Chinese Junks Sampans, Shanghai River
1865
Medium
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Dimensions
21.3 × 31.6 cm (8 3/8 × 12 7/16 in.)
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Cynthia Hazen Polsky Gift, 2005
Accession Number
2005.100.583 (91b)
Art Historical Context
In 1865, Scottish photographer John Thomson captured *Chinese Junks Sampans, Shanghai River*, a vivid albumen silver print that offers a window into mid-19th-century China during the height of Western trade influence. Shanghai, a bustling treaty port following the Opium Wars, teemed with traditional junks—sturdy sailing vessels with distinctive curved sails—and nimble sampans ferrying goods and people along the Huangpu River. Thomson, a pioneering photojournalist known for his ethnographic work in Asia, documented everyday scenes like this with remarkable clarity, later publishing them in his ...
About the Artist
John Thomson · 1837–1921
John Thomson (1837–1921), a pioneering Scottish photographer, was born on 14 June 1837 in Edinburgh as the eighth of nine children to William Thomson, a tobacco spinner and trader, and Isabella Newlands.) After schooling in the early 1850s, he apprenticed with a local optical and scientific instrument manufacturer, where he mastered the principles of photography, completing his training around 185...