fffl=
THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART
Ingalls Library
(J
CHINESE
LANDSCAPE
PAINTING
by Sherman E. Lee
THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART, CLEVELAND, OHIO
>v. i
THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART
BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Harold T. Clark Ralph M. Coe Edward B. Greene Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Mrs. Albert S. Ingalls
Severance A. Millikin Laurence H. Norton Mrs. R. Henry Norweb Ralph S. Schmitt G. Garretson Wade
Lewis B. Williams
LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Bowdoin College Museum of Fine Arts, Brunswick, Maine Fogg Art Museum, Harvard Univer¬ sity, Cambridge, Massachusetts The Art Institute of Chicago The Detroit Institute of Arts Honolulu Academy of Arts John Herron Art Museum, Indi¬ anapolis
Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Dudley Peter Allen Memorial Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio
City Art Museum of St. Louis Seattle Art Museum The Toledo Museum of Art National Gallery of Art (Rosenwald Collection), Washington, D.C.
Musee Guimet, Paris Museum fur Ostasiatische Kunst, Cologne
The Tokyo National Museum The Osaka Municipal Museum Richard B. Hobart, Cambridge, Massachusetts Eli Lilly, Indianapolis Nu Wa Chai Dr. R. Breuer, Beirut Kanichi Sumitomo, Oiso Kichizaemon Sumitomo, Kyoto Richard C. Rudolph, Los Angeles Mrs. Walter Sedgwick, London Mrs. Brenda Seligman, London Frank Caro, successor to C. T. Loo, New York
Durlacher Brothers, New York Heeramaneck Galleries, New York Walter Hochstadter, New York Howard Hollis and Company, Cleveland
Rosenberg and Stiebel, New York The Bamboo Studio, New York
Copyright, 1954 by The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland 6, Ohio.
2
ERRATA
CONTENTS
p. 144, 9, on silk, not on paper. Page
p. 145, 14, il, p. 28, not p. 27. 4
p. 145, 15, it. p. 32, notp. 15. p, 146, 30, il. p. 50, not p. 51.
p. 147, 32, il. p. 56, not p, 57. 11
p. 147, 34, il. p. 59, not p. 58. 23
p. 147, 36, il. p. 58, notp. 60.
. . . . . 43
p. -|49( 43, Hung Chili, not Hung Chin.
p. 150, 53a, il. p. 79, not p. SO. . 59
p.150, 54, il. p.80,. notp. 79. . 73
p. 150, 55, il. p. 82, notp. 81. p. 155, 97, il. p. 121, 122, not p. 117.
p.158,124, il. p.133 , not p.132. 102
. 115
. 142
. 144
. 159
. 169
3
THE CLEVELAND M
BOARI
Harold T. Clark Ralph M. Coe Edward B. Greene Leonard C. Hanna, Jr.
Mrs. Albert S. Ingalls
Lt
LENDERS TO THE
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Bowdoin College Museum of Arts, Brunswick, Maine Fogg Art Museum, Harvard Ur sity, Cambridge, Massachuseti The Art Institute of Chicago The Detroit Institute of Arts Honolulu Academy of Arts John Herron Art Museum, anapolis
Nelson Gallery of Art and A Museum, Kansas City, Missoi Museum of Art, Rhode Island S< of Design, Providence The Metropolitan Museum of New York
The Dudley Peter Allen Merr Museum, Oberlin College, Obi Ohio
City Art Museum of St. Louis Seattle Art Museum The Toledo Museum of Art National Gallery of Art (Rosenwald Collection), Washington, D.C.
Heeramaneck Galleries, New York Walter Hochstadter, New York Howard Hollis and Company, Cleveland
Rosenberg and Stiebel, New York The Bamboo Studio, New York
Copyright, 1954 by The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland 6, Ohio.
2
CONTENTS
Page
Preface and Acknowledgments . 4
Introduction . 5
The Beginnings of Landscape . 11
The Sung Dynasty . 23
The Yuan Dynasty . 43
The Ming Dynasty . 59
The Wu School . 73
Tung Ch’i-ch’ang and Some Individualists . 93
The Ch’ing Dynasty: Orthodox Painters . 102
The Individualists . 115
Bibliography . 142
Catalog . 144
Addenda— Foreign Loans . 159
Index of Artists . 169
3
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The bringing together of objects in a great loan exhibition is an occasion of im¬ portance for the casual visitor, but for the connoisseur and student it is a never-to-be- forgotten opportunity where objects carefully selected from the widest possible sources can be compared and studied in the juxtapositions which such an exhibition makes easy. The Cleveland Museum of Art is therefore very grateful to the lenders who have made this exhibition possible, and particularly to those who have aided in giving it the inter¬ national flavor which has added so immeasurably to its stature. The lenders are listed else¬ where but with them should be recorded the following who so graciously aided in the securing of foreign loans: Bluett and Sons, London, for aid on English loans; Mine, Jean- nine Auboyer and Georges Salles for assistance from Musee Guimet, Paris; Seiichiro Takahashi, Chairman, and the Commission for Protection of Cultural Properties, for Jap¬ anese loans; Shujiro Shimada of the Kyoto National Museum for loans from Kanichi Su¬ mitomo and Kichizaemon Sumitomo; Junkichi Mayuyama, Tokyo, for numerous favors in forwarding Japanese communications; and Prof, Dr, Werner Speiser, Cologne.
An exhibition catalog can be an ephemeral thing so that the grant of monies through Hanna Fund and its President, Leonard C, Hanna, Jr., was of the utmost impor¬ tance; it made possible instead the publishing in far more permanent form of this book on the development of Chinese landscape painting, the objects in the exhibition being used as cogent material and almost all being illustrated.
Many are the scholars to whom we are indebted for specific information, for translations and many seal identifications, and for recordings in Chinese sources: Laur¬ ence Sickman, Director, Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri; Dr, Gustav Ecke, Honolulu; Aschwin Lippe, Associate Curator of Far Eastern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Richard Edwards of the Fogg Art Museum for most of the aid in these matters; Wen Fong for translations of inscriptions on some of the paintings in The Cleveland Museum of Art; James Cahill, New York, for aid on some of true Yuan paintings; and Tseng Hsien-ch'i, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for assistance to Mr. Edwards,
Photographs of Chinese scenery have been made available through the cooperation of Osvald Siren {those on pp. 50, SO, 118) and Walter Hochstadter (those on pp. 29, 31, 38, 81, 84, 90). For photographs in the exhibition we are grateful for those furnished by the various owners and for others made by Richard Godfrey, the photographer of the Museum,
Staff members, such as William E. Ward, Miss Dorothy Sasak, and Miss Gay Samp- liner, have been of invaluable aid in bringing the material into final form. But above all we are indebted to Dr. Lee for his selection of the material shown and for his ability to secure the gracious and generous aid which has made this exhibition and this book pos¬ sible.
July 27, 1954 William M, Milliken
Director, The Cleveland Museum of Art
4
INTRODUCTION
Landscape is the great subject of Chinese painting and Westerners are properly amazed at the very early date of its first full expression. At this time in the ninth and tenth centuries there was nothing in Europe that could be remotely considered a developed landscape art. And yet, if we go further back, to the Mediterranean world in Hellenistic times, we find that there was once a creative and forward looking Occidental landscape art; and even more, that the high state of that art, as seen in the frescoes of the Odyssey in the Vatican, predated a comparable stage in the history of Far Eastern landscape painting. The preconditions for landscape include a non-anthropomorphic nature philoso¬ phy. In the Hellenistic and Roman world this was present in a philosophy for which Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura was the prime literary expression. Chris¬ tianity changed all this and landscape was buried in the West, not to re¬ appear until a more sympathetic attitude to nature was evinced by the thinkers and doers of the post-Renaissance. The early pure landscapes of Claude, Pous¬ sin, Rubens, and Ruisdael are seventeenth-century creations, but still domin¬ ated in number by the more acceptable categories of figure painting. The de¬ velopment of landscape into a dominant category in Western painting occurs in the “materialistic” nineteenth century.
In China nothing occurred to seriously interrupt or reverse the steady growth of a generally accepted philosophy of nature that provided a perfect climate for great landscape painting. While the very first evocations of nature are magical with a heavy overlay of an earlier animism, there is also present an idea of universal orientation. The magic mountain80 is not only an abode of strange spirits, but an axis from which the four directions emanate. This direc¬ tional significance remains in early landscape painting. Ku K’ai-chih wrote in the fourth century, How to Paint the Cloud Terrace Mountain ,51 "Now, in the middle section to the east, I would draw ...” This orientation concept leads us away from the magical to the first of the two dominant Chinese philoso¬ phies which were all-important to a landscape art.
Confucianism, originally and as it developed, was not merely a system of ethics for humans, but was a rational world view of remarkable consistency. While the Analects (Lun Yu) may regard nature with a human bias in the famous quotation, “The wise men find pleasure in water; the virtuous find pleasure in mountains,” the almost contemporary Conduct of Life (Chung
Note: The superior figures in the text refer to the books and articles listed in the Selected Bibliography, p. 142. Diacritical marks have been omitted from Chinese names and words.
5
Yung), a favorite compilation of later philosophers, assumes a more general and universal position: “Nature is vast, deep, high, intelligent, infinite and eternal.” In this view nature’s principles exist for their own sake with no ulterior or fathomable motives. Since the natural order or principle (Li) per¬ vades all things, all things are worthy subjects of attention. Further, since we can observe the fallibility of man, the apparent infallibility of nature makes it the subject in which Li can be shown in its purest form. The first full pictorial expression of this rational attitude will be seen in the Northern Sung period; but it was ever present in the minds of earlier painters and critics. Thus the first and most important of the six pictorial canons listed by Hsieh Ho in the fifth century, “animation through spirit consonance,”61 refers as much to a ra¬ tional correspondence of painting to principle as to mystic responsiveness to the Taoist Way of the Universe.51 In general the end result of Confucian thought on nature was oriented to both humanity and nature. The great tenth-century painter, Ching Hao, writes with both morality and principle in mind:
Every tree grows according to its natural disposition. Pine trees may grow bent and crooked, but by nature they are never too crooked . . . They are upright from the beginning. Even as saplings their soul is not lowly, but their form is noble and solitary . . . Indeed the pine-trees of the forests are like the moral character of virtuous men which is like the breeze.51
The second controlling attitude, Taoism, was more immediately derived from magical attitudes. But in its purest form Taoism provided the intuitive and direct response to nature which was as necessary as rationality. When the seventeenth-century individualist painter, Shih-t’ao, equated the mountain with the wave (water— mysterious female), he was returning to ancient Taoist con¬ cepts as expressed in Tsung Ping (early fourth century).
In this manner, one may represent in a picture the sublime beauty of the Sung and Hua mountains and the spirit of Hsuan Fin (Mysterious Female- Spirit of the Valley) which dwells therein.51
Tsung, in turn, was referring to the source of most Taoist thought, The Tao-te- ching (fourth century B.C.):
The Valley Spirit never dies.
It is named the Mysterious Female.
And the Doorway of the Mysterious Female
Is the base from which Heaven and Earth sprang.
It is there within us all the while;
Draw upon it as you will, it never runs dry.
— tr. A. Waley, The Way and Its Power
—where the valley is thought of as the low point, the gatherer of waters, and hence female. The Taoist intuition of nature was ever the mystic half of the
6
Chinese landscape painter, even when it was later cloaked in the garb of Ch’an Buddhism, the only form of Buddhism that provided a drive for land¬ scape painting. All of these viewpoints, magical, Confucian, and Taoist, make it clear that there is more than the merely literal to the Chinese term for land¬ scape: Shan-shui, “mountain-water” (picture).
But philosophers do not paint and artists do. In this the Chinese painter is no different from his Western counterpart, so well described by Focillon in The Life of Forms in Art:
He is human; he is not a machine. Because he is a man I grant him every¬ thing. But his special privilege is to imagine, to recollect, to think, and to feel in forms.
Just so the Chinese. When Tsung Ping refers to the already quoted passage from the Analects he says, “But the lovers of landscapes are led into the Way by a sense of form.”51
Chinese painting then is concerned with forms seen or imagined by the eyes of a Chinese, but still forms. And while it is true that a Westerner can never see a Chinese painting in a completely Chinese way, the reverse is equally true. Where the Chinese sees the very real quality of brushwork as related to calligraphy, he also imagines the accepted cliches of a “pure and noble spirit . . . above the ordinary crowd.” Where the Westerner sees an original handling of the problem of space composition he also imagines his cliches: the metaphysical significance of the empty silk or the “lovely and dec¬ orative” colors of the later Chinese professional painter-artisan. We are not Chinese nor ever can be, but we can discipline ourselves to understand some¬ thing of that country’s approach to her own painting. This can be done with integrity only if we, at the same time, maintain our “Westernness,” especially in the sense of our objective knowledge of materials and technique and, above all, of style, of forms. Each Chinese painting exists. There it is before us. If to each successive generation of Chinese it was a different painting, how much more so for us. But now it is “our” painting. We can try to see what it was; we see what it is. Both visions are valid and both are taken for granted here.
To the Chinese the purest of the arts is calligraphy for it is pure brush and pure idea,13 the two farthest extremes of material and ideal combined into an inseparable whole. To the Chinese the value judgment of a picture rests primarily on its brushwork as related to, and derived from, calligraphy. The nearest we Westerners can get to the essence of what a Chinese sees in Chinese painting is our concept of touch. Touch differentiates one artist from another and the artist from the non-artist. If we think of the difference be¬ tween the touches of Rembrandt and of Bol, or between the touch of Vermeer
7
and that of Van Meegeren, then we are thinking of something not unlike the concept of brushwork in a Chinese painting. Look at the last picture in the ex¬ hibition, the little page by Ch’ien Tu (117, il. p. 141). Study the circles used for foliage in the background. Note their fatness, as if they were filled with water. Look at the detail of the Wang Hui (84, il. p. 104) and note the precision and shape of each stroke as it falls on the paper in an almost measured ca¬ dence. Then turn to the freer examples such as the Wen Cheng-ming (56, il. p. 84) or the Kuo Hsi (13, il p. 26), and consider them as masterpieces of touch.
The second of the more obvious barriers is the Chinese use of type forms. Not that they did not go to nature, even in the form of sketching. We have enough literary evidence that they did. Again Ching Hao:
Astonished by this curious spectacle (a gnarled and gigantic pine) I walked around and admired it. The next day I returned with my brushes and sketched some of the pine trees. After drawing several they seemed real to me.51
or Wang Li (fourteenth century):
As long as I did not know the form of the Hua Mountain, how could I make a picture of it?56
But still the Chinese landscape is primarily a complex of brush symbols for nature.12 Ruskin would not have liked it, for it does what Claude and other man¬ nerist or ideal painters did. They used types: type elms, type rivers, type forests, intended to be taken as an aesthetic and ideal re-creation. One could not copy nature, one could only create a landscape painting.
Such an achievement for the Chinese could only be accomplished through brushwork. But how varied, rich, and complex that brushwork could be! We have more readily accepted the single brush stroke type of Chinese painting, the type of the Southern Sung period (20, il. p. 38), and we have often identified this one of many styles with the style of Chinese painting. But there were other ways used at all times and just as deserving of our attention. Consider the method of Kuo Hsi (eleventh century):
Having drawn a picture, he would retouch here and add there; augment and adorn it. If once would have been sufficient, he would go back to it for the second time. If twice would have been enough he would go back to it the third time . . . From beginning to end he worked as if lie were guarding against a strong enemy.31 (13, il. p. 26)
In order to help this understanding of touch, relationship to nature, and variety of technique, we have drawn, to a limited extent, on old and mo¬ dern Occidental drawings and on photographs of the Chinese countryside, and have used these in juxtaposition with comparable Chinese landscapes in the
8
exhibition. These secondary aids may assist in making the scrolls less strange. At the same time the visual comparisons will highlight the real differences of the Chinese eye from the Western eye, or of the real landscape from the painted one.
Chinese landscape painting is an aristocratic production from begin¬ ning to end. Painting came after writing. Literacy was the first prerequisite and the second was literary knowledge. How could one use a brush if one could not write, and write well? How else could one know of Li and the first re¬ quirement of good painting, “animation through spirit consonance?” The schol¬ ar was, therefore, the principal class from which the great painters came. Fur¬ ther, the scholars painted for scholars. The standard formats for painting, the hanging scroll, the handscroll, and the album, were portable. They could be hung at will or carried wherever the owner wished. With the possible excep¬ tion of the hanging scroll, the formats were intimate, to be seen by only one person or a few friends at a time. If we wish to experience something of the private and exclusive joy of the scholar-painter-collector, we must think of books. And there we are again back to the word literary which is perhaps the best definition of the term for the creative painters from at least the twelfth century on: wen jen hua, gentleman’s painting. But since only gentlemen were literary— the literary man’s school. Sir Kenneth Clark" has compared this con¬ cept with that in England involving the appreciation of Claude. Claude’s land¬ scapes and their titles were full of just those classical ruins and allusions that were of interest to the literate man. In China this feeling of aristocratic exclu¬ siveness extended to the appreciation of nature. This poem of Po Chu-i (772- 846) perfectly expresses the literary man’s feeling being above and apart from the crowd:
The snow has gone from Chung-nan; spring is almost come.
Lovely in the distance its blue colors, against the brown of the streets.
A thousand coaches, ten thousand horsemen pass down the Nine Roads.
Turns his head and looks at the mountains — not one man.
— tr. A. Waley, More Translations from the Chinese
The idea of the literary man’s school was further developed in the early seventeenth century by the application of the term “Southern School” to the lit¬ erary style. Its opposite, the professional-artisan school, was then called “North¬ ern.” While not all of the “Northern” School deserved the scorn of the critics, in general the literary school was the more creative one, especially in land¬ scape and particularly after the fourteenth century. There is, statistically speak¬ ing, some justification for the geographic distinction even though it is gener¬ ally understood as a qualitative description. In the landscape listings of Kuo
9
Jo-hsu,02 who wrote in the eleventh century, twenty-four of thirty-seven paint¬ ers are from the North; but fifty-three of sixty Yuan or later painters in this exhibition, for example, came from the South. In part it is because the literati were driven there, first by the Tartars and Mongols, and later, in the seven¬ teenth century, by the Manchus. Also, the milder climate of the South with its accompanying rich vegetation made it a favorite residence for the economically self-sufficient, including the scholar-official and his patrons. The life of retire¬ ment or the retreat of the recluse was more feasible in the South. But even more than these objective reasons there remains an apparently natural affinity of the South for landscape. The earliest landscape in the exhibition (1, il. p. 11) is from the South. Buddhism’s greatest triumphs were in the North and with them appeared the greatest efflorescence of a public and a figural art. The South remained the stronghold of Taoist thought, aristocratic painting, and of emerging landscape art.88
Landscape paintings made up a major part of the great Chinese col¬ lections from the Sung Dynasty on. While the fact that a painting comes from a famous collection does not automatically prove it good, such a provenance is at least a good character reference. The growth of the Chinese painting collec¬ tions in this country, beginning with Boston, the Freer Gallery in Washington, and later with Kansas City, has now spread rather more widely than we im¬ agine. And so one can now present a selection of landscape paintings not only of intrinsic interest, but also with accompanying pedigrees in the form of owners' seals and colophons that read rather like a blue book of the great collections: for example, there are twelve paintings from the Imperial Ch’ien Lung collection (1736-1796); four paintings from the collection of the famous connoisseur, the Korean salt merchant An Ch’i (1683-ca. 1742); ten paintings formerly belonging to Liang Ch’ing-piao (1620-1691), perhaps the greatest connoisseur of all; and five paintings from the extensive, if uneven, holdings of Hsiang Yuan-pien (1525-1590). All the standard formats of landscape paint¬ ing are well-represented. The numerical representations from the various periods are comparable, allowing for the greater surviving quantity of post- Yuan painting. Some of the great painters are missing but in general the as¬ sembled exhibition gives an adequate and authentic view of Chinese landscape art.
10
THE BEGINNINGS OF LANDSCAPE
The earliest landscape representations in China take us back to at least the Late Chou period (fifth-third century B.C.). Most of these occur in cast metal; usually stylized trees or mountains on bronze mirrors and inlaid bronze vessels, eT with one rare example in carved jade. But a unique example of even a semi-pictorial technique is to be found in the representation of trees incised on a thin-shelled bronze ewer (1, il. p. 11), reputedly from Ch’ang Sha in South
1
China. The striated and rather naturalistic technique has affinities with some slightly later stone reliefs from West China (Szechuan).50 While the delicately but simply incised lines on the ewer differentiate four tree types and, perhaps, grasses, these elements are distinguished by symbolic over-simplifications which clearly reveal a lack of interest in landscape as such, other than as a magical set¬ ting for figures performing magical rites.
While the pictorial means for landscape representation at this time were comparatively meager, the literary means were much more varied and complex,
11
and we find numerous poems in the Book of Odes and other sources which re¬ veal the beginnings of a sensitive awareness of nature, but again as a setting, either for moral or narrative purposes or, as in the bronze ewer, for magical evocation.
Grandly lofty are the mountains, with their large masses reaching to the heavens- From those mountains was sent down a spirit, who produced the birth of Fu and Shan*#
The succeeding Han Dynasty (206 B.d-A.D. 220) was a time of great development in figure and space representation with landscape remaining in a secondary position as a setting for the dominant figures* By this time two addi¬ tional modes of landscape portrayal may be distinguished.67 Again these are in media other than painting though the evidence is clear that the gap is due to the destruction of painted material* Stamped pottery tomb tiles, common enough as to material, sometimes use a mountain pattern as a base line for scenes of the chase or for magical bird-men, the spirits of the mountain and untamed nature* One unusual tile (2, detail on title page) presents the two mountain styles together on three friezes, one above the other. The uppermost, with the bird-man of Chinese origin, uses the continuous wave mountain range.
