print
- Museum number
- 1955,0106.5.1
- Title
- Object: The method of Soaking the Rice to make it ponderous, that it may sink to the bottom of the Water when Sowed
- Description
-
A Chinese man standing in a stream, reaching out to take a basket of rice from a companion on the shore, to put it with others in the water, watched by an elderly man who leans on a pole, with children, a woman and poultry behind him, at the gate of a courtyard enclosing a house; paddy fields and mountains in the background; plate 2 in a series illustrating Chinese rice cultivation.
Etching
- Production date
- 1775 (circa?)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 210 millimetres
-
Width: 260 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- This plate is a version in reverse of a print from a Chinese book of woodblock prints, "Yuzhi gengzhi tu" (Imperially Commissioned Illustrations of Agriculture and Sericulture; see Asia 1949,0709,0.1) made in 1696 (information from Kee Il Choi, February 2011).
It is the first of a series of 23 prints plus frontispiece listed in two parts in Sayer and Bennett's catalogue for 1775 (pp. 94-95, nos. 7 and 8): "The Rice Manufactory in China ... drawn from the originals brought from thence, by Mr Heckel"; each part is priced at 1s.6d.
P.J.Mariette owned a copy of the Chinese edition, listed as no.1449 in his 1775 auction catalogue, as can be seen from Gabriel de Saint-Aubin's copy from it: see Kristel Smentek, 'Mariette and the science of a connoisseur', 2014, p.137 fn.158.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 1955
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1955,0106.5.1
