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TEXT BY JAMES CAHILL

Former Associate Curator ofChinese Art at the Freer Gallery ofArt, Washington, D.C.
 Colour plate on the title page:
Tao-chi(1641-c. 1717): TheWaterfall on Mount Lu. Detail from a hanging scroll.
Ink and light colours on silk. Collection of the late Kanichi Sumitomo, Oise (Japan).
*

© 1977 by Editions d'Art Albert Skira $.A., Geneva

First edition © 1960 by Editions d’Art Albert Skira, Geneva

Allrights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission.

ISBN
0 333 22371 3

This edition published in Great Britain in 1977 by

MACMILLAN LONDON LTD
London and Basingstoke
Associated companies in New York, Toronto,
Dublin, Melbourne, Johannesburg and Delhi

* PRINTED AND BOUND IN SWITZERLAND

Ts problem of why the Chinese tradition of painting, the richest and most diver-
sified in world art outside Europe, has not received the attention it merits in the
Occident, is treated briefly but perceptively by André Malraux in his Museum
Without Walls. Some of the reasons he advances are material ones: good color reproduc-
tions have not been available in large enough numbers; major collections in the Far East
have until recently been all but inaccessible, while those in the West (one might add,
particularly in Europe) are not yet sufficient to serve'as the basis for any broad acquaint-
ance with the art. Another reason is historical: a “fin-de-siécle ‘Japanism’ ... still
travesties it for us.” Malraux’s most provocative suggestion is that while Sung painting
(no other period but Sung has found a place in his Imaginary Museum) “is beginning
to whet the curiosity of our painters,” its’ “seeming humanism answers none of our
contemporary problems.”
The material obstacles are fast being overcome; the present book is one contribution
toward that end. The “Japanism” is fading, as we become aware of how profoundly
our view of Chinese painting was affected by Japanese ideas and attitudes during the
pioneering stage of our studies, and set about to replace these with the more highly
developed and pertinent ideas of the Chinese, as well as with some of our own. About
the “seeming humanism” there is nothing to be done. It is more than seeming, it is real.
One sometimes finds it denied: as a widespread loss of faith in the Western humanistic
heritage provokes a search for alternatives in remote periods and places, China is some-
times forced into an uncomfortable alliance with India and other “traditional” cultures
governed by ritual and religion, in order that it might seem to offer one such alternative.
But it is in fact just because the civilization of China has been, like our own in recent
centuries, a humanistic civilization repeatedly beset by doubts about the validity of the
humanist ideal, that its art is so completely relevant to the situation of the twentieth
century West. The emergence of an aesthetic theory according to which painting serves
to express the thought and feeling of the individual man, besides—or even instead of—
making any descriptive, interpretative or metaphysical statement about the world
around him, was a relatively early development in China, and one that could have occur-
red only in a humanistic context. Once this view had become the dominant one, accepted
by painters as well as critics, the Chinese artist was even further removed than before
from the anonymous artisan of the “traditional” society, who, the theory goes, suppressed
his own personality to embody in his works concepts common to the whole culture.
Matters that were not supposed to concern this selfless craftsman at all were of profound
concern to the Chinese painter: how to build a style into a personal instrument of expres-
sion, how to reach a balance between objective description and subjective comment,
how to endow the formal materials of the painting with a humane content, so that its
meaning need not be bound to the literal or symbolic meaning of its subject matter.
Although in a superficial sense the human being was not the dominant theme in Chinese
painting of the Sung and later periods, in a deeper sense he was; he may not appear
conspicuously in the picture, but he makes his presence felt, often obtrusively, in the
style. The values attributed to painting in China, moreover, were human values. The
stabilizing effect of tradition was respected, but so was individual creativity. The history
of painting was seen to proceed by impulses, as major masters originated styles, giving
rise sometimes to separate schools and movements. The critics recognized that each
artist must begin by adopting a large part of his style from his predecessors, and tried
to trace the sources of his style, but recognized also the element of free choice in it.
They did not confine their attention to the art object itself, but focused it also on the
painter as a man, and on the painting as a revelation of the man.
There is nothing so very exotic about all this; it seems, on the contrary, perfectly
familiar. The situation has curiously reversed itself: where Chinese painting once was
insufficiently understood because of its’supposed strangeness, it is now in danger of being
misunderstood and distorted by those who feel it is not, in its true character, strange
enough. The temptation is to see it.as mysterious and therefore exciting; insofar as it
appears to repeat our own discoveries, we find it that much less interesting. But it
has no need for spurious glamour. While many of the artistic problems dealt with by
the Chinese painters were essentially the same ones that have occupied Occidental
artists, modes of representation and expression were often very different, so that the
Chinese solutions strike us, nearly always, as fresh and stimulating. We can decide
better whether or not they “answer any of our contemporary problems” when we have
come to a better understanding of them, especially as they are exemplified in particular
paintings. The text that follows presents the paintings against a background of the
aesthetic and critical ideas current in their respective periods and schools, and so is
intended as an aid to such understanding.
We are grateful to all the museums and private collectors who gave permission for
paintings they own to be photographed in color and reproduced in this book. In particular,
the Joint Administration of National Palace and Central Museums in Taiwan deserves
our thanks for granting us the unprecedented privilege of making fifty color transpar-
encies of paintings in that incomparable collection, from which nearly half our plates
have been made; all but a few of them are reproduced in color for the first time, and
many were unpublished until now. In Japan, we are grateful to the Commission for the
Protection of Cultural Properties, Tokyo, and in particular to Prof. Takaaki Matsushita,
for the paintings owned by the Commission; to the Kyoto National Museum and Prof.
Shujiro Shimada, for paintings kept there; to the Osaka Municipal Museum, for paintings
in the former Abe Collection; and to the Yamato Bunka-kan, Osaka; the Fujii
Yurinkan, Kyoto; and the Nezu Art Museum, Tokyo. Four Buddhist temples in Kyoto
allowed us to photograph their treasured paintings: the Daitokuji, the Tofukuji, the
Ninnaji and the Shokokuji. Among private collectors, we are grateful to Mrs. Kanichi
Sumitomo, Oiso, for permission to photograph paintings in the superb collection brought
together by her late husband, and to Mr. Hisao Sugahara, Kamakura.
Museums in the United States and Europe which kindly permitted us to include
Chinese paintings in their possession are the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c.;
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas
City; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Honolulu Academy of Arts;
the British Museum, London; and the Museum of Asiatic Art, Amsterdam. Private
collectors whose paintings appear in our plates include Mr. John M. Crawford, Jr.,
New York; Mr. C.C. Wang, New York; Mr. H.C. Weng, Scarsdale, New York; the
Nii Wa Chai Collection, Munich; and Mr. Jean-Pierre Dubosc, Lugano. I am grateful
to Mr. C. C. Wang also for giving me the benefit of his connoisseurship by checking the
selection of paintings and making useful suggestions concerning the authenticity and
quality of certain pieces.
Prof. Max Loehr was kind enough to read through the entire manuscript critically,
and a great many corrections and other changes, both minor and major, were based
on his careful annotations. The text was read also by my wife, whose suggestions led
to the rewriting of some passages and numerous other improvements. The translations
from Chinese sources are mostly my own, but I have consulted, in connection with some
of them, the seven volume Chinese Painting by Dr. Osvald Sirén, which served also as
a reference for information about some artists. My indebtedness to his monumental work
is thus greater than its mere inclusion in the Bibliography might suggest. The rendering
of lines from a poem by Shen Chou on p. 127 is by Dr. Richard Edwards and Mr. Tseng
Hsien-ch’i. The Chinese title on the cover was composed and written by Mr. Chuang Yen,
Curator of the Palace Museum Collection.
My text is dedicated to Mr. A. G. Wenley, the distinguished director of the
Freer Gallery of Art, with warm gratitude for all his teaching.
JAMES CAHILL.
 Contents

Early Figure Painting: The Han, Six Dynasties and T’ang Periods (2nd-gth centuries) . II
Early Landscape Painting: Six Dynasties to Early Sung (4th-11th centuries) . 25
Sung Dynasty Landscape: The Middle Period (11th-12th centuries) . 35
Figure Painting of the Five Dynasties and Sung (r1oth-13th centuries) . 45
Figures in Landscape and Garden Settings (4th-13th centuries) 55
Bird, Flower and Animal Painting of the Sung Dynasty (r1oth-13th centuries) 67
Landscapes of the Southern Sung Academy: Ma Yiian, Hsia Kuei, Ma Lin (12th-13th centuries) 79
The Literati and Ch’an Painters of the Sung Dynasty (11th-13th centuries) 89
The Early Yiian Painters: Ch’ien Hstian, Chao Meng-fu, Kao K’o-kung (late 13th-early 14th centuries) 99
The Late Yiian Painters: The Four Great Masters and Sheng Mou (14th century) 107
The Early Ming “Academy” and the Che School: Pien Wen-chin, Tai Chin, Wu Wei (15th century) 117
The Wu School: Shen Chou, Wen Cheng-ming and their Followers (15th-16th centuries) . 125
Chou Ch’en, T’ang Yin and Ch’iu Ying (16th century) 137
Tung Ch’i-ch’ang and Late Ming Painting (16th-17th centuries) 149
Early Ch’ing Painting: The “Orthodox” Masters (17th-early 18th centuries) 161

Early Ch’ing Painting: The Individualists (17th-early 18th centuries) 169

The Eighteenth Century: The Yang-chou Eccentrics and Others . 185

TABLE OF DYNASTIES 197

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 199
INDEX OF NAMES 201
LIST OF COLORPLATES 207
 Anonymous, eighth century (?), from Tun-huang: The Paradise of Amitabha Buddha.
Hanging scroll. Ink and colors on silk. (54x40”) British Museum, London.

10
 Early Figure Painting
The Han, Six Dynasties and T’ang Periods

“Le paint is to draw boundaries,” writes the author of the Shuo wen, the first
Chinese dictionary, around the year A.D. 100. He explains the character for hua,
“to paint,” as representing a hand grasping a marker and drawing the four
boundaries of a field, that is to say, delineating a field. Sixteen centuries later, the
great individualist painter Tao-chi was to open his theoretical treatise by speaking of
the Single Brushstroke as “the origin of all existence, the root of the myriad pheno-
mena”—one might almost, without violating the sense, translate: “In the beginning
was the Brushstroke.”
In the beginning and also in the end; the line drawn by a brush remains the central
fact of Chinese painting throughout its history. Painting began in Europe also as an art
of line, but lost its linear character as painters turned their attention from the outlines
to what they enclosed, concentrating on the rendition of light and shadow, mass and
texture, softening or obscuring contours and so lessening the importance of line. The
course of Chinese painting led in a different direction;its artists, never so concerned with
reproducing faithfully the color and texture of surfaces or the corporeality of mass,
gave ever greater emphasis to the brushline itself, taking it as their primary descriptive
and expressive means. Stylistic movements that tended to destroy the integrity of the
individual brushstroke, or to subordinate linear drawing to surface treatment, were
generally regarded as unorthodox departures from the main tradition.
The earliest surviving examples of true painting in China are on two fragments.
of silk, dating from around the third century B.c., which were excavated from tombs at
Ch’ang-sha in present-day Hunan Province. The pictures, drawn in fine, black ink
brushline, with flat washes of color filling the areas thus bounded, exemplify already the
technique, and even something of the style, that was to remain basic and orthodox for
many centuries. They are symbolic representations of humans, demons, animals and
plants, set off as separate images by their outlines from the neutral silk ground. This
ancient mode of representation corresponds to an even more ancient mode of thought,
in which “images” (hsiang) played an important role as abstractions of natural pheno-
mena, objects and aspects of the world isolated from context and conceptualized. The
characters of the written language in their earliest form as “pictograms” were images of

II
 one kind; another was exemplified by the hexagrams of the ancient divination text
known as the Book of Changes, thought to be derived from the visual patterns of the
physical universe. The forms created by the painter were still another. When composed
into a scene, they were juxtaposed without being integrated. Between and around them
was void ;space had no existence except as that which separated one image from another.
The figures painted on a clay slab from a tomb of the latter part of the Han dynasty
(206 B.c.-221 A.D.), now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, still stand isolated against
an amorphous ground. But already the artist has discovered two means of unifying his
picture: through suggested movement, the figures seeming to be swayed by a common
cadence, and through the mutual awareness revealed in the exchange of glances that
binds them. Even a minor drawing such as this—it certainly does not represent the
highest achievements of Han painting—already begins to transcend the limitations of
a truly conceptual art. It shows the results of observation, although the artist almost
certainly did not paint from life (Chinese painters very seldom did). The men in it are
self-sufficient, conscious individuals, not merely symbols or stereotypes. They are not,
moreover, minor players in a cosmic drama, for whatever the subject of the painting may
be (it has not been clearly identified) it is apparently not in any way religious. The greatest
Han painting, as reported in the literature of that period, was secular. Confucianism,
representing the rationalistic and human-centered side of Chinese thought, had become
dominant in state and society, and its influence extended to painting: pictures of edifying
subjects, the Confucianists maintained, performed a moral function in society, refining
the spirit and elevating the minds of men. Portraits of eminent personages of the past,
illustrations to historical anecdotes or classical texts, were most esteemed.
The lineament in which thefigures'on the Boston tile are drawn, while it has not
yet realized the full potentialities of the Chinese brush—perhaps the most versatile
and responsive drawing implement devised by man—suggests that painters may have
been experimenting already with idiomatic brushwork. Fluctuations in breadth of line
serve to enliven the drawing with an air of spontaneity, to accent contours, to intensify
that sense of movement which seems to have been the objective of much of Han art.
One of the chief criteria of excellence in Chinese painting throughout its history is quality
of brushline. The same brush was used for writing, and the brilliant rise of the art of
calligraphy in the Han and later dynasties was eventually to affect profoundly the
technique of painting. But not until much later; the relaxed brushwork of the Boston
tile persists only in similarly informal sketches, while the thin, even line of the most
ancient style, with little of calligraphic character, remains standard for centuries in
more finished works.
The disintegration of the Han empire in the early third century A.D. was followed
by a long period of division into smaller states, none of which succeeded in conquering
the others and ruling the whole territory of China until the end of the sixth century.
We know the names of many artists who were active during the intervening Six Dynasties
period, and a little about what their contemporaries thought of them, for this is the age
that produced the first critical literature on painting. The only artist of the period whose