# From the Ode “Sung Kao/* tr. by Legge in M, Muller, Sacred Books of the East , V. 3, p. 423*
12
a foreign import which can be traced to the Near East* The middle and lower friezes have figures of foreign origin, the hunt and chase motif imported from the Near East by way of the Steppes,60 but the landscape base line is of native inspiration* It consists of linear and rhythmically undulating mountain sym¬ bols of a cloud-like nature* This form can be found as early as Late Chou, being used for clouds, mountains, or even as linear decoration out of which landscape elements sprout, a fine example of a decorative form preceding and giving origin to a natural one* Other stamped tiles (3, ik p* 12) from West China show a surprisingly real and spacious setting for a hunting scene based on observation and possibly evolving from such earlier representations as the bronze basin*
The specifically Chinese linear and rhythmical landscape setting is further developed in the later Han Dynasty and is found on many stamped or molded and glazed pottery vessels (4, il. p. 12)* By this time cliffs, mountains, rocks,
13
and trees are clearly differentiated but without a sense of relative scale and without loss of the playful movement of the line. These, too, are settings for ani¬ mals and figures of magic import.
A pathetically few paintings remain from the late Han or early Six Dynasties period (third-fourth century).22 They are found on bronze mirrors, inside the lids of bronze boxes, or on lacquer bowls or boxes, and on white slip- coated tomb tiles. Of the few, even fewer show landscape elements and the ex¬ ample in the exhibition (5, il. p. 13) is unique in its keenness of observation and its obviously experienced use of the brush as a descriptive rather than a decora¬ tive tool. Still the tree indicates a setting only. It is a prop saying “the scene is out-of-doors.” Space is indicated not by landscape but by the figures, some in three-quarters view and one kneeling, placed above and hence beyond the ad¬ jacent standing man. In contrast to this very direct and simple setting is the complex and exuberant landscape developed from the linear-rhythmical style (6, il. p. 14) by about the fourth century. The incised bronze surface seems alive, not only because of the animal-chase frieze in front but also through the land-
6 ' derail !
14
scape backdrop with its differentiated banana and ginko trees, overlapping angular rocks, overlapping rounded mountains, and rippling water. Still there is no real space, even in a limited cell- like sense, for the swaddled figure to the right of the pond is simply another flat shape superimposed on the flat land¬ scape behind.
The succeeding few centuries have left us few major painted land¬ scape monuments. From the late fourth or early fifth century we have the scroll by Ku Kfai-chih, in the British Museum, which contains a sophisticated rend¬ ering of an incidental and archaic landscape.®0 The numerous fifth- and sixth- century Buddhist frescoes in northwest China at Tun Huang77- 40, 41 establish space control in a landscape as a setting for primarily narrative purposes. These space cells were the means of enclosing figures; and the recession of successive mountain or rock ranges was developed as a setting for more expansive story¬ telling or more violent scenes of action.60 The somewhat later painted banners from Tun Huang show the landscape methods on a smaller scale (8 & 9, 9 il. p. 16). The border fragment suggests space and setting by raising the ground
Anonymous
16
plane and by marking it off with bands of hummocks and grasses. The votive picture sets forth, within the linear-rhythmical format, more solid individual elements, ledges, trees, and cliffs. But it is retrogressive in its curiously naive use of an almost perfectly symmetrical landscape arrangement, as if nature her¬ self were made up of religious implements which could be arranged to conform with the iconic rectitude of the deity and donors.
Clearly the creation of a pure landscape art was beyond or beneath the interests of anthropomorphic Buddhism, and charming or interesting as all the “landscapes” from Tun Huang may be, they are essentially an echo of an¬ other more sophisticated and more serious interest in nature. This interest we can know only second-hand from a few Japanese incidental landscapes of the eighth century, but principally from literary materials of the period. These are largely works of poetry, philosophy, and art criticism and they reflect the Taoist-influenced concern with the meaning of the Universe especially in the manifestations of nature as a mysterious or magical power. Thus Tao-yun (ca. 400) writes:
High rises the Eastern Peak Soaring up to the blue sky.
Among the rocks — an empty hollow Secret, still, mysterious!
Uncarved and unhewn.
Screened by nature with a roof of clouds.
Times and Seasons, what things are you Bringing to my life’s ceaseless change?
I will lodge forever in this hollow Where Springs and Autumns unheeded pass.
— tr. A. Waley, More Translations from the Chinese
We find the same concern with nature as a mysterious force in the Introduction to Landscape Painting by Tsung Ping (375-443)51 with the usual mixture of such Taoist thought with the Confucian ideal of the sage who draws virtue from nature. Tsung, being a painter, is “led into the Way by a sense of form.” Still at this time landscape is realized more fully in verbal than in pictorial terms. We can see this not only in the sharp contrast between the grand de¬ scription by Ku K’ai-chih of How to Paint the Cloud Terrace Mountain 51 and the relatively feeble pictorial accomplishment seen in the mountain section of his painting in the British Museum, but also in the History of Painting writ¬ ten by Chang Yen-yuan in the ninth century. He disparages the landscape paint¬ ing of previous times:
There are still some famous pictures handed down from the Wei and Chin Dynasties, and I have had occasion to see them. The landscapes are filled with crowded peaks, their effect is like that of filigree ornaments or horn
17
combs. Sometimes the water does not seem to flow, sometimes the figures are larger than the mountains. The views are generally enclosed by trees and stones which stand in a circle on the ground. They look like rows of lifted arms with outspread fingers-56
This is a good description of the Tun Huang votive picture (9, il. p, 16). Final evidence for the lack of a real landscape art in the Six Dynasties period is con¬ tributed by the famous first canon of Hsieh Ho which demands “ ch* i-yun-sheng- tung— animation through spirit consonance” as the first and last requirement for great painting. However, the requirement seemingly does not apply to land¬ scapes but to figures or sentient beings,01 for Chang's History specifically ex¬ cludes trees and stones from ch’i yun . We are still in a pre -landscape atmos¬ phere.
The final preparations for a true landscape art are achievements of the T’ang Dynasty (618-907). Two other functions were added to the magical and supporting role of landscapes, both with motivations of a more direct and pragmatic nature in accordance with one aspect of T ang culture. First, land¬ scape became a means of aiding sophisticated decoration- We know copies of courtly palace scenes in park-like settings, painted in green, blue, arid gold.47
7 (defai/J
18
Then there were large scale wall decorations now lost, but attested to by the retardataire eleventh-century tomb murals of the foreign Liao Dynasty in Man¬ churia,39 as well as by literary evidence. The specifically symbolic use of the Seasons or Directions was evidently continued in these wall landscapes as well as the secondary aesthetic position for landscape painting implied by the mere fact of its use as architectural decoration. Second, we have a topographical and descriptive approach which owes much of its drive to the same interests that produced maps and gazetteers. Indeed the earliest “pure” landscape painter, revered as the traditional father of the accepted landscape tradition, Wang Wei (698-759), would seem to have been such a descriptive painter to judge by his most famous scroll, now known to us only through painted or engraved-on- stone copies of a much later date (7, il. p. 18).33 The organization is additive and consists of a series of space cells enclosing the principal points of interest, largely architectural, on the artist-scholar-official’s estate. The ground plane is tilted in an early map-like fashion, and each cell or point of interest is carefully labeled. Nearly all of the painted copies indicate the original to have been in the green and blue decorative style associated with the courtly palace paintings
after Wang Wei
19
20
Anonymous
of the period and which we also find in the Tun Huang fragments (9, ih p. 16)* Still, tradition credits Wang with the origin of monochrome landscape painting and other works, one a possibly original or, at worst, near-original small winter landscape formerly in the Palace Collection,55 show a more developed landscape style* But in the last analysis it is still closer to what had gone before than to the full style which was soon to develop* Such an inference can be supported quantitatively by statements of later writers such as Wang Shih-chen (1526- 1593) that “generally speaking the landscape painters before the Five Dynasties (907-960) were few;”5*1 or by the really small number of pure landscape titles to be found in records of collections up to the eleventh century; Even after the florescence of landscape painting, in the early twelfth-century catalog of Em¬ peror Hui Tsung, religious subjects were placed ahead of landscape*
The beautiful Tribute Horse (10, ih p- 20) is one of our best documents for summing up the position of landscape painting at this point in our nar¬ rative* A work of the tenth or eleventh century, it is a rather conservative state¬ ment of earlier principles with an overlay of up-to-date details. The richly col¬ ored horsemen give a sure hint as to the courtly-colored style of the painting* As we shall see, there are elements of the Northern Sung monumental landscape style present, especially in the treatment of the rocks and distant mountains. In these we sense a new, endlessly expanded world after the cramped quarters of the past* However, gold and what was once considerable color is to be found throughout the landscape as well as a rather careful descriptive handling of the principal tree. Meaningfully, the tree is placed in the immediate fore¬ ground as a space indicator for the frieze of figures, a typically T’ang or even late Six Dynasties device. All of the parts of t he picture are carefully separated, whether details or the more general sub-divisions of composition on the surface of the silk or in the suggested recessions of space. The Tribute Horse may well be one of our best portable keys to the more conservative side of landscape wall painting; and yet there are so many fundamentally new elements that we must now consider their foundation and evolution*
21
11
Anonymous
22
THE SUNG DYNASTY
With Buddhist Temple in the Hills after Rain, (1 1, il. p. 22), probably an eleventh-century work close to the style of Li Ch’eng, landscape has become the subject of the painting and, as the title implies, its raison d’etre. The qual¬ ifying phrase, “after rain,” applies to the natural prospect. The temple hap¬ pens to be there. If we examine the picture objectively, we find a centralized composition with a relatively equal emphasis on its various parts. The fore and middle grounds are united, but clearly separated in space from the distant mountain masses whose bases are lightened so as to silhouette and separate nearer details. The recessions in space are accomplished by a careful and clear series of flat rock or mountain planes placed parallel to the picture plane. Representationally, the forms of nature are translated into brush-terms but not yet at the expense of the natural form. There is a tremendous effort to grasp the reality of nature within a highly schematic and intellectual format. The result is all-embracing and monumental, a true macrocosm.
In this post-T’ang period of the Five Dynasties and the Northern Sung Dynasty (960-1 127), the speculative theories of nature attain an unmatched height, reconciling the rectitude of Nature found in the interrelationships of Heaven, Earth, and Man as expressed in Li or “principle,” with the direct and keen observation of nature as it existed. Thus, for example, large trees must be on solid ground and “far-away figures have no eyes.” This is the technique of landscape painting as expressive of the principles of nature. Nor are the sea¬ sonal, directional, and geographical aspects ignored. Added to these is pure enjoyment, both with regard to the object and to its depiction as we read in the surviving words of the great painters Ching Hao and Kuo Hsi (13, il. p. 26).51 These various preconditions for the fulfillment of great landscape paint¬ ing were also due to “Buddhism’s gradual subsidence from its high place as the most inspiring influence in Chinese life, a process which had begun in the eighth and ninth centuries.”* As Focillon has shown, in other countries and other periods, once a sequence of related forms begins to evolve, the archaic or experimental period proceeds with great speed. Such is the case with Chi¬ nese landscape painting in the tenth and early eleventh centuries.
The Buddhist Temple in the Hills after Rain has introduced us to the results of the experimental period as seen in the hanging scroll format. Later hanging scrolls of the Northern Sung period may often display a greater depth
# L. C. Goodrich, A Short History of the Chinese People , New York, 1943, p. 155.
23
24
Attributed to Hsu Tao-nTng
of space and an increased feeling of mood, but with an ensuing loss of monu- mentality. This loss is compensated for, and perhaps related to, the growth of interest in the handscroll format. This unique and almost musical format is more easily preserved through the vicissitudes of war and peace, and, happily, we are able to study and show an unprecedentedly rich assembly of Northern Sung landscape handscrolls. (12-16, il. pp. 24, 26, 28, 30, 32.)
Perhaps the earliest of these, and certainly the most monumental in scale and symmetrically balanced in composition, is the scroll, Fishing in a Mountain Stream (12, il. p. 24). The traditional attribution is to Hsu Tao-ning who flourished in the early eleventh century and was known to his contemporaries as a master of winter “moods” and in his later years for a “fresh and spontan¬ eous” manner.62 Since the handscroll format for landscape was then a rela¬ tively experimental form, we can expect and do find a compromise between the verticality implicit in the older hanging scroll or wall format and the horizontal movement through time appropriate to the handscroll. The free and loose
25
26
Attributed to Kuo
calligraphic brushwork attests to the remarkable speed with which the land¬ scape art had matured. The second handscroll (13, il. p. 26) is attributed to Kuo Hsi, one of the greatest names in the history of Chinese painting, and show an increased complexity in the presentation of a similar northern barren land¬ scape view. The organization of space here does not depend upon planar over¬ laps so much as on staggered “islands” in a sea of flat, indefinite space. There may well have been more to the left of the painting where the near masses of the mountains provide a balance by contrast against the preceding open distances. The natural forms have an even stronger grotesque character than those of Hsu Tao-ning and an even freer and wetter handling of the brush. Kuo was estimated at the head of his generation62 and evidently justly so for his wry and personal outlook was supported by a great command of medium, representation, and format. He was a climactic figure and may well represent the end of a classic and balanced moment for Chinese landscape painting follow¬ ing the monumental and almost legendary founders of the tenth and early eleventh centuries, i.e., Ching Hao, Fan K’uan, Chu Jan, K’uan Tung, Li Ch’eng, and Hsu Tao-ning.
A virtual summary of accomplishment previous to the twelfth century, as well as a statement of new problems and insights, is to be found in the anonymous Streams and Mountains without End (14, il. p. 28). It is a signifi¬ cant monument, not only for this, but also because its date in the first quarter of the twelfth century can be established beyond a reasonable doubt by consis¬ tent colophons going back to at least 1205, at which time the painting wa already considered old; by its unique correspondence with the only archaeo¬ logical evidence available, a fragment on silk from Khara Khoto; and by its stylistic conformity with paintings in the Palace Collection likely to be North¬ ern Sung in date. As a summary. Streams and Mountains without End provides us, beginning with the first mountain range, with an archaic encircling moun¬ tain-space-cell of T’ang origins, a rolling and resonant distant mountain range in the manner of Tung Yuan, a crystalline and angular mountain range and valley in the style of Yen Wen-kuei, and finally a powerful vertical mountain state¬ ment, twisting and writhing like the mountains of Fan K’uan. The opening and closing flatlands are a new invention of the early twelfth century and illustrate a tendency to realism and further, a gentler, lyrical, and more intimate ap¬ proach than heretofore. The whole effect of a small and distant scale is also more in keeping with a realist attempt to reconcile the monumental with a small format, the conceptual and the austere with the visual and the intimate. All of these factors, both original and eclectic, combine with the excellent preservation to offer a “moistly-rich” original document of the transition from Northern to Southern Sung.
27
H
28
Anonymous
29
'«4 #
<9
Nt f A
1 1
I
Mi
30
Chiang Ts'an
Mountains (Shensi)
16 (detail)
31
15
A second and equally well-preserved landscape of the transition is Ver¬ dant Mountains (16, il. p. 30) where a single personality is evident in the in¬ formal composition and in the staccato and delicate touch. Calligraphic and free as this brush may be, the structural and visual relationship of the moun¬ tain range to its counterpart in nature, the mountains of Shensi (il. p. 31), is reassuring and certifies the belief of the Chinese painter that art proceeds from nature as well as from art.
On a smaller and even more intimate scale, the little album painting from Boston (17, il. p. 34) is another “in-between.” It is like Northern Sung in its relative completeness and interest in far as well as in near detail. It is like Southern Sung in its assymmetry and arbitrary juxtaposition of the large units. The diagonal composition with the two boats reversing the main direc¬ tion is as beautifully accomplished as the representation— a late summery day still save for an offshore breeze. The existence of the miniature-like detail is probably due to the “literal” style first sponsored by the Northern Sung Aca¬ demy during the reign of Emperor Hui Tsung which ended in 1127; but the rather playful and repetitive rhythms of the brush strokes are more like the aristocratic mannerisms of such Southern Sung court painters as Ma Ho-chih. The measure of difference between the middle and late Sung styles can be determined by the comparison of the Boston leaf with another similar composi-
32
Mi Yu-jen
tion from the Metropolitan Museum (21, il. p. 39) which is almost completely vaporized.
Before turning to the new and different solutions of the Southern Sung painters, we must note a personal and unusual mode of brush work which was the contribution of Mi Fei, followed by his son Mi Yu-jen (15, il. p. 32). While the format of Cloudy Mountains, with its firm, self-contained, and strongly architectonic composition, is basically Northern Sung and monumen¬ tal, the brushwork is markedly different. The blunt strokes are massed, giving a rich tone and a compact solidity to the forms of the mountains. At the same time there are elements such as the long brush strokes of the shore at the right which are rather arbitrary and dramatic and which anticipate the extravagantly bold brushwork of the spontaneous style of late Sung. The low- lying hills with their gentle contours and enfolding clouds, rather than sheets, of mist are characteristic of the Southern coastal regions and should be con¬ trasted with the more spectacular inland mountains or the great open spaces of the North.
The southward flight of the court after the Tartars’ capture of the Northern capital in 1127 marked the beginning of a century and a half of academic and individualistic painting activity which developed a second cli¬ mactic answer to the problems of landscape painting. In addition to the hang-
33
ing scroll and handscroll, the album painting, square or fan shaped, was an important and significant ground for painting* The resulting implications of m intimate and introspective result are well-founded* The typical styles of Southern Sung, despite sporadic efforts to revive monumentality, were the Lyric and later the Spontaneous.85 The first used sudden and arbitrary jux¬ tapositions of selected details or motifs combined with misty washes and highly calligraphic brush work; while the second, more conservative, even ar- chaistic in composition, expanded and specialized the intuitive and spontan-
34
18 Li Sung
eous command of the brush even to the extremes of the “flung-ink” style.
A small, fan-shaped painting by Li Sung, The Mountains and the Jas¬ per Sea of the Immortals (18, il. p. 35) indicates the preliminary direction and emphases of the Lyric style of Southern Sung. The fragmented composition is asymetrical in arrangement with a few accents of massed ink against the tex¬ ture of the water. The rough sea is bound by a perfectly controlled linear- rhythmical movement and hence we need have no fear for the boat with its occu¬ pants, close as it is to the rocks. The album leaf is treated like the emotive
35
36
* %
Hsia Kitei
37
fragment of a lyric poet. A simi¬ lar approach to a different subject can be found in another leaf. Re¬ turning Herder and Buffalo (19, il. p. 38). In this case the roman¬ tic spirit is conveyed in part by the low horizon and the asym¬ metry of the vertical and hori¬ zontal arrangements, but espe¬ cially by the deletion of distance through using the silk as mist, thus involving the spectator with the fragmented elements of the foreground: wind - blown trees, rustic cottages, man, and buffalo.
One of the few large-scale clas¬ sic statements of the Lyric mode is the extraordinary but incomplete work by Hsia Kuei (20, il. p. 36), T welve Scenes from a Thatched Cottage, of which the last four scenes are preserved. (A
38
complete version, but a later copy, is at Yale University.86) It is the '‘type” solu¬ tion of the style and period for the most difficult format, the handscroll. The essence of the achievement is dramatic contrast whether in details such as the transitions or juxtapositions of ink tones, contrasts of sharp brush strokes with soft, wet washes, or in larger matters such as near and far distance, complex units such as trees, nets, boats against empty silk-space, or a low, misty shore beside a soaring, sharp-edged mountain range. Where the Northern Sung painters had rather a uniformly detailed vision of nature in sharp focus, the
21
Anonymous
39
Ma-Hsia school chose to see things sharply or dimly, in or out of focus, in ac¬ cordance with a less rational, more emotional and dramatic approach. Where before the universal Li was expressed by rational examination and construc¬ tion, it was now selected intuitively here and there, found with a sudden sense of awareness. If we compare this with the Wang Wei copy, while each scene in each scroll is labeled, one needs only to look at the cramped topography of the earlier scroll and the immediacy of vision in the Hsia Kuei, to realize the long process that has intervened. The tie to the actuality of nature is still very
22
Liang K'ai
40
much present, as we can see in the photograph of the solitary pine on T’aishan (il. p. 38), but it is precisely that lighting and that silhouette, sharply outlined and divorced from its complete setting, that was only a part of the whole before and is now a symbol for the whole.
This suggestive art can be seen in numerous examples in this country. The small fan-shaped leaf of a stormy waterway (21, il. p. 39) is evidence of the limits to which delicate suggestion can be pushed. Yet with all of its per¬ sonal poetry, if we place this with a comparable subject by the individualists of the seventeenth century (97, il. p. 122), the unique nature of each expression is revealed and in addition, the means of differentiation in time. The South¬ ern Sung leaf is a filtered storm “recollected in tranquility,” while the other takes one into the teeth of the wind. The psychological sense of direct involve¬ ment in a given picture, with little or no feeling of recollection or remove, is a sign of later individualism.
The final statement of Southern Sung landscape attitudes is made by practitioners of the Spontaneous mode, such as Mu Ch’i or Liang K’ai (22, il. p. 40). Unfortunately we cannot display a type example with its extremely bold “flung-ink” techniques, as drastically simple as a sword cut or an explo¬ sion.52 The Winter Landscape of Liang K’ai is an essay on the transition from the Lyric to the Spontaneous manner. The twisted tree stump, brushed in a frenzy of movement, sets the space in the picture. Without it the rest is staf- fage, however delicately painted. The technique of the tree reveals an abrupt and arbitrary personality as well as the final direction of Sung painting. Prac¬ ticed largely by monks or others under Ch’an Buddhist discipline, this last Sung style is a pictorial parallel to the mystic’s sudden enlightenment, as well as to the individual’s revolt against the times of trouble that were the last years of the Dynasty. Building on the increasingly dramatic brushwork of the Lyric painters, the Spontaneous masters often returned to more self-contained and even monumental compositions— the wild touch was their contribution and the end of a cycle or period in Chinese landscape painting. The tradition was carried on by secluded Chinese priests and, more significantly, the priest- painters of Japan, where the extremist nature of the Spontaneous style was more readily acceptable than in the country of Li and the golden mean.
