University Museum and Art Gallery,
The University of Hong Kong (15 June – 30 July 2006)

This exhibition presents for the first time in Hong Kong a selection of over one hundred etchings dating from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, tracing the development of the art of copper engraving.

The beginnings of the chalcography collection date to the 1660s under Louis XIV when he established a royal workshop for the production of etchings and the collection known as the Cabinet du Roi (King’s Cabinet) in 1663, which includes depictions of the royal residences, monuments, records of historical occasions, botanical and natural history subjects as well as etchings made after masterpieces in the royal collections.

On view there are prints from the Cabinet du Roi depicting the palace at Versailles, and events such as the Carousel of 1662 held to celebrate the birth of King Louis XIV’s son, among others. Other notable prints date to the nineteenth century when the practice of creating prints from masterpieces held in the Louvre collections was popular. These include La Joconde better known as the Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci, as well as subjects by Nicolas Poussin, Jean-August Dominique Ingres and Raphaël. Prints by several contemporary artists such as internationally-renowned Louise Bourgeois have also been included to illustrate the continuing practice of printmaking today.

The highlight of the exhibition is the two ‘Coronelli globes’, named after the cartographer and cosmographer Vincenzo Coronelli (1650–1718), which are reduced versions of the famous ‘Marly Globes’ presented to Louis XIV by Cardinal d’Estrées in the seventeenth century showing the celestial and terrestrial worlds as they were at the time of Louis XIV’s birth. Another highlight is the map of Paris known as the Turgot map, named after the head of the municipality of Paris, Michel Etienne Turgot who commissioned a new map of the city in 1734. The map shows the city in unprecedented detail as if viewed from above by a bird. Its production entailed one of the most comprehensive surveys of Paris of its time.

Louis XIV had long had a fascination with Asia but did not decide to send the first French mission to China until after 1684 when he received a visit from the Jesuit priest Father Philippe Couplet who had spent 25 years in China, and came bearing gifts of woodblock printed Chinese books. This first mission arrived in Beijing in February 1688 at the court of the Qing dynasty emperor Kangxi (r.1662–1722), marking the beginnings of intellectual and cultural exchanges between these two great nations and the birth of sinology in France.

The mission included books on a range of diverse subjects, and a volume of prints from the Cabinet du Roi. Kangxi, like Louis XIV, was a man of vision with a keen interest in the arts and sciences. Thus began a fruitful exchange between China and France. Many Chinese books were subsequently acquired and translated for the Bibliothèque du Roi (the royal library), forming the best collection of its kind in Europe.

The Louvre’s chalcography collection numbers over 13,000 copper plates and commands the same attention as the Museum’s other collections. Since 1895, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux has managed the making and marketing of prints pulled from the original copperplates. Although the advent of photography in the nineteenth century changed forever the future of printmaking, the fine tradition of copper engraving continues to be practiced by artists today.