I2
Anonymous (second or third century a.D.): Figures painted on a tomb tile.
Ink and colors on a clay surface. (H. 7%”) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

13
 Attributed to Ku K’ai-chih (born c. 345): Admonitions to the Court Ladies. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and colors on silk. (H. 9%") British Museum, London,

name is attached to any surviving pictures of real antiquity, however, is Ku K’ai-chih,

born around the year 345. He was famous not only for his painting, but also for his
eccentric speech and behavior. His contemporaries credited him with “pre-eminence in
three fields: wit, painting and foolishness.”
Nothing so very eccentric can be detected in the paintings attributed to him; only a
touch of playfulness, at most. The earliest and finest among them, the handscroll in the
British Museum titled Admonitions to the Court Ladies, belongs to that didactic kind
 of painting favored by the early Confucianists, illustrating a fourth century moralizing
text which is made up of advice on matters of deportment delivered to ladies of the
imperial harem by the Court Preceptress. The passage of text that precedes the ninth
picture in the scroll contains the words: “No one can endlessly please; affection cannot
be for one alone; if it be so, it will one day end in disgust.” A graceful court lady appears
to be learning this bitter truth as the emperor repulses her with a gesture. The long bands
of cloth fluttering from her clothing; as if blown by the wind or agitated by rapid
movement, are later echoes of the swift linear plays used in Han dynasty drawing to
impart a sense of vitality to the picture. As painters grew more proficient in the descriptive
rendering of action, the need for such artifices disappeared; an entire mass might be
convincingly portrayed in motion.
The painting is in the form of a handscroll, or horizontal scroll, which is designed
to be unrolled section by section, in such a way that no more than two feet or so is seen
at a time. The materials and technique are the usual ones for the early period: fine
drawing in ink line, and washes of water color, on silk. In orthodox Chinese styles the
color washes are flat and ungraduated; color is almost never used as it is in the West,
to model form or to describe the fall of light on a surface. The use of shading in some
portions of the Admonitions scroll is one feature of several that point to a later date
for the painting, some centuries after the time of Ku K’ai-chih. But in its composition
and drawing, it is probably based closely on a work by Ku or some other Six
Dynasties master.
The technique of illusionistic shading, to. give plasticity to the forms of painting,
was introduced to China from the West, along-with the doctrine and iconography of
Buddhism. One of the first masters to put-it to effective use was Chang Seng-yu, an
early sixth century artist whose major output consisted of wall paintings for Buddhist
temples. The Chinese were quite unfamiliar with this device, which was remotely derived
from the late classical art of the Mediterranean region and transmitted to China by way
of northern India and the oasis cities of Central Asia. Chang’s paintings must have been
startling and a bit disturbing in their time; old conventions were being violated. But the
Chinese tended to be tolerant of innovations and experiments, not nearly so artistically
reactionary as the Occidental myths have them. The practice of shading, although it
seems never to have progressed much beyond a simple stage, was carried on into the
T’ang dynasty, and appears occasionally even later.
Another innovation of Chang Seng-yu, probably also of western derivation, was a
more fleshy figure type. A ninth century writer characterizes the great early figure painters
by saying that Ku K’ai-chih captured the souls of his subjects, Lu T’an-wei (a fifth
century master) their bones, and Chang Seng-yu their flesh. A well-known handscroll
attributed to Chang, the Five Planets and Twenty-eight Constellations, exhibits both the
technique of shading and an increased corporeality in the figures. It is quite possibly
based on designs of Chang Seng-yu, although the copy may be as late as the eleventh
or twelfth century. It is made up, like the Admonitions scroll attributed to Ku K’ai-chih,
of a series of pictures, separated by passages of text—in this case, descriptions of the

15
 deities and instructions on how they should be worshipped. The figures are set against
blank areas of silk, again as in the Admonitions. But the two pictures, even as copies,
reveal a change in attitude; in the Planets scroll, a new sobriety has supplanted the
playfulness of Ku K’ai-chih. The lineament is tamer; the naiveté of the earliest styles
has already been lost.
The Chen-hsing, the planet Saturn, is portrayed as an emaciated old man seated
cross-legged on the back of an ox. The dark tone of the man’s skin, along with his large
nose, bulbous forehead and general hirsuteness, are common Chinese conventions for
representing holy men of India and other western lands, and are often encountered in
the Arhat pictures of later centuries. One suspects the ethnocentric Chinese of feeling
that people of such outlandish appearance had no choice but to turn to a life of the
spirit, being so obviously unfitted for urbane society. The accentuation of muscle and
bone structure beneath the skin seems primitive if compared to the products of a
Renaissance European artist’s semi-scientific occupation with anatomy, but was no
doubt a triumph of realism in its day.
The long period of division of the empire ended when, in 589, China was reunited
under a single dynasty, the Sui. But by the end of the century, revolts had broken out
again, and in 618 the Sui was overthrown by a new dynasty, the T’ang, which lasted
nearly three hundred years. During the first half of this period, the peak of Chinese
national power, there was prosperity in all spheres of life: military campaigns pushed
the limits of Chinese domination far to the west, a flourishing foreign trade was carried
on, and Buddhism, which had been-imported from India as early as the Han dynasty,
was stronger than ever before or after. It was during the T’ang dynasty that the greatest
Chinese poetry was composed, ‘and,’in'the categories of religious and secular figure
compositions and portraits, the greatest pictures painted. So, at least, the Chinese critics
tell us, and we can only accept their judgement, since the meager quantity of extant
T’ang painting, or even of trustworthy copies of T’ang painting, hardly allows us to form
any broad judgements of our own.
The achievements of the T’ang dynasty in figure painting may be observed if we
place a small picture executed around the end of that period, the portrait of Fu Sheng
now in the Osaka Municipal Museum, beside the painting attributed to Chang Seng-yu.
A new flexibility is evident in the drawing; the formality of the archaic lineament has
relaxed. There are fewer long curves, less compulsion to continue the line in unbroken
sweeps, to simplify contours and reduce interior drawing. The short, deft strokes defining
the withered skin of Fu Sheng’s arms, the bony structure of his sunken chest, the wrinkles
in his neck, the expressive lines on his cheek and brow, would have seemed arbitrary
and intrusive in the pictures attributed to Ku K’ai-chih and Chang Seng-yu. A T’ang
dynasty critic appears to recognize this difference in distinguishing the style of Ku K’ai-
chih from that of later painters: Ku’s lines, he says, “are firm and tense and connect
with one another uninterruptedly; they circle back upon themselves in sudden rushes.”
Fu Sheng was a Confucian scholar who took part in the early Han dynasty revival
of classical learning in which scholarship attempted to repair the losses it had suffered

16
through the infamous “Burning of the Books.” He produced a copy of the Book of
Documents which he had preserved by hiding it in the wall of his house and devoted the
short remaining period of his life to transmitting his understanding of the text in a series
of expository lectures. He is portrayed as delivering one of these, holding the scroll

Attributed to Chang Seng-yu, early sixth century (copy of the eleventh or twelfth century ?):
The Planet Saturn, from The Five Planets and Twenty-eight Constellations. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and colors on silk. (H. 1034”) Osaka Municipal Museum (former Abe Collection).
+ = ee etree TI 7cpaR hte ee nA IT a Rt Nt

17
 Anonymous, ninth century? (attributed to Wang Wei, 699-759): Portrait of the Scholar Fu Sheng.
Section of a handscroll. Ink and colors on silk. (H. 10%") Osaka Municipal Museum (former Abe Collection).

in one hand and pointing with the other to a difficult passage. A benevolent smile
expresses his contentment; the pupil grasps his meaning, and the truth will not be lost.
Nowhere else in Chinese painting is the Confucian love of learning, the passion of the
literatus for preserving the knowledge of the past together with his own insights, so
well set forth.
 The painting has been ascribed since the eleventh century to the great T’ang
poet-painter Wang Wei, who is more celebrated for the development of ink-monochrome
landscape than for his figure painting. While the portrait of Fu Sheng is not in mono-
chrome, the coloring is subdued, limited to tinges of red along contours for the flesh
and light washes elsewhere. Artists from the mid-T’ang period onward came to rely
even less than before on color, more on the descriptive and expressive power of brushline
alone. The painter proclaimed as the greatest master of the dynasty, Wu Tao-tzu (none
of whose works survive, even in reliable copies), used only thin washes of color, or none at
all. The more conservative court artists, however, continued to draw in fine line and to
add bright mineral pigments. Two of them, Chang Hsiian and Chou Fang, specialized
in pictures of palace ladies. Both worked in the eighth century, Chang in the first half
and Chou in the second.
At least two works of Chang Hsiian are preserved in copies. The best known is the
handscroll titled Ladies Preparing Newly-woven Silk, copied in the early twelfth century
by the Emperor Hui-tsung. An everyday scene in the women’s quarters of the palace
is idealized and turned to the evocation of a quiet mood. Two women stretch a bolt of
silk between them. Another irons, using a metal pan filled with burning coals. A girl
holds the opposite edge of the cloth; a younger one, too small to be of any help, runs
underneath. While there is still a certain static quality to the scene, some movement
is convincingly suggested in the attitude of the lady ironing and in the off-balance pose
of the one further left, repeated by the even more unstable figure of the child. This nice
interplay of motion and rest, balanced and unbalanced masses, was quite beyond the
reach of the Six Dynasties artist, who depended upon impetuous rushes of line to
animate his designs.
T’ang painters, like T’ang sculptors, were occupied with the rendering of volume
and movement, besides applying themselves to the special pictorial concern of group
composition in space. Chang Hsiian’s solution to this latter problem is simple but
satisfying: the placing of the four main figures at corners of an imaginary lozenge laid
on the ground plane establishes a sufficient depth in the picture, and no indication of
setting is necessary. The arrangement is repeated in the main group of a second sur-
viving copy after a Chang Hsiian design, a copy probably made about the same time
as the other, i.e. in the eleventh or twelfth century. It represents Lady Kuo-kuo and
two other sisters of the imperial consort Yang Kuei-fei riding forth on an outing with
their attendants. The two pictures agree in many other points besides their compositions:
the drawing of the costumes and the brocade designs on them, blue or green tracery
over white, gold over red; the faces and coiffures of the women; the little girls—it might
almost be the same child who appears in both.
The paintings attributed to Chou Fang, the later eighth century master of palace
scenes, are no more likely to be T’ang originals than those connected with Chang Hsiian,
but even as copies they reflect a different personality. The subjects are the same: the
occupations and amusements of court ladies. In the small picture in the Freer Gallery,
two of them are playing Double Sixes, a game similar to backgammon, while another

a9
 ESS BS eres.

