The Canton Waterfront

This painting depicts the busy waterfront of Shanghai known as the Bund, an Anglo-Indian name given to the banks of Huangpu River and the center of business activity. In 1842, as part of the Treay of Nanjing which ended the First Opium War, Shanghai was designated as one of five treaty ports. One of the named ships in this painting (located in the lower right corner) is Fire Cracker, a wooden side-wheel steamed, which was an American-built, British-owned ship that first docked in Shanghai on September 7, 1862.

Known as Trade Paintings, such works were largely made by unknown Chinese artists for Western audiences, perhaps even commissioned by one of the captains of the ships depicted here. For this reason, these paintings used a range of foreign pictorial conventions such as linear perspective and chiaroscuro. Prior to the twentieth century, realism such as this was largely limited to export art and made exclusively by professional craftsmen. By the early twentieth century, reforms in art education within China began to promote foreign techniques, and many well-known artists introduced western forms and materials into mainstream Chinese painting.