Abstract Chinese Export Watercolours (CEW) is a type of painting created for export to European and North American markets during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which catered to Western consumers’ aesthetic tastes. These paintings blend Chinese and European painting techniques, depict detailed traditional Chinese occupations, customs, plants, animals, architectures, and landscapes of the late Qing Dynasty, and they form a unique artistic style. This article introduces collaborative research between the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) and University College London. By focusing on the V&A CEW collection, this article presents a new digital humanities research model for studying Chinese export art, which comprises different parts. First, based on the acquisition archives and digitized images, the study analyses its catalogue metadata and acquisition records to trace the collecting history and documented provenance. Secondly, it classifies 2,350 paintings by themes using deep learning methods. It then conducts semi-automatic image annotation and in-depth analysis to explore the iconographies and their evolution in history. The findings reveal a changing iconography distribution before and after 1840 within the V&A holdings, offering new, collection-based insights into Sino-British cultural interactions and global trade history during this period. The model not only contributes to in-depth analysis of the V&A CEW collection but also provides a new way for future research on Chinese export art and beyond.
Gao et al. (Thu,) studied this question.