Girl at the Kitchen Dresser
Girl at the Kitchen Dresser (1985) by Xia Baoyuan
Oil on linen, 101cm x 61cm
Collector: Carrillo Gantner
When I was working in China as Counsellor (Cultural) at the Australian Embassy in Beijing in the mid-1980s, I spent several months of 1986 living in Shanghai while I was directing Jack Hibberd’s play “A Stretch of the Imagination” with the Shanghai People’s Art Theatre (now the Shanghai Drama Centre) on Anfu Road. On one occasion, I was on my way to the Hong Qiao Airport to fly back to Beijing. Someone had told me I should drop by the Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Research Institute which was on the way to the airport. This painting by Xia Baoyuan, hanging in their exhibition at the time, caught my eye.
The subject is very simple: the back view of a young woman with head bent over some food preparation at an old-fashioned wooden kitchen dresser. She is wearing a check skirt and a white shirt. What is utterly striking is the light which streams in from the left of the picture, illuminating the left side of the girl and the white drape masking the lower shelves of the dresser. The work of the 17th Century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer immediately came to mind. He specialised in intimate domestic scenes of everyday life, often with the light coming from an unseen window to the left, just as in this work.
I couldn’t buy the painting at the time, but it stayed imprinted on my mind so some weeks later I wrote to the Institute with an offer to buy the work. Happily, my offer was accepted.
I knew nothing about the artist Xia Baoyuan at that time and never got to meet him. One day, in March 2008, the wonderful Australian Chinese artist Ah Xian was visiting our home in Melbourne. I was deeply impressed when he immediately recognised that this work hanging in our dining room was by Xia Baoyuan. He told me that in 2008 Xia was in his late 50’s, of the same generation as Chinese painters Chen Yifie and Chen Danqin also from the same Shanghai Institute. Sometime around 1990, Chen Danqin and Xia Baoyuan had both gone to live in the USA for about fifteen years, but neither had won fame there and both returned to China around 2005. I regret that I have still never personally met Xia but I find this painting of his to be work of simple beauty and tranquillity.
Carrillo Gantner
(Professor Carrillo Gantner AC is Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts & Culture, a former actor, director and founder of Playbox Theatre, and the Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing from 1985-1987.)
