Boy on Water Buffalo

By Kelly Fu, ’22

There are many objects in the Winterthur collection that stop you in your tracks, some for their beauty, and some for their….interesting looks. It is almost impossible to see this pair of Staffordshire tortoiseshell-ware figures and not wonder why they look the way they do. While it may be tempting to dismiss this pair of objects as a case of poor craftsmanship or transcultural aesthetic communication gone awry, these bizarre visual transformations reveal how early modern British craftsmen understood their rapidly expanding world.

Image [Boy on Water Buffalo (paired figures), Staffordshire, 1750-1770. Winterthur Museum. 1997.0038.001 and 002.]

Each of these figures was likely meant for display on a mantelpiece. The body of the water buffalo is decorated with a mottled brown and white glaze, known as tortoiseshell glaze.¹ The use of tortoiseshell glaze on Staffordshire creamware provided British consumers with ceramics that mimicked the translucent look of tortoiseshell, a material associated with East Asian export objects.[2. See Anita Stein, “Thomas Whieldon: His Agateware and Tortoiseshell Wares,” Winterthur Guide Papers.]

The Asian-inspired glaze echoes the Chinese origin of the figural combination of water buffalo and boy. The motif of a boy riding a water buffalo has a long genealogy in Chinese visual culture.². The doomed romance between the fairy and the poor cowherd was facilitated by a supernaturally intelligent water buffalo. The story’s two main characters embody one of the oldest labor divisions of agrarian Chinese society: the men farm, and the women weave [男耕女织]. The illustrated album from Qing China in the Forbidden Palace Collections features an idealized image of this gendered division of labor. The Album of the Farmer and the Weaver. [绵亿耕织图册] The Forbidden Palace Collections, Beijing, Qing Dynasty.https://digicol.dpm.org.cn/cultural/detail?id=02b382671f0a4d559dff5e7f21a39ed6] The founding figure of Taoism, Laozi, is frequently represented philosophizing atop his trusty water buffalo.³ While Taoist portrayals usually feature an old man, not a boy, on the buffalo, the Winterthur buffalo rider holds a ruyi staff and a peach, objects usually associated with portrayals of Taoist immortals both in Chinese visual culture and in early modern European objects of chinoiserie.[6. Johan Nieuhof, Het Gezantschap der Neerlandtsche Oost-Indische Compagnie (1665), 190. Also see Jing Sun, The Illusion of Verisimilitude: Johan Nieuhof’s Images of China. (Leiden: Leiden University Repository, 2013).] In the Buddhist visual tradition, the stubborn buffalo, a metaphor for the body, is mastered by the spirit, represented by the human rider. Poems employing the buffalo and his rider as a central metaphor circulated as illustrated texts in China, Japan, and Korea as early as the twelfth century. The potency of the symbols were further amplified by the water buffalo’s familiarity to East Asian audiences as a ubiquitous beast of burden in rice paddies.

The English potter who created this object, however, would have likely never seen the animal and had to create his ceramic mold by referencing images on Chinese export objects.[7. Figure of a Boy on a Water Buffalo. Victoria and Albert Museum. 1750-1760. England. C.65-1948. http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O151157/figure-unknown/. Herdboy Riding a Water Buffalo. Late 17th-18th Century. China. 93.3.292.a-b. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/51230. The boy is larger in realistic proportions to the water buffalo. Polychrome enamel coloring. Late 17th century for domestic consumption.] The tentativeness of his experimentation is evident. The buffalo’s too-wide mouth and striated skin texture mirror contemporary illustrations of the rhinoceros, another exotic bovid not native to Britain.⁴

The human rider in the figure is also so transformed so as to seem unrecognizable to both Chinese and Western audiences. Although the boy’s two top knots (a traditional Chinese hairstyle) identify his ethnicity, his nudity is more characteristic of cherubs in European visual culture. The unusual side-facing stride of the boy, while not ergonomic atop a real buffalo, parallel humorous statuettes of boys in Chinese export porcelain, suggesting that the boy’s portrayal was plucked from a different visual source.⁵ Excavations at Staffordshire also uncovered figures made from the identical water buffalo mold without his rider.⁶ The water buffalo and the boy in the Winterthur figure likely originate from different sources, brought together by a British potter’s attempt to reassemble the Chinese buffalo-rider motif.

What stories does this figure tell? It tells a story about transcultural aesthetic discourse through emulation. The tortoiseshell glaze copies the shells of Asian hawksbill turtles just as the form of the boy riding a water buffalo has been transplanted from its Asian context onto the mantelpiece of an aspirant British household. It is a familiar story of “chinoiserie,” looking eastward for aesthetic inspiration. Yet the object also hints at a story of transcultural gaze in a different direction: the malleable buffalo rider motif also hints at a tale of “occidenterie,” in which English objects shaped China’s westward gaze.⁷ This Chinese export plate features a “Quaker cow” pattern taken from Anglo-Dutch prints.⁸ 1800-1820. Winterthur Museum. 2014.0016.038.] In the export porcelain plate, however, the European cow has become a Chinese water buffalo.

The figure, finally, suggests a story of competitive innovation. British artisans transformed Chinese motifs and materials through experimentation with forms and materials, hoping to surpass rather than to imitate Asian objects. The invention of tortoiseshell glazed ceramic liberated the British appetite for precious tortoiseshell from the ecological constraints of over-harvesting turtles. Although tortoiseshell ceramic was by no means plebeian, the mass-reproducible glaze increased the number of surfaces that could be adorned with the pattern, while decreasing the price of the exotic aesthetic. Adding copper oxide glazes created a green tortoiseshell ceramic more striking than the Asian material it once sought to imitate, advancing aesthetic boundaries beyond what nature presented and into the realm of what the human imagination had produced.