Two benchmark publications from the 1990s—Thomas Lawton’s A Time of Transition: Two Collectors of Chinese Art (Lawrence: University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art, 1991) and Warren I. Cohen’s East Asian Art and American Culture: A Study in International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992)—are important precursors in considering Lara Jaishree Netting’s A Perpetual Fire: John C. Ferguson and His Quest for Chinese Art and Culture. These volumes provided some of the starting points for thinking about the trajectories of new, multi-disciplinary research into areas such as art dealers, collectors and collecting, exhibitions, and provenance issues related to Chinese art.

There is an international array of new studies, particularly PhD dissertations, that mimic the works of Lawton and Cohen: for example, Susan Fernsebner, “Material Modernities: China’s Participation in World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1876–1955” (University of California, San Diego, 2002); Judith Green, “Britain’s Chinese Collections, 1842–1943: Private Collecting and the Invention of Chinese Art” (University of Sussex, 2002); Stacey Pierson, “Private Collecting, Teaching and Institutionalisation: The Percival David Foundation and the Field of Chinese Art in Britain, 1920–1964” (University of Sussex, 2003); Shana Brown, “Pastimes: Scholars, Art Dealers, and the Making of Modern Chinese Historiography, 1870–1928” (University of California, 2003; now a book, Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese Historiography, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011); Daisy Yiyou Wang, “The Loouvre from China: A Critical Study of C. T. Loo and the Framing of Chinese Art in the United States, 1915–1950” (Ohio University, 2007); and Guo Hui, “Writing Chinese Art History in Early Twentieth-Century China” (Leiden University, 2010); as well as Netting’s own “Acquiring Chinese Art and Culture: The Collections and Scholarship of John C. Ferguson (1866–1945)” (Princeton University, 2009), on which her book is based. Research topics relating to the art market, museum and exhibition fields, and collecting the arts of China have also been embraced in peer-reviewed, multi-authored volumes based on international symposia, such as Vimalin Rujivacharakul, ed., Collecting “China”: The World, China, and a Short History of Collecting (Newark: University of Delaware, 2011); and Jason Steuber with Guolong Lai, eds., Collectors, Collections and Collecting the Arts of China: Histories and Challenges (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014).

This relatively nascent field of inquiry centered on the collecting arenas of the arts of China has become a dynamic subject area for not only the discipline of art history, but also East Asian studies and Chinese history. Netting’s A Perpetual Fire benefits greatly from these earlier endeavors while also contributing to the field through her important and original archival research into the John Calvin Ferguson (1866–1945) holdings at Nanjing University, which heretofore were essentially unavailable to researchers from outside of China.

A Perpetual Fire is divided into four parts and composed of twelve chapters. The volume follows an expected chronological order, investigating the life of Ferguson and documenting his activities over the decades that witnessed the closing years of China’s last dynasty, the Qing (1644–1911), and the birth of a new Republic amid the fervor of international intrusions into the nation’s borders. Netting’s volume navigates and explores the international spheres of influence, both intellectual and political, while never losing sight of Ferguson’s peculiar, and seemingly diverse yet interrelated, roles as missionary, collector, dealer, art critic, archeologist, politically minded public mediator between China and the United States, and scholar attempting to bridge Chinese and Western art-historical canons of the arts of China.

Netting details Ferguson’s drive to claim, or possibly more aptly to promote, the indigenous Chinese cultural legitimacy to describe, document, collect, and promote Chinese art on traditional Chinese (e.g., jinshi or antiquarian and literati) terms, and she interweaves it with modern art history based on new archeological excavations and dominant collecting tastes throughout China. Part 1 of the book positions the reader to witness how Ferguson was quickly placed at the nexus of intellectual changes where traditional Qing ideas and designations were being replaced with Republican-era Chinese concepts and revolutionary goals (and even, in some instances, outright Western ones). His tutorial relationship with Duanfang (1861–1911) regarding the arts of China, for example, in 1911 was quickly transformed into a relationship in which Ferguson benefited from selling Duanfang’s various collections, ranging from bronzes, ceramics, and paintings to rubbings. In essence, and by default, Ferguson was at the forefront of Western endeavors to collect Chinese art as he promoted himself as the West’s art adviser who was also a modern/traditional jinshi Chinese art expert. He was a transmitter of jinshi concepts as well as gatekeeper to important late Qing collections of Chinese art. After the deaths of collector-officials like Duanfang, Ferguson took advantage of being the transitional link that could traverse time, space, and cultural differences. Simultaneously, the self-ordained spokesperson for dynastic China’s jinshi as well as for modern Chinese archeologists and museum directors in the new Republic, Ferguson could assuage the hunger for new acquisitions by eager Western museums that wished to buy the Imperial and archeological treasures available during the traumatic and tumultuous transition to Republican China. He alone could ordain museums in the West with works from Duanfang’s collection, such as the massively important bronze ritual altar table set now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (late 11th century BCE).