Things are never what they seem or what we wish them to be. It would be a serious error to imagine that all of this unfolds in a lovely sequence. Many conservatives or eclectics confute the critics and produce remarkable works outside the pigeonholes. Two of these can reasonably be placed in this period of shifting values: Late Sung or Early Yuan, thirteenth or fourteenth century. The Landscape with a Flight of Geese (23, il. p. 42) is a suggestive
41
aesthetic parallel to the drawing by Claude (122, il. p. 42), as well as a subtle example of the wedding of the archaic colored decorative style with lyric frag¬ mentation. The evident effort to realize a larger, more total effect recommends an early Yuan date. The general composition of the Chicago handscroll (24, not il.) also seems to be an attempt at recapturing the complexity and com¬ pleteness of Northern Sung style; but the greater interest lies in the remark¬ ably individual hand, especially good in details, with a light, nervous, but confi¬ dent touch.
42
THE YUAN DYNASTY
The contributions of the landscape painters of the Yuan Dynasty (1279- 1368), relatively little known at first hand in the Occident, were of the highest importance, not only in themselves, but also for the whole future development of the art* We have seen the fulfillment and elaboration of the monumental style followed by the baroque qualities of the Southern Sung painters. If we merely look for succeeding and similar qualities in the painting of the Yuan Dynasty, we will have missed the originality and real significance of that short ninety-year period. What happened is quite simple. The creative painters set into motion a new direction, a new cycle* Their experimentation, like that of the tenth century, was rapid, effective, and just as influential. The traditional deference to the past, inherent in Chinese society, influenced their pictures as evidenced by the writings and the colophons on them* But that homage, how¬ ever sincere, should not conceal their real, and even revolutionary, originality*
All that went before existed and could not be erased. What is interest¬ ing is what was used and what was ignored. The reasons for a choice were in part aesthetic, for the major manifestation of traditionalism was a desire once more for completeness, for landscapes with a rational Li, for the formats of hanging and handscroll rather than the fragmental album painting. They were also in part political and social, for non -cooperation with this foreign Mongol government, for a return to the strong virtues of the men of T’ang and Northern Sung rather than the supposed weaknesses of the retreating men of Southern Sung living on borrowed time* The highest ideal now was the sage- scholar-painter, aloof from the “dusty” world of affairs, immersed in the more wholesome world of nature with its inevitable principle, and expressing his allegiance to himself and to his friends through painting. With few exceptions, landscape painting was now omnipresent, the only proper subject matter for the creative painter*12
Let us first look at the Yuan painters who connect with the past, and then at the creative individuals who fixed the direction of the future, Ch’ieri Hsuan lived only briefly into the Yuan Dynasty, refused its favors and so be¬ came the first, in point of time, of the virtuous Yuan masters. His Home Again (25, il* p- 44) is a most consistent example of archaism in style and sub¬ ject* Based on a prose poem by the fifth-century T'ao Yuan-ming, the repre¬ sentation embodies the new ideals* The scholar-official returns from his dis¬ agreeable connections with the state to his rustic home in the country. The blue, green, and gold style is also archaistic as are the stiff, angular strokes
43
h % i * q
i x.
i**L&'*
thi\t
&* $*5/i ^
1, ^ ** .
&JM
w%±k i*
• fcUit**
'* *)& 4 £*i
$$
26
44
•in inn
ifc
Ch'ien Hsuan
Chao Meng-fu
45
used to delineate rocks and mountains. Note well the peculiar and exaggerated per¬ spective of the old earthen wall, tilted almost as if it had been painted in the Six Dynasties, or even by Wang Wei. The figures, too, where not damaged or retouched, seem deliberately stiff and archaic. On the other hand the fluent handling of the dead branches and the care¬ fully realistic willows are very much up-to-date and in the accomplished manner of the still life painter, which was Ch’ien Hsuan’s specialty.
The most famous conservative was Chao Meng-fu, accepted by later generations despite his official cooperation with the Dynasty. The Landscape with Twin Pine Trees (26, il. p. 44) is one of the most important remaining examples of his landscape art and an excellent explanation of the fascination he held for the Chinese: that is, his truly calligraphic brushwork. For us it is a difficult picture. Derived from the Northern Sung masters, Li Ch’eng and Kuo Hsi in tree and mountain types, it represents a cleaned-up and purified version of the style of the earlier men. There is a greater emphasis on “run¬ ning-brush” virtuosity. In a very real sense, it is a skeleton or outline of the past. We are forced to see only the bones of brush and landscape. The lat¬ ter is not the subject of the picture; the brush is. At the same time, there is some wonderfully observed structure transferred into terms of wash, the rocks being particularly notable. If we study the scroll with the drawing by Wolf Huber (118, il. p. 46), Chao’s specialization of interest seems less strange. The compositions as well are comparable although the Huber seems to us more specific in locale.
Two lines of Chao’s inscription are most significant in the light of Yuan attitudes to Southern Sung painting:
I dare not claim that my paintings are comparable to those of the ancients;
contrasted with those of recent times I dare say they are a bit different. .
The Yuan masters knew well their originality and their indebtedness.
118
Wolfgang Huber
46
27
Chao Yung
47
Chao Meng-Eu’s son, Chao Yung, is more conservative than his father, less brilliant in handling his brush, but rather more solid in his ap¬ proach to nature’s shapes. His Landscape with Scholar Fish¬ ermen (27, il. p. 47) is evi¬ dently systematic in brush- work, with its carefully placed broad stubby strokes. While the format and general atti¬ tude are derived from Tung Yuan of Northern Sung, the sharp split in terms of surface pattern is typically Yuan, The split is only a surface one for the space does suggest, in depth, the great sweep of a body of water. The whole effect is a pictorial, not a cal¬ ligraphic, one, and is achieved largely by the parallelism be¬ tween the two main trees as foreground symbols of the dis¬ tant protruding point and ris¬ ing mounLain range. This re¬ lationship, with the subtly controlled scale, tone, and suggested color, is the message of the picture, a quiet and seemingly coarse production until we find our way. This simplicity and rough¬ ness are surely deliberate archaisms designed to deceive the “crowd” in the best scholar-painter manner.
Another and lesser, but large-scale example of Yuan conservatism is to be found in The Guardians of the Valley ( 28 , iL p. 48), The study of ancient trees was already in evidence in the Northern Sung period, judging from cop ies or records associated with Li Ch’eng, Kuo Hsi, and others, and was followed after Yuan in especially notable fashion (55, 56, il- p, 81, 82), The Guardians is
28
LI Shih-hsing
48
29
Wu Chen
49
50
New Summer Palace Garden {Hopei}
typically more specialized than earlier productions. The only complex treatment is in the larch trees, the rest of the picture be¬ ing a simplified setting for the main theme.
The Yuan conservatives are qualitatively of great interest but their original contributions are somewhat incidental to the tradi¬ tionalism of what they conceived to be Northern Sung style. The most significant and creative con¬ tributions of the age were made by the “gentlemen painters” (wen jen), especially the highly revered “Four Great Masters": Huang Kung-wang, Wu Chen, Wang Meng, and Ni Tsan. The first is not represented in the ex¬ hibition, if indeed anywhere,57 but satisfactory works of the other three are to be seen and their testament must now be described
and evaluated, beginning with the most conservative, Wu Chen.
Rocks, Reeds, Old Tree, and Bamboo (29, il. p. 49} is just barely a land¬ scape. Actually it falls equally well into that special category of Chinese paint¬ ing described by its title. But the unified atmosphere of the painting conveys more than its limited repertory of shapes. The painter has executed a deliber¬ ately “homely” picture, especially in the rather dull (as a type) tree. But the brush dominates. It is a conservative brush, not unlike that of Chao Yung (27, il. p. 47), but freer, “untrammeled," less systematic, and more direct. Note, too, that Wu varies his tones drastically, using a typical Yuan variation of in- and-out tones in the bamboo and tree trunk (see also 32, il. p. 57). This pic¬ ture and other reasonably sure works of Wu Chen show a closely knit com¬ bination of all the Sung styles with perhaps more emphasis on the early material. What is most significant about the artist is his insistence on “single¬ stroke” brush work— abrupt, vigorous, and decidedly masculine. His contribu-
51
tion was the selection and emphasis of this one point within a more conservative framework than that of his two juniors.
The complicated textures of nature (il. p. 51) translated into the equally complex language of the brush had occupied earlier painters only up to a point, usually in terms of details rather than the all-over surface of the picture. The new discovery and practice of Wang Meng was just this textural variety and complexity. In his Fishing in the Green Depths (30, il. p. 50) we can immedi¬ ately sense a new and unusual personality. At the same time we rediscover a unified relationship between the distance in the scene and the surface of the picture itself. This is accomplished by the textures made by interwoven brush strokes which function both in depth, as representation, and as strokes on the surface of the paper. With the realization of nature’s complexity Wang also found the means to give movement to landscape, by the undulating brush strokes, and by rolling, even writhing profiles for his rocks, trees, and moun¬ tains. These textural and kinetic interests are accompanied by a coloristic quality, if such a word can be used in early Chinese painting. The limited washes of red-orange, blue, and green are used in a concentrated way. The composition of the picture is rather formal and well-enclosed within the pic¬ ture boundaries. In this Wang is, like his contemporaries, indebted to the Northern Sung painters. His style is, in the reliable works that have survived, seldom delicate or refined. Like Wu Chen, he displays in this picture a rough and ropy exterior which one must penetrate to find the substance of his art.
It would seem wise at this mid- point of our discussion of these two in¬ novators, Wang Meng, and next, Ni Tsan, to point out that all of their generally accepted paintings are on paper. The Fishing in the Green Depths , damaged as it is, was clearly painted on a polished paper with a hard surface capable of taking a sharp brush stroke. We shall see that the Ni Tsan is on a more ab¬ sorbent paper allowing subtle and poetic effects of the brush. Paper became, for the progressive artists of the Yuan period, the most desirable ground for the brush. The reason is obvious. It is considerably more a servant to the brush than silk and where the emphasis was now on the brush stroke, the touch of the painter, paper was the answer.
Ni Tsan was probably the most imitated and copied artist in his period, if not of any period. His legendary “purity" and “loftiness” made him the scholar’s ideal; and the apparent simplicity of his painting made superficially accurate imitation rather common. With Wang Meng, Ni influenced more later scholarly painting than any other man. River Pavilion and Mountain Scenery (31 , il. p. 54) is characteristic of his developed style. Where Wang Meng tended to cover the paper with his network of lines, Ni Tsan used a great deal of
52
blank or lightly touched paper throughout the picture, but without opposing dense areas to blank areas as did the Ma-Hsia school of Southern Sung. The re¬ sult is a delicate, pure, even feminine visual impression. He is very sparse in his use of the brush and usually tends to two extremes— very wet or very dry ink. The dry textures build up whatever mass is suggested while the wet touches define boundaries and add liveliness to the areas concerned. Usually there are no figures— an empty, ideal, cleansed world of nature. The composition of this picture occurs often in his work and is quite in keeping with his period, but with Ni the minor variations are all important.
These minor variations are not merely technical but are primarily vari¬ ations in mood. Often the key to the mood is the artist’s inscription. Almost none of his paintings, or indeed those by most of the Yuan individualists, is lacking in a reasonably long inscription by the artist which tells or hints at the mood, raison d’etre and/or circumstances of its creation. These painters are not called literary without reason. They took for granted and used their mani¬ fold literary, calligraphic, and pictorial accomplishments almost interchange¬ ably. Further, the mood which the picture aroused in notable individuals, priestly or secular, was important and hence their inscriptions added to those of the artist (31, 34, 36, il. p. 54, 58, 60). The delicate, almost prim character of Ni Tsan’s calligraphy is as much a part of the painting as is the meaning of his inscription.
It is the second month and the sound of rain follows from the first;
The boat-oars of Three Rivers turn toward Suchou.
The sadness of the spring does not awake and is as deep in wine;
Waves show forth the madness of the wind which shakes my window.
— tr. by R. Edwards
The most interesting characterization of the art of Ni Tsan is given by another great individualist of a later date, Shih-t’ao (94-97):
The paintings by Master Ni are like waves on the sandy beach, or streams between the stones which roll and flow and issue by their own force. Their air of supreme refinement and purity is so cold that it overawes men.
Painters of later times have imitated only the dry and desolate or the thinnest parts, and consequently their copies have no far-reaching spirit.58
Since the style of Ni Tsan is so important in later painting, we have placed together with the River Pavilion, two works in the manner of Ni Tsan by early Ming painters of the first rank, Liu Chueh (40, il- p- 55) and Shen Chou (52, il. p. 55). In so doing, we hope that the idea of “copying” is dispelled. Within the set limits one can visually differentiate the individual variations on the given theme: first, the suggestive and cloaked style of Ni Tsan; second, the more brittle and dramatic composition by Liu Chueh; and third, the rougher,
53
31 Ni Tsan
54
55
32
Ts’ao Chih-po
56
bolder, playful, and at the same time more solid style of Shen Chou. The re¬ lationship is not so much that of a musical composition played by two virtuosi as it is a variation on an earlier composer’s theme by two creative composers of a later day.18 One thinks of Brahms’ Variations on a Theme of Haydn, or the less acknowledged “borrowing” by almost any creative musician.
Ni Tsan and Wang Meng were not alone. Others explored similar ground and priority of discovery is not too clear from Chinese histories, though precedence is always assumed to be with these two. Thus Ts’ao Chih-po has much in common with Ni Tsan. While Ts’ao died well before Ni, he is always described as influenced by the latter, when the opposite might well be indi¬ cated. Both artists share an interest in wet and dry textures, spare composi¬ tion, and a lack of interest in figures. While looking at A Pavilion near Old Pines (32, il. p. 56), one should always remember it is an album page and meant to be seen at close range. Then the tremendous changes in scale, the in-and- out treatment of the upper pine branches, the lovely, free brushwork of the left hand tree and the rich “soot- varnish” ink, are at their most effective. Like the Chao Meng-fu (26, il. p. 44) and the Li Shih-hsing (28, il. p. 48), this old tree type of composition goes back to such Northern Sung masters as Li Ch’eng.
But more often we find late Yuan pictures by masters essaying the com¬ plex textural problems that fascinated Wang Meng. The first of these pictures, Saying Farewell to a Guest at Ch’ing Ch’uan (33, il. p. 58), is by Chao Yuan, one of those worthies who gained posthumous fame by their death at the hands of the powerful Hung Wu, first emperor of the Ming Dynasty. The scroll has an obvious textural relationship to Wang Meng, except that Chao uses smaller strokes, even points of ink. The two most evident dissimilarities, and very original, too, are: the forcing of ink tone at the edges of large forms so that a rather dramatic contrast appears, with resulting clear separations in¬ stead of the unified surface characteristic of Wang Meng; and the deliberately ghostly quality of the figures, impalpable before the powerful background. The splendid preservation of the picture is extraordinary and permits us to savor the ink tones and touch to a higher degree than is usual in originals of the period. We can find here the careful “glazes” of ink that contribute to the rich¬ ness of the whole.
Another fourteenth-century textural style is to be found in the little handscroll by the almost unknown Yao T’ing-mei (34, il. p. 59). It presents a consistent and somewhat unusual manner of building up tones by scumbles of ink finished with dark, wet accents, but always following an irregular, twisting line whether in rocks, trees, or mountains. The composition is equally original
57
33
Chao Yuan 36
Hsu Pen
58
59
with its irregularly shaped space holes through which we move away from near areas of heavy texture. The result of these devices is a surface feeling of quiet gravity with a certain turbulence beneath. Two other details attest a master deserving of some fame; the “fade-out” of the landscape into the in¬ scription and the delicate, precise brush strokes in the foreground grasses.
The last Yuan painting to be discussed (36, il. p. 58) is by Hsu Pen, another of those unfortunates whose death was arranged by the Hung Wu em¬ peror. The painting provides a fitting end to our view of this all important period for it is both a creative and an eclectic picture and so gives us that neat and tidy summary so much to be desired. The artist owes much to the way of Ni Tsan for his delicate tree forms and dry textures, and to Wang Meng for his complex and rolling vision of nature. This marriage of two seem¬ ing incompatibles is an accomplishment in itself but when a truly monumental composition within a small format is added the result is completely satisfac¬ tory. One should note as well the additional element of the fantastic, for the twisting metamorphic shapes are quite unusual. They may be found occasion¬ ally in Wang Meng, only once in Ni Tsan, and that because of a specific sub¬ ject, the Lion Grove near Suchou,19 where there were carefully selected rocks that looked like animals. Much later, Wu Li (91, il. p. 113) was to dwell in this realm of the grotesque. Hsu’s landscape is well provided with literary inscrip¬ tions and that, too, is typically Yuan. His Streams and Mountains is a true accomplishment in a single work as complete and final as the total accomplish¬ ment of the Yuan painters on a larger scale. Another period of ever quicken¬ ing experimentation in the continuing life of Chinese landscape painting was drawing to a close.
THE MING DYNASTY
Curiously enough, the return of a native Chinese dynasty to power in 1368 did not cause a mass return to the Academy or the Court on the part of the literary painters. Perhaps the fatal experiences of Hsu Pen, Chao Yuan, and others with the first Ming Emperor helped to maintain the disinclination for official posts. But fundamentally the garment of remote and solitary isola¬ tion “above the crowd” fitted the progressive painters so well that the idea of a return to the restrictions of Imperial or official patronage was never seriously entertained. Like late nineteenth-century “Bohemia,” the scholar's retreat, literal or figurative, had become the accepted climate for artistic creation. This climate was radically different from the recreated official Academy and its
60
38 (detail) Chin Wen-chin
adoption of a very conservative pre-scholarly style of painting best exemplified by such masters as Pien Ching-chao, whose small and competent album painting (37) could be taken as Southern Sung or at least conservative Yuan were it not for his signature.
The real history of landscape painting in the Ming Dynasty is to be found outside the painters of the official Academy and this history can be or¬ ganized without undue distortion into: (1) a short period of about fifty years continuation of the Yuan literary style, (2) a simultaneous flourishing of a more conservative non-literary style, (3) a brief classical moment of controlled emotion and rationality in the art of Shen Chou, (4) the elaboration of the literary tradition, and finally (5) the new impetus provided by the experi¬ ments of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang and the later individualists of the seventeenth cen¬ tury.
The Dynasty begins as a brief continuation of Yuan Dynasty styles and interests in the works of such men as Wang Fu and Yao Shou. Two bamboo- landscape handscrolls, one by a pupil of Wang Fu, illustrate this continuity and the beginnings of change. Bamboo painting, beyond our scope here, was a particular favorite of the scholar-painter, for it was a specialized form, a final test of brushwork. But these paintings combine that specialized interest with a true landscape vision. The scroll by Chin Wen-chin (38, il. p. 61) does not de¬ rive from the near view implicit in bamboo painting, but from a relatively dis¬ tant, objective, and contained viewpoint like that of the Yuan artists and before them the masters of Northern Sung. However, the delicate and poetic quality of Ten Thousand Bamboos speaks with the voice of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century.
61
62
39 fdefaiH Hsia Ch’ang
39 (detail)
The second bamboo landscape, Serene Banks of the Hsiang River (39, il. p. 62), is markedly different. The composition is daring and very much not Yuan in effect. If a precedent must be cited it is to be found in the truncated and arbitrary compositions of Southern Sung. But Hsia Ch’ang goes beyond those earlier concepts. The origin of his dramatic composition is in the eye. There is a visual unity in the picture as if one saw a narrow, panoramic strip of landscape through a slitted aperture. Further, the wet, glazed washes of the rocks and distant shore act as a slightly blurred, out-of-focus foil to the sharply rendered grasses, bamboo, tree, and rocks in the foreground areas. The view¬ point, too, is striking, “a frog’s-eye view” of the river bank. The fully realized daring of this scroll marks Hsia Ch’ang as one of the first Ming masters of an original stamp.
The conservative side of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is presented by the Che (from the old name of the Chekiang region) School and its associates. It is usually maligned by the scholar-painters of the more pro¬ gressive school deriving from the greatest fifteenth-century master, Shen Chou. But the relegation of the Che School to a subordinate position in an
41 (detail)
evolutionary sense need not obscure its very solid and aesthetically interesting achievement based largely on the Ma Yuan-Hsia Kuei style of Southern Sung. The most representative Che painter is Tai Chin and his long scroll, Ten Thousand Li of the Yangtze (41, il. p. 64), shows his style at its most conserva¬ tive. The dominant influence is that of the most famous Southern Sung painter of that subject: Hsia Kuei. The crystalline rocks and the sharp, acutely angled manner of the brush are his as are the contrasting juxtapositions of landscape detail. Still, with all of its traditionalism, if we examine the scroll carefully, many parts are not unlike the work of Shen Chou (53, il- p. 78), and we are not far wrong if we say that the prince of literary painters owed much to such men as Tai Chin.
The hanging scroll (42, il. p. 66) by Tu Chin is equally under the in¬ fluence of Southern Sung, but with an easy technique and composition that should place Tu with Tai Chin as one of the greatest men of the conservative
64
Tat Chin
group. The tree, violating the picture boundary, and the gaze of the sage be¬ yond that frame, are typically derived from Southern Sung, but the rapid brushwork, with warm and cool tinted inks, is the virtuoso trademark of the Che painter. Perhaps the most extreme example of such virtuosity is seen in the Snowscape by Shih Chung (43, il. p- 67) where the wild abandon of the artist is expressed not only in the brushwork but also in his self-apellation, “The Fool.”72 Many such works were executed while the artist was under the in¬ fluence of wine, a not uncommon state for Shih Chung. Inspiration is inspira¬ tion, however obtained, and the line between the fool and the wise man or the drunk and the inspired may often be thin indeed. We recall the almost ritual drinking of the Seven Poets of the Bamboo Grove in the T’ang Dynasty.
