约翰·里维斯：中国植物艺术画收藏家 John Reeves: Pioneering Collector of Chinese Plants and Botanical Art

作者：Kate Bailey 

ISBN:9781788840316

类型：精装

出版日期：2019/09/01

出版社：ACC Art Books Ltd

页数：160

尺寸：215mm x 270mm

内容简介：

本书讲述了里维斯植物艺术画收藏的故事。里维斯从未公开过他的乡村生活境况，却给我们留下了一些信件、笔记、图纸和地图。这些资料收藏于伦敦文森特广场皇家园艺学会的林德利图书馆。本书对当时在西方还不为人知的植物进行了描绘，并且对19世纪广东和澳门种植的植物进行了记录。  

This is the story of the Reeves Collection of botanical paintings, the result of one man's single-minded dedication to commissioning pictures and gathering plants for the Horticultural Society of London. Reeves went to China in 1812 and immediately on arrival started sending back snippets of information about manufactures, plants and poetry, goods, gods and tea to Sir Joseph Banks. Slightly later, he also started collecting for the Society but despite years of work collecting, labeling and packing plants and organizing a team of Chinese artists until he left China in 1831, Reeves never enjoyed the same degree of recognition as other naturalists in China. This was possibly because he had a demanding job as a tea inspector. Reeves himself never claimed to be a professional naturalist and the plant collecting and painting supervision were undertaken in his own time. Furthermore, fan qui (foreign devils) were restricted to the port area of Canton and to Macau, so that plant-hunting expeditions further afield were impossible. Furthermore, Reeves never published an account of his life in the country, unlike Clarke Abel and Robert Fortune, but he left us some letters, notebooks, drawings and maps. The Collection is held at the Royal Horticultural Society's Lindley Library in Vincent Square, London. It is a magnificent achievement. Not only are the pictures accurate and richly colored plant portraits of plants then unknown in the West, but they stand as a record of plants being cultivated in nineteenth-century Canton and Macau. In John Reeves: Pioneering Collector of Chinese Plants and Botanical Art, Kate Bailey reveals John Reeves' life as an East India Company tea inspector in nineteenth-century China and shows how he managed to collect and document thousands of Chinese natural history drawings, far more than anyone else at the time.