Description
The RA Collection
Renato de Albuquerque started collecting at a young age, gradually building an eclectic group of works of art. In the 1980’s he started to focus on cross-cultural works of art, including Chinese porcelain, having so far assembled over 2000 pieces, especially those made for export. Gradually his collection expanded to other fields, such as Chinese enamelled copper, as well as works of art from Africa, India, Sri Lanka and Japan, with a particular relevance for the global world of the 15th to the 18th centuries.
The collector is not only passionate about cross-cultural works of art but has also become a serious connoisseur in this field, continuously reassessing the collection as how to improve and expand it. With so few world class collections of enamel on copper in existence—exceptions include those of museums such as the Hermitage in St Petersburg, the Forbidden City in Beijing and the National Palace in Taipei—Renato de Albuquerque’s collection has now become one of the references in a field that is crucial to the understanding of the overall production of Chinese export wares.
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Book Review of The RA Collection of Chinese Enamelled Copper in Arts of Asia
SUMMER 2022 | MORE FROM THIS ISSUE
THIS SUMPTUOUS publication is Volume 5 in a series of works that aims to catalogue the large and many-faceted collection of Renato de Albuquerque, the noted Brazilian collector. The previous four volumes have detailed Chinese export porcelain pieces in exhaustive detail, all authored by Maria Antónia Pinto de Matos. This book concerns itself with Chinese painted enamels on copper, a more problematic and less well-researched area, for which reason the talents of the authors, Ana Moás and Ching-Fei Shih, have also been called upon…
By Rose Kerr
Click here to access Arts of Asia‘s Summer 2022 issue for the full article.