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G eorge Walden’s collection (Fine Chinese Paintings, Lots 2501-2544)) reflects the serendipitous adventures of a multifaceted life spanning politics, diplomacy and journalism. Born in 1939 just days after the Second World War was declared, a graduate of Cambridge University, “Lucky George” began postgraduate life in the British Foreign Office in 1962. An expert in Russia who had also studied at Moscow University, he was nonetheless assigned to the British delegation in Beijing, and in 1965 flew to Hong Kong to begin the two requisite years of Mandarin language studies. What greeted Walden in 1967 Beijing was a time of acute civil turmoil. With next to no foreigners, tourists or businessmen in the capital at the time, and little else to preoccupy him outside of his work as Second Secretary at the British Embassy, Walden found himself drawn to the Beijing Antiquities Store on Liulichang (琉璃廠), visiting from time to time.
“The interior was hung with scrolls: wisteria looping and trailing like giant handwriting, poets reclining next to streams, landscapes in great scrawly strokes or minutely brushed.”
An old quarter of Beijing lined by traditional Chinese stone dwellings that had been a favourite haunt of scholars, poets, painters and calligraphers during the Ming and Qing dynasties, Liulichang was now largely deserted. Walden found himself almost always the sole customer in the state-run painting shop, the only one officially open in Beijing at the time. “The shop seemed staffed by monks – shuffling figures who kept their eyes to the ground and were sparing of speech”, he recalled. These “aesthetes disguised in proletarian clothes” offered little more than a “surly grunt” in greeting initially to their foreign visitor. For the first month the taciturn salesmen declined to show their visitor more than the second-rate scroll paintings on the walls. But Walden was not put off. Badgering them with “unrelenting cheeriness and persistent questions”, they slowly warmed up to their inquisitive visitor. Soon enough, passionate pedagogic opinions poured forth:
“When I indicated a scroll dangling from the wall they would say yes, an interesting little artist, but this work was not quite right. This line, for example, or that colour. Early middle work rather than his best, late period. Though even at his best his colours tended to be too stark and his composition cumbrous. Think what a real master would have made of that lotus leaf! They would mention a famous name – Huang Pin-hung or Wu Chang-shih – shaking their heads as if in infinite regret. Now there was an artist! The finesse of some of his strokes, the boldness of others! It took a man of ninety to develop a technique like that. This one here (he would point to the wall) was a pupil of his. A pallid imitation, and the artist was a mere sixty when he did it. What could you expect of a man only sixty years old?”
Just as the small talk exhausted itself and their visitor was on the point of leaving, the old man would motion him to wait. Fussing about in one of the cupboards beneath the hanging scrolls, he would pull out a scroll. Hooking the top to the wall, he slowly allowed the scroll to unfurl in his hands, uncovering a tantalising topmost bud on the highest branch of a tree, or a cloud on a mountain peak, before the full splendour of the painting was revealed.
“My old man was silent now, following my eyes with sly anticipation and a hint of triumph as the masterpiece was revealed, then snorting and grunting in satisfaction as I expressed my pleasure. ‘Wonderful!’ I would say. ‘Look at that – and that! Is it--?’ I hesitated, even if I was sure by now who the artist was, to give the old man the satisfaction of telling me.”
Walden recalled these visits as a time of immense private happiness that offered respite from the turmoil and greyness that characterised life at the time in Beijing. He read up on Chinese paintings and became “obsessed” by them, whilst the shop’s elderly proprietor took Walden under his wing and taught him how to look at paintings properly. The pricing was invariably reasonable, marked by an official ticket (most of which have survived and accompany their respective lots in the sale) which also came with the added bonus of verified provenance. Over three years in Beijing, Walden amassed a trove of around 60-70 scrolls.
Sometimes asking after an artist he had seen in a book would result in the acquisition of a new treasure – such as in the case of Zhang Daqian’s Lady (lot 2539). Painted in April 1936 whilst working out of his studio at the Master of the Nets Garden in Suzhou, the simple strokes of Zhang’s pensive beauty capture a reflective side of the artist.
Works with storied histories also found their way into Walden’s hands, such as Qi Baishi’s Crabs (lot 2512). The vertical scroll of an elegant cascade of crabs had belonged in the 1930s to a famous Kuomintang general from Sichuan, Wang Zuanxu (王纘緒), who had struck up a long-distance friendship with Qi Baishi. Appointed provincial governor of Sichuan shortly after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1938, just a year later Wang led an army of 100,000 to fight the Japanese on the Hubei and Henan fronts.
As Walden’s time in Beijing drew to a close, he returned to the shop one last time to say goodbye to his unofficial mentor. The old man pointed to a painting on the wall, Yu Fei'an’s Red-billed Blue Magpie by Bamboo (lot 2515), and suggested that Walden purchase it.
Hesitating initially over its formal, academic style, Walden would later come to realise it was perhaps the best painting he had ever bought. A masterpiece of Yu's later years, it was painted during a trip to Tiantai with fellow artists Zhang Daqian, Xie Zhiliu and others in February 1937. Literally meaning “platform of the sky”, according to Chinese mythology Tiantai Mountain was carried on the back of the giant turtle Ao who paddled in the ocean, and was subsequently moved to its current location by the creator goddess Nüwa. Nearly four feet long with a bright, full composition, the picture’s brushwork appears simultaneously still and dynamic, with playful contrasts between the snowy mountains, bamboo branches and jewel-toned magpies calling to each other.
Around 15 years later Walden returned to Beijing on official business as the private secretary to the then British foreign secretary, Lord Carrington. In a break between meetings he sought out the scroll shop, but found it a much changed place: now situated in a new antiques quarter in the city, the old men had been replaced by younger staff; there were more customers and fewer scrolls, of lesser quality and higher prices. The works Walden had serendipitously gathered between 1967 and 1970 – a collection studded with sublime treasures by renowned artists from the late Qing dynasty onward such as Chen Shizeng, Pu Ru, Wang Mengbai, Tang Dingzhi, Huang Binhong and Wu Changshuo – proved to be a time capsule from a period in Beijing’s history that would not be seen again. Although some of the paintings participated in a small private exhibition at the British Agency in Beijing in December 1968, which brought together collections of China-based diplomatic personnel from Britain, France, Sweden and other countries, Walden’s collection has not been shown publicly for more than half a century.
