Museum accessions.

Shortly before her death in February 1816, Everarda Catharina Sophia Roberts Morris (nee van Braam Houckgeest) decided to have her wishes for the disposition of her personal affects recorded. A surviving handwritten memorandum, probably dictated to her second husband, Staats Long Morris, shows that she wished to divide them primarily between her three daughters, specifying for each one pieces of jewelry, clothing, and some of the Chinese export objects that she had received from her father, Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest (widely referred to without Houckgeest, which he added in 1763). Among the things from her father that Everarda left to her middle daughter, Louisa, were "my toilet complete, my mother's likeness supported by Hope, and the two smaller Chinese paintings,... and second best of the ivory fans." These objects have been kept together ever since by Louisa's descendants, and earlier this year they were acquired, together with a pair of armchairs that had also belonged to Andreas van Braam, by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, thus preserving a window into the colorful life of a man who was central to the important crosscurrents of Sino-Dutch relations in the eighteenth century.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Born in the Netherlands in 1739, van Braam first went to China in 1758 as a supercargo for the Dutch East India Company. In 1773 he returned to the Netherlands, and from there enthusiastically followed developments in the American Revolution. In 1783 he moved with his wife and five children to Charleston, South Carolina, where among other endeavors he experimented with growing rice in the Chinese fashion. But four of his children died in a diphtheria epidemic in 1784 and he suffered financial reverses, so in 1788 he and his wife and a newborn daughter departed for the Netherlands, from whence he proceeded alone to China. His eldest daughter, Everarda, remained in Charleston, having married Richard Brooke Roberts in January 1785.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Van Braam arrived in Canton (now Guangzhou) in 1790 and remained in China for nearly five years, the high point being a six-month journey to Peking (now Beijing) as one of the two Dutch ambassadors to the lavish ceremonies marking the sixtieth anniversary of the accession of the Qianlong emperor. During these years in China van Braam commissioned thousands of watercolors, paintings, and maps and collected quantities of furniture, porcelain, silver, lacquerwares, silks, and other Chinese arts, which, in ...