Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Lifting the Siege of the Black River Camp
After a drawing by Giuseppe Castiglione Italian
Not on view
This work belongs to a set of sixteen prints recording the Qianlong Emperor’s (r. 1735–96) campaign in East Turkestan that were etched and engraved on copperplates in Paris. The two hundred impressions issued from each of the sixteen plates, as well as the plates themselves, were then shipped to China. The emperor composed poems on each scene. For some sets, the poems were woodblock-printed on separate sheets. For others, such as the one shown here, the poems were inscribed in brush and ink on the prints themselves, in imitation of the emperor’s handwriting.
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