The Sampans from Canton is a collection of ninety-nine Chinese gouaches from the second half of the eighteenth century that depict in minute detail an entire community afloat on the water, with the various sampan vessels used for everything from the sale of fruit and religious ceremonies to warfare and thievery. For more than 200 years, the gouaches hung in Skärfva Manor House, the home of Vice Admiral Fredric Henric af Chapman, on the outskirts of Karlskrona, Sweden. In 2014, the collection was broken up for auction. Today they can be found at the UNESCO World Heritage Site Engelsberg Ironworks; they are a unique chronicle of the dream of China and contacts between east and west.
This book, the first detailed account of the collection, examines the gouaches from both an art historical and a cultural perspective. They serve as an important entry into the eighteenth-century world of ideas and as a way of understanding Fredric Henric af Chapman's great importance as a collector and visionary. A separate booklet of essays highlights the images in their art-historical context.
The Sampans from Canton: F.H af Chapman's Chinese Gouaches is a book about 99 Chinese watercolours that have been on Swedish soil since the end of the 18th century.
Fredrik af Chapman was a shipbuilder and shipyard admiral. Together with C A Ehrensvärd, he became one of the leading figures in King Gustaf III's construction of the Swedish navy's ice-free port city of Karlskrona in southern Sweden. Fredrik af Chapman's 99 gouaches depict Chinese boats on calm seas with varying cargo, as well as three with scenes from the magazines and harbour in Canton. On each painting, the Chinese name of the boat model is inscribed in Latin letters. The boats are painted in layers with gouache, an opaque watercolour on thin oriental paper. The gouaches bear witness to 18th-century Cantonese export painting and are at the same time carriers of knowledge about Swedish international shipping and politics during the time when the East India Company was operating in its most expansive period. The gouaches are therefore also a document of the time, telling the story of cosmopolitans in the 18th century with innovative thinking in shipping, architecture and culture. Here you can see parts of the Swedish merchant fleet in Chin,a and the images testify to a global 18th-century world. The gouaches hung in the same place from 1786 until 2014. Many questions are answered in the book, but who or what created the works has remained a mystery. The book contains all 99 gouache,s both in their entirety and with some enlarged details.
