A Passion for China: The Adolphe Thiers Collection

Jia Quan, L’officiel des Eaux (detail), 1771, Musée du Louvre ©GrandPalaisRMN (Musée du Louvre). Photo Mathieu Rabeau.

The Louvre’s Department of Decorative Arts holds more than 600 Chinese works, most of which come from the collections of Adolphe Thiers and Adèle de Rothschild and from the royal collections. Thiers was a journalist, historian, and a major political figure in the 19th century (as deputy, minister, president of the council and, ultimately, president of the French Republic).

The exhibition aims to reveal these exceptional works to the general public, putting them in the historical, diplomatic and cultural context of their creation and their acquisition by Thiers for his collection. It explores Thiers’s little-known passion for China. The exhibition presents over 170 works dating mainly from the 18th and 19th centuries: scrolls, album pages, engravings, prints, porcelains, jades, lacquers, and precious objets d’art in ivory, bronze, or wood inlaid with gems and mother-of-pearl.

The first part of the exhibition presents Adolphe Thiers, his particular vision of art, his collecting practices and his passion for the Renaissance. The second part, the heart of the exhibition, presents the full collection of Chinese art. Thiers, in view of publishing a work on Chinese art, concurrently collected books, documents and objets d’art related to the subject. The exhibition highlights the major themes of his collection: ancient and contemporary history, images of China (landscapes, architecture and dress), some staples of Chinese culture (language, literature and the literati), the ‘Three Teachings’ (Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism), Chinese porcelain (of which he was an expert of renown), and, finally, imperial art. The collection holds a number of masterpieces in this last area, including an exceptional scroll, the Qingming shanghe tu created for the Qianlong emperor.