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- On Collecting
Chinese Painting** of the 20th Century BRIAN S. McELNEY
I had, as a youngster, collected stamps and coins and I suppose collecting came naturally to me. At public school (Marlborough College in UK) I studied the Classics and the form master there insisted, as part of his wish to inculcate a properly rounded education on us, that his class have two periods a week learning how to look at art. I had to write one essay a week on the painting or art work of my choice from among the postcard images that were the subject he had chosen for that week, giving reasons for my choice. The subjects varied from week to week from the Impressionists or the Siennese school one week to Greek pottery or sculpture the next. To this day I can recognize and in many cases put a name to the painter of many of the Western world�s greatest paintings from what was learnt in those periods. There is no doubt they stood me in great stead, when I myself came to collect.
In the autumn of 19561 went to work as a lawyer in the well known Hong Kong law firm of Johnson Stokes & Master, eventually becoming in April 1971 the senior partner of that firm. I retired from being senior partner in 1983 but I continued with the firm, living in Hong Kong until 1992.
The only real collecting field in art available in Hong Kong until recently was Chinese art and I naturally gravitated to collecting in that area. From 1958 I started to collect Chinese art avidly starting in a very modest way with porcelain, chiefly blue and white but later going in for jades. I was, to a large extent, opportunistic as the supply on the Hong Kong market varied from year to year. Sometimes there was a glut and sometimes a scarcity. At other times there might be an abundance of ceramics or jade but no examples of other catego�ries of Chinese art.
In the late 1970s the quantity of Chinese art on the Hong Kong market was at a particularly low ebb and the prices, of what little there was, were very high. There was, however, one area of Chinese art which seemed to me at the time undervalued, namely Chinese watercolour paintings.
The prices of original works by some of the best known 20th century Chinese artists were at the time no more than what prints of works by Western artists of equivalent rank would fetch. I ruled out collecting Chinese watercolours done before the 20th century partly because authentication was too difficult and partly because, with few exceptions, in my opinion, Chinese painting had rather lost its way from the late 17th century on with constant repetition. By the 19th century their paintings had become dull and lifeless before the revival that I considered was taking place in the 20th century.
I decided to start collecting Chinese 20th century watercolour paintings. Being blessed with a photographic memory, I started to recognize the brush work and preferred subjects of some of the better known artists. Fortunately there were sufficient examples around at reasonable prices and experts to make authentication fairly easy. Initially I started in a fairly
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