tombs in Peking, he admired ‘sunken panels worked in relief and lacquered with dragons' and in the Imperial Summer Palace, seven miles outside Peking, he loitered on the Pavilion Bridge, ‘hung with bronze bells which tinkle softly in the breeze', and clambered over the steps of the Pavilion of Precious Clouds, ‘piled with bricks and bushes to keep off pilferers', to get close to a building that was made entirely of cast bronze, shimmering blue in the light.
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As with the smaller objects he took home to study, Bushell investigated details of construction and decoration techniques, exploring the intricacies of large-scale design with the same precision he applied to smaller pieces of art. Walking through the trees to discover the turreted pagoda in the Changchunyuan, or Garden of Everlasting Spring, in the Imperial Summer Palace, for example, he was struck by its distinctive colour and form, and went to great efforts to describe the ways in which these effects were achieved. ‘The glazes used in the decoration of this pagoda are five in number; a deep purplish blue derived from a compound of cobalt and manganese silicates, a rich green from copper silicates, a yellow, approaching the tint of a yolk of an egg, from antimony, a
sang de boeuf
red from copper mixed with deoxidising
flux, and a charming turquoise blue derived from copper combined with nitre,' he explained, with the scientific eye of a doctor, before adding a note with the enthusiasm of the collector: ‘The fivefold combination is intended to suggest the five jewels of the Buddhist paradise.'
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But, even in the 1870s and 1880s, the objects of Bushell's admiration were not untouched. The ruins of the Imperial Summer Palace were not the result of centuries of natural decay and degradation, but of attack by British and French troops in 1860, after the end of the Second Opium War. In a retaliatory operation under the command of James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin, whose father had ‘collected' the Elgin marbles, 3,500 British soldiers set the buildings alight in a fire that lasted three days. Only thirteen buildings in the enormous complex of palaces remained intact, mostly in remote areas, and the elaborate gardens were destroyed. There was widespread and chaotic looting. Over subsequent years, a variety of important pieces were sold to eager collectors by profiteering soldiers and local adventurers: embroidered robes, sculptures and carvings, furniture, paintings and porcelain. It is estimated that one and a half million relics eventually found their way into more than 2,000 museums in forty-seven countries, while many thousands more ended up in private collections.
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At the British Museum, Augustus Franks negotiated directly with the military to acquire a pair of ancient vases and some glazed architectural roof tiles – similar to the ones Bushell so admired – which were taken as souvenirs by Captain de Negroni, a French officer. Plenty more ceramic pieces were donated by returning soldiers. All over Britain, the growing fashion for things Chinese was swelled by the looted treasures; collectors were anxious to profit from the sudden arrival of so many interesting objects and the market flourished. Back in Peking, amid the ruins of the Summer Palace, Bushell could only go so far with his studies. Ironically, many of the
objects that would have most illuminated his work were now scattered across the world.

Looting was just one more way of getting objects on the move. In an age of international collecting, neither collectors nor objects seemed confined by national boundaries. The aristocratic atmosphere and dignified dining of the Fine Arts Club might have made it seem a quintessentially English organization, busying itself with London affairs and serving the needs of British collectors. In fact, it reflected the expanding world of collecting: truly international in scope and aspiration, it was in contact with collectors and connoisseurs from far and wide. It was not just that some members acquired a taste for things Chinese or Indian, for exotic objects from faraway nations. Nor was it that many members had trade interests that took them beyond Britain, making fortunes abroad that they could then spend at home on their collections. There was also a more far-reaching and fundamental internationalism, a growing recognition that collecting was a way of understanding, appreciating and managing the world, and that shrinking distances were allowing collectors from the furthest reaches of the Empire to meet together in London.

In 1840, the sickly Charles Fortnum, already bored at the age of twenty with his family's business interests, emigrated to Australia to develop land in New South Wales. He did not stay for long; five years later, he was back in London. But the trip had given him a taste for travel. He had discovered a new world whose natural history absorbed him, and a fascination with collecting that was to last a lifetime. Back in England, he married a wealthy cousin, who could fund his new enthusiasm, and immediately set off on buying trips; he began a long association with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the British and South Kensington Museums, developed an expertise in Early German prints and
became a member of the Burlington Fine Arts Club. There he met an Australian, George Salting, who had grown up in Sydney. They had plenty to discuss. They knew the same places in the growing Australian city, the bizarre flora and fauna of its bay, and they shared experiences of the protracted sea voyage. They became friends, and, when, at the age of thirty, Salting was left the fortune his father had made in Australia's sheep stations and sugar plantations, both men sat together exchanging collectors' anecdotes and scouring the catalogues and sales bulletins for the furniture, jewellery, bronzes, medals, enamels, ceramics, ivories, glass, textiles, leatherwork, manuscripts and paintings that were to become part of Salting's magnificent collection.
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It was a long way from the harsh open terrain of New South Wales and the undiscovered wilderness of nineteenth-century Australia; the Fine Arts Club provided a retreat for collectors, no matter how far they had come.

