A Royal Eye for the Chinese

In 1632, Sweden's royal palace had only one painting on its walls. That was the year Queen Christina came to the throne: 22 years and 500 paintings later, she had made Stockholm into the Athens of the North. Now 300 years and 14 monarchs later, Sweden has still another royal art lover. He is Gustaf VI Adolf, 84, and he collects things Chinese.

Sixty years have passed since Gustaf made his first purchase: a hexagonal famille rose dish of the Ch'ien Lung period. In the interim he has bought about 2,400 objects for his collection which he works at with as much archaeological curiosity as artistic love. Even the dog he gave the late Queen Louise is a Pekinese named Eisei, and she laps water from a modern Scandinavian imitation of an ancient Chinese stoneware bowl placed on a square of Chinese carpet in the palace's museum room.

At the age of 15, Gustaf began digging for viking relies in, of all places, the gardens of Sweden's sumer castle. He found none, but that did not blunt his enthusiasm for further exporation. He studied archaeology at Uppsala University, and while a student, unearthed one of his nation's most precious artifacts--a gold-plated sword dating from Sweden's Iron Age. As the young Crown Prince, Gustaf in 1926 visited the Orient, where he met Swedish archaeologists busy uncovering China's prehistoric ages. Fascinated by the similarity between Viking and ancient Chinese bronze objects, Gustaf began collecting, helped stock Stockholm's Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities.

Currently, 150 choice pieces from King Gustaf's collection are touring the U.S., and last week went on exhibition in New York's Asia House Gallery. Typical of his sharp-eyed acquisitiveness are his ceramic brace of Northern Wei young women. Dating from around A.D. 500, they stand only 6 3/4-in. high and represent dancers ready to perform in a nobleman's house. The piece was never meant to be seen by living eyes; like funeral objects found in Egyptian tombs, the sculpture was placed in the elegant grave of a dead princeling as a token of worldly pleasures to accompany him in the afterlife.

The late Queen Louise lovingly used to twit the King about his digging enthusiasms. Once, while the royal limousine was inching along a torn-up street in Stockholm, she asked him: "Gusti, have you been busy here lately?" But she was equally proud of his accomplishments, used to remark: "I didn't marry a King. I married a professor." And very like a professor the King still acts, always carrying a pocket magnifying glass and often remarking that if Sweden ever got rid of his crown, he could always go to work in a museum.

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