COLORS AND INK

In 2005, Geneviève Lacambre, honorary general curator, while working on the ethnographic collections of the Navy Museum, rediscovered an exceptional series of eighteen Chinese export paintings in the reserves of art museums and museums. history of La Rochelle. These totally unpublished works are attributed to Youqua, a nineteenth-century Chinese artist and considered one of the most talented painters in the export trade. Settled in Canton then Hong Kong, he supplied merchants and travelers with canvases, especially garden and interior scenes evoking a world that made the West dream. At the end of the exhibition, they will return to the permanent collections of the Musée Rochelais.

Colors and Ink also reflects the range of trends that occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in China and Japan. It brings together pieces of curiosity for foreigners or works intended for the domestic market in the case of Chinese paintings. Japanese paintings cover a broad panorama of styles and subjects.

Chinese export painting corresponds to a genus mass produced in Canton and Macao in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It takes the technique of oil painting on canvas, then not widespread in China. It mixes Chinese imagery and Western realism by favoring a rich and harmonious palette to satisfy the taste of foreign buyers. This type of painting remains little studied although it appears in many French and foreign collections. It is not classical Chinese art, but rather a so-called "historical" painting that testifies to trade and artistic exchanges between China and the West.
Youqua is considered one of the most talented painters in the Chinese export trade, along with Lamqua and Tingqua. If the course and production of Lamqua are fairly well known, information about Youqua is much rarer. He is often equated with Yeuqua, another painter active in Hong Kong at the same time.