After Chang Hsiian, eighth century (twelfth century copy [?] attributed to Li Kung-lin):
Lady Kuo-kuo and Her Sisters Setting Forth on an Outing. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and colors on silk. (H. 13%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

stands gazing down at them, leaning on the shoulder of a girl. The faces are impassive,
as they tend to be in Chinese portrayals of well-bred subjects; but, unlike the faces in
the scrolls after Chang Hsiian, these disclose a thoughtful bent in the minds behind
them. No profound intelligence or individuality, to be sure; rather a consciousness,
discernible in the sidelong glances, and even more in the postures: the tilt of a head,
a poised hand. One can begin to note here a degree of psychological insight into the
relationship between the players, and between these and their standing friend; or into
the reverie of the girl on whom this friend leans, her gaze fixed outward almost toward
the spectator and yet withdrawn (all this in a few simple lines).
To speak here of personal relationships sensitively captured is not to credit the
artist with a precocious mastery of psychological portraiture. The picture tells us nothing
about the participants beyond defining their roles in this particular scene. It is rather
a distillation of the quality of a single moment in their lives, with no implications
beyond that moment. The painting is precisely what it appears to be; it is not a

20
pictorial allegory, nor is there any of the extraneous overlay—humor, drama, pathos,
sentiment—that is so often present in Occidental genre art. Such a detached approach
to an everyday subject may call to mind Vermeer or Chardin; but Chou Fang is less
concerned than they with technical problems of representing light and space, more with
the embodying of mood. Or perhaps, rather than a limited mood, something more
profound and less specific: the very nature of sentient existence, that intensified aware-
ness of the passing moment which is common to so much of Chinese literature and art
from early times, and which is later made much of, as if it were an invention of their
own, by the Ch’an (Zen) Buddhists.
So far we have been considering the secular painting of the T’ang dynasty. The
largest body of paintings extant from the period, however, is Buddhist. It has been
preserved in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas near Tun-huang, in western Kansu
Province, in the far northwest of China. As the westernmost Buddhist stronghold in
China on the pilgrimage route that extended across Central Asia to India, Tun-huang was

After Chang Hsiian, eighth century (copy by Emperor Hui-tsung, early twelfth century):
Ladies Preparing Newly-woven Silk. Section of a handscroll. Ink and colors on silk. (H. 14%")
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
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Ink and colors on silk. (H. 12% ") Freer Gallery of Art , Washington, D.c,
a point of entrance for foreign styles; it was also in close contact with the metropolitan
centers of China, where the major artists were at work. The greater part of Tun-huang
painting, in both quantity and quality, remains in the caves, painted on the walls.
A large number of mobile paintings on silk and paper were also found there, however,
marvelously preserved by the dry climate of the region.
One of the best-known is the large composition in the British Museum usually
called the Paradise of Amitabha Buddha, but tentatively identified by Arthur Waley
as a representation of the historical Buddha, Sakyamuni, delivering his first sermon
under the Bodhi tree. The Buddha, whichever it may be, is engaged in preaching the
doctrine, as is shown by the position of his hands. On either side are Bodhisattvas,
beings who mediate between the Buddha and humankind, and monks, the disciples of
Buddha. A seated woman, one of the donors, is in the lower left corner: the portrait
of the male donor, originally in the lower right, is missing. The painting seems to belong
to the later eighth century, but is probably based on a seventh century design. The
original was no doubt executed with greater sensitivity; a degree of hardness and some
awkward passages in the drawing (particularly of hands) warn us against supposing
that it reflects very accurately the most advanced Chinese styles of its period. In certain
features—the faces and poses of the Bodhisattvas, the bronze coloring of exposed
flesh, and especially the white highlights on noses, cheeks, eyelids and chins—it seems
to owe something to Central Asian Buddhist art. The coloring is exceptionally lovely,
with the brightest hues concentrated in the costume of the Buddha, a brilliant red
robe with green lining, and in the rich azurite blue of the hair. The painting, although
it cannot be more than a dim reflection of the great.Buddhist compositions of the T’ang
dynasty, remains impressive, a majestic conception rendered with firm conviction.
 Early Landscape Painting
Six Dynasties to Early Sung

2
TTTenatieen the period covered in the previous chapter, from the Han dynasty
until the end of T’ang, the human figure occupied the same dominant position in
Chinese painting as it did in pre-modern Occidental art. By the ninth century,
however, the interest of artists had begun to shift from man to nature; by the eleventh
century the shift was complete, and was never afterward reversed. It was landscape
that was to prove the characteristic product and chief glory of the whole tradition.
Figure painting flourished primarily in a Confucian context; the rise of landscape
painting, on the other hand, seems to have been stimulated by Taoist attitudes and ideas.
The practice of seeking out places of scenic beauty, of “communing with nature,” first
became popular in a school of Taoist poets and painters of the Six Dynasties period.
They dwelt upon their emotional responses to the sights and sounds of nature and were
inspired by them to the creation of works of art, thus adding positive values to the
negative attraction (freedom from human society) that the wilderness had held for the early
Taoists. Earlier painters had used landscape as an adjunct to pictures of human activities;
those of the fourth and fifth centuries began to depict it for its own sake.
In a short and enigmatic essay titled “Preface on Painting Landscape,” one of these
painters, Tsung Ping (375-443), relates that when old age came upon him and he grew
too feeble to climb mountains, he re-experienced his former travels by painting the
scenery of his memories on the walls of his room and gazing at these pictures. His essay
is an affirmation of the power of painting to function as a substitute for the thing it
represents, by arousing in the viewer those emotions that the actual scene would arouse.
The forms of nature, he says, possess not only physical substance but also immaterial
qualities of “attractiveness” or “flavor”; and it is by these qualities, rather than by
outward appearances, that the spirit of the sensitive man is affected. If the artist is so
affected himself and manages to transfer his feeling to his picture—if, as Tsung Ping
puts it, he takes “response to his eyes and accord with his heart” as his guiding principle—
then all other eyes will respond to, and all hearts be in accord with, his paintings. It is this
concept which underlies the early landscape painting of China. The Sung dynasty
writers’ praise of landscape as “making one feel as if he were really in the place depicted”
is a later reflection of the same idea.
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 No example of landscape painting survives from the age of Tsung Ping, but a copy
of a scroll attributed to Ku K’ai-chih, illustrating a narrative poem titled The Nymph
of the Lo River, offers some clue to its probable nature. The detail reproduced here
represents the final scene of the poem, in which the poet, deserted by the river goddess
after an abortive love affair, sits disconsolate on the bank of the river. The elements of the
landscape—hills, rocks, trees—still preserve their character as images; conceived
individually, they are juxtaposed as one would arrange ready-made stage props, without
much concern for size relationships or placement in space. They serve to demarcate
the separate episodes of the story, or to enclose the groups of figures that carry the
narrative. The figures are disproportionately large, perhaps because the story is still
the prime consideration of the painter. It is hard to imagine that such landscape, which
is probably no more primitive than that envisioned by Tsung Ping when he composed
his essay, could ever have inspired such an emotional response as the essay suggests.
Neither the painter’s technical means nor his power of visualization were adequate to
suggest, at least to the modern viewer, the animistic world of Tsung Ping’s text, in which
plants, streams and rocks are endowed with spiritual essences and captivate the soul
of man. Still less could he call forth any sense of the grand and pervasive movement
which unites the Taoist cosmos into a single organism. That remained for landscapists
of later centuries to achieve. But the viewer of a painting responds to familiar conventions
with a directness denied to those who find them strange; the mushroom-like trees and
modest hillocks of this naively presented scene were no doubt metamorphosed, in the eyes
of the early nature-lover, into dense forests and towering peaks.
Far more impressive, although still preserving some residue of the archaic, is the
landscape in the famous Emperor Ming-huang’s Journey to Shu, believed to be a close
copy of an eighth century design: The event depicted occurred in 756; Ming-huang,
driven from the capital by a revolt, made the long journey southwest to Shu (modern
Szechwan Province), following the rugged mountain road. The diagonally jutting crags,
the road precariously propped out from a sheer cliff, the dark and mysterious clefts
in the rocks, are intended to impart a sense of harshness and danger. Their effect is
softened, however, by the brilliance of the pigments; it is hard to see any peril in a scene
so cheerfully colored, so charmingly embroidered with flowering trees. The ancient and
orthodox mode of painting in fine outline and heavy washes of color here reaches its
culmination, achieving a richness which satisfies the T’ang love for lavish surfaces.
In applying this technique to landscape, however, the artist found himself forced into
some curious conventions, and severely hampered in the rendition of height and distance,
mass and texture. He is limited to a world sharply defined and without shadows, made
up of cleanly fractured rocks, hard-edged clouds, solitary trees and bushes. Nature is
made unnaturally neat, and perceived with unnatural clarity.
Such an air of clarity and precision seems to imply a physical world susceptible
to analysis by human intellect. The same firm confidence in the humanistic ideal that
pervades T’ang figure painting is thus reflected even in landscape. But it was not to last.
The revolt that drove the emperor Ming-huang into exile, even though it failed, signaled
 Attributed to Ku K’ai-chih (born ¢. 345), copy of the twelfth or thirteenth century:
The Nymph of the Lo River. Section of a handscroll. (H. 914”) Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c.

the tragic fall from power of this most brilliant of dynasties, and put an end to the sense
of security that permeates these pictures. It was during the following century that artists
began to turn their attention away from the sphere of human affairs, now too obviously
flawed with failure to merit the original faith. Nature, even in its most awesome and
unfathomable aspects—and the tenth and eleventh century landscapists, more than
their T’ang predecessors, were profoundly aware of these aspects—proved in the end
the more rewarding to those in search of absolutes.
The heavily colored “blue-and-green” manner of landscape to which this picture
belongs was already, by the late eighth century, a bit old-fashioned; more progressive
painters were exploring the advantages of broader kinds of brushwork in place of the
fine-line drawing, and of the reduction or complete exclusion of color. The famous poet-
painter Wang Wei (699-759) is credited by later critics, perhaps undeservedly, with
several innovations, including the p’o-mo or “broken ink” method, a means of “breaking”

27
 s Journey to Shu.
Anonymous (eleventh century copy of an eighth century composition?) : The Emperor Ming-huang’
Detail from a hanging scroll. Ink and colors on silk. Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.
by deeper-toned accents that flatness which can easily afflict ink-wash painting, and the
use of ts’un, or texture strokes; both techniques were essential to the later evolution of
the ink monochrome landscape. Other artists were carrying out more extreme forms of
experimentation. We read of one eighth century master who spread silk on the floor
and spattered ink freely onto it, then turned the result into a recognizable landscape
by the addition of some brush lines. Another painted with a worn-out brush, still another
with his own braided hair, dipped in ink. The prize for eccentricity must go to the painter
who faced in one direction and painted in another, waving the brush in time to music.
Most of these men worked while drunk, in a frenzy only partly aesthetic. Today’s
“action painters,” when they claim Oriental precedents for their styles, are more right
than they may realize. Those who indulged in such eccentricities were for the most part
minor artists, but their unorthodox techniques, grouped under the 7-p’in or “untrammeled
class” of painting, were to have a profound effect on later styles. The authority of the
traditional mode was broken.
The Five Dynasties period (906-960) which followed the T’ang was another era of
political division; China was again split into small states ruled by short-lived dynasties.
Several schools of landscape that were to continue into the Sung dynasty were inaugur-
ated during this short but crucial period. The great landscapists of the Five Dynasties
remain indistinct figures; it is perhaps too much to hope that any considerable number
of authentic works from their hands will ever come to light, and the task of isolating
their individual styles in existing copies and imitations remains to be done. Especially
shadowy are the earliest of them, Ching Hao and Kuan T’ung, active in the late ninth
and early tenth centuries. The creation of a more monumental landscape type, with a
new sense of solidity in the rocks and mountains,’ was evidently their achievement.
Later in the century, Tung Yiian and his pupil Chi-jan inaugurated an important
school in the south, portraying the characteristic scenery of the area just below the
Yangtze River. A few early paintings either by them or by close followers reveal their
style more clearly. The typical productions of this school are river landscapes with
dots and
rounded hills, drawn in a broad, relaxed manner, with a profusion of small
streaks of ink softening the forms and giving them an earthy texture.
The quest of the Five Dynasties and early Sung landscapists was for pictorial
unification. The subordination or elimination of color was a move toward that end,
since the tapestry-like variegation of early landscape had tended to fragment the
composition. A new emphasis on brushwork gave surface consistency to the painting.
within
Most important of all, methods were developed to create a spatial continuum
into
the picture: the use of concealing mists, the convincing depiction of recessions
atmo-
depth, the drawing of distant objects in thinner tones of ink to suggest a hazy
but set forth a
sphere. A landscape was no longer an assemblage of individual images,
coherent vision.
Ch’eng,
The painter who has been called the greatest of Chinese landscapists, Li
He specia-
was active in the north during the late Five Dynasties and early Sung period.
and wintry
lized in winter scenes, perhaps because they agreed with something austere

29
 Attributed to Li Ch’eng (tenth century), but probably eleventh century in actual date:
A Buddhist Temple in the Mountains. Detail from a hanging scroll. Ink and light color on silk.
William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City.
 Fan K’uan (early eleventh century): Traveling among Streams and Mountains. Detail from a hanging scroll.
Ink and light color on silk. Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

in his personal nature, but also for reasons related to technique: the black-and-white
scenery of this season was well suited to depiction in ink monochrome, and its bare trees,
with their traceries of branches and twigs, served as ideal vehicles for displaying the
extraordinary vitality of his brushwork. Li Ch’eng was regarded by his contemporaries
as superhuman, sharing in the creative forces of nature. His influence on painting was
profound. The grandeur of Northern Sung landscape, the supreme achievement of
 Chinese painting, probably owes more to him than to any other single figure. Many of
the finest surviving landscapes, notably those of Fan K’uan, Hsii Tao-ning and Kuo Hsi,
are by men who acknowledged Li Ch’eng as their master.
The paintings attributed to Li himself all appear to be by lesser artists of later ages,
but a few of them retain some trace of that stupendous creative power. A Buddhist
Temple in the Mountains, probably painted around a century after the time of Li Ch’eng,
is one of these. In the stillness of a mountain gorge, bare trees stand against thin mists.
Those in the foreground are dark and distinct ;further back, they fade to pale silhouettes.
The very essentials of T’ang and earlier landscape, the warmth of color and charm of
individualized details, are sacrificed to gain a new gravity of mood. The T’ang land-
scapist’s presentation of nature as an assemblage of elements carefully analyzed and
depicted no longer satisfies the Sung artist, who attempts to comprehend the physical
world intuitively. His transformation of visual impressions into this superb coherence
of form reveals his conviction of a coherence and order underlying surface appearances
in nature, the same conviction that inspired Sung philosophers to erect the vast and
orderly structure of the Neo-Confucian cosmology.
With Li Ch’eng we have arrived at the Sung dynasty (960-1279), the age of full
maturity of Chinese painting. The first half of the dynasty, during which the capital
was located at the northern city of K’ai-feng, is known as the Northern Sung period;
the remainder after 1127, when the capital was moved to Hang-chou in the south, as the
Southern Sung. For about a century and a half after the foundation of the dynasty,
the empire was again united and-relatively secure. A succession of artists of great
originality and power produced masterworks which remained for later ages to admire,
to emulate and to despair of equaling. Very few works by these men survive today,
but those few give substance to the reverential appraisals they have received from
all Chinese connoisseurs. The perfect balance between nature and art was attained in their
works. Prodigious technique was applied to valid pictorial ends, never exploited in order
to impress by sheer virtuosity; a classical restraint governed the expression, allowing
no lapses into sentimentality. The artists approached nature as if for the first time, and
responded to it with wonder and awe. The freshness of their vision and the depth of their
understanding were never to be quite recaptured.
The supreme monument of the period is a large signed landscape by Fan K’uan,
an early eleventh century master. He began his career by imitating the works of
Li Ch’eng, but then, it is reported, came to a sudden realization: “My predecessor’s
method consisted of a direct apprehension of things in nature; here am I, learning
from a man, which is not the equal of learning from the things themselves. But better
than either of these methods is the way of learning from my own heart.” Thereafter,
we are told, he altered his style, and founded a school of his own. Like Li Ch’eng he is

