- Title
- Xantsui
- Culture
- Dutch
- Date Made
- 1665
- Period
- 17th century
- Medium
- Engraving
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 12 1/8 × 14 1/2 in. (30.8 × 36.83 cm)
Image: 7 3/4 × 12 1/4 in. (19.69 × 31.12 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.63.8.10
- Collecting Area
- Prints and Drawings
- Curatorial Notes
Explorer Johannes Nieuhof recorded his travels through China between 1655 and 1657, including sketches of the landscape. As the first Dutch envoy to China, he was tasked with documenting the country, and his renderings and notes were later used to produce engraved illustrations for An Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces, published in 1665 by Jacob van Meurs. However, the travelogue was embellished beyond Nieuhof’s descriptions and drawings, exoticizing the Chinese scenery with vegetation and pagodas and ultimately contributing to the rise of chinoiserie in eighteenth-century Europe.
LACMA’s engraving would have originally been bound as a foldout illustration. It shows a walled settlement called Xantsui (probably Zhangqiu), pictured along a riverbank and populated with pavilions and houses toward which figures travel on a path at center. Almost certainly the artist responsible for this print’s composition did not travel to China; the work is a mélange of inventive details from earlier engravings and other visual sources that ultimately highlight the subject’s foreignness to the Dutch viewer. Further, the high vantage point devotes substantial space to the sky, a common compositional approach among Northern artists during this period, reinforcing the distinctly Dutch perspective on the Chinese landscape.
Claire Spadafora Baes
2025