This extremely bold and abbreviated style, rough in Shih Chung, tran¬ quil and reserved in the scroll by Kuo Hsu (44, il. p. 68), is easily compara¬ ble to that of some Western masters such as Rembrandt (120, il. p. 68). The
65
66
67
single stroke and the skillful use of wash and blank paper is common to both, with the reed pen of the Dutch master providing the variety of line widths which the Chinese ac¬ complished with the brush.
In contrast to this facet of the conservative tradition we find numerous works in an almost miniature technique, richly detailed and with a close fidelity to the traditional conventions of natural representation. The two most famous names in this connection are Chou Ch’en and his pupil Ch’iu Ying. The little album painting (45, il. p. 69) attributed to the former, but for the tiny figures of com¬ mon people, could well be by either. Where the Che School went to the Ma-Hsia group for their Southern Sung inspiration, Chou Ch’en and some¬ times Ch’iu Ying were influenced by such early Southern Sung painters as Li T’ang or others (17, il. p. 54), who tried to maintain something of the earlier monumentality. Pines and Towering Mountains shows this conservative manner well but the angular, linear touch, the rhythmically repeated trees with their feathery foliage and the minuscule detail are all characteristic of the second Ming conservative style. This detailed style was also used by Ch’iu Ying for archaistic, richly colored pictures in the T’ang decorative mode.10
The second follower of Chou Ch’en was T’ang Yin, and with this master we come to the most important link between the conservatives and the literary school.05 He can be placed in either, stylistically or socially, but the finest pic¬ tures available in the West illustrate his more conservative style. The two
S
' A ■
-iris- v'-
ir
120
Rembrandt
*******
44
68
hanging scrolls can be con¬ sidered together although the composition of Strange Peaks (46, il. p* 70), is a massive central mountain composi¬ tion where space is de -empha¬ sized and forms are more rounded and placid, while Scholar in a Summer Land * scape (47, il* p. 70) is an off- center Li T’ang type with di¬ agonal thrusts and recessions and more angular, tenser shapes. The touch and meth¬ ods in both scrolls are the same. The oyster-like incrus¬ tations that form rocks and mountains are built up by parallel but irregularly di¬ rected strokes of heavy ink.
It is a manner as massive in detail as the pictures are as a whole. This massive quality is enhanced by a particular handling of the lighter materials, especially foliage and mist. The leaves are loosely and irregularly handled, while the bands of mist are arranged in thin planes at almost right angles to the picture plane. These feathery motifs and thin, flat sheets serve to emphasize the mass and weight of the major landscape elements. One should note also the narrow, jumping ribbons of
Kuo Hsu
69
70
47 (detail)
71
water and the angular grasping exposed tree roots. T’ang Yin’s skill as a figure painter is suggested by the scholar with staff in the second picture.
A curious handscroll (48, il. p- 72) is closely related to these larger pic¬ tures although the smaller format allows a slightly tighter organization and technique. The major technical difference lies in the use of a pale ink wash over all the paper in any landscape area. The satin ground of the hanging scrolls hardly permits such a method and the result on the paper ground is strangely Western. The whole impact of this handscroll is expressive of the at¬ tached colophon, signed T’ang Yin, which recalls a Han legend of immortality and resurrection from the dead. The ethereal figure, pale and ghostly, sits amidst a real but strange environment, barren and eroded, a lunar landscape in monochrome. Although there is also a free and delicate style associated with his name, making him acceptable to the scholar critics, T’ang Yin stands slightly apart from both camps. He is almost the last voice of the monumental style and by no means the smallest.
72
THE WU SCHOOL
The Wu School, named after a part of the southern garden city of Suchou, is the great scholar-painter school of the Ming Dynasty and from a de¬ velopmental viewpoint represents the main limb of landscape painting in this period. From it and its later off-shoot, the Sung-chiang School, stem almost all of the later creative developments in Chinese painting. The school begins with Shen Chou. He is its classic expression and his followers are the elabora- tors and refiners of his contributions. Shen’s art is well-represented here and we can begin by an examination of a key work in establishing his artistic per¬ sonality, the album in the Boston museum (49, il. p. 74).T3
The use of a landscape as a sequence, like a handscroll but retaining the artist’s control of the “frames” of the “moving picture,” while it may have begun earlier, would seem to have been fully exploited first in the fifteenth century and especially by Shen Chou. The sequential album satisfied the more consciously aesthetic and specialized demands of the scholarly style and could now compete on equal terms with the scroll forms. Further, the album is after all a book and hence a more accustomed format for scholar-artists steeped in a literary tradition. The Boston album of eight double leaves is a perfect union of poetry, calligraphy, and painting, and so conforms to the highest ideals of the Wu School, While the pictures may be in different “manners,” they are all unified in touch with an emphasis on the single stroke, broad, strong, and in¬ cisive, a style that confirms Shen’s traditional dependence on the Yuan painter, Wu Chen. So that even when he paints in homage to Ni Tsan (leaf No. 4, or 52, il. P. 55), his brusque and positive manner constructs a more solid, if less poetic world than that of “old Ni." Shen Chou can be complex or simple, his unity is given by the brush. The colophon written in 1604 by Wang Chih- t’eng on the Boston album praises the artist with the traditional but well- justified cliche: “absorbed in play, unfettered by rules.”
This is not to say that his paintings are unresponsive to careful exami¬ nation, and indeed it is only then that we begin to realize the rationality and clarity of his art. The short handscroll, Traveling in Wu (50, il. p. 75), may at first seem just a rough and hasty improvisation. The sureness in placement of objects in space is particularly important, as well as the extremely subtle modu¬ lations of tone. The mood is melancholic, even elegiac, and the shading of that mood with a great variety of grays is especially noticeable. The vertical dots and strokes are most skillfully varied in size, weight, and relationship to each other, They are never mechanical or monotonous. The movement of the scroll from right to left— from the poem and the lacy transparency of the trees to
73
49
Shen Chou (A)
49
Sheri Chou (B)
74
75
Shen Chou
125
Vincent van Gogh
51 Shen Chou
76
the solid encompassing rocks and hummocks— is particularly well-handled. The path is effective, appearing on stage at right, continuing parallel to the picture plane, and finally turning back into the distance and disappearing as unobtru¬ sively as it appeared. It serves as a representational parallel to the kinetic act of unrolling and rerolling the scroll. Such is the “play” of Shen Chou.
In this last example and in the four-leaf album (51, il. p. 76), we are aware of certain staccato effects of the brush, dots and slashes, sudden and abrupt, which remind us strongly of one of the great pen-draftsmen of the mod¬ ern Western movement, van Gogh (125, il. p. 76). Like Rembrandt in the drawing shown on page 68, Vincent uses the reed pen to achieve effects similar to those of the brush of Shen Chou, save that Shen and Van Gogh are inter¬ ested in complexity rather than simplification.
The fragmental album mounted as a handscroll (53, il. p. 78) shows the highest achievements of the artist in his fully developed style. Again we have a sequential album, but with a stylistic conception different from the one in Boston. The more mature work is built on variations within the artist's personal style rather than, as in the latter, with personal variations on the styles of others. The sequential organization is clear. For example, leaf 53 (A) has no horizon and a kind of open, receding alley composition with a fence used as a space divider. Leaf 53 (B) is in total contrast: a spacious composition with a mass in the center, audacious and dramatic. The individual strokes of the brush are comparable but their arrangement in (A) is tighter, and with less contrast than those in (B). Another leaf picks up the suppressed diagonals of (A) and (B) and combines the sharp, diagonal split of the composition with the strongest statement of color in the whole series. Similar relationships are to be found in the remaining two leaves by Shen Chou. The second leaf (B), with its cliff towering above the clouds, is about as complete a visual and literary sym¬ bol as possible of Shen Chou’s original style and contribution. The poem reads:
White clouds like a belt encircle the mountain’s waist.
A stone ledge flying in space and the far, thin road.
I lean on my bramble staff and gazing into space
Make the note of my flute an answer to the sounding torrent.
— tr. R. Edwards
His is the remote but personal world of the scholar-sage-hermit towering above the crowd. He can support this remoteness by the strength of his brush and the clear intellect shown in his compositions. Where the contemporary and con¬ servative T’ang Yin built mass and structure by accumulation, Shen built mass and structure in the brush stroke itself, and in this lies the secret of his stature in the history of Chinese painting.
77
l*4** *
-7# 4*. i m *
* t 4M-
* -ft A -
4 3 # 4*
■ *4*/fc
53
Sheri Chou (A)
53 Shen Chou (B)
78
53a
Wen Cheng-ming
The sixth panel (53a, il. p. 79) in the Kansas City album is by Wen Cheng-ming, the only one remaining of four by him originally contained in the album. The relationship of this picture to those by Shen Chou in the album verifies the record that Wen was his foremost follower and the second great light of the Wu School. Wen’s album leaf was presumably painted in 1516, early in his career when the influence of his master was paramount. The vocabulary of the rocks and trees is that of the older man, but handled in a more restrained and delicate manner and tied to a greater interest in dramatic subject matter- in this case a rainstorm. If we compare, for example, the house and fence with similar renderings by Shen Chou, we can see the difference of temperaments most clearly. Wen Cheng-ming is the perfect scholar-painter, elegant and re¬ fined. Shen is less conventional; the hermit dominates the scholar.
Wen worked in a variety of styles, but his most original contribution, a combination of drama, taste, and carefully controlled dry brushwork, is well- represented in the exhibition. The small painting, dated 1531 (54, il. p. 80), is one of the earliest manifestations of this style. In this case it is overlaid with a tribute to the T’ang decorative style in its use of blue and green color
79
80
as well as in its rather careful finish. The dominance of the rocks is note¬ worthy and reflects the already estab¬ lished interest in these grotesque and gnarled shapes which was characteristic of the art of gardening, especially strong in Suchou and Hangchou (il. p. 80).
This susceptibility to the grotesque reaches its height in a picture (55, il. p. 82) painted in the following year (1532) where the drama of the subject and com¬ position are fully exploited. Again the interest is paralleled in nature and gar¬ den art, the twisted junipers being much prized in gardens or in a more natural setting (il. p. 81). Wen Cheng-ming’s Seven Junipers is not only an ideal rec¬ ord of a specific place, but a literary and cosmic symbol of the greatest interest. The artist’s colophon is the best explana¬ tion of the scroll:
Behold, memorials of by-gone days, the Seven Junipers of Ch’in-ch’uan, celestial as the Constellation of the Seven Stars. Power divine had planted them back in the time of Liang. Never dared Sui-jen’s flaming fire seize them, never. Forms superb, flawless idols, spirits infinite, their shadows guard the ancient halls, cover the jade seats. They hallow the Palace of the Stars, attendants subservient to Heaven’s majesty. Up float their sleeves, their hair hangs deep in tufts, chaste, taut forces of mystery. Poems unheard are deepest. Ten thousand oxen will not pull the spreading roots grappled in a soil of pristine power. They wedded the weird in thunder and darkest Yin. Mosses dry at their bone knots. Now trail their boughs . . . now soar they up . . . swinging in curls or drooping abruptly. Martial-like spears now, now oppressed as a platter. Now they writhe like ape arms grasping at the shifting peak, haughty cranes now, bending their necks, combing their feathers. Wrinkles crack as axes strike. Where the russet bark bursts, pierces through tiny leafage. Crawl their broom-like tails in desolate night, in day time roaring waves in the trunk’s gaping hollows. Writhing, twisted ropes dance they to the wail of the wind, as the chill spreads. Horns split, blunted claws, wrestling of dragon and tiger, whales rolling in the main.
The giant birds snatch unexpectedly. Like ghosts, now vanishing, now re-appearing, in boundless intricacy. To further their perfection, sky be¬ stows his auspices, dropping sweet dew into the well of elixir. Fairies, gods, pay them visits, tuning songs in stringed encores. Color of dawn their morning meal, heavenly nectar their wine.
The world’s hasty uproar they disdain, be it danger or peace, be the bronze
81
55
camels hidden by weeks, while Sun and Moon ever hasten, (spheres) of
the firmament . . .
In the year 1532 Summer, Cheng-ming painted and wrote this for Shih-men.
— tr. by Gustav Ecke
Eighteen years later, at the age of eighty-one, the artist painted a similar motif in a much less grandiose manner in the Cypress and Old Rocks (56, il. p. 84). In many ways it is his masterpiece in this country and one of his most perfect works. There is no striving for effect. The brushwork is more flexible and varied with a brilliant use of contrasting dry and wet textures. All of his sense of antiquity, of restraint, and of the full use of the scholar’s brush is com¬ bined in a small format. Again, as in the Yuan painting by Chao Meng-fu (26, il. p. 44), the twig ends, executed with a swift “running brush” are a pleasure to us, if not to the extremely high degree experienced by the Chinese critic. These qualities, plus the moral and literary virtues attributed to the artist as scholar and critic, have placed him on a level with his immediate predecessor, Shen Chou.
82
Wen Cheng-mmg
Wen's followers in the Wu School include members of his family. Per¬ haps the most notable of these was his nephew with the alliterative name, Wen Po-jen. His contribution is derived in part from his uncle, especially in the often complex use of dry textures. But there is something a little larger in scale to be found in Wen Po-jen. Perhaps his interest in atmosphere and his often spacious compositions owe much to Sung and Yuan predecessors. Thus the Landscape (57, il. p. 85) is in the spirit of Wen Cheng-ming, but the upper mountains are more massive and fully realized than anything similar in that artist. The poignant contrast between the luxurious textures of the trees below and the spare, austere distant mountains is especially well-realized. The same re¬ straint and subtlety is communicated by the little handscroll of The Lute Song (58, il. p. 84) where the layout reminds us a little of Southern Sung. Again we can see the continued close relationship of the painter to nature in a photo¬ graph of a Min River scene in Fukien (ih p. 84). The Lute Song possesses that intimacy and personal touch found in the fans painted as personal gifts by the scholar-painters.16 (See the examples by Lu Chih and Yun Hsiang, 62, 81, not il.)
83
5S Wert Po-ien
Min River (Fukien)
84
■H
85
86
The dry-brushed textural style of Wen Cheng-ming was often used by one of his pupils, Chu Chieh, and his Watching the Stream (59, il. p. 86)30 shows the extent of his specialization. Like some drawings by Paul Klee, the narrow hanging scroll must be read from bottom to top and from side to side, observ¬ ing each sign on the way. Something of the same detailed texture of nature was the stock in trade of Pieter Brueghel in his drawings (1 19, il. p. 86), even to his mannerist pen-stroke symbols for foliage. The word mannerist is no accident here, for Wen Cheng-ming and his followers were just that, in the best sense of the word, testing, examining, refining, and elaborating the Yuan and Wu contributions.
One of the most interesting painters in this group, Lu Chih, is usually listed as a painter of flowers. But in a few of his landscapes he uses a most individual, crystalline-like brush stroke to construct pictures of striking clarity and refinement. While he is rarely original in composition, the handscroll, dated 1549 (60, il. p. 88), is just that, with a particularly rich use of color with¬ in a horizon-less landscape and with no area left without texture. The sudden views through this texture to rice paddies, caves, houses, are also unusual. The typical brushwork can be studied most easily in the Chicago hanging scroll (61, il. p. 85). The composition and the brushwork are both influenced by Ni Tsan but Lu makes his strokes smaller than those of the Yuan master. The strokes are extremely angular with many little sharp, vertical accents. These, plus the color, usually on the cool side in the blue-green range, with some touches of orange, give to his work a certain prim tartness. Only in the total composition is he ill at ease, especially in handling the conventional Ni Tsan type of break in the middle distance.
65 (defa/JJ Ch’en Shun
87
60 fdefaiW
One other painter of this group, Ch’en Shun, was also known primarily as a bird and flower painter, but where Lu Chih followed the dry and brittle style, Ch’en seems to have specialized in the opposite direction. His strength was the “boneless” manner, emphasizing the broad use of washes, usually colored, and without much reinforcement from brush strokes. Not that his hand was incapable of sharp brush work. The River Landscape , (65, il. p. 87), “painted
88
Lu Chih
in play for an elder brother,” is eloquent proof of his ability to use the brush stroke as a bold means of building an original and striking handscroll. The distant washes with their sensuous softness are more typical of his style. This quality comes through even in monochrome in the Pavilion of Eight Poems (63, il. p. 90) with its dreamy but deliberate blurring of shapes which recalls some of the dissolved landscapes of Southern Sung. Ch’en Shuns finest land-
89
90
Pines on Hengshan (Hunan)
91
Ch'en Shun
scape style combines the boneless method, color, and the massed brushwork of the Sung “Mi style” (15, iL p. 32). The Landscape and Poem (64, iL p. 91) is a beautiful example of this style. The composition, gracefully bending down, then up, is surprisingly real. The color is soft and rich, enjoyed in itself. In this sense, the scroll is a proto type for seventeenth-century coloristie develop¬ ments. (93, 95). Ch'en Shun's paintings seem as free and easy as his calli¬ graphy, usually written in the “running style/'
The direct influence of Shen Chou, the original founder of the Wu School, is less evident than that of Wen Cheng-ming, but it did inspire two men: one his direct pupil, Chou Yung, a successful official; the other, Hsieh Shih-ch'en, Chou's works are extremely rare and Whiter Mountains and Lonely
67 (defer//) Hsieh Shrh-ch'en
92
Chou Yung
Temple (66, il. p. 92) may well be his only work in the Occident. In figures, architecture, and trees it recalls Shen Chou, but the heavy use of washes in the “axe-hewn” mountains is derived from Southern Sung, Li T’ang in par¬ ticular, as stated on the title colophon. The result is bold and original, some¬ where between the Wu and Che Schools. Hsieh Shih-ch’en also falls between the two camps and for this he was criticized by the scholar-critics. But Tiger Hill, Suchou (67, il. p. 92) is in a more purely scholarly vein. It has his distinctive soft, slightly blurred touch and is obviously based on Shen Chou’s style, par¬ ticularly in trees and architecture.
TUNG CH’I-CH’ANG AND SOME INDIVIDUALISTS
The end of the sixteenth century closes this period of elaboration in the accomplishments of the Wu School. A new impetus was needed and it was forthcoming in the theories and paintings of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang who dramati¬ cally changed the course of Chinese landscape painting. His importance and the extent of his influence is comparable to that of Caravaggio for European paint¬ ing, who, coincidentally, was active at almost the same time: about 1600.
There is little doubt that we must speak of later Chinese painting as “before Tung Ch’i-ch’ang” and “after Tung Ch’i-ch’ang.” His literary, critical, and calligraphic influence is paramount, and so is his painting, like it or not. In his writing he asserts the supremacy of the Northern Sung and Yuan masters, and in his painting he attempts to recapture the monumental strength
93
94
of the former and the controlled calligraphy of the latter. No one could de¬ scribe the Wu School as having been monumental or universal in an objective way. In opposing the previous direction of the literary school, Tung Ch’i- ch’ang was both a supreme reactionary and a supreme revolutionist. While the result is a loss of the outward reality of nature, there is a really significant aesthetic gain in an arbitrary, even fierce, reorganization of the elements of landscape painting into a monumental format. This aesthetic specialization in¬ volves striking distortions in his most typical pictures (69, il. p. 94). Ground or water planes are slanted, or raised and lowered at will. Foliage areas are forced into unified planes regardless of depth, and often in striking juxtapo¬ sitions of texture. No small details or minuscule textures are allowed to stand in the way of the artist’s striving for a broad and universal expression of the tradi¬ tional attitudes to nature. Malraux’s subtle distinction between Chardin and Braque, “In Chardin the glow is on the peach; in Braque the glow is on the picture,” applies as well to the works of Tung. The result is difficult and not completely realized when we compare his works with such later giants as Chu Ta (98, il. p. 124), or even the more academic Wang Yuan-ch’i (86, il. p. 106), for theirs was a pictorial genius which accomplished what Tung Ch’i-ch’ang in¬ dicated.12 And others of the later individualists, Rung Hsien (101, il. p. 126) for example, took details or specific elements out of Tung’s pictures and enlarged or elaborated them.
We must not assume, as the writer once did, that the appearance of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang’s pictures results from a lack of competence. An earlier picture “after Chang Seng-yu” (68, il. p. 94), the almost legendary pre-T’ang painter, clearly demonstrates Tung’s control and subtlety within a chosen set of rules: in this case color and a relatively “boneless” manner. This compe¬ tence could be commanded if desired, but, like the Post-Impressionists, the artist was desperately striving to reconstitute the powerful and virile forms rather than the surface likeness of the earlier painters. Tung Ch’i-ch’ang had the last word: “Those who study the old masters and do not introduce some changes are as if closed in by a fence. If one imitates the models too closely, one is often still further removed from them.”56
Tung’s official position and his pictorial and critical acceptance as the arbiter of taste and authenticity certified the triumph of the literary-painters’ tradition, identified by him and his colleagues with the “Southern School,” in opposition to that tradition represented by the Che School and described as “Northern.” His own immediate following, Ch’en Chi-ju (70, not il.), Mo Shih- lung, who coined the sometimes obfuscating Northern and Southern categor¬ ies,7 and others, is usually described as the Sung-chiang School, after the town
95
71
Li Liu-fang
96
97
near Suchou which was their center.
