Bishop White Gallery of Chinese Temple Art
The Bishop White Gallery of Chinese Temple Art
Name of the Gallery
The Gallery is named in honour of
He was also the first curator of the East Asian galleries (1934-1948) and founder of the School of Chinese Studies (later the East Asian Studies Department) at the University of Toronto in 1934. The Bishop White Committee in the Royal Ontario Museum was founded shortly after his death to promote the collections of the East Asian Galleries.[4]
Contents of the Bishop White Gallery
The collections of this Gallery are mostly
The Paradise of Maitreya (1298 AD)
The wall painting depicts Maitreya, the Buddha of the future and successor to the historical Buddha, enthroned in heaven and awaiting his incarnation on earth where he will save the souls of lost humanity. Maitreya himself is the central figure but he is joined by a goodly retinue of greater and lesser bodhisattvas and monks (arhats, or 'luohan' in Chinese). According to the Indian Buddhist tradition, Maitreya will be born in to the Kingdom of Ketumati, whose King and Queen are depicted here, at the far left and right, 'taking the tonsure' (i.e., having their heads shaved) as a sign of their conversion to Buddhism.
The
The Paradise of Maitreya is currently dated as having been composed in 1298 and is one of the best surviving examples of its kind from late Yuan period, but there has been much scholarly debate about the exact date of composition. Bishop White himself contributed a monograph on the subject,[8] arguing for a slightly earlier date, and suggesting that the painting should be attributed to Zhu Haogu, whose name Bishop White procured from the temple records before it was destroyed. This attribution has been accepted by subsequent scholars and has been a useful point of reference for research into the development of a Buddhist-Daoist style of temple art in southern Shanxi Province.[9]
The Sculptures (12-15th Centuries)
These Buddhist sculptures are
Bishop White surmised that most of the statues in this Gallery were sculpted from a variety of catalpa, either in pieces or from a single block.[8] All of these sculptures were acquired through the efforts of George Crofts, a fur merchant who was also instrumental as an agent in the Chinese art market of the early 20th century, and arrived to the ROM before 1925.[11]
Homage to the First Principle (1271 - 1368 AD)
On the east and west walls of the Bishop White Gallery are a pair of two slightly smaller paintings, Homage to the Highest Principle, that depict a procession of Daoist deities and their celestial attendants, sometimes referred to as Chaoyuan tu or the 'Heavenly Court'. These deities, whose court is modeled on the bureaucratic structure of the earthly world, are said to maintain the order of nature and to govern the welfare of human beings. In their original monastic context, these processional paintings would have led up to a great picture at the end of the room, probably depicting the heavenly host.[12] In the Bishop White Gallery, the north wall is occupied by the Paradise of Maitreya, a Buddhist painting but with a similar motif and treatment of the subject matter as what would have been seen in the original Daoist temple. By the time that these paintings were being produced in the 13th or 14th century, Buddhism had been assimilated into the Chinese philosophical system, and this syncretism had long since begun to influence iconography.[7]
The provenance of these paintings, which both measure approximately 10 (height) x 34 (width) feet, is not known with certainty. It is thought that they came from a Daoist temple in southern Shanxi, whose name and exact location are unknown, but the stylistic similarity between these and other paintings found in another Shanxi Daoist temple, Yongle Gong, suggests that they might have come from the same workshop and be roughly contemporaneous, dating from the early 14th century.[13] Since the paintings in Yongle Gong bear the inscription of the master Zhu Haogu, the same painter whom Bishop White first identified as being responsible for the Paradise of Maitreya, it has been inferred that all three wall paintings in the Bishop White Gallery, both Buddhist and Daoist, might have been executed by the same man or, at least, in the same workshop.[7]
The Daoist murals were acquired through the well-known art dealership of
Design of the Bishop White Gallery
The Bishop White Gallery is located in the original wing of the ROM, constructed in 1914, where it has remained since the wall paintings were installed in the 1930s. The design of the Gallery, however, has changed dramatically over the years, beginning with a fairly prosaic display of the objects around the circumference of the room, later progressing in the 1980s to a recreation of an authentic temple setting and, since the mid-2000s, receiving a more modern treatment with an 'open concept' layout.