Trends set by high-profile collectors like Salting were taken up all over the world, and particularly in America. Salting's enthusiasm for Chinese porcelain, for example, was shared by men such as William Thompson Walters, a Baltimore liquor merchant and collector who had opened his house to the public (for a visiting fee of 50 cents) in the mid-1870s. There was nothing limited or introspective about this type of collecting. There were no boundaries, and distance was not an obstacle. If an object had to be shipped around the world from its place of origin, sold in one continent and displayed in another, then there were increasing numbers of people with the resources and dedication to make this happen.

When William Thompson Walters developed an enthusiasm for Chinese porcelain and decided to assemble a significant collection, Stephen Wootton Bushell was by now the obvious man to guide such a project. By the 1880s, Walters' fortune was vast. What had begun as a relatively modest grain and then liquor
business had expanded to take in banking and railways, from Washington DC to Florida and Missouri. He was a director of every line of steamers between Baltimore and the Southern states; he bred horses, patronized local Maryland artists and had amassed more than 3,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain in forty years.
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All that remained was to record his achievements for posterity, and to find someone with the expertise to catalogue his pieces of oriental art. His first port of call was the British Museum, but staff there, aware of their own limitations, directed him instead to Peking where Bushell was continuing his studies. Without hesitation, Walters commissioned Bushell to write his catalogue, and in the late 1880s arranged for him to make the journey from China to see the pieces for himself.

After long years in the low-lying streets of Peking, arrival in Baltimore's busy port was something of a shock for Bushell. A smoggy industrial hub, the city echoed with the noise of shipbuilding and its skyline was already straining upwards, spiked with church spires and factory chimneys. Bushell was taken through the city to Walters' home in Mount Vernon Place, where the imposing townhouses with their European architecture and the neatly laid park around the Washington memorial column brought home to him again how far he had travelled. This bold American grandeur seemed like a different world. But, before too long, Bushell found himself surrounded by familiar objects, by forms and designs and colours that he had seen so many times before in Peking houses and market stalls, and the alarming size of the globe contracted to a room filled with China.

We don't know how long Bushell stayed in Baltimore to study Walters' collection. After such a journey, and with so much work to do, it seems safe to assume that he spent several weeks at least, and possibly several months, getting to know the collection, cross-referencing with the books he had brought with him from China and drawing on conversations he had had with Peking merchants
and collectors. The two men had little in common beyond their collecting, but this proved more than enough to sustain them. Bushell had found a collector who was as passionate about Chinese culture and objects as he was, and in their spare moments there was also a variety of other distractions in Walters' vast collection: contemporary European paintings, sculptures, French landscapes and antique vases. With Walters' enthusiastic support, Bushell described not only the Chinese objects themselves, but also the intricacies of their construction and decoration techniques, their historical and social contexts, and their relationship to similar objects across the East. He translated ancient Chinese texts and consulted modern ones. The catalogue grew and grew, the pages of Bushell's manuscript mounted, his notes expanding into long and erudite descriptions. The time came for him to return to China, and still he wrote. As life settled back into a round of medical visits, the book continued to take shape, with the routine of writing punctuating the days.

Rooted in Walters' magnificent collection, the catalogue soon became much more than just a simple record. After returning from Baltimore as a young man in his late thirties, Bushell worked on the book for fifteen years, marking his forties with chapter after chapter of studious text. The result was to be a major work: the first comprehensive study of Chinese, Japanese and Korean art in the English language, a pioneering undertaking. Entering enthusiastically into its scale and ambition, Walters took on the task of commissioning illustrations, scouring America for someone whom he believed could provide accurate pictures to accompany Bushell's writing. He chose Louis Prang, from Massachusetts, to work on the lithographs, instructing him to supply the highest quality regardless of cost, and approving a final count of 2,000 printing stones to create 116 lithographic plates. He looked even further afield for an artist he thought capable of doing the water-colour illustrations, employing an Englishman, James Callowhill,
along with his three sons, converting the second-floor north-facing library of his house into their studio and installing them in their own living quarters for the duration of the work.
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Money was no object. Walters was reportedly willing to pay $250,000 to see the book produced to the highest standards and he was notoriously exacting in ensuring that everything was of the very best quality.