''The Chinese Convert'' is a 1687 painting by Godfrey Kneller depicting the Chinese Catholic convert Michael Alphonsius Shen Fu-Tsung. The painting was ordered by King James II when he met Shen Fu-Tsung during his visit to

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in 1685. The king was so delighted by this visit that he commissioned the portrait, and had it hung in his bedroom. The portrait remains in the Royal Collection, and usually still hangs at

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. Shen also visited Oxford, where he helped catalogue the Bodleian Library's collection of Chinese books. Shen left China in 1681 with Philippe Couplet SJ for a tour of Europe, where Couplet planned to promote the Jesuit's China Mission and plead the Jesuit cause before Pope Innocent XI. Couplet was to be accompanied by five Chinese candidates for the priesthood, including

Wu Li Wu Li, SJ (); ca. 1632-1718 was a Chinese landscape painter, poet, calligrapher and Jesuit from Jiangsu who lived during the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912). Wu was born in Changzhou in the Jiangsu province of China. His style name was 'Yu Shan' ...

(Simon de Cunha) and Shen Fuzhong (Michael Shen). In the end only Michael Shen and another young candidate left with Couplet, and after a delay in

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, only Michael Shen went with Couplet on that tour of Europe. Being a young Jesuit candidate, Shen's meeting with the English king was only possible during a brief period in post-Reformation English history, when the king was a Roman Catholic and Jesuits were received at court. A year later, in 1688, James II was deposed and replaced by the Protestant William III and Mary II, and so that encounter between king, Jesuit, and artist — James II, Michael Shen Fuzong, and Sir Godfrey Kneller — could not otherwise have happened. But the result of that encounter was an important Western portrait of a Chinese subject, and hence also its name, "The Chinese Convert".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chinese Convert, The Paintings by Godfrey Kneller Portraits by British artists 17th-century portraits 1687 paintings Paintings in the Royal Collection of the United Kingdom