Fan K’uan (early eleventh century): Traveling among Streams and Mountains. Hanging scroll.
Ink and light color on silk. (61x29%4”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

32
33
credited by Sung critics with a power akin to that of natural creation; his works were
endowed, that is, with the same all-pervading rightness or inherent order which one
senses in natural scenery. Nature can never produce a rock or tree that looks artificial
and wrong; an ordinary mortal can, but a truly great artist, the critics maintained,
never will, because he works with the same spontaneity as nature itself, and without
human willfulness.
Fan K’uan’s one extant work, Traveling among Streams and Mountains, satisfies
fully the expectations aroused by this praise. The composition is one of heroic simplicity,
serene, free of trickery, showiness or any obvious trace of artifice. It is a vision so
compelling that questions of subjectivity or objectivity, pursuit of likeness or the
rejection of it, become irrelevant; the world of the painting seems neither to reflect
faithfully the physical universe nor to overlay it with a human interpretation, but to
have an absolute existence in itself. A massive bluff dominates the scene, its scale set
by the trees and buildings on the crest of the knoll below. In a dark, mysterious cleft,
a waterfall drops as a thin streak of white. Mists thrown up at its base drift through
the valley, adding a further impression of soaring height to the cliff by obscuring its base.
The quality of the drawing is best seen in the detail: the lineament, and particularly
the thick, jagged contours of trees and rocks, is charged with an electric energy. The
foliage of the trees is depicted by accumulation of individually delineated leaves, but in
spite of all the labor involved in the method, the result has no air of laboriousness.
The surfaces of boulders and cliffs are defined with texture strokes of the kind called
by the Chinese “raindrop ¢s’wn” :innumerable small, pale-toned brushstrokes are applied
to give a convincingly tactile rendering of the faces of rock. These technical devices,
and such motifs as the scrubby foliage surmounting the bluff, were all to be imitated
by later landscapists working “in the Fan K’uan manner”; they appear here in their
pristine, unmannered forms. Few reminders of man and his works are to be seen: two tiny
figures driving mules, a bridge, a half-hidden temple. The rest is untouched nature.
 Sung Dynasty Landscape: The Middle Period

,
ik second half of the Northern Sung period, from the mid-eleventh century into
the early twelfth, was an especially eventful age in Chinese painting. To understand
all that happened then, one would have to take into account the activities of many
separate schools and individual masters: traditionalists and innovators, archaists and
eccentrics, academicians and amateurs, working in a bewildering variety of styles.
The foremost exponent of the landscape tradition of Li Ch’eng who was active at
this time was Kuo Hsi. He distinguished himself not only as a painter but also as author
of the most important Chinese treatise on landscape, in which he describes his methods
and states his beliefs. Like Tsung Ping six centuries before, he maintained that the value
of landscape painting lay in its capacity to make the viewer feel as if he were really in
the place depicted. A genuine lover of the wilderness, he says, may be prevented by
circumstances from carrying out his dreamed-of..wanderings among mountains and
streams; but he can experience imaginary journeys by gazing at paintings. The artist who
would paint such landscapes must himself be intimate with mountains, observing their
aspects in various kinds of weather, at different times of day and year. Mountains in
spring are light and seductive, as if smiling; those in winter sad and tranquil, as if
sleeping. All this is captured by the sensitive and skillful painter. “Contemplation of such
pictures arouses corresponding feelings in the heart; it is as if one really came to these
places. Herein lies the marvelous quality that paintings possess in addition to their
(descriptive) meaning.”
Kuo Hsi’s masterwork, Early Spring, signed and dated to the year 1072, is the only
other extant Chinese landscape that rivals the Fan K’uan painting in grandeur. But it
is grandeur of a different sort, a turbulent vision of the world in flux rather than an
affirmation of immutability in nature. The earth forms, swollen to an exaggerated
rotundity, fuse and interpenetrate like parts of a vast organism. The strong sense of
unrest that activates the picture is intensified by the use of a nervous, wavering line,
constantly fluctuating in breadth, and the suggestion of an unnatural illumination, by
which rocks can be lit from below, and shadows flicker mysteriously over a surface.
Most unsettling of all is the regularity with which the ponderous masses are deeply
undercut, as if by aeons of erosion. In what would seem to have been a last-minute

35
Kuo Hsi: Early Spring. Dated 1072. Hanging scroll. Ink and light colors on silk. (62%
x 42%")
Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.
change of plan, for example, the artist has altered what should have been the solid
earth foundation for the pavilion at extreme right into a perilously overhanging ledge,
and opened below a glimpse into a subterranean world. Something in the temperament
of Kuo Hsi abhorred stability.
So much borders on fantasy; and yet when we move nearer to study the individual
scenes in the cells of space enclosed by these coiling masses of earth and rock—the vista
over an eroded river valley at left, the temple in a hazy gorge at right, boatmen disem-
barking on the shore in each of the lower corners—we find a degree of realism beyond
anything encountered earlier. Kuo Hsi has brought to perfection the technique of
atmospheric perspective, a method of creating the illusion of space and distance by
depicting objects in progressively lighter tone as they recede into depth, suggesting
the intervention of atmosphere between them and the viewer. Local areas of mist obscure

Attributed to Kuo Hsi: Autumn in the River Valley. Section of a handscroll. Ink and light colors on silk. (H. 10%")
Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c.

37
 the tops of trees, and, as in the Fan K’uan landscape, increase the sense of height by
masking the bases of the cliffs. That the profusion of detail does not weaken the coherence
of the design is part of the wonder of the picture. Although each of the spidery bare trees
is individually characterized, they serve by repetition as a unifying motive, and as a
relief to the weightiness of the masses.
Of the many other works attributed to Kuo Hsi, a handscroll in the Freer Gallery,
Autumn in the River Valley, agrees best with the Early Spring as a production of the same
hand. The points of similarity are numerous, even though the handscroll is much smaller
and quieter in mood. It answers the requirements set forth in Kuo Hsi’s treatise, inviting
the viewer to share in imagination the feelings of the strolling scholars who move leisurely
through the landscape—one of them is seen approaching a rustic wine shop in the section
reproduced. Since this is intended as “a painting one can move around in,” a feeling of
spaciousness is essential. Here as in the Early Spring, Kuo Hsi has created a hollow
of space, using foreground rocks and tall pines for repoussoir. The cliffs and ridges are
depicted in a softer manner, with pale contours or none at all, and a texture suggestive
of crumbling earth. This is a technique suited to the smaller dimensions of the handscroll,
but not to the huge hanging scroll, for which a firmer structure is required.
The Freer handscroll indicates that Kuo Hsi, who was an influential member of the
Imperial Painting Academy, probably did much to introduce the new, more intimate
mode that was to dominate landscape painting during the following two centuries;
but anticipations of it can be found eyen earlier. In particular, the format and function
of the handscroll, which is meant to be seen at close range, encouraged the artist to draw
nearer to his subject. This close-up-presentation can be observed as early as the tenth
century, in the River Journey at First. Snowfall scroll attributed to Chao Kan (p. 58),
and again in a handscroll from the first half of the eleventh century with a similar title,
Clearing after Snow on the River. The latter painting is signed by a less-known artist,
Kao K’o-ming, and is dated 1035. Unrolling this scroll takes one on an imaginary journey
along the river, past cottages of retired scholars, fishermen in their boats, bamboo groves
and tall pines. The most poetic passage is near the end: a solitary fisherman, trudging
homeward along the shore, crosses a clearing between groves of trees. A spot of bright
color, he provides an effective foil for the greyed tones of the wintry landscape. Skillful
use of atmospheric perspective, surrounding the nearby trees with haze and dimming
those more distant, and a convincing recession along diagonally placed earth masses,
open a deep space behind him. In the success with which this is accomplished, the
painting seems advanced for its time, and in other ways as well: the broad broken
sweeps of dilute ink on the heavily eroded banks, for example, resemble the “axe-cut”
system of texture strokes used by Li T’ang more than a half-century later.
Li T’ang was the next major landscapist after Kuo Hsi in the Imperial Academy.
He served the Emperor Hui-tsung at the northern capital of K’ai-feng during the last
decades of the Northern Sung period, then followed the imperial court when it moved
southward, under pressure from the Chin Tartars, to establish the new capital at
Hang-chou, below the Yangtze River. He was over seventy at the time, and lived for less

38
 Anonymous (eleventh or twelfth century): A Market Village by the River. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and light colors on paper. (H. 11%") Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

than a decade after the move; but he managed to so dominate the newly reorganized
Painting Academy that there was scarcely a single Academy landscapist during the whole
of the Southern Sung period (1127-1279) who was not in some way his follower. Li T’ang
himself belonged in the tradition of Fan K’uan, sharing that master’s fondness for
weathered rock cliffs surmounted by scrubby vegetation, and somber, shadowed gorges.
He painted monumental landscapes, at least one of which, a well-known work in the
Palace Museum collection dated 1124, is still extant. But the dimensions of the large

39
 hanging scroll, ideally suited to the majestic visions of the Northern Sung painters, were
less adaptable to the more intimate spirit that was now becoming popular. Li T’ang’s
achievements in the smaller forms, the handscroll and the album leaf, were probably
at least as influential as his large-scale compositions.
The fan-shaped album leaf titled A Myriad Trees on Strange Peaks, although it
carries an attribution to a much earlier artist, can be convincingly ascribed on grounds
of style to Li T’ang. The trees in it are distinctively his, and the contours of the rocks;
the rock surfaces are treated with a variant of his characteristic “axe-cut ¢s’un,” a
method derived from the “raindrop ¢s’un” of Fan K’uan but replacing the fine dabs
of ink by broader sweeps, applied with the brush held in an inclined position. The
resemblance of the resulting surface to that of a block of wood hewn with an axe accounts
for the curious name. The use of the technique is difficult to see in this small picture;
it appears more clearly, and in more mannered form, in the large dated landscape
mentioned above. Passages strikingly similar to this album leaf in subject and style
are to be seen in both the large landscape and a handscroll by Li T’ang in the same
collection. They occur in these other paintings as subordinate elements, however; and
the fact that Li T’ang has utilized what is essentially a detail from a large composition
as the entire theme for a painting is itself significant: from the grand, all-inclusive
vision, encompassing mountains, forests, rivers, buildings, paths—the painting as a
world complete in itself—the artist’s field of view narrows now to a small fragment
of nature. More concentrated, the picture gains in immediacy. One no longer wanders
in imagination through the scenery, pausing to enjoy individualized details, but instead
absorbs at ence the whole content.of this cool, calm view of mysterious peaks rising
above the fog. This may well be the. earliest extant Chinese landscape that contains
no stream or waterfall, no animals, no trace of human handiwork, nothing to break the
absolute stillness. Mountains, trees and mists: only these, arranged and presented as a
unified image. The painting attains by a drastic reduction of elements that coherence
which Fan K’uan had achieved through more complex and difficult means of formal
organization.
The feeling of spaciousness, noted already in the works of Kuo Hsi and Kao K’o-
ming, is heightened by this reduction, and by the use of a compositional type which
probably originated with Li T’ang, and became a favorite of Southern Sung landscapists.
The picture is divided diagonally, with the entire foreground, containing the elements
of greatest weight, compressed into the lower half. Li T’ang keeps a few peaks in the
upper left segment; even these were to be all but eliminated in works by his followers.
There is less of solid matter in the scene than there had been in earlier landscape, and
it is made to seem still less by the expansion of the mists: no longer confined to the
bases of cliffs and to the role of masking areas of difficult transition, they now flow
freely between the peaks, and outward through the boundaries of the picture. A circum-
scribed view of a remote corner of the world, by drawing the imagination far beyond
its actual limits, thus implies all the rest that lies outside it. This is no less a microcosm
than the grand vistas of earlier centuries had been. The sense of vastness it conveys

