The Wu Family In Export Paintings From The 18th To The 19th Century

The Wu family’s EWO was one of the most famous merchant houses in Guangzhou during the Qing Dynasty.Looking back on this century-long trading history of the Wu family,Guangzhou,as the center of world trade in the 18 th century,one can recall a prosperous scene when the global economic center bustled around here.The prosperity of Guangzhou’s ports led to the emergence of a number of special paintings with commercial and cultural connotations in the Thirteen Houses market.After the mid-twentieth century,Western scholars collectively called them "Chinese trade paintings" or "Chinese export paintings".In fact,the paintings were intended for the Chinese export market.These paintings were a special type of painting that combined Western painting and traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting to meet the needs of Western countries searching for Chinese specialties during the colonial period,showing the appearance of Guangzhou at the ports of foreign trade in the Qing Dynasty.However,these commercial paintings were mostly regarded as "artisan paintings" and were mostly hidden in Western countries,with few authentic paintings in China,so they have long been neglected by academics.It was not until the 1940 s and 1950 s that these long-forgotten export paintings gradually received the attention and research of Western scholars and gradually led to the attention of domestic academics.This paper takes the social environment of the Qianlong period of "one mouthful of merchants" as the background,and starts from the development history of the Wu family in the export paintings.As the rise and fall of the Wu family was accompanied by the rise and fall of export paintings,the paper attempts to sketch the image of the Wu family in export paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through different visual media,including documentary sources,oil painting,watercolour painting,gouache painting,porcelain painting,and architectural remains,in the hope of conducting an art historical case study from a cross-media perspective.