The influence of Tung can be seen in numerous other important masters who can only be described as seventeenth-century individualists, a description that can be narrowed to these late Ming men alone, or broadened to include all of the distinctive personalities of the troubled late years of the century, even into the early part of the Ch’ing Dynasty (1644-1912). However, since this latter group is involved in the social and political picture of the new and alien dynasty, these later individualists will be considered subsequently, as a contrast to the almost neo-classic academicism that was the early Ch’ing by-product of the Sung-chiang School. The other Ming individualists are too numerous and relatively recently known to Westerners to be presented in more than a sum¬ mary way, Although the poem on one of Li Liu-fang’s boldest pictures (71, il. p. 96) mentions Ni Tsan, and the brush work is influenced by the brusque style of Wu Chen, the over -all effect of the landscape would be unthinkable with¬ out the intervention of Tung Ch’i-ch'ang. We should note in passing, as a post- Yuan characteristic, the way in which the so-called Ni type composition is vis¬ ually and compositionally unified from bottom to top. The excellent preserva¬ tion of the ink and the particularly simplified brushwork combine to offer de¬ tails (il. p. 96) which reveal the order of the successive strokes and washes with an almost kinetic force. Or consider the fantastic boldness of Sheng Mao-yeh’s Lonely Retreat, dated 1630, (72, il. p. 97). Sheng17 has taken a small segment of a monumental landscape, a mountain notch, and magnified it, treated it with great bravura, producing a large scale painting with an immediate rather than a cumulative effect. Nevertheless, the fading mists are suggestively handled and show the subtle touch that is found in many of the artist’s smaller pictures. The painter is not without humor in the figure of the Sage and in the grotesque trees. The painting fascinates precisely because of its wild, off¬ beat quality.
Another of these individualists was a direct pupil of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang. We can see the art of Ch’eng Cheng-kuei in an early (73, il. p. 99) and a late (74, not il.) handscroll. The former is particularly interesting as it confirms Ch’eng’s use of "a dry and stumpy brush” as mentioned in the Kuo Ch’ao Hua Cheng Lu. The effect in the early scroll is almost like that of Western chiaro¬ scuro. The unusual dry-textured and shaded areas are accomplished by the use of a sooty ink, sparely watered and applied with a relatively stiff brush. The composition is equally strange and willful, and is based on near masses and sud¬ den break-throughs, with a jerky, erratic rhythm that is typical of the artist. In later years, as in the second scroll, he exploits this mode even further, but with a wet brush and a rapid, unshaded handling, using slight and rather tur-
98
99
73 (detail) Ch’eng Cheng-koei
75 (detail)
Lan Ying
gid color. This extreme specialization is carried over into the titles and inscrip¬ tions on his pictures, for he uses the same title for nearly all his scrolls and even goes so far as to number them for each year!
In contrast to this specialization are the wide-ranging interests of Lan Ying, an effervescent and skillful, if secondary, talent. He delights in play¬ ing the improvisation game and his long scroll in the style of Tung Yuan, Huang Kung-wang, Wang Meng, and Wu Chen (75, il. p. 100) is a type example of vari¬ ations on given themes. The last passage, inspired by Wu Chen, is especially good —wet and free— and seems to best express the temperament of the late Ming man. The same exuberance is found in the hanging scroll (76, il. p. 97), dated 1652, twenty-eight years later, where the spiky and saucy flavor is increased by the decorative use of clear, warm color. Lan Ying’s lack of “loftiness” certainly reduced his rank in Chinese criticism.
Of course, many in this period continued to practice a more conservative and detailed manner, especially in figure painting. Of these the most note¬ worthy was Ting Yun-p’eng whose works even Tung Ch’i-ch’ang praised as “every hair alive.” His rather rare landscapes (77, il. p. 101), in this case in T’ang style, are very traditional in details, but quite proper for their period in their unified and realistic atmosphere. Tightly and carefully painted, they use color as a surface coating. Ting’s hanging scroll in the exhibition must rank as one of the finest ultra-conservative works in this seventeenth century. Other paintings, such as the little handscroll by Wang Chien-chiang (78, not il.) use this archaistic technique with a gold background in a highly decorative way.
Still another phase of traditionalism was the continued close copying of great painters of the past. One of the very best manifestations of this form of
100
79
Ku I-teh
Ting Yun-p'eng
'A
m"
’i4M
101
4 V*
filial piety is Enjoying the Moon by Ku I-teh (79, il. p. 101) which has a colo¬ phon by the great Tung Ch’i-ch’ang himself.34 In this colophon he describes the now lost original by the Yuan master, Wang Meng, from which the paint¬ ing by Ku was taken. Much can be learned by the visual comparison of these known later copies with originals or presumed originals. Thus the painting is texturally and compositionally close to Wang Meng (30, il. p. 50), but the color and brushwork combine to produce a more immediately charm¬ ing efFect without that rough and rustic exterior which often seems charac¬ teristic of the earlier artist. The later washes are wetter in the foliage, the pine needles and bark are more carefully and precisely treated. The ropy and strong brush of Wang Meng has been transformed into an idiom that takes for granted the existence of the sixteenth century, and especially Wen Cheng-ming and Wen Po-jen (57, il. p. 85).
THE CH’ING DYNASTY: ORTHODOX PAINTERS
All of these painters worked in a confused and troubled period which ended with the triumph of the alien Manchu Dynasty in 1644. The parallel with the Mongol conquest of the thirteenth century immediately suggests itself and has in it much of interest. There is a similar dichotomy involving a strongly traditional-eclectic group and a nonconforming group of rugged indi¬ vidualists, rebellious in aesthetics as well as in politics. With the Ch’ing Dyn¬ asty we see the revolutionary style of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang and his followers be¬ come the academic manner of the late seventeenth century. This manner is embodied in the work of “The Four Wangs.” In evaluating their contribution we must be especially tolerant of eclecticism and unusually sensitive to the fine shadings involved in variations on earlier styles. Almost all of their paintings are “in the manner of” or “in homage to” some earlier master and fall quite readily into a pattern comparable to the performance of a great composition by a musical virtuoso. In most of their production the Wangs, with the pos¬ sible exception of Wang Yuan-ch’i (86, il. p. 106), can largely be appreciated in terms of their consummately skillful brushwork. Consequently they will prob¬ ably always rank much higher in Chinese eyes than ever in ours.
Wang Shih-min, unrepresented here, was the oldest and, let it be said, the dullest of the four. Wang Chien was of the same generation and a friend of his namesake. His variation on Wang Meng (83, il. p. 103) possesses no orig¬ inality in composition but does have a personal touch, a kind of waving, roll¬ ing rhythm of considerable grace. The wet and transparent dots are skillfully
102
84
83
Wang Chien
Wang Hui
84 I detail )
placed on the foreground rocks and serve to pinion their linear movement. Nevertheless this is painting for other painters and critics in an even more limited sense than in the usual literary man’s style.
The subsequent generation produced the other two and more interest¬ ing members of the Four Wangs. Wang Hui was the pupil of both the older Wangs and achieved extremely high marks from them as well as from other critics. Wang Hui’s Bamboo Grove and Distant Mountains (84, il. p. 103), after Wang Meng, is an excellent example of an improvisation which the Chinese define as a “copy,” or even a “tracing.” It could never be taken as a Wang Meng or anyone except Wang Hui himself. If there is no daring or boldness in the composition there is the most amazing control of all the nuances possible with brush and ink (see il. p. 84), a control comparable to that found on the porcelains of the period. The in-and-out movement of the bamboo leaves, the absolutely sure placement of the rocks in space, the variety of texture and tone,
104
and the precision of the brush strokes, all these attest the refinement and amazing skill of the artist* We feel admiration rather than wonder or excitement* This is nothing to be despised; we still leave space in our aesthetic hearts for the small but genuine pleasures of a Fantin-Latour or a Richard Wilson*
If Wang Hui is the greatest vir~ tuoso of the group, then Wang Yuan- ch'i is by all odds the most original* He must have studied Tung Gh'i- ch’angs distortions in paint more than his critical emphases on tradi¬ tion; and he added to these gleanings a careful, intellectual technique with an original and constructive use of color* His monochrome pictures seem more traditional than those with color, as we can see by compar¬ ing the hanging scroll "after the style of Huang Kung-wang” (85 , il. p* 105) with a colored work after Ni Tsan (86, ih P* 106). The mono¬ chrome landscape provides a fine demonstration of the typical con¬ tinuous space of later Chinese paint¬ ings essaying the earlier monumental styles. While there is tilting and dis~ tortion of the various ground and water levels, the space in which they are placed seems all of a piece, not divided and separated as, for example, in the Northern Sung hanging scrolls* But color gives Wang Yuan-ch’i a greater opportunity for innovation and with it he finds his full means of expression.
We shall soon have occasion to mention the use of color again, but in a different technique. Wang's careful, almost laborious, method is really water- color painting, not tinted ink painting. The method is not unlike that of
Wang Yuan-ch1!
105
86
Wang Yuan-ch'i
106
Cezanne in his water colors (126). Glazes of color, more limited in range of hue than those used in the West, are applied one above the other and in the distant island of the picture “after Ni Tsan” (86, il. p. 106) produce an extremely solid and well-placed structure. The contrast with the supposed pro¬ totype style of Ni Tsan (31, il. p. 54) is a decided one and rests largely on the successful and solid use of color as opposed to the delicate and evanescent mono¬ chrome of the earlier painter. A contemporary source gives us an excellent description of Wang Yuan-ch’i’s working method and, incidentally, additional proof of the often time-consuming approach of Chinese painters. The single brush stroke, which once put down is never erased, is only one of various creative techniques.
He started by spreading the paper, and then he cogitated for a long while. He took some light ink and drew some general outlines indicating in a summary way the woods and the valleys. Then he fixed the forms of the peaks and the stones (cliffs), the terraces and the folds (of the mountains), the branches and trunks of the trees, but each time before he lifted the brush (to paint) he thought over the thing very carefully in his mind. Thus the day was soon ended.
The next day he invited me again to his house and took out the same scroll. He added on some wrinkles (on the mountains) . Then he used some reddish brown (ochre) colour, mixed it with a little yellow gum-raisin (sic) (gambodge) (sic), and with this painted the mountains and stones. Thereupon he took a small flat-iron, loaded with hot coals, and with this he ironed and dried the picture. After that he went over the stones and the whole structure of the picture again brushing with dry ink. The leaves of the trees were dotted in a scattering manner, the woods on the mountains, the buildings, the bridges, ferries, streams, and beaches were brought out clearly. Next he took some green colour mixed with water and ink and with this he washed quite lightly and slowly, emphasizing the lights and shadows and the relief. Then again he used the same flat-iron as before to dry the picture. And once more he went over the hooks and horizontal strokes, the coloured and the dotted spots from the lightest to the darkest parts thus making the picture gradually more dense. It took him half a month to finish a picture.
At the beginning it was all in a nebulous state (hun lun), but gradually this was broken up, and then the scattered parts were brought together; finally the whole thing returned again to the nebulous state. The life- breath (ch’i) was boundless, the emptiness was filled with beauty, not a single stroke was carelessly done. That is the reason why he spent so many days on a work. The saying that the old painters used ten days for painting a water course and five days for a stone may not be an exaggeration.57
The Four Wangs are the principal luminaries of what the Chinese call the Lou-tung School which formed the basis of conservative scholarly painting of the period. One need only examine the landscape dated 1697 (87, il. p. 108) by Huang Ting, a pupil of Wang Yuan-ch’i, to realize that fine painting was produced outside of the big four, but within the limits of the school. While
107
87
108
Huang Ting
the painting is based texturally and compositionally on Wang Meng, the artist has made two important changes. The rounded contours do not bulge, but are treated as flat planes with textured surfaces; and these planes recede, not by rolling masses, but by overlapping in a man¬ ner analogous to pre-Yuan painting.
The result is a combination of mon- umentality and intimacy which is quite unusual and very successful.
In turn take Huang Ting’s pupil,
Chang Tsung-ts’ang (88= il. p. 109), a favorite painter of the Ch’ien Lung Emperor (1732-1796). While super¬ ficially similar to Wang Yuan-ch’i,
Chang has relied more on ink and less on color. The effect is dense and compact with a minimum aware¬ ness of space or air for containing these densities. The result is highly abstract, almost a diagram of mass in a vacuum. In addition the picture is marvelously well-preserved and shows, per¬ haps as much as any late painting, the sheen and liveliness of ink and trans¬ parent color on paper.
The more purely official court painters and decorators interest us little save for one quite individual artist, Yuan Chiang, whose Carts on a Mountain Road (89, il. p. 110) was painted in 1754 “after Kuo Hsi," the Northern Sung master. This is a late mannerist kind of painting with an intense interest in lava¬ like forms with metamorphic overtones and strikingly like some European draw¬ ings of rocks and mountains such as the one by Jan Brueghel (123, il. p. 110), which also borders on the grotesque. Yuan’s monumental composition of a con¬ tinuous mass in continuous space is belied by the pale, almost pastel-like, color which reduces the monumentality while helping the decorative qualities. There may well be European influence, quite common in eighteenth-century Chinese painting, in the more realistic treatment of the individual parts. This also adds to the tensions in the picture, tensions which make the whole unreal, however real the parts. Here we can see very well how totally real the Sung or Yuan landscape paintings are by comparison, and that this earlier reality was achieved
. * - 1. a » i « t
I S3 t: it f * i* &
It * £ ft »
r iU-
* it i 4 1 *
‘Mt-V ;
88
Chang Tsung-ts’ang
109
89 Yuan Chiang 123 Jan Brueghel the Elder
by magnificent intellectual control.
The aesthetic bridge between the new conservativism of the Four Wangs and the priest-hermit-individualists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centur¬ ies is formed by two painters usually assigned to the Lou-tung School: Wu Li and Yun Shou-p’ing. They belong, but not quite. Wu Li3 especially is possessed by a rather different genius and the results justify his contemporary fame and the growing appreciation of his works today. Although he was a boyhood friend of Wang Hui and a pupil of Wang Chien, Wu Li proved his essentially different nature by his painting and by becoming a Christian and a
110
Jesuit. The latter did not affect the style of his painting but may have influenced its later mood. His ear¬ lier paintings seem no different in intention or level of accomplishment than those of the lesser Wangs. But he could, on occasion, step over the boundary of accepted taste into the realm of the unusual or the gro¬ tesque. The hanging scroll in the style of Wang Meng, dated 1674 (90, il. p. Ill), was painted two years be¬ fore he became a Christian and seems a tense and turbulent, even subjec¬ tive picture. The extraordinary con¬ volutions of the rocks and the moun¬ tain peak may derive from the Yuan master, but they go far beyond him in exaggerated tension. These, with the large scale, the enclosed composi¬ tion, and the somber ink make for a dramatic and disturbing picture really outside the bounds of then con¬ ventional taste. His second scroll in the exhibition (91, il. p. 1 12), while not dated, seems to belong to his Christian years. It is a mature and serene work of after 1700, with a real fusion of delicate color and touch with a monumental composi¬ tion of extreme verticality. Like Huang Ting (87, il. p. 108), the artist knew very well how to flatten the planes and to overlap them in direct relationship to the picture plane. The sharply vertical composition is stabilized by the sug¬ gested breadth of the base which supports the upper half by the contrapuntal, upward thrust of the foothills. The detail (il. p. 113) reveals a delicacy and control of the brush comparable to Wang Hui. It also suggests the metamor- phic character of the landscape, as in the cliffhead with a large nose at the right. Such an interest in anthropomorphic forms in nature was not just Chinese but universal. We can cite the Great Stone Face in New Hampshire, the remarks
90
Wu Li
111
112
91 (detail)
113
Yun Shou-p’ing
tk*\
f ** ;* % •*> i 4 # i j
* <L
3*‘
114
of Leonardo on the subjects to be found in the worn and damaged surface of a wall, or more recently the metamorphic landscape of Pavel Tchelitchew (128, il. p. 112). That these disquieting forms were significant to Wu Li can be guessed from his paintings of the human-rock formations of Huang Shan. These, as well as his strongly, and often tense, individual compositions, link him to such more daring individualists as Shih-t’ao. Conversely he is far less sub¬ jective and informal than the rebel artists and such a composition as 91 (il. p. 112) attains a compact and timeless expression undreamed of by either the individualists or the orthodox.
The Four Wangs, Wu Li, and Yun Shou-p’ing are usually classed as the Six Famous Masters of the Ch’ing Dynasty,8 the foremost exponents of ortho¬ doxy deriving from Tung Ch’i-ch’ang. Yun Shou-p’ing is more often thought of as a flower painter, but his landscapes are reasonably numerous. If Wu Li was a strong and individual variant of orthodoxy, Yun was his suave and subtle counterpart. His large hanging scroll of juniper, rock, bamboo, and flowers (92, il. p. 1 14) is one of interest for several reasons. It can be compared with the Yuan version of a similar subject by Wu Chen (29, il. p. 49) to fully un¬ derstand the later sensuousness and archaism, more particular, more real, and hence more individual and less rational. Concepts of nature’s principles fade before the captivating charm of subdued color and fluent wash. The combina¬ tion of the archaistic roughness of the juniper, the delicate brush strokes of the bamboo, and the “boneless” washes of the flower-leaves, is markedly sophis¬ ticated as is the warm, golden patina of all the painted parts. Such sensuous¬ ness cannot be fully equated with the Four Wangs, any more than can Wu Li’s strangeness. Both painters were individuals as well as conformists. More than a few creative artists went all the way of nonconformity.
THE INDIVIDUALISTS
I am always myself and must naturally be present in my work. The beards and eyebrows of the old masters cannot grow on my face. The lungs and bowels of the old masters cannot be transferred to my stomach. I express my own lungs and bowels and show my own beard and eyebrows. If it happens that my work approaches that of some old painter, it is he who comes close to me, not I who am imitating him. I have got it by nature and there is no one among the old masters whom I cannot follow and transform.56 — Shih-t’ao
The question is how to find peace in a world of suffering. You ask why I came hither; I cannot tell the reason. I am living high up in a tree and looking down. Here I can rest free from all troubles like a bird in its nest.
People call me a dangerous man, but I answer: “You are like devils.’’57
— K’un-ts’an
115
With these writings and these pictures (93-101) we enter a radically different world. In many ways the styles of painting and the attitudes towards past or present of these Ch’ing individualists were the most extreme in the his- tory of Chinese painting until modern times. While they were just as aware of tradition as any of their more conservative contemporaries, their use of that tradition was free and original. In many cases they went to Tung Ch'i-ch’ang’s paintings rather than his writings, and extracted that artist's most advanced and unusual approaches to form for their own use and development.12 This is particularly true of Chu Ta and Kung Hsien. Nearly all of these men were, in one way or another, rebels in retirement, actively out of sympathy with the new Dynasty in particular and the world in general. In the cases of Pa-ta-shan- jen, ShihTao, and K'un-ts'an, their assumed monk's names alone witness their chosen path of retreat from the world. Further, the first two were connected with Ming royal and princely lines, and the fall of that Dynasty in 1644 was more to them than just a foreign triumph. Their position, like that of the other, slightly later individualists, was well understood by the new powers for their works are scarcely represented in the enormous Imperial collections. While they were rather untouchable, these individualists were not completely so, and their position of moral isolation was respected and often admired, even by offi¬ cialdom. We must also remember that this rebellion and isolation was aesthetic, verbal, and ethical. Had it spilled over these limitations there might well have been martyrdom, like that of a few late Yuan painters,
K’un-ts'an (also known as Shih-cbi) and Shih-t'ao are usually considered together as the “Two Stones” (Shih).11 Their relationship is more than that of a pun or a personal relationship, for among their contributions was a mutual understanding of the creative possibilities of color. We have already seen the constructive use of color by Wang Yuan-chi and its sensuous application by Yun Shou-p'ing, but in the case of the Two Stones the use was governed equally by a desire for emotional expression. In the seventeenth century, for the first time, we find various artists experimenting with color, another index of their personal and visual approach. Of the Two Stones, KJun-t$'an was the more specialized. Nearly all of his paintings (93, ik p. 117) have a rather gran¬ diose and dramatic view of nature in movement, within and beyond the picture. The trees and rocks dance and twist— only the two sages are quiescent. The emotive meaning of the orange color used throughout the picture is given by the inscription which speaks of a retreat from summer heat and of the rosy color of the light coming through the clouds in the late afternoon. If any sources for K'un-tsan's art should be mentioned, that inspiration would be Shen Chou in such pictures as (53, ih p, 78)*
116
117
Mountain Pines near Peking
118
The second “Stone,” Shih-t’ao, is even less traditional and more varied than the first, and this variety is well-represented here.* He seems at his best in the small, personal format of the album leaf. Two of these, dated 170S (96, il. p. 117), are not only of interest for their varied brushwork and composition, but because their inscriptions (see catalog) are excellent statements of Shih- t’ao’s unusual aesthetic position.74 The contrast between the soft, wet washes and strokes of one, and the crisp, dry edges of the other is evident and this var¬ iety is carried out in other leaves from the album not in the exhibition. Then there is the painting of six years earlier (94, il. p. 118) which uses a wonderful assymetry with warm color, a complete range of brush stroke, and texture. The result is a personal statement, but still related to what the eye sees of nature (il. p. 1 18) in a similar situation. The suavity of the painting goes well with the highly interesting and virtuous inscription translated in the catalog.