40
Kao K’o-ming: Clearing after Snow on the River. Dated 1035. Detail from a handscroll.
Ink and colors on silk. (H. 16%") Collection of John M. Crawford, Jr., New York.
 Probably by Li T’ang, early twelfth century (misleading attribution to Yen Wen-kuei, tenth to eleventh century) :
A Myriad Trees on Strange Peaks. Album leaf. Ink and light colors on silk. (94x 1044")
Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

does not depend, as before, upon the depiction of lofty cliffs and deep recessions along
river valleys, but purely upon the evocative use of space. The hazy void in which the
peaks and trees are set becomes as significant, pictorially and expressively, as the forms
themselves. The void, and the interrelationships of the rocky spires within it, are

42
perceived intuitively ;the picture is not constructed according to rational principles, least
of all according to any such geometric formulae as underlie Occidental linear perspective.
Once more, and in still another mode, the Chinese landscapist has succeeded in embodying
in painting the organic cosmos of the Taoist and Neo-Confucian world view.
The main course of landscape in this period, the important schools and masters,
the activities of the Academy, are fairly well understood; but there were, as always,
artists who stood outside these relatively well-charted paths, working in individual
manners, or continuing traditions of painting that had declined to the status of minor
local phenomena. Their works, if unsigned, are difficult to place. One such problematic
work is the short handscroll titled A Market Village by the River, which fits into no
familiar category. It appears to be a production of the eleventh or twelfth century;
if the latter, it is decidedly retardataire. There are suggestions of the Fan K’uan manner
in the massive bluff at the left, and of the Tung Yiian school in the flat river bank and
rounded distant hills at right. The landscape proper is of less importance, however,
than the genre details in it, drawn meticulously in the finest of line. A trading junk
approaches the shore, where three similar vessels are already moored, one displaying
its occupants’ laundry on a line strung from the mast. The riverside village is populated
with lively figures: two travelers lunching in a restaurant, an old man chastising a servant
who kneels before him, a boy driving a mule, a scholar climbing toward the temple in
the valley above. A caravan of camels and their drivers, simply depicted in silhouette,
is seen filing through the pass at right. The picture may represent a particular place,
and perhaps there is some story connected with it; but these questions, like those of
its date and authorship, remain as yet unanswered.
 Figure Painting of the Five Dynasties and Sung

4
I the short and turbulent interim between the T’ang and Sung dynasties, while the
five ephemeral powers that give the Five Dynasties period its name were succeeding
one another rapidly in the Yellow River region, two more stable governments in the
south, the Shu and the Southern T’ang, provided refuge for artists in search of peace and
patronage. The Southern T’ang controlled most of what is known as the Chiang-nan
area, south of the Yangtze, and had its capital at Nanking. It was ruled from 961 until
975, when it was finally absorbed into the Sung, by the famous poet-emperor Li Yi.
He claimed descent from the imperial family of the T’ang dynasty, and considered his own
dynasty as its legitimate successor. The dominant tone of Li Yii’s court was one of
elegance and aestheticism, and the painting created under the court patronage transmits
something of that flavor. Figure painters in Li Yii’s academy followed T’ang traditions.
Especially popular were scenes of palace life in-the manner of Chang Hsiian and Chou
Fang; such sensitive portrayals of aristocratic pleasures and pastimes suited perfectly
the taste that prevailed within this fragile enclave of culture.
Most famous of the Southern T’ang figure painters was Chou Wen-chii, who imitated
Chou Fang, but, says a twelfth century catalog, “surpassed him in elegance and refine-
ment.” An unsigned and unattributed painting representing A Palace Concert, one of
Chou Wen-chii’s favorite subjects, has more likelihood of being a work of his period
and school, if not of his hand, than any of those actually ascribed to him. The genre is
familiar from T’ang painting. Four women, playing on the lute, cither, flute and mouth
organ, accompanied by a servant who keeps time with wooden clappers, make up a
chamber ensemble. Five others drink wine from celadon cups. They are already tipsy;
one, at the far left, is supported by an attendant. Behind her is the empress, wearing
an elaborate headdress and holding a flat fan; she alone preserves her dignity, sitting
upright. The figures, although unmistakably based on those of Chou Fang, have lost
something of the T’ang sense of volume. The long curves of the early style are replaced
by sharp breaks, and the line itself fluctuates slightly in breadth here and there. If we
leave aside these details of style, however, the picture might well persuade us (as it
was meant to do) that nothing of importance had changed since the age of Chou Fang.
The colors are still as bright and cheerful, the ladies as plump. The artist and his models

45
School of Chou Wen-chii (tenth century): A Palace Concert. Hanging scroll. Ink and colors on silk. (19%x27%%")
Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

assume the same air of calm assurance, as if the T’ang had never fallen. Painters in the
Nanking court must have done their part in maintaining Li Yii’s precious illusion of
perpetuating a glory long vanished.
Further west, in what is now Szechwan Province, the Shu state held out in a like
way against the tumult of the time. Some artists who had served under the last T’ang
emperors fled to Chengtu, the Shu capital, and a flourishing school of painting grew
up there, a generally more progressive school than that of the Southern T’ang. From
literary accounts, we know of the popularity in Shu of the 7-p’im or “untrammeled” styles,
and of ink monochrome. Two small pictures in Japan attributed to one of the Chengtu
artists, Shih K’o, although they are much later than the Five Dynasties period in date,
may be free copies after his works, and can give us some hint of how the rough brushwork
of the 1-p’im was applied to the painting of figures.
 Since the subjects of the pictures pertain to Ch’an Buddhism (Japanese Zen), we
must pause to consider that unique sect. The semi-legendary story of the transmission
of Ch’an from India to China by Bodhidharma in the early sixth century is well known;
but it need not prevent us from thinking of Ch’an as properly a Chinese product.
Buddhism, centuries before, had converted a good part of China; now China converted
Buddhism. The evolution of Ch’an to its maturity in the seventh and eighth centuries
owed more to Taoism, and to a succession of Chinese thinkers, than to any foreign
importation. This is no doubt one reason why Ch’an penetrated so deeply into the
intellectual life of the late T’ang, Five Dynasties and Sung periods, and was the only
sect to sustain its strength in the midst of a general Buddhist decline in China. In Ch’an,
most of the appurtenances of orthodox Buddhist sects—ritual, the pantheon of deities,
holy images, the scriptures—are denied any real value. All these are regarded, in fact,
as obstacles to the attainment of individual enlightenment, and are rejected in favor of
a direct assault on that goal. Ratiocination leads away from it, intuition toward it, ever
closer, until some shock—it can even be physical—accomplishes the final break-through.
The fact that the rise to popularity of the new painting styles, including the rough
manners of brushwork and ink monochrome, was contemporary with the popularization
of Ch’an, may be responsible for the often-encountered exaggerations of the closeness
of relationship between the two movements. Ch’an was no more responsible for ink
monochrome painting than it was for Ch’an; the new styles were employed by Ch’an
artists, but also (and earlier) by Confucian literati, Taoist recluses, and the masters of
landscape about whose broader beliefs we know. nothing at all. There is no reason to
suppose that Shih K’o was personally committed to Ch’an; he painted Taoist, orthodox
Buddhist and secular subjects as well.
The Two Patriarchs Harmonizing their-Mindsascribed to Shih K’o, however, are
unmistakably Ch’an personages. One of them leans comfortably upon the back of a
tiger, his head lowered between hunched shoulders. Whether he is meditating or asleep
is uncertain; the tiger, in any case, is asleep. Something other than an ordinary hair
brush, probably a brush of straw or shredded bamboo, has been employed in drawing
the garment of the man and the fur of the tiger. The experience of such a picture is
quasi-kinesthetic. One senses, in observing these ragged lines, the vigorous movements
of the painter. Where his brush rested momentarily, blots of deep black remain; where
it moved more swiftly, streaks of ink trailed behind it as the fibers of the brush separated.
The man’s face and the tiger’s mask are finished with more conventional strokes. This
manner of painting matches literary descriptions of Shih K’o’s style, and belongs to the
i-p’in tradition in its violent rejection of orthodox fine-line-and-color-wash technique.
With its air of spontaneity, it suited the needs of Ch’an, and the future development of
Ch’an painting lay chiefly in successive transformations of the “untrammeled” styles.
The orthodox sects of Buddhism, meanwhile, continued to commission icons in
the traditional manners. Although their doctrines played no significant part in the main
intellectual currents of the Sung period, except insofar as they influenced Neo-Confucian
thought, they retained some popular following, and enough force to inspire an abundance

47
 a
Bose AAT)

Anonymous: Portrait of the Ch’an Master Wu-chun. Dated 1238. Detail from a hanging scroll.
Ink and colors on silk. Téfukuji, Kyoto.
of painting, ranging in quality from indifferent to excellent. The entire range is repre-
sented among surviving works, especially in the rich collections of Japanese temples.
Most of the paintings are unsigned; the artists were not famous, and their identity was
of no special concern to purchasers of their works, who required objects for worship
rather than for aesthetic enjoyment. The painters, accordingly, were not encouraged
to develop individual styles; they tended to follow old models for their designs, and
worked in whatever manner was orthodox in their time. They were constrained to
iconographic correctness, and aimed at portraying the Buddhist subjects with skill and
conviction, endowing them with whatever aspects were required: fierceness, benevolence,
asceticism or nobility.

Anonymous, thirteenth century? (copy after Shih K’o?, tenth century): Patriarch and Tiger.
Detail from one of a pair of hanging scrolls representing Two Patriarchs Harmonizing their Minds. Ink on paper.
Commission for the Protection of Cultural Properties, Tokyo.

49
 Anonymous (eleventh century): The Peacock King. Detail from a hanging scroll.
Ink and colors on silk Ninnaji, Kyoto.

50
 K’ung-chiao Ming-wang, the Peacock King, is represented in a superb early painting,
one of the treasures of the Ninnaji, a Buddhist temple in Kyoto. Like many other
deities of esoteric Buddhism, he is austere in appearance but benevolent in function:
he devours the evil thoughts and passions which befoul the minds of humans, just as
his peacock vehicle (in legend, at least) consumes poisonous snakes, insects and plants.

Chang Sheng-wen: Sakyamuni Buddha Preaching.

Painted in the period 1173-1176. Section of a long handscroll of Buddhist images. Ink and colors on paper. (H. 12”)
Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

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 The two faces at the sides of his head have fierce expressions, while the central face is
impassive. Probably Northern Sung in date, the picture is unsurpassed in beauty among
surviving Buddhist paintings. The colors, bright mineral pigments, are well preserved,
although the designs in gold line which originally covered the textiles have all but
disappeared. The great fan-shaped tail of the peacock surrounds the deity like a second
aureole. All this visual richness could easily have fallen into trivial decoration ; instead,
together with the quality of the drawing and the sense of power in tranquillity conveyed
by the hieratic image, it lifts the painting to the level of the sublime.
The continuity of orthodox Buddhist styles may be seen in the similarities between
the eighth century composition from Tun-huang (p. 10) and a twelfth century treat-
ment of the same or a closely related subject which is part of a long handscroll of
Buddhist images in the Palace Museum. An inscription on this latter painting is dated
1180, and identifies the artist as one Chang Sheng-wen, an otherwise unknown painter
who worked far in the southwest, in the present province of Yiinnan. It is painted on
paper, in line of the utmost delicacy and subtle shades of color. The perfection of drawing,
the refinement of the faces, sets Chang far above the anonymous image-makers of
Tun-huang in skill and sensitivity. His strength apparently lay in these, however, and
not in originality; or, if he was in fact endowed with any inventiveness, he was not
encouraged to exercise it. The four guardian kings in the lower corners of the composi-
tion look as if they had been transmitted, without much change, from the Buddhist art
of the T’ang dynasty; the Buddha and Bodhisattvas are likewise direct descendants of
those in T’ang painting. We see here*the end-product of a slow and natural evolution,
with nothing of the conscious archaism practiced by other Sung painters. To some
extent, the style has been brought up to date: the faces have the same gentleness, the
drapery the same elaboration of festoons and ribbons, as we know from Sung sculpture.
But so little significant change in five centuries bespeaks a backward-looking art, as
most Buddhist painting of the Sung period certainly was.
Such pictures as these played no part in the Ch’an sect; its attitude toward cult
images and holy texts is vividly displayed in some portrayals of famous Ch’an masters
using images of the Buddha for firewood and ripping scriptures to shreds. All that can
be transmitted must pass directly from one human being to another, from mind to
mind. Anecdotes of the doings and sayings of masters of the past were of value in
preserving some record of their individual insights. Portraits were painted for a similar
reason; the relationship between master and pupil was very close, and a portrait of the
master could recall that relationship to the pupil after he had left the monastery at the
end of his apprenticeship. Several such portraits are preserved in temples in Japan,
brought back from China by Japanese monks who went there to study.
The best of these, and perhaps the finest extant Chinese portrait, has for its subject
the Ch’an master Wu-chun. It was painted by an anonymous artist; Wu-chun himself
has inscribed it and written the date, 1238. According to this dedicatory inscription,
the picture was done as a farewell present for the Japanese priest Ikkoku, who on his
return to Japan founded the Tofukuji, the Kyoto temple in which the painting is still

52
 Li Sung: The Knick-knack Peddler. Dated 1210. Album leaf. Ink and light colors on silk. (10%x 107%")
Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

kept. Wu-chun is portrayed seated in an alert pose, dressed in richly colored robes.
It is the face, however, which commands attention: benign, eyes wide open, good humor
evident in the wrinkles at the corners of the eyes and in the slight smile. A light modeling,

