Framing the Image of ‘China’ in the Writings on the History of Asian Painting in Early 20th-Century Britain

This paper examines how early twentieth-century Japanese and Western scholars framed the image of China in their writings on the history of Chinese painting.In the early 1900s, Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) who was a dedicated curator of Oriental Prints and Drawings at the British Museum devoted to the study of Japanese and Chinese painting. Early English writings on the arts of Japan and China were major references for Binyon, and imperceptibly influenced his interpretation of these subjects. I argue that Okakura Kakuzo’s (1862-1913) idea of Pan-Asianism in The Ideals of the East (1903) significantly shaped Binyon’s conception of the historical relationship of Japan, China and India. Okakura’s discussion of Eastern thought also opened Binyon’s mind to the ancient ideals of Asia which led him to realize the shared spirit of religion, poetry, art and life. In An Introduction to the History of Chinese Pictorial Art (1905; rev. edn 1918), Herbert Giles’s (1845-1935) use of Chinese sources added to the sense of authenticity and gave the British public the traditional native view. However, I will discuss how Giles’s book had later been re-evaluated by Binyon and other scholars, due to its inaccurate English translations of original treatises and its incomplete interpretation of the history of Chinese painting. Having acquired his knowledge of China and Chinese art from the early writings by Japanese and Western scholars, I will examine how Binyon developed his own narrative in his numerous publications on Chinese painting.