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- fine little collection of Chinese tomb figurines. His other daughter, Frances, also collected Asian art and has some fine examples of Tibetan art, Japanese sword guards (tsuba), an Arita ware ewer from Japan, etc. His son, Arthur, while in Beijing in 1928, collected an interesting variety of small embroidered accessories such as fan cases, pipe cases and small panels and decorations. In fact, this embroidery collection was the subject of a small exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in 1985. After their parents had left for China for the last time in 1937, all three of Rev. Menzies children later returned to China to serve in a professional way. In 1945 Marion went with the United Nations Relief and Rehibilitation Organization as a social worker for two years and then worked on a survey of Educational facilities in liberated areas for the World Student Relief, returning to Canada in 1948. Frances and her husband, Ervin, went to China as missionaries in January, 1946, going first to Anyang city in Henan province and later to Chengdu city in Sichuan province. They returned to Canada in 1950. Arthur served as Canada�s Ambassador to China in Beijing from 1976 to 1980.
The Menzies children, who inherited the part of their father�s collection which was not donated to the Royal Ontario Museum, have on several occasions generously loaned to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria for such exhibitions and catalogues as Chinese Paintings in Canadian Collections, Arts of the Middle Kingdom: China, Images from the Tomb: Chinese Burial Figurines, and Wonders of Earliest China. Some of these artifacts have been repeated in this catalogue, but the majority are different, from later periods and not previously published. In past catalogues, we have concentrated on giving a brief art history of China, but in the present catalogue we have chosen to highlight Rev. Dr. Menzies� career and to deal with the artifacts on an individual basis.
The objects in this exhibit from the Shang (16th-11th century, B.C.) and Zhou (11 th-3rd century, B.C.) periods are quite outstanding and overwhelming in their antiquity. They include fine bronzes, intricate jade ornaments, interesting ceramic containers and sherds, exquisite bone carvings, oracle bone inscriptions, etc. Each of the three Shang bronze jue ritual vessels from the Anyang phase (14th-11th century, B.C.) illustrated in the catalogue, have an inscription. They are of a classic shape and one is covered with the popular motif of a stylized geometric animal mask known as taotie (1). Other bronze artifacts from the Menzies collection include swords, arrowheads and ritual daggers called ge (which was the topic of Rev. Menzies� doctoral dissertation). Bronze ritual vessels and weapons were the source of power for the Shang and Zhou aristrocracy. With weapons they could control the masses and with the ritual vessels they maintained authority through religious ceremonies.
The Menzies collection has some very beautiful carved jade artifacts from the Shang and Zhou periods. The Shang pendant of a seated man (16) is quite unique, while the Shang fish pendants and inscribers or engravers (17-19) are very similar to those recently excavated from the Fu Hao tomb in Anyang. These examples will help in better understanding the type of jades that existed during the Shang period.
The collection also has some interesting examples of early pottery. These include Shang earthenware objects which imitate the shapes of bronze vessels as well as some white earthenware sherds which have decorative motifs similar to those found on contemporary bronze ritual containers. The ceramic pigment containter (27) is quite rare and Shang artifacts of similar shape executed in bronze, jade and stone are known.
Besides the �oracles bones� in the Menzies collection, there are also some early bone carvings of hairpins and arrowheads from the Shang period.
Although the collection has a good variety of artifacts from the early periods, there is only a small sampling of objects from the Han (206, B.C. - A.D. 220) to the Sui (581-618) periods. Of these, the most important is a bronze lamp with an early inscription dated 28 B.C. (44). In contrast, the Tang dynasty (618-907) is well
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