Jean Theodore Royer (1737–1807) and his collection of images of Chinese musical instruments
Abstract
In the eighteenth century many Dutch organizations and individuals amassed significant collections of Chinese objects, although none of them came close in size and variety to the one assembled by the lawyer, antiquarian and proto-sinologist Jean Theodore Royer (1737–1807). He never visited China, but dedicated years of his life to learning the Chinese language, history and culture. Between 1765 and 1780 he collected objects related to all aspects of Chinese life to use them as the basis of a dictionary of the Chinese language. Besides various realia that arrived mostly from Canton, he owned a set of fifteen watercolor paintings, showing eighty Chinese musical instruments, each annotated with its name written in Chinese. When these paintings arrived in The Hague in the 1770s, this collection became the most extensive encyclopedic survey of Chinese instruments in Europe. However, since the pictures (today kept at the Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden) were in Royer’s private collection and never published, they remained unknown to sinologists and music historians. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Royer obtained the paintings from a trader in Canton, Carolus Wang, with whom he corresponded and who sent him some other objects, books and pictures. Wang was also a source of information for the English music historian Charles Burney, who communicated with him via Matthew Raper. Raper, an English trader with the East India Company, owned a collection of Chinese instruments which may have been represented in these pictures, and some of the depicted instruments may have eventually ended up with Burney.
