[Chunhua] « Le plaisir des saveurs sans limite » Album de cinq peintures érotiques chinoises.

Concertina album comprising five paintings in colour on ochre silk, mounted on card and framed with beige silk. Bound in blue brocaded silk with Chinese motifs, with a blank gold-flecked buff title label. Both paintings and binding retain notable freshness in the areas documented by the photographs.

The first page bears a four-character manuscript title, 趣味無止, freely rendered as “Pleasure Without End”. Beside it is a partially legible vertical inscription, 汴江陸[...], followed by a red seal and a final character which has not yet been deciphered. While 陸 may represent the surname Lu, and 汴 historically evokes Bian, a name closely associated with Kaifeng, the present state of the inscription does not allow either its precise function or the identity of its author to be established. It cannot therefore be regarded with certainty as an artist's signature; together with the seal, it nevertheless constitutes an unusual material feature which may eventually assist in establishing an attribution.

The five paintings depict couples within carefully composed interiors, furnished with beds, chairs, tables, and domestic objects that form an integral part of each scene. The precision of the drawing is evident both in the figures and in the textiles; slight modelling gives volume to bodies and faces, while the folds and overlapping layers of clothing lend depth to compositions further articulated by the arrangement of the furniture and the varied poses of the figures. The erotic subject is thus inseparable from its setting, conceived as the cultivated domestic space of private intimacy.

The women remain shod throughout the five scenes. Their small shoes may evoke the erotic significance attached to bound feet in Qing China, although the images alone do not establish that every foot represented was in fact bound. Far from being invariably concealed in Chinese erotic painting, bound feet and their miniature embroidered shoes could themselves form part of the genre's visual language of desire.

These paintings belong to the long tradition of chungong hua, literally “spring palace pictures”, also known by the shorter term chunhua, or “spring pictures”. The vocabulary of spring had long been associated in China with love and sexual relations, and was particularly suited to the album format: held in the hands and revealed leaf by leaf, the album was among the preferred vehicles for imagery intended for intimate, private viewing. From the late Ming period onwards it became one of the predominant formats of Chinese erotic painting.

Frequently condemned by moralists and subjected to prohibitions on their production and sale under the Ming and Qing dynasties, such works occupy a distinctive position within the history of Chinese painting. Their transmission is complicated by the prevalence of copies and spurious attributions; the names of celebrated masters were sometimes added to later compositions in order to enhance their prestige. Reliable artists' signatures and seals are, by contrast, comparatively uncommon among surviving erotic paintings.

It is in this context that the title 趣味無止, the still only partially deciphered inscription, and the red seal preserved in the present album acquire their significance. Although they do not yet allow the artist to be identified with certainty, these features enhance the documentary interest of the five paintings, notable both for the quality of their execution and for the presence of early marks that may eventually help clarify their attribution.