QING DYNASTY, LATE 18TH/EARLY 19TH CENTURY, AFTER THE 1588 ENGRAVING BY THEODOR DE BRY

THE ART OF REVERSE-PAINTING
The practice of painting on mirrors developed in China after 1715 when the Jesuit missionary Father Castiglione arrived in Beijing. He found favor with the Emperors Yongzheng and Qianlong and was entrusted with the decoration of the Imperial Garden in Beijing. He learned to paint in oil on glass, a technique that was already practiced in Europe but which was unknown in China in 1715. Chinese artists, already expert in painting and calligraphy, took up the practice, tracing the outlines of their designs on the back of the plate and, using a special steel implement, scraping away the mirror backing to reveal glass that could then be painted. Glass paintings were made for export, fueled by the mania in Europe for all things Chinese. Although glass vessels had long been made in China, the production of flat glass was not accomplished until the nineteenth century. Even in the Imperial glass workshops, established in Beijing in 1696 under the supervision of the Bavarian Jesuit Kilian Stumpf, window glass or mirrored glass was not successfully produced. As a result, from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, when reverse glass painting was already popular in Europe, sheets of both clear and mirrored glass were sent to Canton from Europe to be painted.

THE ‘PICT PLATES’ OF THEODOR DE BRY
The painted figures derive from Plates I and III of ancient Picts in the Grand Voyages by Netherlandish engraver, mapmaker and goldsmith, Theodor De Bry (1528-1598). De Bry’s volumes compiled travel narratives, maps and images of distant lands and people, profoundly shaping—with widely varying accuracy—European perceptions of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the New World. The ‘Pict Plates’, a set of five images near the end in Volume I of the Grand Voyages, derive from watercolors by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (circa 1533-before 1588), including one which is now preserved in the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art (acc. no. B1981.25.2646). De Morgues draws this “Young Daughter of the Picts”, the source for the female figure on our mirror, as vibrantly painted with flowers, evoking the Roman name Picti, or ‘the painted ones’, likely inspired by accounts of tattooed or painted British tribes.

In De Bry’s Voyages, each of the Pict Plates is placed against a description of a scheme of body paint, jewelry, hairstyle and weaponry, which De Bry claims are derived from “an oolld English cronicle”. He presents these figures as a foils to the urbane society of his contemporary Europe, introducing their section of the 1588 English edition with the caption, “to showe how that the Inhabitants of the great Bretannie have bin in times past as sauage as those of Virginia”. Nonetheless, however, he does not present these imagined ancients as objects of ridicule; describing, for example, the three-pronged spear in the female figure’s hand as “a thinge trwelly worthie of admiration.”