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October 17, 2008

China lost and found at Peabody Essex Museum

Alan Burke

SALEM — In the era of the China Trade, Americans were amazed as a bounty of beautiful and exotic goods arrived on these shores — everything from porcelain to lacquered woodworking to gleaming silks. It was a haul that made traders rich.

When he returned from China in 1796, however, American businessman Andreas Everardus van Braam did not amass a fortune. And yet, it could be said that he was the first man to bring China itself to America.

In Philadelphia, he put on an exhibition of more than 350 paintings of China by Chinese artists. Delicately rendered, full of subtle tones and thin lines, they captured vignettes from the nation’s interior. With its simple villages and soaring temples, here was a world Westerners had never seen and where only Chinese were permitted to travel.

America was fascinated. The Dutch-born van Braam enjoyed a triumph. Moreover, his years in China had seemingly brought enough wealth to build a mansion crammed with Asian-made furnishings and fabrics.

Then, in short order, van Braam’s ambitions exceeded his income. He lost the big house. Friends rescued him from debtors prison. Approaching 60, he fled. Three years later, his paintings were on the auction block at Christie’s in London.

They earned 173 1/2 pounds, recalls Bruce MacLaren, the Peabody Essex Museum’s associate curator of Chinese art. And after that, most were never seen again.

Until now.

Tomorrow at 3 p.m. at the Marblehead Arts Association, 8 Hooper St., MacLaren will tell two incredible stories, covering van Braam’s contribution in creating the paintings and the path that has brought them to public notice again.

The 249 paintings, collected in 12 silk-covered albums, were purchased by the Essex Institute, predecessor to the PEM, in 1943 for 143 pounds — less than the price paid at Christie’s nearly 150 years before. In all that time, MacLaren speculates, the art remained in the hands of a single family.

Nothing indicates that the Institute knew what they’d bought. The works were soon forgotten in the basement of the Phillips Library. Around 2000, however, museum volunteer and art collector William Strole began to suspect that these were the van Braam paintings.

MacLaren, who grew up in Marblehead and now lives in Salem, was intrigued enough to investigate. “We had to figure out if we had what we thought we had,” he says. At one point, fellow curator Karina Corrigan traveled to the British Museum where 100 of van Braam’s paintings were known to be housed.

The album covers, the handwritten descriptions of the paintings — in French — on the facing page seemed conclusive. “They’re almost identical,” MacLaren said. Thus, it was decided to take the find public. Indeed, after his talk in Marblehead, the curator will travel to China with a slide show for an audience of Chinese scholars.

An eye on China

At the turn of the 19th century, images of China were plentiful enough, he said. Some were done by Westerners, some by Chinese using Western techniques with an eye toward Western markets. What makes van Braam’s paintings unique is the fact that they are by Chinese artists in the traditional Chinese style. The businessman, who became an American out of admiration for the Revolution, hungered to know the parts of China that he could not see.

In an era before photography, he commissioned two artists to go into the interior and paint it. Their works show some Western influence. By custom, Chinese did not paint the blue of the sky or the ocean. In these works, however, a few minimalist strokes make it seem river boats are floating on a mist.

Van Braam established himself twice in China. He went broke the first time only to recover remarkably. In Philadelphia, MacLaren believes, he may have been the victim of an earlier and unprecedented face-to-face meeting with the emperor in Beijing.

“I kind of think he was inspired by the (lifestyle of) the emperor of China. He said, ‘Mmmm, that’s the life for me.’”

It couldn’t last. And this time van Braam was unable to recover from the economic setback. He died in obscurity in 1801 Amsterdam.

The paintings are not signed, MacLaren notes. He perceives that two artists were involved, one good and the other very good. On the other hand, he speculates that van Braam did not get what he paid for.

“I think (the artists) went and copied these images out of books. Van Braam was convinced that they were faithful images.”

The theory does not detract from the beauty of the paintings nor their historic significance as a Chinese representation of a little-known world. And soon MacLaren is determined to give them something they’ve never had before — a public exhibition at the PEM.

“It’s just a matter of finding the right place and time.”

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