The album of seven leaves (95, il. p. 120), left from an originally much larger total, is of a different nature. Small in size and very sketchy in treatment, the pages were intended as personal notes for a friend, based on famous scenes throughout the country. They are, therefore, more specific, not only in a de¬ scriptive sense, but in the sense of the spectator sharing an intimate experience with the artist rather than observing something presented. This intimacy is refreshingly new. Leaf no. 6 (il. p. 120) is of great importance because of its relatively complex use of color; in addition to the standard triad, based on red, blue, and green, we have a purple and a mixed blue-green used in small but significant areas. The result is comparable to as advanced a modern painter as John Marin (127, il. p. 120). Both pictures must be described as water color painting, with emphasis on the word color. Still another album by Shih-t’ao (97, il. p. 121, 122) is purely pictorial with no inscriptions or literary material. Again there is a great variety from a dry and crabbed handling of fantastic and forbidding rock forms to the most dashing and fluent representations of nature in various moods. The leaf with boat and rainstorms is extremely direct and im¬ mediate and has a more than casual connection with the equally torrential storm scene by Claude (121, il. p. 123) where the tempest is all water and boat rather than tree and land. The universality of Shih-t’ao is due, in part, to his free and often un-Chinese attitude toward the brush. Few, if any other Chinese painters use the brush more pictorially, with relatively little emphasis on pre¬ cision and accuracy of the stroke. His brush-stroke method, or as he would say, “no-method,”58 is one of noncommitment. Like a great general he holds
• An early Shih-t’ao handscroll, dated 1662, of Rocks , Orchids , and Bamboo is in The Cleveland Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Collection. (52.589)
119
127 John Marin
120
back until he sees what is needed, and then he supplies it to meet the particu¬ lar demand. “The method is complete when it is bom from the meaning, but the method of the meaning has never been recorded/' or, “the method which consists in not following any method is the perfect method/'66 This attitude governs the great variety and universality of his work, which includes one of the most interesting and unusual of all Chinese treatises on painting, the Hua Yu Lu (Notes on Painting )/* In this, as in his painting, he goes directly to the original words of the Ch’an Buddhist and Taoist philosophers and starts from them, brushing aside the intervening years of commentary* Like his pic¬ torial brothers, the spontaneous masters of Southern Sung (22, iL p* 40), he is frighteningly direct and seemingly naive* He makes us think and look anew. Study of the old masters is for him not archaism but “Pen-hua”: Transforma-
121
97 Tao-chi (A)
tions. Painting is merely painting to Shih-t’ao, Real painting is “I-hua”: one- stroke painting in the sense of relationship to the first, primordial stroke of creation.
The third of these four most famous seventeenth -century individualists is the Chu Ta of imperial lineage who became Pa-ta-shan-jen, the priest. His most characteristic works are fish, flower, bird, and rock pictures,* but enough of his landscapes remain to show his originality and his greatness. The land¬ scape after Kuo Chung-shu (98, il. p. 124) is derived in some of its parts, notably the trees at the lower right, from Tung Ch'i-ch’ang. But from there on into
* A characteristic scroll, Fish and Rocks, is in The Cleveland Museum of Art* John L* Severance Collec¬ tion. (53*247)
122
121 Claude Geflee (Claude Lorram)
the picture a bolder and more accomplished hand takes over. Kuo was a rare northern Sung master and we have nothing to go by in determining the extent of Chu Ta’s dependence. As we look we can feel safe in assuming there is very little. Chu has achieved monumentality in size and scale with the great twisting movement of his cliff capped by the two peaks beyond. The view past the cliff at the left is not new in itself, but its pictorial and abstract validity is. His metier is not color or wrash but linear and calligraphic brush strokes. The second hanging scroll (99, il. p. 1 25) is a colored and calmer view of flat islands and distant shore in which the musical play of the brush is particularly delight¬ ful. The fatness and cleanness of this brush-play is characteristic from the largest scrolls to the tiniest album leaf. The landscapes of Pa-ta-shan-jen, un¬ like those of his three parallel masters, seem more rational and less sensuous in general effect. What sensuous quality exists is to the Chinese one of the most sensuous of all qualities, the brush stroke. But to us he must seem a more pur¬ posefully abstract and constructivist master than the others.
123
124
125
The last of the four is Kung Hsien, no priest but nevertheless a recluse, a cultivator of his own garden, and a painter, Kung seems the most limited of the individualists in terms of mood and general pictorial appearance. Perhaps, unlike Shih-t'ao, he had a method, for in addition to authoring a critical trea¬ tise, he also prepared a manual for painters. The long handscroll (100) and the sequential album (10T il- p. 126) are typical, although the album has a few unusual quiet and lacy pages. The illustration shows Kung’s characteristic dark and ghostly view of nature. He depends upon a heavy massing and glazing of ink, perhaps more so than any other Chinese painter. In these masses he places sudden appearances of ribbons and patches of light like wraiths before his night world. The gloomy drama of his landscapes is strangely Western as is his sys¬ tematic massing of similar brush strokes and the almost completely covered surface of his paper. The interest in light as a true pictorial phenomenon is apparently a development of later Chinese painting.
The measure of the originality of these and other individualists is the ease with which we recognize their personal styles and instantly separate them from the styles of nearly all other Chinese landscape painters. Their unique¬ ness is also a snare since their manner is so distinctive that it can be superficially reproduced with considerable ease. To reproduce their touch is another matter, as it is with a Rembrandt or a Renoir, Who can justify such an interest in later painting? Even in traditional China the trace and touch of the individual be¬ came more and more important, culminating in these and other painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
126
127
102 (detail) Hsiao Yun-ts’ung
103 Hsiao Yun-ts’ung
The importance of local geographic factors, including physical isolation and environment, is always present in Chinese painting. Con tag has stressed the importance of local collections of paintings and the local landscape in the for¬ mation of an artist’s style;13 and for this reason the standard Chinese histories of Chinese painting tend to a rather too neat geographic basis of classification; “The Four Masters of Anhui;” “The Eight Masters of Nanking;” “The Strange Masters of Yangchou.” But this over-emphasis should not lead us to overlook the partial validity of the geographic idea. Anhui province, south and west of the usual school centers, is a case in point. Two Anhui men of late Ming and early Ch’ing stand apart as individuals with unusual but related styles. Hung Jen, a priest-recluse, died before Hsiao Yun-ts’ung, but was his pupil. The stu¬ dent became more famous than the master. Both are very much worth atten¬ tion. Hsiao is represented by one of his masterpieces, a long handscroll of Clear Sounds among Hills and Water (102, il. p. 127) and a perfect example of his late style, a small fan (103, il. p. 128) painted a year before his death. Clear Sounds is dated 1664 and is a composition based on free-swinging rhythms and cool, crisp color. The variety of landscape representation aids the uniformity of the brushwork system based on angles and arcs. The clear, sharp, almost tart, flavor of the scroll, like that of high mountain country, must have impressed the eighteenth-century scholar, Shen Feng, who chose the title. The second work is thinner and more delicate, in part because it is a fan, but also because of the intervention of the pure and cold style of the dead pupil, Hung Jen. The com-
128
104
Hung-|en
129
105 Ch’a Shih-piao
130
109 Mei Ch'ing
position is, however, extremely bold, in keeping with the fantastic legend of the subject: the magical land of flowering orchards found by a wandering fisherman.
Hung Jen does to Hsiao’s style what Chao Meng-fu did to Li Ch’eng (26). He deletes the color and flesh of the style and leaves only the bare bones. Of course Hung is also an ardent admirer of Ni Tsan (31, il. p. 62) and the large hanging scroll (104, il. p. 129) is even more a tribute to his spiritual god¬ father Ni than to his actual master Hsiao. The most crystalline and angular treatment possible produces a calculated air of unreality and refinement, as if one were in the thinnest air of the highest mountains. The spare details are wedded to a delicate touch and a large scale composition. His use of the old de¬ vice of flat planes, overlapped and receding into space, relates the details to the picture surface and gives a large effect that belies the thin and delicate brush- work. Hung Jen’s style is an essence of an essence, refined to the breaking point and always on the verge of disappearance. But it seldom fails and the end pro¬ duct if specialized is fine and rare.
Another product of Anhui, Ch’a Shih-piao (105, il. p. 130) is more tra¬ ditional and more approachable. His abbreviating and free-flowing brush is
131
108 Mei Ch’ing
used to produce scenes with an immediate impact of great physical charm, often in an almost full water-color technique. The last of these individualists, Mei Ch’ing, seems less concerned with brush virtuosity and more with the Yellow Mountains in his native Anhui. Most of his albums are made up of scenes from this range executed “in the style of” various earlier painters. The two albums (108, il. page 132; 109, il. p. 131) present considerable variety in subject and quality. Mei is at his best in more complex organizations such as 109, where the rolling, rococo movement of pine trees, leaves, waterfall, and rocks, not unlike the movements of a Fragonard drawing (124, il. p. 133), successfully overrides his brush. The apparently common idea of metamorphosis, as found in Wu Li and others, is found here too. Is the man in the foreground a rock that looks like a man, or a man sitting like a rock? Both albums are achievements in scale reduction. For Mei Ch’ing the landscape is reduced to small rhythmical motifs and repetitions: trees are like flowers, mountains like rocks, etc. While he re-
132
124 Jean Honore Fragonard
minds us at times of Shih-t’ao, he does not possess the amazing inventive fecun¬ dity of that artist. Mei invented some six or eight motifs and varied them ad infinitum. For Shih-t’ao every picture is an invention. Mei Ch’ing’s works are very special concoctions, not for constant use, but well worth knowing.
As in the case of the orthodox painters and the academicians, the eighteenth century produced fewer individualists of great intrinsic worth, but those few are quite up to the high levels of the preceding century. Most of these interesting personalities are included in the “Strange Masters of Yangchou,” from the city where they were born or to which they migrated. Hua Yen is one of these and at his best, as in the famous Conversation in Autumn, dated 1732 (110, il. p. 134), is a stunning painter. He is not only a brush virtuoso, but a colorist and a pictorial organizer. The twisted rocks below are height¬ ened in their tone and movement as counterpoint to the tall mountains washed with color in the “boneless” manner. There are innumerable telling contrasts of wet wash, dry texture, and crisp, small strokes that seem as if flicked upon the paper (il. p. 135). The viewer feels the hand of the artist as it literally flies over the paper. As much as any painting in the exhibition, this one has touch and it should be compared with the fifteenth century Tu Chin (42, il. p. 66) for the same spirit in a different age. Hua Yen’s brushwork is buttressed by a strong sense of structure as in the pierced tree trunk at the left, or in the larger organization by contrast of excitement below and tranquillity above. Diversified but integrated, Conversation in Autumn is a completely satisfying pic¬ ture. His later compositions are often more carefully handled but even more original in composition. The Enjoyment of Chrysanthemums (111, il. p. 136) uses this later interest in off-balance compositions with an unusual representa-
133
110 Hua Yen
134
110 (detail)
135
Ill
Hua Yen
112
Chin Nung
136
113 Huang Shen
tion of a highly literary activity: the tranquil scholar with his books and his flowers in the midst of garden-like nature.
Chin Nung is a far "stranger” Yangchou scholar- pain ter, a priest with bizarre pictorial tendencies that go farther from the norm than those of any of the individualists. The Honolulu album, dated 1759 (112, il. p. 136), is a rare thing, a “sketch” album with free notations which could be used later in more developed form.4 We read of sketches from nature, but few of these have come down from important painters. Aside from the evidently unusual com¬ positions, we are aware that strong linear elements dominate in the sketch much more than in final versions by Chin. These latter are free, too, but use washes of undulating color to supplement the more varied lines. The quality of the sketches is rather close to that of the "intimist” drawings of Bonnard or Vuillard. Even his contemporaries called Chin Nung “most peculiar” or “quite
137
115
startling,” but the illustrated painting seems as warm and sensitive as the poem written on it:
The lotus has bloomed,
Hushed is the pool.
Early arrived the new chill . . .
How many blue-winged dragon flies are there?
Six, six water-windows open wide,
Breeze drifts under the fan,
Remember here, sitting with her . . . those slender fingers peeling lotus seeds . . .
— tr. Gustav Ecke
Chin Nung is a highly serious artist, even in the sketch medium. Huang Shen has a touch of humor transmitted with a nervous, flying touch. In his album (113, il. p. 137) we see him as a kind of “sport” descendant of the Che School. His fluttering brushwork is usually used for figure painting, but in the landscapes he gives it even freer rein and so the outlines and wrinkles of the rocks seem to dance in a syncopated way. His exaggeration and his humor evidently puzzled his countrymen who called him “too extravagant” and “lack¬ ing refined beauty and harmonious ease.”57 Perhaps this explains why his best pictures are to be found in Japan where the extremes are more easily ac¬ ceptable.
138
Chang Tao-wu
With these after all not-so-strange masters, one nears the end of creative landscape production. An orthodox painter like Li Shih-cho may occasionally produce a striking example of dry brushwork in a bizarre and angular compo¬ sition which is almost a play on the similarity of dry and crumbly textures in nature: water foam, crumbling rock, and rotting tree (114, il. p. 140). Or an unknown, sad, and unsuccessful scholar, Chang Tao-wu, will take a hack¬ neyed seasonal subject, blossom time, and contribute a fresh and charming handscroll (1 15, il. p. 138). But by 1800 landscape and all painting has run dry in theme, technique, and mood. And so the last of our talented painters, Ch’ien Tu (117, il. p. 141), living on to 1844, sets himself a limited scale of dry brush- work within a severely limited size and so is able to keep touch and breath alive —just barely. He is a miniaturist with absolute command within his tiny range and his dense and tight view of nature seems terribly introspective, slightly twisted, and carefully censored. The dry-rot of latter day Imperial China re¬ quired Ch’ien Tu’s traditional scholarly response: cultivate your garden, avoid the dusty crowd. He was enough an artist to turn the dryness into style, but even his contribution is minuscule in the depressing light of the beginning time of troubles. The Chinese view of nature was still a valid one and its pictorial expression depended upon other new and individual replies but exhaustion made no answer.
139
114
Li Shih-cho
140
117
Ch’ien Tu
141
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Ludwig Bachhofer, A Short History of Chinese Art , New York, 1946.
2. Ludwig Bachhofer, "Chinese Landscape Paint* mg in the Eighth Century,” Burlington Magazine , November, 1935.
3* Chhen Yuan, "Wu Yu-shan,” Monumenta Serica , Vol. Ill, 1937-1938.
4. Chou Ling, "Introduction au pay sage chinois,” Phoebus, Vol. II, No. 3, 1949.
5. Sir Kenneth Clark, “An Englishman Looks at Chinese Painting,” The Architectural Review , July, 1947.
6. William Cbhn, Chinese Painting, London, 1948.
7. Victoria Con tag, "Tung Ch'i-ch’ang’s Hua Ch an Shih Sui Pi und das Hua Shuo des Mo Shihdung," Ostasiatische Zeitschrift, 1933.
8. Victoria Contag, Die Seeks Beruhmten Mater der Ch'ing-Dynastie, Leipzig, 1940.
9. Victoria Contag, “Schriftcharakteristiken in der Malerei dargestellt an Bildern Wang Mengs und anderen Maler der Sudschule,” Ostasiatische Zeitschrift, 1941, 27. Jahrgang, Heft
10. Victoria Contag, Chinesische Malerei der letzten vier Jahrhunderte, Ausstellung in Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, 1949-1950,
1L Victoria Contag, Die Beiden Steine, Braun¬ schweig, 1950.
12. Victoria Contag, "The Unique Characteristics of Chinese Landscape Pictures," Archives of the Chinese Art Society, VI, 1952,
13. Victoria Contag and Wang Cht-ch’uan, Maler- und Samm ler-S te mp el aus der Ming - und Ch*ing-Zeit , Shanghai, 1940,
14. Ernst Diez, Shan Shui, Die Chinesische Land- schaftsmalerei, Vienna, 1943.
15. Lucy Driscoll and Kenji Toda, Chinese Calligraphy, Chicago, 1935.
16. j, J. Dubose and L. Sickman, Great Chinese Painters of the Ming and Ch'ing Dynasties, New York, 1949. Wildenstein Exhibition Catalogue.
17. Gustav Ecke, "Comments on Calligraphies and Paintings," Monumenta S erica, Vol. Ill, 1957- 1938,
18. John C. Ferguson, "Chinese Landscapists,” Asia Major: Hirth Anniversary Volume, London, 1923.
19. John C. Ferguson, Chinese Painting, Chicago, 1927.
20. Otto Fischer, “Die Entwricklung der Raum darstellung In der Chinesische Kunst,” Ostasia¬ tische Zeitschrift, II, 1913-14,
21. Otto Fischer, Chinesische Landschaftsmalerei, Munchen, 192L
22. Otto Fischer, Die Chinesische Malerei der Han-Dynastie, Berlin, 193L
23. H. A. Giles, A Short Biographical Dictionary , London, 1898.
24. H. A. Giles, An Introduction to the History of Chinese Pictorial Art, Rev. ed., London, 1918.
25. Ernst Grasse, Die Ostasiatische Tuschmalerei , Berlin, 1923.
26. Binzan Harada, Shinn Meigwa Hokan: A Pageant of Chinese Painting , Tokyo, 1936.
27. Illustrated Catalogue of Chinese Government Exhibits for the International Exposition of Chinese Art in London, Shanghai, 1936, Vol, III,
28. Soame jenyns, A Background to Chinese Painting, London, 1935.
29. Ku Rung: Vols. 1-43. Palace Museum, Peking, 1929-1936.
30. Ku Rung Shu Hua Chi : Collection of Cal¬ ligraphic* and Paintings in the Palace Museum, Peiping, 1929-35. 45 Vols.
31. Kuo Hsi, An Essay on Landscape Painting, London, 1936. Translated by S, Sakanishi: Wisdom of the East Series.
32. Ku Teng, "Tuschespieie,” Ostasiatische Zeitschrift, 1932-
33. Berthold Laufer, "The Wang-chuan t'u, a Landscape of Wang Wei,” Ostasiatische Zeitschrift, 1931.
34. Aschwin Lippe, "Enjoying the Moon,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, May, 1951.
35. Aschwin Lippe, “A Christian Chinese Painter,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, December, 1952.
36. Aschwin Lippe, "Waterfall by Chu Chieh,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, November, 1953,
37. Benjamin March, "Linear Perspective in Chinese Painting,” Eastern Art, III, 1931.
38. Benjamin March, Some Technical Terms of Chinese Painting, Baltimore, 1935.
39. E. Matsumoto, "On the Eastward Propagation of the Indian Method of Mountain Portrayal,” Rokka , No. 618.
40. Prudence Myer, Landscape Elements in the Earlier Caves at Tun-huang, A thesis accepted by the Institute of Fine Arts of NewT York University, 1947-1948. Digest published in Marsyas, Vol. V, 1947-1949.
41. Paul Pelliot, Les groties de Touen Houang, Paris, 1914-24, Six portfolios.
42. Raphael Petrucci, La philosophic de la nature dans Tart d’ Extreme-Orient, Paris, 1910.
43. Raphael Petrucci, Encyclopedia de la pein- ture chinoise: Riai-tseu-yuan houa tchouan, Paris, 1918.
44. Alan Priest, "Southern Sung Landscapes: The Horizontal Scrolls,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, March, 1950,
45. Alan Priest, "Southern Sung Landscapes: The Album Leaves,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, April, 1950,
46. Alan Priest, "Southern Sung Landscapes: The Hanging Scrolls," Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, February, 1950.
47. Alan Priest, "Landscapes: Green and Blue," Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, March, 1951.
48. Benjamin Rowland, "The Problem of Hui Tsung,” Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America, V, 1951,
49. George Rowley, Principles of Chinese Paint¬ ing, Princeton, 1947.
142
50* Richard Rudolph and Wen Yu, Han Tomb Art of West China, Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1951.
51. Shio Sakanishi, The Spirit of the Brush , London, 1939.
52. S* Shimada and Y. Yonezawa, Painting of Sung and Yuan Dynasties, Tokyo, 1952.
53. Shina Nangwa Taisei , Tokyo, 1926. (Nan Hua Ta Chien).
54. Osvald Siren, Chinese Paintings in American Collections, London, 1927-28, two portfolios*
55. Osvald Siren, A History of Early Chinese
Painting, London, 1933, two volumes.
56. Osvald Siren, The Chinese on the Art of
Painting , Peiping, 1936*
57. Osvald Siren, A History of Later Chinese
Painting , London, 1938, two volumes.
58. Osvald Siren, "Shih-t'ao, Painter, Poet, and Theoretician T” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm , No. 21, 1949.
59. Sogen Minshin Meigwa Taikan (Collection of Famous Paintings of the Sung, Yuan, Ming and Ch'ing Dynasties), Tokyo, 1931,
60. Alexander C* Soper, "Early Chinese Land-
scape Painting," Art Bulletin, XX1I1, 1941.
61* Alexander C, Soper, ‘‘The First Two Laws of Hsieh Ho/' The Far Eastern Quarterly, August, 1949.
62. Alexander C. Soper, Kuo Jo-hsu’s Experiences in Painting, Washington, 1951.
63. Soraikwan Kinsho: Chinese Paintings in the Collection of Abe Fusajiro, Osaka, 1930 ff* Six volumes. Two pts.
64* Werner Speiser, "Die Yuan — Klassik der Landschaftstnalerei/* Qstasiatische Zeitschrift, 1931.
65. Werner Speiser, "T'ang Yin,” Qstasiatische Zeitschrift, 1935.
66. Werner Speiser, Meisterwerke Chinesiscker Malerei, Berlin, 1947.
67. Michael Sullivan, "On the Origin of Land¬ scape Representation in Chinese Art," Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America, VII, 1953.
68. Michael Sullivan, "Pictorial Art and the Attitude Toward Nature in Ancient China,” Art Bulletin, March* 1954.
69. Sei-ichi Taki, Three Essays on Oriental Painting, London, 1910*
70* Teng Ku, "Einfuhrung in die Geschichte der Malerei Chinas," Sinica, X, 1935*
71. Kojiro Tomita, Portfolio of Chinese Paint¬ ings in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Han to Sung), Second rev. ed. Cambridge (Mass.), 1938*
72. Kojiro Tomita, "Snowscape by Shih Chung,” Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, April, 1940.
73. Kojiro Tomita and Kaiming Chiu, "An Album of Landscapes and Poems by Shen Chou (1427-1509),” Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, June, 1948.
74* Kojiro Tomita and Kaiming Chiu, " Album of Twelve Landscapes by Tao-chi (Shih-t'ao), " Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, October, 1949*
75* Kojiro Tomita and Kaiming Chiu, “Album of Six Chinese Paintings Dated 1618, by LI Liu- fang (1575-1629)," Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, June, 1950*
76. To-so Gen-min meigwa tai kwan: Catalogue of Exhibition of Chinese Paintings of the T'ang, Sung, Yuan and Ming Periods, Tokyo Imperial Museum, 1928, Tokyo, 1930. Four volumes.
