Re-discovering the Arts of China through Native Sources: Laurence Binyon, George Eumorfopoulos and Their Taste in Chinese Painting

George Eumorfopoulos (1863–1939) and Laurence Binyon (1869–1943), close contemporaries who both lived for more than 70 years, played an important role in promoting an appreciation of Chinese art in Britain. Eumorfopoulos, a notable collector of European and Eastern art, was the founding president of the Oriental Ceramic Society from 1921 to 1939 and was renowned for his collections of Chinese ceramics, metal work, bronzes, jade, jewelry, sculpture and paintings. Binyon, a pioneering curator of Oriental prints and drawings who worked at the British Museum from 1893 to 1933, became an authority on Chinese painting in Britain. Although contemporary scholars have undertaken research into the life and art collection of Eumorfopoulos, much of this attention has focused on his Chinese ceramics rather than his paintings.

This paper examines Binyon’s involvement with the renowned Eumorfopoulos collection of early Chinese paintings in 1928, several of these works were acquired by the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in the mid-1930s. It will explore the provenance and aesthetic value of selected paintings in the Eumorfopoulos collection, including an album of small paintings of animals,
birds and flowers formerly collected by the Manchu Viceroy Duan Fang (1861–1911), along with documents relating to their acquisition, exhibition and publication. I argue that with the assistance of Chinese scholars and Sinologists, the English translation of Chinese inscriptions and seals on individual paintings not only facilitated provenance research and stylistic analysis, but the Eumorfopoulos collection and its comprehensive catalogue recognised the importance of Chinese connoisseurship that refreshed the British understanding of Chinese painting and aroused their interest in objects and knowledge acquired from native sources.