[Shunga] Chungonghua. Rêve de printemps. Album de 12 peintures érotiques. Chine, XIXe siècle.

China, probably 19th century, undated. An album of twelve erotic paintings in ink and colour on paper, each mounted on silk and depicting a couple in an amorous scene, either in a domestic interior or in a garden or outdoor setting. Each painting measures 16 x 19.2 cm.

Accordion-fold album, 19 x 25.4 cm, the boards covered in green silk patterned with polychrome crosses over a diamond lattice, the endpapers in figured cream silk. Small losses of fabric along the edges of the boards, two further small losses to the rear board, and one fold of the accordion partly split. The twelve paintings retain a remarkable freshness of colour.

The traditional attribution to the nineteenth century remains plausible, particularly by comparison with several albums of twelve erotic paintings on paper or silk assigned to this period, but no dated material evidence or inscription in the present album allows the date to be established with certainty. A degree of caution is therefore appropriate, and a somewhat broader dating within the Qing period cannot be excluded.

Albums of this kind belong to the genre commonly known in China as chungonghua, literally "Spring Palace paintings". James Cahill notes the related term chunhua, "spring pictures", written 春畫, the same characters used for the Japanese term shunga. The association of spring with sexuality, and of such pictures with the intimacy of the palace, belongs to a long Chinese literary and pictorial tradition.

The tradition itself is ancient, although its material history is difficult to reconstruct. Written sources refer to erotic paintings from early periods of Chinese history and attribute such works to artists of the Tang and Song dynasties. References become more numerous under the Ming, but early attributions are often uncertain, and securely surviving works belong chiefly to the period from the late Ming onwards. Albums of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries therefore constitute the principal surviving body of material through which the genre can now be studied.

The album was one of its favoured formats. Unlike the handscroll, which is progressively unrolled, its leaves can be revealed individually and immediately concealed again. Cahill emphasises how well this form lends itself to close and private viewing, with the pictures remaining hidden except while actually being examined. From the late Ming onwards, the album became the predominant format for Chinese erotic painting.

The twelve compositions in the present album belong fully to this culture of intimacy. Lovemaking is never isolated from its surroundings. Furniture, curtains, beds, tables, clothing, trees and architectural details construct carefully articulated domestic or garden settings around the couples. The eye consequently moves between bodies and interiors, between the amorous action and the objects that frame it. The finest Chinese erotic paintings characteristically combine explicit subject matter with close attention to gardens, furnishings, dress and the material signs of cultivated domestic life.

One detail recurs throughout all twelve scenes: the women retain their small shoes even when much of the rest of the body is exposed. These indicate bound feet, the celebrated "golden lotuses", whose diminutive form carried both social and strongly erotic associations. In premodern Chinese painting the shoe could thus suggest what the foot itself continued to conceal. The Metropolitan Museum similarly draws attention to the erotic charge of the tiny shoes indicating bound feet in an eighteenth-century Chinese painting.

The absence of a signature or seal is in no way exceptional. Chinese erotic painting is overwhelmingly anonymous, and Cahill stresses that works of this kind bearing reliable artists' signatures or seals are comparatively uncommon. Famous names were sometimes added retrospectively to erotic paintings in order to increase their prestige. The impossibility of assigning the present album to an identified workshop is therefore entirely consistent with the history of the genre.

Long relegated to the margins of Chinese art history, erotic painting has only comparatively recently received sustained scholarly attention. In 2006 Cahill could still describe it as an undervalued and understudied field. That same year the Musée Cernuschi devoted its exhibition Le Palais du printemps : peintures érotiques de Chine to the collection formed by Ferdinand Bertholet, accompanied by a catalogue that has become an important reference for the subject.

This rediscovery has also helped clarify the distinction between the Chinese and Japanese traditions. Whereas Japanese shunga is principally familiar through woodblock printing and multiple circulation, an important part of Chinese pictorial erotica survives in painted albums intended for close, private viewing and capable of remaining concealed for long periods. That material discretion partly accounts for both the rarity of early surviving sets and the difficulty of studying them.

A handsome and complete album of twelve paintings, retaining remarkably fresh colours in its contemporary silk-covered accordion binding. Through its succession of interiors, gardens and bodies in which the bound foot remains persistently withheld from view, it provides a particularly coherent example of this Chinese art of intimacy, long overshadowed in Western scholarship by its Japanese counterpart.