33
with blushes of red along contours, gives it a surprisingly naturalistic look. Portraiture
may have gone even further in the direction of realistic portrayal in the Sung period,
but nothing else so far advanced as this survives.
Figure painters in the Imperial Academy, meanwhile, devoted themselves chiefly
to secular themes: incidents from history and legend, illustrations to the classics,
occasionally genre subjects; the last were especially common in the Southern Sung
period. Li Sung, whose specialty was the careful delineation of architecture called in
Chinese chieh-hua or “boundary painting,” sometimes applied the same meticulous
technique to representations of figures, producing such astonishing displays of drafts-
manship as The Knick-knack Peddler. This is a fan-shaped album leaf, only about ten
inches tall, with a signature and the date 1210. The painter has written on it, in addition,
three tiny characters meaning “Five Hundred Articles,” referring with well-justified
pride to the number of individual objects he has drawn in the peddler’s pack. The
fineness of the drawing is not the only virtue of the picture; such lively pieces of charac-
terization as the sly glances of the children and the patient expression of the harassed
mother, such well-observed detail as the baby who reaches out for a toy without pausing
from his suckling, make the painting more than a mere virtuoso showpiece.
 Figures in Landscape and Garden Settings

5
[i ever-changing dialogue between man and nature, in which man transforms
his surroundings in imagination and is himself transformed by them, has been a
lasting concern of poets and painters in China as elsewhere. The anonymous
authors of the earliest Chinese poetry, the lyrics in the Chou dynasty Book of Odes
(c. 800-600 B.C.), begin already to suggest some affinity in feeling between the human
and non-human worlds, introducing plant, animal and other images from nature as a
prelude to the statement of somehow congruent emotions. Early painters seem to have
followed the pattern set by the poets, using a simple kind of evocative juxtaposition.
In the Nymph of the Lo River, attributed to Ku K’ai-chih (p. 27), images of trees and
hills, placed beside those of persons playing out their roles in the story, serve not so much
to provide a convincing setting as to create a structure of mood into which the feelings
of the human participants interweave. One senses this in the picture, even though the
emotional associations of these images now Commiunicate themselves to us only faintly.
It is tempting to suppose that the painter of the Emperor Ming-huang’s Journey
to Shu, the eighth century composition introduced previously in connection with T’ang
dynasty landscape, was still using the same device, intending the harsh patterns of
fractured rock with which he surrounds his principal figures to accord with the bitterness
of the exiled and bereaved emperor. But it is more likely that this was simply his standard
manner of depicting rocks, and would have been used in any case. The colorfulness
of the scene, with bright-leafed trees and a scattering of flowers, would rather suggest
a pleasure outing. The landscape assumes here a semi-independent status, and is not
made to comment upon the narrative, or even to harmonize with it. It commands at
least as much attention as the figure groups it encloses, but also serves as a stage for
their actions: clefts in the mountains, tree-ringed glades, are carefully located so that
the players may enter, perform and exit in the most orderly manner. In the lower right
corner of the picture, a party of riders is seen filing through a narrow pass into an open
area on the bank of a stream. It is the emperor himself who leads—he is identified by
his princely bearing, and by the three tufts of hair into which the mane of his horse
is tied. Four courtiers and seven palace ladies make up his retinue. He approaches a
wooden bridge, which connects this compartment of the picture to the adjacent one.

Ps
 Attributed to Chao Yen (tenth century): Eight Riders in Spring. Hanging scroll (cropped at top and bottom).
Ink and colors on silk. (w. 40%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

56
Anonymous (eleventh century copy of an eighth century composition ?) : The Emperor Ming-huang’s Journey to Shu.
Detail from a hanging scroll. Ink and colors on silk. Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.
 Attributed to Chao Kan (tenth century): A River Journey at First Snowfall. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and colors on silk. (H. 10%") Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

Innovations in landscape during the Five Dynasties and early Sung period, bringing
various solutions to the problem of creating a unified space within the picture, opened
alternatives to this space-cell mode of construction. The so-called “level distance”
composition, a method of presenting an unbroken view over a flat expanse of land or
water, was perfected by such tenth century masters as Li Ch’eng and Tung Yiian.
It is used effectively in a scroll attributed to Chao Kan, one of the painters who served
with Tung Yiian in the Nanking academy. The scroll, titled A River Journey at First
Snowfall, has been credited to Chao Kan since the early twelfth century, when it was
recorded in the catalog of the Emperor Hui-ts’ungs collection. The author of that
catalog comments on the evocative power of Chao Jan’s river scenery: “Even though
you may be among all the petty distractions of court or marketplace, you have only
to look at it to be transported at once to the river.” Eight centuries later, the painting
preserves the same power. Unrolling the scroll, moving over this bleak stretch of grey
water, among the sharp-cut islets, one is made to feel empathically the chill of the
fishermen in their hovels and boats. Two of them huddle on a fishing platform raised
on stilts, protected only by a mat covering from the wind that ruffles the surface of
the river and bends the tassels of reeds. In the open water beyond, a punt goes by, poled
by two boatmen, carrying colorfully dressed travelers. Snow is depicted with white
pigment spattered lightly over the surface of the silk. The bunches of reeds, the islets,
the boat, are all set off sharply by the surrounding ink wash, with a sense of isolation
that enhances the lonely mood of the scene, as well as emphasizing the sparse, very
sophisticated placing of elements within the area of the painting.
This mastery of arranging forms on a surface, and the unfailing sense of correct
proportion in laying out the space around and between them, is the heritage of T’ang
painting. It can be admired also in a large composition of about the same period
representing Eight Riders in Spring. In order that the group of horsemen may be dis-
played with the utmost clarity, indications of setting have been kept few and simple.
A balustrade marks the further limit of the scene, which is a palace courtyard. In a
corner formed by a jog in this balustrade stand two trees, an ornamental rock and a
short palm. Seven mounted noblemen encircle an eighth—the emperor?—who raises
his whip. The drawing is crisp and admirable throughout, the coloring brilliant. For a
picture of this age and size to have been preserved in such condition is an almost
incredible piece of good fortune. But nothing in it contradicts the tenth century date
traditionally assigned to it. The artist to whom it is ascribed, Chao Yen, was the son-
in-law of an emperor of one of the Five Dynasties, and a leading collector and patron
of art, besides painting himself. Like collector-painters in later times, he was fond of
working in old styles. “On leisure days,” writes a twelfth century historian, “he would
usually set himself the task of completing some scroll in imitation of a well-known
work by an old master.” Perhaps it is such a picture that we have here. In any event,
the hand that produced it was endowed with an antique elegance quite worthy of
Chao’s reputation.
The unknown painter of the picture titled Breaking the Balustrade, probably an
artist of the Imperial Academy working in the twelfth century, has constructed a more
elaborate setting for his drama. He is illustrating an edifying anecdote from history,
concerned with the Han emperor Ch’eng-ti, his loyal minister Chu Yin, and the marquis
Chang Yii. Chu Yiin’s indignation against the traitorous marquis overcame his prudence,
the story goes, and he asked permission to wield the imperial sword to put him to death.
The emperor, outraged by this unprecedented request, commanded instead that Chu
himself be beheaded, but Chu clung to a balustrade and asked to be cut open on the spot,
as another loyal servitor had once been executed. The emperor was impressed by Chu’s

59
 Anonymous (twelfth century?): Breaking the Balustrade. Hanging scroll (cropped at top and bottom).
Ink and colors on silk. (w. 40”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

strength of purpose, and by the pleas of another minister, Hsin Ch’ing; he relented,
canceled the death sentence for Chu, and ordered that the balustrade, broken in the
scuffle, be left unrepaired as a memorial to the event.
Inanimate objects are here made to participate in the drama, to echo the play of
passions between the four chief actors. The trunk and branches of a tall pine frame the
main group at right, which has the emperor as its center. Two ornamental stones,
pitted and hollowed by erosion, stand behind the two groups, reinforcing the impression

60
of steadfast determination created by the figures themselves. Hsin Ch’ing stands isolated,
forward of the others; Chang Yii cringes at the emperor’s side. As in T’ang dynasty
designs, the postures of the figures and their interrelationship in space are among the
artist’s chief means of characterization. So skillfully is it accomplished that we might
guess what is happening without knowing the story; the tension of the moment is unmis-
takable. The total success of the picture as narrative, the success of the drawing in combin-
ing liveliness with precision, make of this one of the finest of Chinese figure compositions.

Anonymous (twelfth century?): “The Tribute Horse” (The Emperor Ming-huang’s Journey to Shu?).
Detail from a hanging scroll. Ink and colors on silk. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
 A work close to it in style, and rivaling it in splendor of color and refinement of
drawing, is the well-known painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art which has been
called The Tribute Horse, but which may in fact be another representation of The Emperor
Ming-huang’s Journey to Shu. A mounted figure not shown in our detail has been said
to represent Ming-huang. If this interpretation is correct, the riderless white horse alludes
to the absence of the imperial consort Yang Kuei-fei, put to death at an earlier stage in
the journey, and the somberness of the setting takes on new meaning. The rich blue,
green, crimson and rose hues of the costumes and saddle-cloths have softened over the
centuries, and the drawing in powdered gold on the trappings is worn and subdued,
but the colors still glow brilliantly against the deep-toned silk ground. Washes of gold
on the cliff face above the white horse give a strange luminosity to that part of the
picture; it is as if the men and horses were emitting a mysterious light as they pass
through the darkened landscape.
In paintings of the early periods, men move through nature as travelers, or pursue
their private concerns in the midst of the most awesome or entrancing scenery. Even
when subject to the harshness of an uncongenial environment, as are the fishermen in
the Chao Kan scroll, they preserve some measure of self-containment. Nature is outside
them and beyond their control. The poet seated on the river-bank in the Nymph of
the Lo River scroll broods upon his personal tragedy, affected only unconsciously by
his surroundings. The same is true of the figure in the anonymous eleventh century
Noble Scholar under a Willow. The personage represented is probably the fourth century
poet T’ao Yiian-ming, who retired from official life to enjoy the pleasures of the country,
and became for later ages the ideal scholar-recluse. He sits on a leopard skin rug in a
relaxed posture, his head sunk between his shoulders. On the ground before him are a
bowl of wine, from which he has been drinking, and a scroll of paper, blank to receive
the poem taking form in his mind. The face is pensive, the eyes narrowed in thought;
it is an expression of inwardness. The curving willow that encloses the figure only increases
this air of introspection. The willow, in China, is symbolic of sensual elegance (the sterner
virtues belong to the pine and bamboo); here, it mirrors the poet’s mood of aesthetic
inebriation. Still, it is the artist who employs natural objects as a commentary on his
subject; it is not the subject himself who willed them there.
In painting of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially in the court Academy
works of that period, a new attitude toward nature becomes apparent, one closer to
Occidental romanticism. Those scenes once considered in the West to be most typical
of Chinese painting, which portray scholars seated on mountain ledges gazing at water-
falls or into mysterious voids, are products of this age and the new attitude. The type
was created by the late twelfth century academy landscapist Ma Yiian, and imitated
by his numerous followers. One of the finest surviving specimens of it is by his son
Ma Lin, a large signed painting titled Listening to the Wind in the Pines.
The experience of being emotionally moved by the stimuli of nature, which in
Six Dynasties art theory was considered to enrich the expressive content of a work of
art, now becomes itself the subject of the work of art. It is presented as a cultivated

62
Anonymous (eleventh century?): A Noble Scholar under a Willow. Hanging scroll. Ink and colors on silk.
(25%4x15%4") Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.
 Ma Lin: Listening to the Wind in the Pines. Seal with the date 1246.
Hanging scroll (cropped at top and bottom). Ink and colors on silk. (w. 43%") Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.
pastime, determinedly pursued. The aesthetic scholar of this picture, too self-conscious
to enjoy the true relaxation of the drunken poet in the other, sits in a tense posture,
striking a listening pose, with a sideward glance directed at his boy attendant. The elegant
lines of the rocks, stream and distant mountains, the consummate refinement of form
in the pine tree, belong to a world which exists within his mind; he is surrounded, in
the picture, not by nature itself but by a projection of his emotional response to it.
The ancient dialogue between man and the world, now that both sides are dictated
by man himself, has become a soliloquy.
 Bird, Flower and Animal Painting of the Sung Dynasty

6
[oe Chinese critics customarily divide painting into three large subject-categories:
the two dealt with in the previous chapters, figures and landscape, and a third which
includes pictures of flowers and other plants, birds, insects and animals. Pictures
in this third category were never taken so seriously by the critics, who tended to dismiss
them as trivial. But they were no less popular for that, and occupied a surprising number
of first-rank artists from the T’ang through the Sung periods. We read of bird and flower
specialists in the T’ang dynasty, but know next to nothing about how they painted.
What we have of this genre from T’ang is limited to decorative details in outdoor scenes,
both Buddhist and secular. Blossoming trees, leafy bushes, small flowers, are interspersed
among the figures in many of the wall paintings at Tun-huang, and in such landscapes
as the Emperor Ming-huang’s Journey to Shu. They enrich the picture surface, fill out
the setting, and often indicate the season of the year. Neatly drawn, with different
plants accurately distinguished, they lead one to conjecture that decorative beauty and
representational accuracy were the aims of T’ang flower, bird and animal painting.
Just these qualities are most conspicuous in a famous pair of hanging scrolls in the
Palace Museum collection, which represent herds of deer in an autumn forest of maple
trees. They may originally have formed parts of a single, much larger composition,
perhaps a screen. Something of T’ang style is undoubtedly preserved in them, but it is
difficult to say how much, or in what features, since nothing really comparable survives
from T’ang. There is, in fact, nothing else quite like them in the whole of Chinese painting.
A convincing theory is that they were produced under the Liao dynasty of the Khitan
Tartars, which controlled the north of China, along with parts of Mongolia and Manchuria,
during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Wall paintings in the eleventh century Liao
tombs at Ch’ing-ling, similar in subject but much cruder in execution, appear to represent
a debasement of this same style, so the tenth century attribution usually given the
Palace Museum pictures is quite reasonable. However we may account for it, there is
something foreign in them; the decorative brocade of the autumn foliage, and the un-
usually naturalistic portrayal of the deer, have reminded some observers of Near Eastern
painting. Fairly strong shading on the animals increases their plasticity without obscuring
the skill and sensitivity of the linear drawing.

