The Great Chinese Art Transfer by St. Clair Michael;

Author:St. Clair, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Tonying Company

An important pipeline out of China for first-rate pieces of Chinese art was the Tonying Company, established in Paris in 1902 by Zhang Renjie (1877–1950), briefly mentioned above. The company branched out to New York from its original base in Paris and its sources in Shanghai. As well as selling in its own right, the company supplied a number of British dealers, including John Sparks and Bluett and Sons. Because Zhang occupied a special position of wealth and political connections in China, the company was able to obtain high-quality works of art directly. Some suggest that Zhang’s friends and connections gave him access to art objects that was not possible for others. A long-standing friend of Zhang was Li Shizeng, who became chairman of the newly created Palace Museum in 1925 after the last emperor Puyi was finally expelled from the Forbidden City in 1924. Li Shizeng was given the task of overseeing the Imperial Collections and conducting an inventory. In 1933, Zhang did play a useful role in removing imperial treasures when the Japanese threatened to overrun Beijing, but only about two-thirds of the collection finally made it to National Museum in Taipei after World War II.[37] It was during this period that many imperial works of art found their way into Western collections through dealers such as Zhang. Although Zhang dealt extensively on the Shanghai stock exchange, a great deal of his wealth and therefore the financing of the nationalist cause came from the profits created by the Tonying Company.[38]

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