77. Irene Vincent, The Sacred Oasis ; Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, Tun Hwang, with a pre¬ face by Pearl Buck, Chicago, 1953.
78. Arthur Waley, An Index of Chinese Artists, London, 1922* ("Erganzimgen zu Waley ’s Index," by Werner Speiser, Ostasiatiscke Zeitschrift, 1931 and 1938).
79. Arthur Waley, An Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting, London, 1923.
80. A. G. Wenley, "The Question of the Fo¬ shan Hsiang- lu," Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America, III* 1948-49.
81. Chiang Yee, The Chinese Eye, London, 1936*
82. Chiang Yee, Chinese Calligraphy, London, 1938*
83. T'ang Sung I-lai Ming-hua-chi, two volumes. Catalog of the Chang Ts’ung-yu Collection*
84. J. Tamura and Y. Kobayashi, Tomb and Mural Paintings of Ching Ling , Kyoto, 1952.
85. Sherman E, Lee, "The Story of Chinese Painting," Art Quarterly , Winter, 1948.
86. Louise W* Hackney and Yau Chang-foo, A Study of Chinese Paintings in the Collection of Ada Small Moore, London, New York, Toronto, 1940.
143
CATALOG*
1. EWER, il. p. 11.
Bronze with incised decoration of figures in a landscape; H. 3"; W. 8i/£"; D. 9i/2". Reputedly from Ch’ang Sha, Late Chou Period (5th-3rd c. B.C.). Publ: Bibl. 68.
Lent by Seattle Art Museum, Eugene Fuller Mem¬ orial Collection.
2. TOMB TILE, il. title page.
Terra cotta with stamped designs; H. 14"; W. 3' 5i/£". Later Han Dynasty (A.D. 2nd-3rd c.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ralph King.
3. RURAL LANDSCAPE SCENE, il. p.
12.
Rubbing of a tomb tile, the original of molded clay; H. I614"; W. 181/J". From Cheng-tu, Szech¬ uan; Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220). Publ: Bibl. 50, p. 32, pi. 76.
Lent by Dr. Richard Rudolph, Los Angeles.
4. “HILL JAR/* il. p. 12.
Hard reddish pottery cylinder on three feet, lead glaze; H. lOi/J"; D. IO94". Han Dynasty (206 B.C.- A.D. 220). The Cleveland Museum ot Art, J. H. Wade Collection.
5. PAINTED TOMB TILE, il. p. 13.
Black and red color on slip over gray earthen¬ ware; L. 41"; H. 8i/£". Late Han or Early Six Dynasties (3rd-5th c.). Publ: Bibl. 67. The Cleve¬ land Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Nasli M. Heeramaneck.
6. CUP, il. p. 14.
Bronze with incised landscape design; H. 3i4"; D. 4". Early Six Dynasties Period (4th-6th c.). Lent by Mrs. Walter Sedgwick, London.
WANG WEI (Yu-ch’eng), 698-759, Shansi- Honan
7. WANG CHUAN, il. p. 18.
Handscroll; ink and color on silk; L. 15' 9i/£"; W. lime". Late Ming or Early Ch’ing copy. The colophons are reproductions.
• The artist’s usual name is given first with his most common by-name in parentheses. His dates are followed by his place of birth or activity, where known. The seal and colophon information varies from relatively complete to incomplete, depending upon time, availability, and significance. No effort has been made to include every instance of publication or reproduction. The abbreviation C & W refers to Bibl. 13, the most available reference on artists’ and collectors’ seals of the Ming and Ch’ing periods. In most cases the page referred to has an identical or comparable seal to those on the exhibits.
Lent by Seattle Art Museum, Eugene Fuller Me¬ morial Collection.
ANONYMOUS
8. SCENES FROM THE EARLY LIFE OF THE BUDDHA (THE EPISODE OF THE ARCHERY CONTEST), not il.
Fragment of a border of a large mandala; ink and color on silk; H. 2Si/$"; W. 7i/£". From Tun Huang; 10th c. Publ: Tonko ga, vol. 2, pi. LXXV, left.
Lent by Musfe Guimet, Paris.
ANONYMOUS
9. THE MIRACLES OF AVALOKITES- VARA, il. p. 16.
Votive painting; ink and color on paper; H. 32s4"; W. 25". From Tun Huang; dated 943. Publ: Tonko-ga, vol. 2, pi. XLI, right.
Lent by Mus£e Guimet, Paris.
ANONYMOUS
10. THE TRIBUTE HORSE, il. p. 20.
Originally a hanging scroll; ink and color on silk; H. 32s4"; W. 443,4". lOth-llth a Publ: Bulletin of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October, 1 943.
Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
ANONYMOUS
1 1. BUDDHIST TEMPLE IN THE HILLS AFTER RAIN, il. p. 22.
Hanging scroll; ink and very slight color on silk; slightly cut down; H. 44"; W. 22". Northern Sung Dynasty (960-1127). Ex.Coll: Imperial collection of a 12th c. Sung Emperor; Liang Ch’ing-piao (1620-1691); Hsu Ch’ien-hsueh (1631-1694); Miao Yueh-tsao (1682-1761); Miao Tsun-i, son of Miao Yueh-tsao; Shen Shu-jung (1832-1873).
Lent by Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.
ATTRIBUTED TO HSU TAO-NING, act. 10th c., Ho-chien — Ch’ang-an, Honan.
12. FISHING IN A MOUNTAIN STREAM, il. p. 24.
Handscroll; ink on silk; L. 82i/£"; W. 19". Northern Sung Dynasty (960-1127). 25 seals in¬ cluding 10 of Keng Chao-chung (1640-1686), C & W., p. 564; 1 of Prince I (See Cat. 31); and 2 of An Ch’i (1683-ca. 1742). Recorded: Ta Kuan Lu, XIII/25. Publ: / Lin Yueh K’an, nos. 53 and 54. Lent by Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.
144
ATTRIBUTED TO KUO HSI (Ho-yang)* ca. 1020-90* Honan.
1 3. MOUNTAIN LANDSCAPE, il* p* 26.
Handscroll; ink on silk; L. 15' 9i4"; W. 21%/'* There is possibly the seal of the Sung Emperor, Hsi Sung Publ; Bibl. 1, fig, 99; Bibl. 6f fig, 51* Lent by The Toledo Museum of Art.
ANONYMOUS
1 4. STREAMS AND MOUNTAINS WITHOUT END, il, p* 27.
Handscroll; ink and slight color on silk; L. 83^4"; H. 11%-. Northern Sung Dynasty, Early 12th c. 49 seals and 9 colophons, the earliest dated 1205, the last by Wang To (1592- 1652). The most notable colophon author is K'an Li -kuei, the famous Yuan calligrapher. The seals include those of Liang Ch’ing-piao (1620-1691) 8 seals, Emperors Ch'ien Lung through Hsu an T'ung (I8th-20th c*) 9 seals, and Chang Ta-chien, modern painter and collector. Publ: S. Lee and W. Fong, Streams and Mountains Without Ascona, 1954. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Hanna Fund.
MI YU- JEN (Yuan-hui)* act. first half 12th c.* Kiangsu
1 5* CLOUDY MOUNTAINS, il. p. 15.
Handscroll; ink, white and slight touches of color on silk; L. 6' 3%": W. 17%2". Poem and inscription by the artist:
Innumerable are the wonderful mountain peaks which join the end of the sky, Cool and dark, the smoky mist is lovely both in the evening and under daylight;
To make known that the gentleman has been here,
I am leaving traces of my brush at your house. (1130 A.D.) year, done at Hsing Gh'ang, Yuan-hui (signature), Yuan Hui playfully made” (seal)
Tr. by Wen Fong 4 colophons, 3 by Wang To (1592-1652), 1 by Chen Kuang. Ex.Coll: Prince Ch'eng; Pi Chien-fd; Li Chih kai; Wang To; T. Yamamoto. Publ: Bibl. 6; 26; Chokaido Shoga Mohutokuf 19S2, 1/98 (Cat. of the Yamamoto Coll.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, J. H. “Wade Collection,
CHIANG TS’AN (Chiang Kuan-tao), act, first half 12th c.* Chekiang*
16. VERDANT MOUNTAINS, il. p. 30.
Handscroll; ink and slight color on silk; L. 9' 8l,4w; H. 1234** Four character signature: Chiang Ts an of Chiang-nan. (Signature and two seals of the artist are an interpolation.) Colophon by K‘o Chiu-ssu (1312-1365), colophon by Emperor Ch ien Lung, dated 1785, 22 seals, including those of Liang Ch’ing-piao (162QT691), Sung Lo (1634- 1713), and the Emperors Ch'ien Lung. Chia ChTing, and Hsuan T'ung. Rec: Shih-ch*u Pao-chi , Part H, Yu-shu-fang.
Lent by Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.
ANONYMOUS
17. A COTTAGE BY A RIVER IN AUTUMN, il* p. 34
Fan -shaped album painting; ink and color on silk; H. 9p£"; W* 10^4". Traditionally attributed to Uu Sung- men, act. 1190-1230. 5 collectors' seals. Ex. Coll: Wu Tsan (18th c.), Li Tsai-hsien (19th c*). Publ: Bibl. 71, pi. 88,
Lent by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
LI SUNG, 1195-1265.
18* MOUNTAINS AND THE JASPER SEA OF THE IMMORTALS* il p. 35.
Oblate circular form album leaf; ink and slight color on silk; H. IOl^"; W. 9^4 "* Signature of the artist on face of cliff, upper right. Publ: Bibl* 55, II, pi* 7L
Lent by Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri,
ANONYMOUS
T9. LANDSCAPE WITH RETURNING HERDER AND BUFFALO* il. p. 38*
Album leaf mounted as a hanging scroll; ink on silk; H. 8^4 **\ W, 9^4". Traditionally attributed to Li T'ang, act. first quarter 12th c* Ex. Coll: Masuda Odawara.
Lent by Howard Hollis and Company, Cleveland.
HSIA KUEI (Yu-yu), act. ca. 1180-1230* Chekiang.
20* TWELVE SCENES FROM A THATCHED COTTAGE* il p* 38*
Handscroll; ink on silk; L. T $¥4”; W* II". Four character signature: ‘Tainted by the Official, Hsi a Kuei", 10 seals, most of them unidentified. The round seal with a square interior near the end of the painting may be a nien-hao of Emperor Sung Li Tsung. The Chiang-ts*un Hsiao-hsta Lu, de¬ scribing the complete painting in the late 17th c., mentions at both ends five Sung Dynasty seals and three of the Yuan Dynasty. 8 colophons, including colophons by Shao Heng-chen, act. in the late 1 4th c.? Tung Ch'i-ch’ang (1555-1636), Wang Shih- ku (1632-1717), Viceroy Tuan Fang (1861-1911). Rec: Shan-ku wang Hua Lu XXIII/38 (1st half 1 7th o), Shih -ku-fang Shu- hua Hui-k’ao XIV/64 (ca, 1682), Chiang- t$run Hsiao- hsia Lu 1/30 (1693), Pei-wen-chai Shu-hua P’u LXXXVIII/26 (1708), Nan Sung Yuan Hua Lu VI /3 (1721), Mo-yuan Hui-kuan 6 (hsu) III (1742), Chu-chia Ts'ang-hua Pu IX/XIV (2nd half 1 8th c.). Publ. and/or Rep: Famous Chinese Paintings , vol, 5. (Chung-kuo Ming-hu Ti-wu-chi), Shanghai, n*d.; Kokka f no. 2, Tokyo, 1936; Bibl. 44.
Lent by Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri,
145
ANONYMOUS
21* RIVER LANDSCAPE IN WIND AND RAIN, il. p. 39.
Fan-shaped album leaf; ink on silk; H. 9i/£"; W. 10;4". Southern Sung Dynasty (12th-l3th c.). 3 seals of Hsiang Yuan-pien (1525-1590). Ex.CoIl; A, W. Bahr.
Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
LIANG K’AX (FO), act. ca. 1203, Chekiang (Hangchou),
22. WINTER LANDSCAPE WITH BIRDS, il. p. 40.
Album painting; ink and faint color on silk; H. 9i/g"; W. 10". Signed "Liang K'ai." Remains of 4 (?) seals. Publ; Bibl 79, pi. XLV.
Lent by Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University f Cambridge, Massachusetts.
ANONYMOUS
23. LANDSCAPE WITH FLIGHT OF GEESE, il p. 42.
Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk; H. 25^4"; W. 15". 13 th- 14th c. From a Japanese provenance. Lent by The Art Institute of Chicago.
ANONYMOUS
24. LANDSCAPE, not il.
Handscroll; ink on silk; L. 18'; W. lOi/J". 13th- 14th c. Publ: C> F. Kelley, "Chinese Painting/' Art Institute of Chicago Quarterly s XLV, no. 4,
pp. 68-70.
Lent by The Art Institute of Chicago.
CHTEN HSU AN (Shun-chu), 1235-1290, Chekiang
25. HOME AGAIN, il, p. 44.
Handscroll; ink and color on paper; L. 42"; H. 10^" Inscription, signature, and 2 seals of the artist. Colophons; among the seals are those of Hsiang Yuan-pien (1525-1590), Ch'ien Lung Em¬ peror, The picture illustrates the famous poem by Tao Ch’ien (365-427), Publ: Bibl. 19, p. 147. Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
CHAO MENG-FU (Tzu-ang), 1254-1322, Hopei -Chekiang
26. LANDSCAPE WITH TWIN PINE TREES, il. p. 44.
Handscroll; ink ou paper; L. 42i4"; H. lO1/^ Two inscriptions and seals of the artist:
Landscape painting is a genre I am not skilled in. The fact is, of the wonderful works of the T'ang masters, Wang Yu-ch'eng, General Li p£re, General Li fils, Cheng Kuang-wen, there aren’t more than one or two to be seen these
days. The Five Dynasties masters such as Ching Hao, Kuan T'ung, Tung Yuan, and Fan K’uan are absolutely different from the works of recent times. I dare not claim that my paintings are comparable to those of the ancients; contrasted with those of recent times I dare say they are a bit different. Since Y'eh- yun has asked me for a painting, 1 write this at the end of it. Chao Meng-fu.
— Translation of an identical inscription from a probable copy published in Art Quarterly f vol. XV, no. 4 (Winter, 1952), by H. Munsterberg.
Ex.Coll: Yang Tsai (Yuan), T'ung Hsuan (Ming), Liang Ch'ing-piao (1620-1691), An Ch/i (1683-ca. 1742), Ch'ien Lung, and later Imperial collections. Lent by The Bamboo Studio, New York,
CHAO YUNG (Chung-mu), born 1289, Chekiang
27, LANDSCAPE WITH FISHERMEN, il. p. 47.
Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk; H.
W. 16^". One seal of the artist at lower right (Chung-mu), G k W., p, 527. no. 3. 3 collectors' seals, 2 seals of Chang Ts’ung-yu (20th c.) on mounting. Publ: Bibl. 83; 26.
Lent by Frank Caro, successor to C. T. Loo, New York.
LI SHIH-HSINGj 1282-1328, Kweichou
28. THE GUARDIANS OF THE VALLEY, il, p. 48,
Hanging scroll; ink on silk; H, 67 ifi*; W. 38^". Signed, two seals of the artist with possibly one other. One seal of Yin Hsiang (Prince I), see Cat. 31. One unidentified seal.
Lent by Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
WU CHEN ( Chu-yu ) , 1280-1354, Chekiang
29* ROCKS, REEDS, OLD TREE AND BAMBOO, il. p, 49.
Hanging scroll; ink on silk; H. 65^"; W. 38^", One poem on bamboo by the artist and 2 seals of the artist, C Sc W., p. 515, nos. 2, 3, Signed and dated 1338. Two unidentified seals; 2 seals of Liang Ch'ing-piao (1620-1691); 1 seal of C.C. Wang (20th c.).
Lent by The Bamboo Studio, New York.
WANG MENG, ca. 1320-1385, Chekiang
SO. FISHING IN THE GREEN DEPTHS, il. p* 51.
Hanging scroll; ink and color on smooth paper; damaged and repaired, dearly visible; H. 34^g"; W. 171/2". Signed with a poem on the right:
Your home is over the clean flood And you drop your hook in green depths;
Dew dampens the hibiscus moon
146
And fragrance soft in the lotus wind.
The drifting boat enters dreamy isles,
And in the press of flowers sits your flute; Knowing only him who lives forgetting,
No thought for the Old Man of the Frontier.* Huang-hao-shan-chung-jen (The-man-from- the-heart-of-Yellow-Crane- Mountain), Wang Shu-ming (i.e. Wang Meng) painted and inscribed.
— tr. by R. Edwards. 2 other poems by unidentified contemporaries of the artist; 3 old but unidentified collectors’ seals; 2 unidentified seals on the probably-Yuan inscrip¬ tion at left. Rec: Shan-hu-wang XI /5, 1643 (full description); Shih-Ku-t’ang XXI /6, 1682; P’ei-wen - chai LXXXVI/12, 1708.
Lent by The Bamboo Studio, New York.
NI TSAN, 1301-1374, Kiangsu
31. RIVER PAVILION AND MOUN¬ TAIN SCENERY, il. p. 54.
Hanging scroll; ink on paper; H. 32%6"l W. 13i/6". Seven character line poem, dated 1368, 3rd month, 10th day, signed Tsan (see p. 53). Inscrip¬ tion by the artist:
Shu-kuei, my friend, asking me to go to a priest’s dwelling, with this paper requested a painting, and I informally painted “River Pavilion and Mountain Scenery’’ and added this poem in the righthand corner.
— tr. by R. Edwards. Inscription on left by Hsieh Ch’ang (Yen Ming), an official of Hung Wu period (1368-1398) with three seals. Collectors’ seals: (2) Yin Hsiang (Prince I), a hereditary title that began 1686-1730; (3) Ta Chung-kuang (1623-1692), C & W., p. 310; (1) Wang Hung-hsu (1645-1723), C & W., p. 533. The picture is possibly that recorded in Li Jih- hua’s (1589-1616) Wei-shui-hsuan-jih-chi, VI/47, where it is considered unreliable but a good paint¬ ing.
Lent by The Bamboo Studio, New York.
TS’AO CHIH-PO, died 1355, Kiangsu
32. A PAVILION NEAR OLD PINES, il. p. 57.
Album leaf mounted as a hanging scroll; ink on paper; small damages and repairs; H. 18%"; W. 14%". Inscription: The Balcony of the Over¬ flowing Swamp (Wa Ying Hsien; a retreat); did this for the Liang Ch’ang Grass Hall (a re¬ treat); seal of the artist: Yun Hsi.
6 Ch’ien Lung seals; 2 Hsuan T’ung seals. Publ: Bibl. 19, opp. p. 148.
Lent by Walter Hochstadter, New York.
• “Old Man of the Frontier’’ refers to a figure in the old Chinese text, Huai-nan-tzu, whose good fortune turns to bad and whose bad fortune later becomes good. His experiences stands as a symbol of the unpredictable quality of change and of the measureless nature of truth.
CHAO YUAN, act. ca. 1360-1400, Kiangsu- Shantung
33. SAYING FAREWELL TO A GUEST AT CH’ING CH’UAN, il. p. 58.
Hanging scroll; ink on paper; H. 37i/4"; W. 13%". Inscription and seal of the artist, C & W., p. 526, no. 2. Seals of An Ch’i (1683-after 1742), seals of Ch’ien Lung (1736-1796); seals of Chang Ts’ung-yu (20th c.). Rec: An Ch’i’s catalog, Afo- yuan-hui-kuan, V/29. Publ: C & W., p. 526; Bibl. 83.
Lent by The Bamboo Studio, Ncwr York.
YAO TTNG-MEI, 14th c.
34. THE SCHOLAR’S LEISURE, il. p. 58.
Handscroll: ink on paper; L. 33%e"; H. 9^6". Inscription: 1360, spring, first month. I did this and added my humble words at the end, fol¬ lowed by a poem signed Yao T’ing-mei of Wu Hsing.
Collectors’ seals: Liang Ch’ing-piao (1620-1691), Emperors Ch’ien Lung, Chia Ch’ing, and Hsuan T’ung. The poem on the painting by the Ch’ien Lung Emperor is dated 1755. Ex. Coll: Chang Ts’ung-yu (20th c.). Publ: Bibl. 83.
Lent by Frank Caro, successor to C. T. Loo, New York.
CH’EN JU-YEN, act. 1350, Kiangsu
35. LO FOU SHAN’S WOOD-CUTTER, not il.
Hanging scroll; ink on somewhat darkened silk; H. 41 W. 21". Text written by the artist on top left of the painting: 1366, 1st Moon', 16th day, Lu Shan Ch’en Ju-yen painted for Magistrate Szu-ch’i, the painting of Lo Fou Shan’s wood¬ cutter.
Ex.Coll: Magistrate Szu-ch’i’s family, Lu P’eng- sheng (2 seals), Wang Shih-min: 1592-1680 (4
seals), Rung Heng-p’u (1 seal), Chang Tsung-yu, 20th c. (4 seals). Rec: Li Tai Chu Lu Hua Mo, vol. 3, p. 296; Jan Li Kuan Kuo Yen Hsu Lu, vol. 4, p. 7. Publ: Bibl. 83.
Lent by Frank Caro, successor to C. T. Loo, New York.
HSU PEN (Hsu Fen), act. ca. 1380, Sze- chuan-Kiangsu (Suchou)
36. STREAMS AND MOUNTAINS, il.
p. 60.
Hanging scroll; ink on paper; H. 26%"; W. 10i/4". One poem and inscription of the artist: Green trees, the oriole,
everywhere are mountains;
Then from over the valleys see the returning cloud.
Man’s life does not allow unbroken ease,
But the high climb, the looking down — this is leisure.
147
1372 on the 10th day of the 7th month , Hsu Pen did this painting and then added the poem above it for Chi-fu.