67
 Anonymous (tenth century ): Deer among Red-leafed Maples. Detail from a hanging scroll. Ink and colors on silk.
Palace Museum Collection Taichung.

68
Anonymous (early twelfth century? ye Birds in a Thicket of Bamboo and Plum. Detail from a hanging scroll.
Ink and colors on silk. Palace Museum Collection” Taichung.

69
 It was the genius of the early Chinese painter that he could, when he wished, avoid
giving any impression of intruding upon his subjects, portraying animals absorbed in
their private activities and unaware of being observed. The effect of such paintings is
that same sense of revelation of a world totally unfamiliar to us, remote from human
concerns, which some films of animals made with concealed cameras and telescopic
lenses have achieved in our own time. The feeling of mystery in a little-known early
composition in the Palace Museum titled Monkeys and Horses arises in part from this
alien quality, but also from the indeterminate character of the subject: what is the
relationship, if any, between the monkeys, two of them hanging from the upper branches
of a tree and a third perched on a rock, and the two horses below, trotting toward an
undefined destination? If the painting ever carried any symbolic meaning, it has been
forgotten, and the painter adds no clarifying comment, but only presents his curious
scene with a matter-of-fact air. The monkeys are not turned into comical beasts, or the
horses into unnaturally noble ones. The picture is attributed to an eighth century painter
of horses, Han Kan, but appears to be later, probably Five Dynasties or early Sung in
date. It is roughly contemporary with the Deer among Red-leafed Maples, then, but
belongs firmly in an unmixed, native Chinese tradition. The rocks and trees, more than
the animals, give a clue to the date; they appear to be prototypes of those seen in copies
and imitations of tenth century paintings. Forms are given convexity by the simple
device of shading along contours, with curved strokes on the tree trunks to establish
their cylindrical shape. No texture strokes (ts’um) are used on the stone surface; some
such use of graded washes as this must lie behind the “rocks like clouds” which critics
admired in the landscapes of Li Ch’eng and Kuo Hsi.
The greatest master of bird-and-flower painting in the Northern Sung period was
Ts’ui Po, a brilliant and independently-inclined member of the Imperial Academy.
He dazzled his contemporaries by his practice of dispensing with preliminary sketches
in charcoal, attacking the silk directly with the brush; he could draw long straight lines
without using a straightedge, and his power of invention was inexhaustible. The painting
which is probably his only surviving work, a large composition signed and dated to the
year 1061, upholds his reputation, displaying just the combination of skill and sponta-
neity which the Sung writers praise. With a technical virtuosity matching that of his
contemporary Kuo Hsi, he depicts the dead, windblown leaves, the bent reeds and
bamboo in fine line and color washes, the tree with a dry, rough texture, the earth bank
in broad strokes of ink. The aloofness of the tenth century masters has relaxed, and the
artist penetrates with sympathetic understanding into the lives of his subjects. Two
magpie jays, chattering at a bewildered hare, are admirably caught in mid-motion.
The seemingly unstudied arrangement of these forms against a thin wash of ink, rendering
the bleak winter sky, shares the naturalness of the best Northern Sung landscape.

Anonymous (tenth century?), attributed to Han Kan (eighth century): Monkeys and Horses.
Hanging scroll (cropped at top). Ink and colors on silk. (w. 19”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

70
FES
 Emperor Hui-tsung: Two Finches on Twigs of Bamboo. Section of a handscroll. Ink and colors on silk. (H. 12%")
Collection of John M. Crawford, Jr., New York.

yu
<4 Ts’ui Po: Hare and Jays. Dated 1061. Hanging scroll (cropped at bottom). Ink and colors on silk. (w. 40%”)
Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

Like landscape, however, bird-and-flower painting followed a different course from

the late eleventh century, replacing this seemingly extemporaneous approach with one
which gave greater value to precision and orderly arrangement. A major role in the shift
in taste was played by the Emperor Hui-tsung (ruled 1101-1125), who was himself a
bird-and-flower painter of major rank. The court Academy, under his patronage and
active control, enlisted many of the leading artists of the age and rose to a dominance
which it maintained until the fall of the dynasty. Hui-tsung’s passion was for literal
 renderings of the real appearances of things; he reprimanded his painters for the most
trivial lapses from accuracy. “Painters are not to imitate their predecessors,” proclaimed
a regulation issued to the Academy at the beginning of his reign, “but are to depict
objects as they exist, true to form and color.” Under the pressure of such demands, the
painters might have fallen into the worst academicism, but they did not. The essence
of the Academy style in Hui-tsung’s time is not a photographic fidelity to nature at all;
nature does not bound her creations with such elegant line, or dispose them in such
exquisite, timeless arrangements. It is rather a crystalline clarity, a sense of perfection
ideally achieved. These pellucid visions are derived closely from nature, but set forth
with such absolute assurance as to create their own, separate reality. This, states the
painter, is precisely how a pigeon or a branch of flowering plum looks, and no one would
dare to doubt him.
Such an enchanting performance as the anonymous Birds in a Thicket of Bamboo
and Plum, for example, if accepted on its own terms, makes even the masterwork of
Ts’ui Po seem a bit artless and arbitrary. It is probably from the hand of some member
of Hui-tsung’s Academy, and may well be the only large-scale work by any of them
to survive. Details in it are drawn with the same near-miraculous refinement which we
know from the best album leaves of the school, and the same sense of order and clarity
prevails in the composition—this in spite of the intricate overlapping of stalks of bamboo,
branches of blossoming plum and tall briers, which should produce an impression of
tangled confusion, but instead functions as an openwork screen upon which the birds
are displayed. The arrangement is static, unlike that of Ts’ui Po, and no relationship is
implied between the birds; they perch imisolation, in their assigned places. Minute and
patient observation lies behind the -visual truthfulness of individual elements—the
artist understands how bamboo puts forth leaves and twigs, the difference between the
sleek plumage of doves and the spiky feathers of the quail. But it is Ts’ui Po’s picture
which, in the end, better fulfills the purpose of bird-and-flower paintings stated in
Hui-tsung’s own catalog. Associated with the various creatures and plants of nature,
says the author of that catalog, are ideas and emotions: rustic tranquillity with the
quail, autumnal melancholy with deer, and so forth. “When these are presented in
painting, they serve to evoke human thoughts. Such pictures not only capture the
appearance of created things, but also transmit their essential spirit. They take hold
of one’s mind, as if one had come to the very place and were gazing at the thing itself.”
The passage is similar to one quoted previously from Kuo Hsi’s treatise on landscape;
both are expressions of the orthodox Chinese view of painting.
Several dozen pictures exist which are ascribed to Hui-tsung himself; most of them
are signed with his famous illegible cipher; all but a few are patently imitations, and
there is none at all which is entirely above controversy. One of the three or four most
likely candidates, and one of the best in quality, is the short handscroll representing
two small finches on twigs of bamboo growing from an overhanging bank. The arrange-
ment of the birds, one in profile, the other facing forward but with its head turned to
the side, was a favorite of Hui-tsung and his court painters, and appears in others of

74
their compositions—for example, the pair of jays in the Birds in a Thicket of Bamboo
and Plum. The two pictures agree also in their mode of presentation: the branches and
twigs spread out in a single plane, like ribs of a fan; the birds perched primly upon

Anonymous, twelfth century (misleading attribution to Chao Ch’ang): A Branch of White Jasmine. Album leaf.
Ink and colors on silk. (9%x10%") Sugahara Collection, Kamakura (Japan).

ihapieubees ss: 3 ? :
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73
 these; the earth banks drawn in contour and wash only, with no rendering of texture
on the main areas. Whatever the respective ages and proper attributions of these two
pictures may be, the relationship between them probably reflects accurately the relation-
ship between the painter-emperor and his academy: the style of the Hui-tsung handscroll
is a simplification of the style of the professional’s composition, with technical require-
ments reduced to accommodate the sensitive and capable amateur.
The death of Hui-tsung, the removal of the imperial court to Hang-chou in the
south and the drastic decline in Chinese power do not seem to have discomposed the
Academy painters seriously. Under the reigns of Hui-tsung’s son and grandson they
continued, with the special imperturbability of bird-watchers in any age, to portray
their small subjects with the same careful elegance. Along with the Southern Sung
landscapists who were their contemporaries in the Academy, they seem to drift away
from the imperfect, material world into an ideal realm, leaving behind the firm foundation
in reality upon which Northern Sung painting had been built, and sometimes even the
persuasive semblance of reality of Hui-tsung’s painting circle. Their mood was milder,
their aims more modest; what we have of their work consists almost entirely of album
leaves, a form which they especially favored.
The exquisite Branch of White Jasmine in the Sugahara collection, although tradi-
tionally ascribed to an early eleventh century flower painter, belongs completely to the
Southern Sung period in style and taste, and is probably by some twelfth century
Academy master. Chao Ch’ang, the artist to whom it is attributed, was a conservative,
working in a careful, relatively realistic manner; he referred to his pictures as hsieh-sheng,
“transcriptions from life.” Sung writers tell of his strolling in the garden early in the
morning, holding flowers in his hand to draw them. It is not difficult to understand
how his name became attached:-to such pictures as the Sugahara leaf. The precise
depiction of leaves curling in space, the calculation and balancing of the weight of
leaves and blossoms on the slender twigs, are accomplished with such assurance as to
give an initial impression of a portrayal directly from life. It is only afterward that one
becomes aware of the degree of idealization in the drawing. The diagonally divided com-
position, familiar from twelfth century landscape album-leaves, suggests the real date
of the picture.
The Imperial Academy of the Southern Sung, like Li Yii’s academy at the Southern
T’ang court two centuries earlier, served an uneasy aristocracy that was forever looking
northward in fear of invasion. Painters working in such times felt, perhaps, the need
to affirm the values of peace and stability. In scenes of palace ladies in protected court-
yards, of children playing in gardens, of scholars in mountain seclusions so well tended
as to seem corners of the park, a sunlit tranquillity excluded all hint of cold, barbarian
wind from the north. Even bird and animal pictures of the Southern Sung academy
share in this mood. It permeates two small paintings attributed to the twelfth century
Academy artist Mao I, one of a bitch and puppies, the other of a mother cat and kittens,
both in garden settings. The mother cat, in its plump haughtiness, is an animal counter-
part of T’ang court ladies; the same aristocratic conviction of security is expressed in

76
 Attributed to Mao I (twelfth century): Mother Cat and Kittens in a Garden. Album leaf.
Ink and colors on silk. (10x 10%”) Yamato Bunka-kan, Osaka.

its poise and calm gaze. Two of the kittens wrestle playfully. Another, in the foreground,
its orange fur all but invisible against the brown silk, gazes upward at a pair of small,
white butterflies dancing in the air beside the hollyhocks.
 Landscapes of the Southern Sung Academy
Ma Yiian, Hsia Kuei, Ma Lin

#)
We after some unsettled years, the Sung capital was finally established at
Hang-chou in 1138, the imperial court came into new surroundings, the luxuriant
terrain of the region known as Chiang-nan, literally “South-of-the-River,”
i.e. of the Yangtze. Under the spell of this very civilized city, affected by the charm of
its scenery and by the poetic pleasures to be enjoyed on the shores of its renowned
West Lake, the Painting Academy was instilled with a new lyricism. The rugged peaks
and wind-swept plains of the northern schools of landscape were ill-suited to this gentler
mood; the styles of Kuo Hsi and Fan K’uan continued to be practiced by some painters
in the north, under the Chin invaders, but only as minor local traditions. The style of
Li T’ang proved more adaptable to the tendencies of the relocated Academy, and was
followed by most of its landscapists. Successive transformations of this style, moving
always in the direction of mildness and, intimacy, form the basis of Southern Sung
Academy landscape.
A few artists carried on older traditions, some of them working in archaistic styles.
An antiquarian taste, which had arisen among scholarly collectors during the late
Northern Sung, stimulated the imitation of T’ang and earlier painting. A descendant
of the first Sung emperor, Chao Po-chii, adopted the “blue-and-green” manner of the
T’ang dynasty landscapists. One of the many paintings attributed to him is the small
fan-shaped picture known as The Han Palace. It is unsigned, and the attribution
unconvincing; the landscape is not painted in the blue-and-green manner at all, and
some details, such as the figures, the twisted plum trees and the blue mountains beyond,
point to a date in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, long after the death
of the purported artist. The archaic flavor of the composition and the nature of the
subject account for the attribution to Chao Po-chii, who specialized in such palace
pictures. It is a scene of twilight on the day of the Double Seven, the autumn festival
of the legendary Oxherd and Spinning-maid. In the foreground, servants gather with
oxen and carts, perhaps for a pageant. The empress and her retinue proceed from the
lamplit palace through a natural tunnel in the fantastically eroded rock toward a tower
in the upper left. The last light is fading, and they will ascend the tower to engage in
the traditional pastime of this evening, gazing at the moon.

