CHINA - LEVESQUE (C.): Reproduction of plants in Tougk-T-Sao - Lot 232

CHINA - LEVESQUE (C.): Reproduction of plants in Tougk-T-Sao marrow. Large album in-8 contemporary brown chagrin, ornate ribbed spine, boards decorated with gilt fillets and fleurons and a cold plate in the center with the epigram "Offert à la bonté par la reconnaissance", gilt edges (minor wear, rare freckling). Unique work, comprising a handwritten title page and 27 plates of flowers, captioned in pen and ink, produced on Moëlle paper, circa 1820. This very fragile paper, known generically and inaccurately as "rice paper", was used in the 19th century to reproduce paintings for export to China. Strictly speaking, it is not actually paper, but a thin sheet obtained by unrolling the marrow of a shrub, the "Tetrapanax papyrifera (Hook)". According to the "Manual of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau", the origins of these uses date back to the Daoguang period (1820-1850) of the Qing dynasty, when a farmer from Hsinchu (in Taiwan) named Chen Kuozui, realizing that the thin slices of pith could be used to make artificial flowers, had the idea of extending their use as a medium for water-based paints. From the 1820s onwards, marrow paper production expanded in Taiwan, but the export of paintings on marrow paper was from the port of Cantonn 4 to Europe, America and Japan. European and American merchants trading in China employed local painters to depict artisans, scenes of daily life, various industrial activities and landscapes. The artists combined indigenous Chinese themes with perspective techniques and light effects introduced from the West. Very little used worldwide, pith paper was mainly employed in China, as paper for water-based painting and in the production of artificial flowers. The use of this "paper" to make floral arrangements is by no means classic, and our research has failed to turn up a single example of a similar album that has gone on sale in the last 50 years. The floral compositions in this album, created using this difficult-to-master technique and material, are particularly fine and complex, and have remained astonishingly fresh and in a remarkable state of preservation, despite a few very slight accidents and missing pieces. A very fine and rare album.