Part 2 provides more detail concerning Ferguson’s track record as an art dealer. He did struggle to convince museums to buy certain works due to issues of quality and aesthetic appreciation even though many important works entered U.S. museum collections and private collections. Netting explains that Ferguson encountered friction with many museums and private collectors during the 1910s in part because the field of Chinese art had yet to have a mature canon from which to derive what Chinese art ought to look like and what sort of hierarchy ought to exist, both within this canon and museum galleries. Jinshi criteria and traditions were not aligning well with Western museums and collectors. Ferguson was genuinely frustrated, and later he would focus on collecting works that would eventually become his generous gift to Nanjing University in 1934.

Part 3 contains Netting’s important, original contributions to the field of Chinese art. Here she demonstrates and documents archival materials to establish a new understanding of Ferguson as a scholar-collector and his motivations for systematically donating and documenting the collections. Part 4 demonstrates Ferguson’s obsessive indexing (e.g., Lidai zhulu huamu or Catalog of Recorded Paintings of 1934 and Lidai zhulu jijinmu or Catalog of Recorded Bronzes of 1939) which stored information in a time-capsule of sorts—until “unearthed” by Netting’s access to the Ferguson archives in Nanjing. The volume overall, then, is a kind of reattribution that redefines and reintroduces Ferguson to scholars and students today. Netting’s assessments and examples, the archival resources shared for the first time since 1934, and the ways in which the materials are presented are to be commended.

One final note of interest regarding Ferguson’s engagement with the literati aesthetic can be offered as a topic that is not only complex but valid for future scholarly inquiries. Netting encapsulates very well (172–82) how Ferguson fully backed the justified concept that the Chinese scholars and the Chinese nation had the right to elucidate their art and how he thoughtfully and strategically positioned himself as the model intermediary spokesperson for China’s well-intentioned national pride through self-scholarship and narratives. Netting’s meticulous documentation and elucidation of Ferguson’s intentions allow the reader to see Ferguson as an idealist for the literati aesthetic. However, it is quite intriguing how Netting’s access to the works held in Nanjing University’s collection reported that many of the works Ferguson acquired actually date from later periods than what he designated. Was he duped by forgeries and/or copies or misguided misattributions? How does this align with how scholars view his overall merit as a pro-Chinese literati spokesperson and as a dealer who sold to some of America’s most prominent collectors, such as Charles Lang Freer? How can one evaluate the fact that he sold amazing treasures from the Duanfang collection, such as the bronze altar set to the Metropolitan Museum, while also collecting bronzes of little or no importance? Again, Netting’s original contributions toward fully introducing and investigating Ferguson have allowed future scholarship much needed materials.

Although A Perpetual Fire has merit for its original research and for the new materials it makes available to future studies, there are editorial and production oversights that distract the reader. The volume’s lack of an illustrations list of all images (color and black and white) is unfortunate. An illustrations list would have been helpful for ease of use and for locating images and their respective reproductions rights for future studies. As for Pinyin and Wade-Giles Romanization systems, the reader encounters Nanking/Nanjing, Yangtze/Yangzi, Peking/Beijing, and other such examples. An explanatory note at the beginning could have assisted in differentiating between historical titles of places and their contemporary spellings. Sometimes, too, Romanization systems are omitted, such as on page 27, where the Chinese characters for shuyuan and xuetang are given but without Pinyin. In terms of abbreviations and name spellings, on pages 72, 95 (fig. 5.2 caption), and 100, “AD” and “BC” were used rather than “CE” and “BCE,” while “Lawrence Sickman” rather than “Laurence Sickman” was on page 205. Some important volumes found in the notes were omitted from the bibliography, such as Rujivacharakul’s Collecting “China” (cited on page 222, note 38). The index fails to list an important page (161) for the scholar Ma Heng (1881–1955). Here, Netting encapsulates what happened to the exhibition of Ferguson’s collection and Ma Heng’s role. Finally, and importantly, however, the color presentations of important images of Chinese paintings from museum collections are printed quite unevenly. For example, figure 5.1 does not present the colors correctly, while figures 5.4 and 5.5 are very dark compared to the works when seen in person.

Nevertheless, A Perpetual Fire is an important contribution to understanding not only Ferguson but also how and why collections of Chinese art were built during and immediately after the fall of the Qing dynasty. The enduring legacies of Ferguson, be it through the Chinese art collections he sold to the West or the Chinese art collections he donated to Nanjing University, are well researched, and new materials are brought to light. Much akin to the books by Lawton and Cohen, A Perpetual Fire is an important addition to the field of study that focuses on how and why the arts of China were and continue to be collected.