— tr. by R, Edwards. 4 other poems with 3 seals by contemporaries of Hsu Pen: Hsieh Hui, Kao Ch’i, Lu Chen, and Huang Tsai. Hsieh Hui writes: "When Hsu Pen was visiting Wu-hsing (Chekiang) he did the paint¬ ing Streams and Mountains , and added a poem to present to Chi-fu, and I have written this.*' 2 unidentified collectors' seals on the painting; 3 seals on the mounting, including 2 of Xiang Chlng-piao (1620-1601), and 1 title with a seal, possibly the writing and seal of Liang Ch’mg-piao. Lent by Walter Hochstadter, New York.
PIEN CHING-CHAO (Pien Wen-chin), act early 15th c.3 Fukien
37, LANDSCAPE WITH WILD HORSES, not i 1.
Album painting; ink and color on silk; H. 9%6"; W. 914®". Signed Pien Ching-chao, One possibly spurious seal of the GMen Lung Emperor; 4 un¬ identified collectors' seals.
Lent by Heeramaneck Galleries, New York.
CHIN WEN-CHIN, act 1400-1450*
Kiangsu
38. TEN THOUSAND BAMBOOS, il p. 6L
Handscroll; ink on paper; L. 29' 9i/£"; H. 13^4". Dated 1438; 14 colophons including the artist's inscription, all on the painting. 44 seals not count¬ ing mounting seals; 4 seals of Hsiang Yuan- pien (1525-1590). Publ. as by Kuan Tao-sheng in G, Siren. Kinas Konst, vol. 2, p. 423.
Lent by Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
HSIA CHANG (Chung-chao), 1388-1470, Shantung
39* THE BANKS OF THE SERENE HSIANG RIVER, iL p. 62.
Handscroll; ink on paper; L. 30' 9%"; H. 12^". 6 colophons, including 2 by Wang Ao (act. ca, 1465) and 1 by Fu Han (act. 1464-1506). Ex. Coll: Lu Shih-hua, 1714-1779 (3 seals). Also 17 unidenti¬ fied seals. Rec: Wu Yueh So-chien Shu-hua Lu, vol, 4, p. 34 ff. Second preface dated 1777. Title by Chang Heng, (Here listed under name of Wang Fu.)
Lent by Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum, Kansas Oty, Missouri.
LIU CHUEH, 1410-1472, Kiangsu (Suchou)
40. LANDSCAPE IN THE STYLE OF NI TSAN, il. p. 55,
Hanging scroll; ink on paper; H. 58^4"; W. 21 Inscription and 1 seal of the artist. Colo¬ phon by Shen Chou, see p. 53. Ex. Co 11: Kao Shih-
ch'i (1695-1704). Publ: Mostra di Pitture Cinese Ming e Ch’ing , Rome, April, 1950.
Lent by Mus£e Guimet, Paris.
TAI CHIN, act. ca. 1446, Chekiang
41, TEN THOUSAND LI OF THE YANGTZE, il, p. 64.
Handscroll; ink and color on paper; L. 38'
H. I3y£". 2 seals of the artist: Tai Chin, Wen Chin; and 1 colophon:
In my old family collection of paintings, there is a Sung scroll titled Ch'ang Chiang Wan Li (literally. Long River of ten thousand miles, referring to the YangUe River), The brush- work is quiet and graceful; the depicted ob¬ jects are elegant and expressive. It is indeed a masterpiece. The other day, at my classmate Ghiu-farfs place, I saw a painting with the same title done by Chou Tung-ts'un (this is the painting recorded in the Ghiang-Ts’un - Hsiao -hi, 1693, Kao Shih -chi's catalog). In view of the rendering of the mountains, waters, pavilions, boats, and carriages, the latter paint¬ ing is of a different interest than that of my Sung painting, whose brush is thick and well- blended, enlivened by a note of elegance, a quality that could never be attained by the Yuan and Ming artists. The technique of Tung-ts'un is derived from various schools of Sung and Yuan, Although it has kept Its own individuality, it lags far behind a Sung painting in liveliness and humor. This seems to be conditioned by its lateness in time, and the deficiency seems rather inevitable. Today, I have just looked over this Tai Wen-chin scroll. The brush is aged yet still fresh. Often there are strange poses and gestures. Obviously, it was created with such a smooth play between the heart and the hands, and a har¬ monious movement with the ancient methods, that there were qualities which Tung-ts'un could not possibly match. Tung Hsiang-kuang (Tung Chl-ch'ang), in commenting on Li Po-shih's copy of Tung Yuan's Hsiao-hsiang- tu, has remarked that in spite of his fame, Li Po-shih lacks this "age and freshness11 in his work. From this, we know that Wen- chin's "aged and yet fresh brush" would have been greatly praised by Tung Hsiang-kuang. Anyone who understands this will back me on this point,
Ch’ien Lung, Cha Ying (1794), autumn, 8th month, at Yang-chou, Wang Wen<hih (Meng-lu) has written this.
—tr. by Wen Fong.
1 colophon by Tieh Ping-tzu, written in 1927,
The Cleveland Museum of Art, J, H. Wade Collection. , "u 'Vi
i lly ••'♦VVr-r
TU CHIN, act. ca. 1465-1487, Hopei (Peking) -Kiangsu
42. WANDERING IN THE MOON¬ LIGHT, il. p. 66.
Hanging scroll; ink and slight color on paper; H. Sls/g"; W. 281/z" Signed and sealed; the seal
148
is the one from which the reference in C & W., p. 158, is taken. One old unidentified seal; 1 seal of Chang Tsung-yu (20th c.); 1 seal of C. C. Wang (20th c.). Publ: A Special Collection of the Sec¬ ond National Exhibition of Chinese Art under the Auspices of the Ministry of Education , Part I, Commercial Press, 1943, pi. 138 (Chang Coll.) The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Collection.
SHIH CHUNG, 1437-1517, Kiangsu (Nanking)
43. WINTER LANDSCAPE, il. p. 67.
Handscroll; ink on paper; L. 994"; H. 5i/£". Dated 1504; poem by the artist:
The sky is clear; snow covers mountain and river.
The Myriad Trees tower high; this is nature’s work.
Alone and always happy to suffer poverty, This old man, moved to tears, records the divine pine.
In the spring of the chia-tzu year, during The reign of Hung Chin (1504), when snow fell heavily. The Fool made this picture and added the poem to accompany it.
Shih Chung — Tr. by K. Tomita 2 seals of the artist, C & W., p. 83, no. 10, 1 un¬ recorded. 1 seal of Pang Yuan-ch’i (contemporary collector). Publ: K. Tomita, “Snowscape by Shih Chung,” Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, April, 1940, pp. 30-33.
Lent by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
KUO HSU (Ch’ing-k’uang), 1456-after 1526, Kiangsi
44. LANDSCAPE: PAVILIONS AND WATER, il. p. 68.
Handscroll; ink on paper; L. 62"; H. 8i/£". Two paintings, mounted together, signed:
Written and painted by Ch’ing-k'uang with running brush.
5 seals of the artist, C & W., p. 318, nos. 2, 3; 1 unrecorded. Ex.Coll: P’ang Yuan-ch’i, Shanghai. Lent by The Detroit Institute of Arts.
ATTRIBUTED TO CHOU CH’EN, act. ca. 1532, Kiangsu (Suchou)
45. PINES AND TOWERING MOUN¬ TAINS, il. p. 69.
Album painting; ink and slight color on very finely woven silk; H. 9%"; W. 8%". The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Collection.
TANG YIN, 1470-1524, Kiangsu (Suchou)
46. STRANGE PEAKS AND A SCHOL¬ AR’S HIDDEN RETREAT, il. p. 70.
Hanging scroll; ink and slight color on darkened silk; H. 53i/£"; W. 24%". Colophon and seals of the artist.
Lent by The John Herron Art Museum, Indianapo¬ lis.
47. SCHOLAR IN A SUMMER LAND¬ SCAPE, il. p. 70.
Hanging scroll; ink and slight color on satin- silk; H. 5$i/2 "; W. 2194". Seven character line poem by the artist for an unidentified person (perhaps Sung Ch’eng-ch’i); 3 artist’s seals (C & W., p. 226, nos. 11, 10, 15); 10 seals of Hsiang Yuan-pien (1525-1590); at least 3 seals of Li Tsung-wan (1705-1759), C & W., p. 621; 1 seal of C. C. Wang (20th c.). 5 unidentified seals.
Lent by Frank Caro, successor to C. T. Loo, New York.
48. LANDSCAPE WITH MEDITAT¬ ING SCHOLAR, il. p. 72.
Handscroll; ink on paper; L. 33 H. 10%e". No inscription on the painting; 2 seals of the artist and 1 unidentified seal. Colophon signed T’ang Yin after the painting, with 2 seals of the artist and 1 unidentified seal as on the painting. Lent by The Bamboo Studio, New York.
SHEN CHOU (Shih-t’ien), 1427-1509, Kiangsu (Suchou)
49. ALBUM OF LANDSCAPES AND POEMS, il. p. 74.
Album paintings; ink on paper; H. 14%"; W. 2594"- Each of the eight leaves is signed and sealed by the artist (similar to C & W., p. 167, no. 15). Ex. Coll: Wen Cheng-ming (1470-1559); Wen Chia (1500-1582); Teng Ju-kao; Lu Hsin-yuan (?) 1834-1894; Lu Shu-sheng; Tuan Fang. Publ: Bibl. 73.
Lent by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
50. TRAVELING IN WU, il. p. 75.
Handscroll; ink on paper; L. 65"; H. 12i4". In¬ scription:
I did this painting. Yuch Ch’uang does not find fault with its easy quality, but says it has the flavor of Tung Yuan and Chu Jan. Yueh Ch’uang has big eyes; most people believe what he says. But I myself just can’t understand it.
Dated 1474, signed Shen Chou.
— tr. by R. Edwards. 4 seals of the artist, 3 rather faded (C & W., p. 167, nos. 3, 20), 1 unrecorded. Colophon signed by Shen Chou’s friend, Wu K’uan, the first and larger part of which appears to be replaced. At the end it relates that when Yueh Ch’uang went South this painting was given to him. The pic¬ ture is like traveling in Wu. 2 seals of Wu K’uan. 20 other seals; at least 5 are those of Li Chao-hang (17th c.); 3 seals of An Ch’i (1683-after 1742); 2 seals of Ch’en K'uei-lin (late 19th c.). Rec: Ch’en’s catalog, Pao Yu Ko Shu Hua Lu, Shanghai. Lent by The Bamboo Studio, New York.
51. FOUR SCENES AT TIGER HILL (?), il. p. 76.
Album paintings; ink on paper; H. 12i4"; W. 1594"; possibly Tiger Hill, see 67 where the cov-
149
ered bridge is to be seen. Each leaf with 1 seal of the artist {C Sc W*, p* 167, no* 3):
1. Chasm with Pavilion and Three Figures
2. The Seven Poets (?) on Rocky Ledges
3. A Street with Two Figures
4. Oaks and Hummocks with Three Figures at a WelL
Lent by Richard B, Hobart, Cambridge, Massa¬ chusetts,
52. LANDSCAPE IN THE STYLE OF NI TSAN, il. p. 55.
Hanging scroll; ink on paper; H. 54y£*: W* 244"* Poem, signature, and 1 seal of the artist (C Sc W., p, 167, no. 24), dated in the 20th year of Ming Cheng Hua (1484), a Winter day. Ex, Coll: T. Yamamoto, Rec: Chokaido Shoga Mokuroku , 1932, 11/99.
Lent by Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Mliseum, Kansas City, Missouri.
53. LANDSCAPES WITH POEMS, iL p* 78*
Album paintings mounted as a hand sc roll; ink on paper and ink with color on paper; H. 15 4*'; W. 23^4". 2 seals of the artist (C & W„ p, 167, nos. 3, 20). 2 colophons: 1 by Wen Cheng- ming, dated 1516; 1 by Hsieh Lan-sheng, dated 1824, Each leaf with poem and signature of the artist:
L Three Gardeners in Fenced Enclosure (with slight color)
2. The Artist-Poet on a Mountain (with color)
3. The Painter with His Grane in a Boat (with color)
4. Mountain Lake with Boats (ink only)
5. Mountain Trail with Village Grove and a Stream (ink only),
Rec: P'ang Cheng-wei, T'ing Fan Lou Shu Hua Chi (Mei Shu Tsung Shu edition), supplement, 2nd part, la-2b, 1843 or later. Publ: L, Sick man, ’'The Unsung Ming,” Art News, November, 1946* See 53a for leaf no. 6 by Wen Cheng- ming.
Lent by Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum, Kansas City* Missouri*
WEN CHENG-MING (Wen Pi), 1470- 1559, Kiangsu (Suchou)
53a. STORM OVER A LAKE, il. p. 80.
Album painting; ink and slight color on paper; H, 1514"; W. 23<4". Dated 1516: 2 seals of the artist (C & W*, p. 19, nos. 3, 6). 2 colophons (see 53), The picture illustrates two lines of Wei Ying-wu's T'ang Dynasty poem:
On the spring flood of last night’s rain The ferry boat moves as if someone were poling.
— tr. Wytter Bynner Lent by Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri,
54. LANDSCAPE WITH A WATER¬ FALL, il. p. 79*
Hanging scroll; ink wash and color on paper; H* 21 $4"; W, 9^"- 1 colophon and 2 seals of the artist (similar to C & W*, p* 19, nos* 10-20; 2nd seal is double):
I was alone in my house, there were no guests, no friends, because it was raining. So I took up my brush and painted the trees and the waterfall. Dated in accordance with
1531, 7th month, 24th day*
5 seals of Emperor Chlen Lung. 3 unidentified seals. Publ: Afortra di Pilture Cinese Ming e Ch’ing, Rome, April, 1950*
Lent by Frank Caro, successor to C. T. Loo, New York.
55. SEVEN JUNIPER TREES, il. p. 81.
Handscroll; ink on paper; L. IP lO^"; H. 114"« Signed and dated:
1532, Summer, Cheng-ming used Sung-hsueh's (Chao Meng-fu's) brush. (See 26)
Colophon by the artist is given in large part on p. 81; 2 seals of the artist (similar to C k W., p. 19, nos. 20, 30). Colophon dated 1538, by Gh'en Shun (see 63) with 2 seals:
In the Spring of 1532, Mr. Wang Shih-men came from Hai-yu (i.e., where the ancient junipers were standing), visited me at the Lake, stayed over night and left, 1538, in Autumn, Mr. Wang again visited me. He showed me the scroll with the Seven Junipers of my teacher, Master Heng-shan. He told me that after he had seen me last time, he visited Master Heng and begged him to let him have the scroll. And now he wants from me a few words of comment. I carefully studied the scroll and could not leave my hand from it. This is indeed my teacher's masterpiece* In his lines and washes, delicate and lush, he attained the essence of Chao Meng-fu's genius. Such a painting is not easily given away, Mr, Wang was certainly not afraid to ask and was lucky enough to get it. If it had not been for Mr, Wang’s appearance and his personal culture, so appealing to the Master's taste, how could he have given it to him. So much the more Shih-men should treasure it I Tao-fu inscribed — tr* by Gustav Ecke
3 collectors' seals.
Lent by Honolulu Academy of Arts.
56. CYPRESS AND OLD ROCKS, il* p. 84.
Handscroll; ink on paper; L. 19^ W. 10*4 Inscription, signature, and 1 seal of the artist (similar to C & W., p. 19, no* 40). 12 colophons including: Wang Ku-hsiang, painter and poet, 1501-1568; Chou T*ien-ch*iu, calligrapher and painter, 1514-1595; Lu Shih-ta, painter and pupil of Wen Cheng-ming, act. ca, 1522-1566; Yuan Tsun-ni, 1523-1574; Huang Chi-sui, calligrapher, 1509-1574; Yuan Chung, poet, contemporary of Wen Cheng-ming; Lu An-tao, calligrapher, brother of Lu Shih-ta; Wen P’eng, eldest son of the aTtist, 1498-1573: Wen Chia, second son of the artist and himself a painter of note, 1501-1566; P'eng Nien. calligrapher, 1505-1566, colophon dated in the 29th year of Ming Chia Ching (1550) (This is the last colophon written at the time the pic¬ ture was painted); Chang Feng-i, poet and calli¬ grapher (His colophon, written in 1612, mentions
150
that the picture was painted for him and pre¬ sented when he was 23 years old). Ex. Coll: Chang Feng-i, 1527-1613; Liu Shu, 1759-1816; Ku Wen- pin, 181 1-1889.
Lent by Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.
WEN PO-JEN, 1502-1575, Kiangsu 57, LANDSCAPE, il. p. 85.
Hanging scroll; Ink and color on paper; H. 50!j4"; W. I4i4" Signed and dated 1561; 2 artists' seals (I in C & W., p. 10, no. 14). 5 unidentified seals. Ex.Coll: Emperors Ch’ien Lung (4 seals); Ghia Ch'ing (1 seal); T. Yamamoto, Tokyo,
Lent by Seattle Art Museum, Eugene Fuller Me¬ morial Collection.
58* THE LUTE SONG; SAYING FARE¬ WELL AT HSUN-YANG, il. p. 84.
Hand scroll; ink and slight color on paper; L. 23^"; W. 8i/@". Inscription signed by the artist: painted at Ting Yun-kuang, 2 seals of the artist (similar to C & W., p. 10, nos. 5, 6). 10 collectors' seals on painting and colophons; the 1st colophon is a transcription of the Lute Song (Pi-p’a fusing) by Po Chud (772-846) from which the title is taken. See A. Waley The Life and Times of Po Chu-i, London, 1949, p, 117. Ex. Coll: T. Yamamoto, Tokyo. Puhl: Chokaido Shoga Mok - uroku, 1932, 111/94. (Cat. of Yamamoto Coll.) The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L, Severance Collection.
CHLJ CHIEH, act. ca. 1574, Kiangsu 59* WATCHING THE STREAM, il.
p. 86,
Hanging scroll; ink on paper; H. 43 1/£"; W. 9?/b ", Inscription and i seal of the artist (C Sc W., p. 188, no. 4):
In the i-wei year of the Chia-ching reign (1559) on a day of the Little Cold season {approximately January 6-20) Hsuan-chin dropped by to pay a call and produced this paper, pressing me for a painting by my clumsy brush. At that time I had been ill and had long neglected brush and Ink-stone. In a disorderly way I daubed and rubbed; surely one must find it awful. May Hsuan-chin not be offended with my soiling his beautiful paper.
Inscribed by Chu Chieh
— tr, by A, Lippe 2 seals of Liang Ch'ing-piao (1620-1691), 6 seals of the Ch'ien Lung Emperor including an Im¬ perial gift seal. Publ: Bibl. 36.
Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
LU CHIH (Pao-shan), 1496-1576, Kiangsu (Suchou)
60* ROCKY LANDSCAPE, il. p. 88,
Hand scroll; ink and color on paper; L. 44^4"; H. 9i4". Inscribed and signed by the artist:
Painted by Pao-shan Lu Chih, at the end of the full moon in March, the chi-yu year of Chia Ching (1549),
Seal of the artist (C & W., p. 343, no. 5) at the beginning and at the end of scroll; poem by the artist on the 1st colophon. First commentary colophon by Tung ChTch'ang, 1632. Publ: Bibi. 16,
Lent by Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.
61. LANDSCAPE WITH CLEAR DIS¬ TANCE, il. p. 85,
Hanging scroll; ink and color on paper; H. 41s4"; W. Poem by the artist and 3 artiste
seals (C & W„ p. m, nos. 3, 10, 18). 5 seals of Hsiang Yuan-pien (1525-1590); 1 unidentified seal. Lent by The Art Institute of Chicago.
62* LANDSCAPE WITH FLOWERING TREES, not IL
Fan painting; ink and color on gold paper; L 2T'; H. 75/g", Inscribed after a 7 character line poem:
Lu Chih presented to Mr. Ssu Yell A double seal of the artist, Shu -ping (similar to C k W., p. 343* no. 1), 1 collector's seal of P'ang Cheng-wei (19th c.). Publ: Kokka 731, Dec., 1953. Ex.Coll: T. Tomioka.
Lent by Howard Hollis and Company, Cleveland.
CH’EN SHUN (Tao-fu), 1483-1544, Kiangsu (Suchou)
63* PAVILION OF EIGHT POEMS, II. p, 90,
Handscroll; ink on paper; L. 48"; H. 10". 4 seals of the artist (C & W., p. 327, nos. 3, 1) and signature:
Written and signed by Ch’en Tao-fu in my country house, on the 16th day of the 5th month in the year Wu Hsueh (1538).
4 collectors’ seals, including those of P'ang Yuan- ch'i (20th c.).
Lent by The Art Institute of Chicago.
64. LANDSCAPE AND POEMS, il, p. 91.
Handscroll: ink and slight color on paper: Signature and 2 seals of the artist (1 similar to C & W., p. 327, no. 3); 3 poems by the artist, signed, Ex.Coll: Lo Chen-yu, scholar, archaeologist, and writer (1866-1940).
Lent by Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum, Kansas' City, Missouri.
65. RIVER LANDSCAPE, il. p. 87.
Handscroll; ink and slight color on paper; L, 24' 7j4"; H. 12/4". Inscription and signature of the artist, 2 artist's seals (1 similar to C & W., p. 327, no. 2). Publ: Alan Priest, 4t River — for an Elder Brother," Bulletin of The Metropolitan Museum of Artf March, 1947,
Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
151
CHOU YUNG, 1476-1547, Kiangsu (Suchou)
66. WINTER MOUNTAINS AND LONELY TEMPLE, AFTER LI T’ANG, il. p. 92.
Handscroll; ink on paper; L. 61%"; H. 1134". Inscription and signature of the artist:
In 1548 of the Chia Ching period, in the autumn during chrysanthemum time, painted at “Love the Sun Hall," signed, Chou Yung of Sungling.
2 artist’s seals. 2 colophons, the 2nd by