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Painting and Diplomacy at the Qianlong Court: A Commemorative Picture by Wang Zhicheng (Jean-Denis Attiret)

It is hard to imagine a more meticulously structured picture than Imperial Banquet in the Park of Ten Thousand Trees [Wanshu yuan] (fig. 1). Painted on silk in a syncretic style that combines Chinese and European elements, it is a work of unusually impressive size, 221.2 x 419.6 cm. Its composition and general conception can be attributed to the French Jesuit court artist Jean-Denis Attiret (Wang Zhicheng, 1702-1780), while two other Jesuit painters, Giuseppe Castiglione (Lang Shining, 1688/9-1766) and Ignace Sickelpart (Ai Qimeng, 1708-1780), together with other unidentified Chinese artists, helped bring the work to completion.1 The purpose of this article is to raise some straightforward but detailed questions about the careful structure of this painting?not, perhaps, the most obvious angle of attack to take. Given the picture's overall imposing effect, would it not be more appropriate to inquire into the sheer propagandistic feat managed by the Jesuit artists on behalf of their imperial patron? The display of imperial authority was certainly paramount in the minds of the painting's creators. However, an attempt to come to terms with the degree of skill, ambiguity, and intensity with which the theme of the imperial banquet is visualized reveals the inadequacy of this characterization of the painting. My analysis here will pursue three main lines of inquiry, one having to do with the way we "read" the picture for its most basic narrative information, another resting on matters of visual play and metaphor. But above all, the almost enthusiastic display of cunning artistic skill places the very commemoration of state authority at a certain remove, in a work that proclaims the unambiguous nature of that authority.