The album "Russian drawings of China" from the collection of the Krasnoyarsk bibliophile G.V. Yudin (Library of Congress): experience of source analysis

The purpose of the article is to study the drawings of China from the collection of the Krasnoyarsk merchant-bibliophile G.V. Yudin. It's about 333 drawings, which are now in the Library of Congress. They are named "Russian drawings of China" by the researchers . The authors are to uncover the numerous riddles of the art album - from studying authorship, analyzing the subject matter of images and the circumstances of creating drawings to the history of the album for a century. Images can be divided into the following groups: 1) portraits of men and women; 2) images of children; 3) the types of cities and other settlements; 4) natural landscapes; 4) urban and rural genre scenes, various types of agricultural work; 5) images of Christian and Buddhist temples; 6) interiors of public and private buildings; 7) images of animals. Images from the "Russian album" are made in different techniques: the masters used ink, pencil, tempera, charcoal and watercolor paints. Most of the drawings are black and white, there are a few color images in the collection. The sizes of the drawings are nonstandard and do not repeat. The work is done on paper. For the most part, visual material presents sketches to future pictures. Few images contain notes in Russian and Chinese. Information on the presence of Russian litter is given by bibliographers in the descriptions, but the texts are not listed. Most images reflect the life of traditional China, not seriously affected by modernization processes. In the figure with twenty female heads, various variants of national hairstyles are presented; there are in the collection drawings of deformed female legs, which were called "golden lotuses". Images also give an idea of the special miniature shoes - "lotus shoes". Traditional types of agricultural work are presented in the sketch "The Chinese are engaged in various types of labor: harvesting, deforestation, planting rice, carrying cargo". Part of the drawings allows us to fix the first Westernistic tendencies in the everyday life of Ch'ing China. It is established that the collection includes works by Russians, for example, the artist 14 Spiritual Mission in China L.S. Igorev, Chinese artists. Attribution work of images should be continued.

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