In 18th‑century China, these artists made Europeans’ portraits. Only now are their identities emerging.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, a little-known era of global art history was born, sparked by the arrival of European and American merchants to the port city of Canton (known today as Guangzhou). These merchants, from countries like Portugal, the Netherlands, England and Scandinavia, would arrive every fall to trade silver and illegal opium in exchange for tea and porcelain. 

Sailing across the ocean to China was a treacherous, monthslong journey, but a successful trading season in Canton could bring huge profits and social mobility. When they finally made it, the European captains and traders wanted to commemorate their achievement. It was an important moment, one that could transform their lives if they were successful. To memorialize their potential good fortune — and kill time while they waited for Chinese merchants to answer them — they were very pleased to find local artists to create their portraits. 

“It’s this long period of cultural exchange in which the West and China had its most significant sort of getting-to-know-you period — it went on for several generations and was very rich,” says Winnie Wong, a professor of rhetoric at UC Berkeley and author of the new book The Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade. 

The Europeans found that they could get portraits of themselves in a variety of media, including unfired clay figures and paintings in oil on canvas, or miniatures on ivory, watercolors on paper and even reverse painting on glass. They remarked on how well the portraitists captured their appearances, often with an astonishing degree of realism, such as using human hair for eyebrows on the figurines and translucent pith paper to give watercolors a glowing, three-dimensional effect. 

While the public sometimes assumes that this was an exploitative transaction, given the West’s violent attempts to colonize China in the late 19th century, Wong says that the portraitists were actually regarded as “great” artists by their European patrons, who paid them well for their work and ballyhooed their fame throughout Europe and America. These portraits have long been treasured in family collections, and have since gained prominence in a niche art-collector market. 

But while these artists were highly talented and prolific, with tens of thousands of paintings likely sold during this period, we know almost nothing about who they were. 

“It’s amazing how many paintings were bought, yet not a single period source identifying them has been found in the Chinese language,” says Wong. 

While people have been collecting these artworks for centuries, Wong’s book is the first to bring together all the detective work that has been done by art dealers, art collectors, curators and family historians about who these artists actually were, how they worked and how they came to be painters in Guangzhou. 

To unearth details of the period’s famous Cantonese artists, Wong turned to painting inscriptions, centuries-old European account books and ships’ logs for clues. She found their signatures on invoices, or their names written on the back of canvas frames or tucked into the ledgers of the East India Companies. 

But defining these artists proved more difficult than Wong had expected; for every answer she found, a dozen more questions surfaced. She found that a painter who went by the name “Lam Qua” might actually refer to at least three different generations of men who used the same professional name. And that the artist Spoilum, thought to be the earliest and perhaps most famous glass painter in Canton, wasn’t necessarily one individual, but a name that existed in many forms and was used by at least two different historical persons over decades.

As time went on, Wong began to suspect that maybe she’d been thinking about it all wrong. It appeared that these Chinese artists used names in ways that Western scholars, most of whom didn’t speak or read Chinese, hadn’t considered before. 

“Figuring out who the artist is, what they painted, and when they lived is tied in with that larger cultural question,” says Wong, “which is: What if we’ve been making the wrong assumptions because these painters had a different culture of using names?”

In fact, Wong points out that some canonized literati Chinese painters, like the landscape master Shitao, used over 20 artistic names in his lifetime, many very playful or erudite. Other prominent Chinese artists are known to have even jokingly used the names of ancient painters. More recently, Wong recalls the years she spent in Dafen Oil Painting Village in the early 2000s, which inspired her first book, Van Gogh on Demand. There, artists would use different names all the time, regularly handing out business cards with new names on them. When she asked artists why they might have changed their name that day, everyone would have different answers. One artist told her, “I don’t know. I just felt like it.” 

Wong started to question what — and who — was behind every Cantonese artist’s name she came across. She asked herself: Was that really their name, or did it change sometimes? And what if a famous artist’s name was actually many artists? 

“I think it so happens that traditional Chinese artists have been the most playful and creative with the use of names,” says Wong. “Our expectation that one person paints an artwork and then personally signs it with their unchanging, legal name is a very modern Western expectation.” 

Maybe, Wong posited, it wasn’t necessarily that these artists were overlooked or left out of history. Unlike the Europeans, obsessed with documenting their individual legacies, maybe the Chinese artisans actually wanted to be anonymous.

There are likely several reasons for this. One is that Chinese citizens were prohibited from associating with foreigners unless they were a licensed trader, making it possible that they didn’t want any record of those meetings, to avoid getting in trouble. “I think we should start with the possibility that people don’t always want to be recorded,” says Wong. It’s also conceivable that by maintaining a consistent trade name, these artists could build a brand that Westerners recognized and trusted, even as the actual portraitists behind the artworks changed.

In the end, The Many Names of Anonymity is two things: a traditional art history book that covers five of the most famous painters of the 18th and early 19th centuries in Canton, and an exploration of how the function, norms and meaning of these artists’ names have largely been misunderstood for all these years.  

As the first scholar to go beyond the art itself and question the identities of these famous Cantonese portraitists, Wong asks questions about what’s behind their names that no one else has. And she wonders: What if the contemporary idea that our one name encapsulates all of who we are isn’t in itself empowering, but limiting? 

“The Western idea that we have one name that we use, though seemingly life-affirming and celebratory, can reduce us to a singular public image,” Wong says. “We become a brand or a trademark instead of a full person with many identities.

“We should really try to give a full scope of imagination to who these artists could have been and what they could have been thinking.”