In the early 1980s, the Bishop White Gallery was redesigned to give the effect of a Chinese Buddhist temple of the 14th century. This was not an attempt to reproduce a particular site but rather a thoughtful way of utilizing the space to combine a number of roughly contemporary artefacts into a coherent unit. This was done by imitating a few features of what remains from the Yongle Gong temple complex, long roof beams terminating in curved brackets and a coffered ceiling, together with the same general layout of a rectangular space where devotees could participate in rituals such as meditative circumambulation around a raised altar supporting sculpted images of bodhisattvas. The choice of a temple environment was appropriate not only thematically, since both the wall paintings and the statues were originally used as temple art, but also in terms of the provenance of these artefacts, which originated in geographic proximity to each other in northern China. It might be objected that the contents of this Gallery are not exactly contemporaneous, dating from 1195 to the late 14th century, but yet it would not have been uncommon for a temple to contain devotional objects that its community had accumulated throughout many generations. Although the wall paintings displayed in this 'temple' setting are both Buddhist and Daoist, it was decided that this too would not be inappropriate, because there had long since been a blending of these two religious belief systems. Indeed, from the 10th century onwards the syncretism of Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian beliefs – 'The Three Teachings' - was reflected even in the similarity of artistic style, which is certainly evidenced in the examples presented in the Bishop White Gallery. The renovated Gallery was reputed to be as close as one could come outside China to a major North Chinese monastery hall.[15]
Present Design
The current incarnation of the Gallery, which opened in 2005, dates from the renovations that were undertaken during the first phase of the 'Renaissance ROM' building project. Several other galleries were also renovated, including the other galleries of the Far Eastern collection, and the construction of the Michael-Lee Chin Crystal, designed by Daniel Libeskind, was completed in 2007. Like the Crystal, the renovation of gallery space in the historic buildings was also intended to be modern in style - quite austere, with a minimum of colour and helpful signage, and an 'open-concept' layout that minimizes visual barriers between adjoining galleries, purportedly so that audiences might appreciate the collections as 'works of art,' with little indication of the context for which objects – particularly religious objects – were originally intended.[16] That said, the general organization of the artefacts remains much as it was during the Gallery's previous incarnation as a temple reconstruction, with the murals surrounding the wooden sculptures situated in the middle of the space, but the decorative elements of the temple setting have been stripped away to focus one's attention on the objects themselves.
References
- ^ "Art & Culture".
- ^ "Royal Ontario Museum | Exhibitions & Galleries | World Culture Galleries | Bishop White Gallery of Chinese Temple Art". romlx6.rom.on.ca. Archived from the original on 16 January 2014. Retrieved 26 January 2022.
- ^ "History of the H.H. Mu Library - the Royal Ontario Museum's H.H. Mu Far Eastern Library - Research guides at University of Toronto". Archived from the original on 2014-01-17. Retrieved 2014-01-16.
- ^ Walmsley L, Bishop in Honan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (1974)
- ^ Tsang, "The Paradise of Maitreya: A Yuan Dynasty Mural from Shanxi Province" in Orientation: The Magazine for Collectors and Connoisseurs of Asian Art. (Spring 2006)
- ^ Walmsley L, Bishop in Honan, p. 153. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (1974)
- ^ a b c d Royal Ontario Museum. The Bishop White Gallery: Wall Paintings and Wood Sculptures from Shanxi Province, China. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum (1990)
- ^ a b White W., Chinese Temple Frescoes (1940)
- ^ Stenhardt, N. "Zhu Haogu Reconsidered: A New Date for the ROM Painting and the Southern Shanxi Buddhist-Daoist Style," in Artibus Asiae (1987)
- ^ Royal Ontario Museum, Homage to Heaven, Homage to Earth: Chinese Treasures of the Royal Ontario Museum. P.178. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum (1992)
- ^ Royal Ontario Museum, Homage to Heaven, Homage to Earth: Chinese Treasures of the Royal Ontario Museum. P.9. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum (1992)
- ^ Currely, C. I Brought the Ages Home. Toronto: Ryerson Press (1990)
- ^ Tsang, K., Gesterkamp, L and Ruitenbeek, K. Beyond Clouds and Waves: Daoist paintings in the Royal Ontario Museum. P. 45-63. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum (2013)
- ^ Currelly, C. I Brought the Ages Home, p. 254. Toronto: Ryerson Press (1990)
- ^ Nagai-Berthrong, E. "The Bishop White Gallery," p. 12, in Rotunda. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum (Fall 1983)
- ^ Ruitenbeek, K. "Light from and for the East: The New East Asian Galleries in the ROM", p.39-44, in Orientations: The Magazine for Collectors and Connoisseurs of Asian Art. (Spring 2006)