The Triumph of Benevolence

Purchased by an American merchant in Canton (now Guangzhou), about 1805, this is the kind of Chinese-export painting Elias Hasket Derby might have encountered through his Asian shipping trade. By the end of the eighteenth century, Chinese artisans had developed a lucrative business copying European and American prints onto sheets of glass, which then were framed in the Western style and sold to Westerners. This painting is a direct copy of an English print-"The Triumph of Benevolence" by James Gillray, published in 1788.