The Bishop White Gallery of Chinese Temple Art is one of four galleries in the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) that are dedicated to Chinese art and archaeology. It contains one of the most important collections of Chinese temple art in the world, including three Yuan Dynasty (1271 – 1368 AD) temple wall paintings from Shanxi Province that adorn the three walls of the Gallery, and several wooden sculptures depicting bodhisattvas from the 12th to the 15th centuries. These are some of the earliest acquisitions and most iconic objects in the ROM.
Name of the Gallery
The Gallery is named in honour of Bishop William Charles White (1873-1960), an Anglican missionary, educated at Wycliffe College in the University of Toronto, who became Bishop of Honan Province, China (1909-1934). Bishop White was chiefly responsible for building and interpreting the ROM's Chinese collection in the early days and, in particular, for the acquisition of the Buddhist wall painting on the north wall of this Gallery and the H.H. Mu Far Eastern Library . He was also the first curator of the East Asian galleries (1934-1948) and founder of the School of Chinese Studies (later the East Asian Studies Department) at the University of Toronto in 1934. The Bishop White Committee in the Royal Ontario Museum was founded shortly after his death to promote the collections of the East Asian Galleries.
Contents of the Bishop White Gallery
The collections of this Gallery are mostly Buddhist, including the wall painting on the north wall of the Gallery, The Paradise of Maitreya, and the wooden sculptures, which are mostly of a later provenance; but the other two wall paintings, both entitled Homage to the First Principle, are from the Daoist tradition.
The Paradise of Maitreya (1298 AD)
The wall painting depicts Maitreya, the Buddha of the future and successor to the historical Buddha, enthroned in heaven and awaiting his incarnation on earth where he will save the souls of lost humanity. Maitreya himself is the central figure but he is joined by a goodly retinue of greater and lesser bodhisattvas and monks (arhats, or 'luohan' in Chinese). According to the Indian Buddhist tradition, Maitreya will be born in to the Kingdom of Ketumati, whose King and Queen are depicted here, at the far left and right, 'taking the tonsure' (i.e., having their heads shaved) as a sign of their conversion to Buddhism.
The Paradise of Maitreya, which measures approximately 16 (height) x 36 (width) feet, is known to have come from the Monastery of Joyful Conversion (Xinghua Si) in southern Shanxi Province, which has long since been destroyed after falling into ruins. The painting remained in situ and was undisturbed until the 1920s, when social and political unrest in China led to the destruction of many temples in the northern part of the country. To protect the wall paintings from war lords who were looting the northern monasteries, the Buddhist monks resolved to cut the painting in to 63 sections and hid them. They eventually sold the painting in 1923 to a syndicate of Chinese art dealers from Beijing from whom Bishop White purchased it in 1928 for the Royal Ontario Museum where it was installed in 1933 after being reassembled. It was acquired through the generosity of the Sir Joseph Flavelle Foundation, in memory of Sir Joseph Flavelle, a prominent Toronto businessman and Trustee of the ROM.
The Paradise of Maitreya is currently dated as having been composed in 1298 and is one of the best surviving examples of its kind from late Yuan period, but there has been much scholarly debate about the exact date of composition. Bishop White himself contributed a monograph on the subject, arguing for a slightly earlier date, and suggesting that the painting should be attributed to Zhu Haogu, whose name Bishop White procured from the temple records before it was destroyed. This attribution has been accepted by subsequent scholars and has been a useful point of reference for research into the development of a Buddhist-Daoist style of temple art in southern Shanxi Province.
The Sculptures (12-15th Centuries)