79
 The school of Chinese landscape most familiar to the West is the Ma-Hsia school,
named after its founders, Ma Yiian and Hsia Kuei. They and their countless followers
painted pictures of such broad and immediate appeal that they have, in addition to their
great popularity in their homeland, remained the favorites of foreigners through the
centuries. Thousands of works by the followers, and a few originals by Ma and Hsia
themselves, were carried abroad by travelers and merchants, first to Korea and Japan
(where the imitations were imitated in their turn, and became the models for a whole
school of landscape) and later to Europe and America, where they created the standard
Occidental image of Chinese painting. Most Chinese critics, by contrast, have admired
the productions of the Ma-Hsia school only moderately, preferring on the whole the
landscapes of the Northern Sung period which preceded, and of the Yiian dynasty
which followed, the Southern Sung.
Both Ma Yiian and Hsia Kuei were active at the end of the twelfth century and
in the first quarter of the thirteenth; both are classed as followers of Li T’ang, although
it is unlikely that they could have studied with him directly, since Li probably died
during their childhood, or perhaps even before their births. Very little is recorded about
the personal life of either of them. Ma Yiian belonged to a family of painters; his father,
grandfather and great-grandfather had all served in the Academy, and the evolution
of the style that he brought to maturity may have taken place largely within this family
tradition.The typical works connected with him seem remote from Li T’ang, even though
the continuing influence of that master is discernible in them. Both the album leaves
reproduced here use the diagonally divided composition of the Li T’ang school, and
the drawing of the rocks derives ultimately from Li’s style. But very much has changed.
The subject is brought closer, the:field of vision narrowed. In his Myriad Trees and
Strange Peaks (p. 42), Li T’ang had presented a cool, aloof view of mountains in mist,
a segment of a vast and imposing prospect. Nature in the works of Ma Yiian has been
tamed and idealized, relieved of all but its most agreeable aspects. The scholar who
strolls along a mountain path in one picture, and his counterpart in the other who leans
on a rock, gazing meditatively at a pair of deer drinking from the stream, express in
their postures a sense of security that the relatively rare humans in Northern Sung
landscapes could scarcely have felt, awed as they were by the magnitude and mystery
of their surroundings.
The theme of Ma Yiian’s signed album leaf titled Walking on a Mountain Path
in Spring is the same as that of the larger-scale work by his son Ma Lin (p. 64): the
conscious enjoyment of nature. A scholar walking with his servant on a path along
a stream bank stops momentarily to watch two orioles in the wind-blown willow. A verse
couplet is written at the right: “Brushed by his sleeves, wild flowers dance in the wind;
fleeing from him, the hidden birds cut short their songs.” The picture is a distillation
of mood, everything in it subservient to the production of a well-defined effect. Nothing
is extraneous, and the profusion of interesting detail found in the work of Kuo Hsi
and earlier landscapists is gone. The result of this rigorous elimination of the unessential
is not austerity, however, but poetry; like the T’ang lyricists and the Japanese haiku

80
 i):
Anonymous 2 late twelfth century (misleading attribution to Chao Po- chii The Han Palace.
Album leaf. Ink and colors on silk. (w. 9 % ") Palace Museum Collection > Taichung.

81
 Ma Yiian (fl. c. 1190-1230): Walking on a Mountain Path in Spring. Album leaf.
Ink and light colors on silk. (10%4x17”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

poets, Ma Yiian envelops his subject in an aura of feeling with an extreme economy
of means, relying upon the emotional associations of his images and the evocative power
of the emptiness surrounding them.
The album leaf owned by Mr. C. C. Wang is unsigned, but is one of a pair, the other
of which bears an apparently genuine signature. Ma Yiian here employs his most typical
composition, the one which earned him the nickname “One-corner Ma” from his contem-
poraries. In delicate gradations of ink tone, he opens behind the sharply drawn fore-
ground group a middle distance bounded by the dim silhouettes of leafy trees, and a
limitless void beyond that. The gaze of the viewer is inevitably drawn back into this
void, moving from the material world to one without substance; and the universal
human proneness to associate space with spirituality gives to the experience a touch
of the mystical.
Hsia Kuei carries even further the simplification of design and elimination of solid
form, scarcely defining the textures of surfaces, obscuring even larger parts of his pictures

82
in mist. Line is reduced to a minimum, and much of that is merely the edges of areas
of wash, but this minimum is so telling that it brings the entire composition into focus.
Together with the consummately skillful handling of graded washes, in which the
Southern Sung painters excelled all others, it establishes firmly the positions of solid
elements within the picture space, leaving the viewer with no sense of doubt about its

Ma Yiian (fl. c. 1190-1230): A Scholar and His Servant on a Terrace. Album leaf.
Ink and light colors on silk. (9%,x10%") C. C. Wang Collection, New York.
 structure, even providing his imagination with clues as to how the extensive empty
areas should be filled. In his own way, then, Hsia Kuei adheres to the Academy canons,
since he presents clearly whatever he chooses to present at all.
The radical abbreviation of design and form in the small paintings that make up
most of Hsia Kuei’s surviving output allows one to absorb their content in a single
glance, and prolonged study only fills out and deepens the initial impression. His
paintings in handscroll form produce the same impression of instantaneous disclosure,
even though the viewing of a handscroll necessarily takes place over a period of time.
The eye is led in and out, from solid to space and back, each segment existing in itself
as a brief, crystalline visual statement. The detail reproduced here, with a massive
boulder set against evocative evening mists, is from the scroll titled A Pure and Remote
View of Streams and Mountains, perhaps the supreme masterpiece of the whole Ma-Hsia
school. The fact that it is painted on paper instead of silk allows the brilliance of the
brushwork to be appreciated: dry strokes applied with a slanting brush for the rock
surface, the foliage done with a split brush (the fibers of the tip divided), the frail bridge
and solitary traveler drawn in line that is firm but not stiff. What the Chinese praise
most highly, however, is Hsia Kuei’s control of ink values, from the subtlest washes to
the richest black. This technical prowess is used with discipline and restraint. Critics
of later centuries, who often found the works of Ma Yiian and other Southern Sung acade-
micians too sweet for their taste, treated Hsia Kuei more favorably, preferring his cooler
approach and (in the somewhat moralistic Chinese view) more chaste expression.
The master of the school who has,been most unjustly treated is Ma Lin, son of
Ma Yiian. He began his career overshadowed by four generations of famous ancestors;
his father, the story goes, was so anxious for Ma Lin to attain an eminent position in
the Academy that he sometimes signed’ “Ma Lin” to his own works, hoping to enhance
the son’s reputation. It may have done so, but can hardly have helped the younger
Ma’s self-confidence. Judging from extant works of Ma Lin, he was quite capable of
standing alone. In addition to the superb Listening to the Wind in the Pines (p. 64),
a number of small signed paintings by him may be seen in various collections. One of
them, Waiting for Guests by Lamplight, belongs among the most exquisite of all Southern
Sung creations in the idyllic mode. As twilight falls in a palace courtyard, a nobleman sits
at the entrance to a pavilion, preparing to welcome guests to a night banquet. Servants
outside stand ready to light candles along the path between flowering trees. Color is
used with unusual effectiveness in imparting the feeling of this moment: a yellow moon
in a dusky blue-green sky, blue hills, a glow of yellow lamplight under the eaves, pale
green leaves and violet blossoms on the trees. The Chinese title of the picture refers to
verses by the T’ang poet Li Po, on a theme which must have suited the spirit of the
Hang-chou court in these last, declining decades of the dynasty: since life is so brief,
it suggests, we must light candles and make the most of the hours of darkness.
Appraisals of Ma Lin by both Chinese and Western writers have generally been
based on works as orthodox as this, and have dismissed him as a faded facsimile of
Ma Yiian. But some things in his pictures suggest that the real Ma Lin, a more complex

84
 Hsia Kuei (fl. c. 1190-1230): A Pure and Remote View of Rivers and Mountains. Section of a handscroll.
Ink on paper. (H. 18%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

artistic personality than the critics have recognized, has slipped away from them.
The degree of tension and unrest, for example, in his Listening to the Wind in the Pines,
is something hostile to the complacency of Academy landscape, and the preciosity of
the figure seems suspiciously deliberate. It is as if the painter had tried in this work to
push beyond acceptable limits some features of Ma-Hsia landscape—the refinement of
line and wash, the idealization of natural forms, the assertion of man’s emotional
responsiveness to nature—and so bring to culmination, and to an end, this species of
landscape painting. It proved, in any event, no longer viable, and was never again
practiced with the same conviction or success.
The future of Chinese painting lay outside the Academy; but the direction it was
to take is accurately forecast in another small signed work by Ma Lin, one that reveals
him as a still more enigmatic figure. Titled The Fragrance of Spring : Clearing After Rain,
it is a picture of trees, bamboo and briers growing in disorderly profusion on the banks
of a stream. Mists drift over the marshy ground and among the trees. An aged and

85
 Ma Lin (fi. mid-thirteenth century): Waiting for Guests by Lamplight. Album leaf.
Ink and colors on silk. (9%4x9%") Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

86
twisted plum tree, growing from between rocks, puts forth new buds; the exuberant
regeneration of plants in spring is revealed as an unruly force, and no effort is made to
idealize it. On the further shore of the stream, a splintered tree stump stands as just
the stark memorial to death and decay that all standard landscapes of the school had
diligently excluded. From the pleasure parks of orthodox Ma-Hsia landscape (including
most of Ma Lin’s own), we are brought back suddenly to the real, unkempt world.
Much of the school manner is preserved—the rocks are Ma Yiian’s, and the trees are
obviously by the same hand that drew those in the Waiting for Guests by Lamplight;
but it is applied to a composition in which the canons of the Academy are violated,
and turned to the excitation of feelings quite outside the fairly narrow range of the
Academy taste. The painting thus anticipates developments in the Yiian and later
dynasties, when there was no longer to be any fixed relation between a style and the
expressive uses to which it was put.

Ma Lin (fl. mid-thirteenth century): The Fragrance of Spring: Clearing After Rain. Album leaf.
Ink and light colors on silk. (1034x 163%") Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.
 The Literati and Ch’an Painters of the Sung Dynasty

8
U NTIL the second half of the eleventh century, the theory of painting spoken of
in the previous chapters as the traditional one in China, the notion that a
painting of a given object or scene should evoke in the person who sees it thoughts
and feelings akin to those that the actual object or scene would evoke, was never seriously
challenged. By then, however, some scholars concerned with painting had become aware
of the inadequacy of this theory to explain the peculiar expressive power of certain
unorthodox styles and techniques that had been gaining popularity during the preceding
few centuries. Pictures that failed to offer reasonably faithful renderings of natural
forms should, according to the traditional belief, fail to produce any very strong response
in the viewer, since they obviously could nojlonger make him “feel as though he were
gazing at the thing (or place) itself.” But the excitement generated by some of these
radical departures from visual truthfulness could not be denied. A new theory was
required to account for it.
The theory was formulated by members of a remarkable coterie of scholars which
had for its central figure the great poet, prose writer, statesman, calligrapher and painter
Su Shih (1036-1101), better known as Su Tung-p’o. He and his friends belonged to the
literati class, and accordingly devoted their main energies to administrative service in
the bureaucracy, study of the classics, literary composition, and other pursuits considered
suitable as the major concerns of men of letters. In their spare time they painted, and
argued and wrote about painting. The school they founded became known as wen-jen hua,
or “literati painting.”
The theory of painting held by these scholar-artists reflected their Confucian
background. Poetry and music, and later calligraphy, had long been treated in Confucian
writings as vehicles for embodying one’s personal thought and feeling, for conveying
to others something of one’s very nature. In calligraphy, this was accomplished through
abstract means, the expressiveness of line and form, interest and individuality of
brushwork. The new and eccentric styles which grew out of the i-p’7 or “untrammeled
class” of painting made use of these same means, and so opened the way for painting
to be recognized as fulfilling a like function. The quality of a painting, said the literati
writers, reflects the personal quality of the artist; its expressive content derives from

89
 Liang K’ai (fl. mid-thirteenth century): Li Po Chanting a Poem. Hanging scroll (cropped at top).
Ink on paper. (w. 12%”) Commission for the Protection of Cultural Properties, Tokyo.

go
his mind, and has no necessary relationship to anything the artist or the viewer thinks
or feels about the object represented. The value of the picture does not depend upon its
likeness to anything in nature. The object in nature serves as raw material which must
be transformed into an artistic idiom, and the mode of this transformation, the charac-
ter of the lines and forms produced by the brush, reveals something about the person
who drew them, and about his mood at the moment he drew them. “Anyone who talks
about painting in terms of likeness,” writes Su Tung-p’o, “deserves to be classed with
the children.”
All this seems precocious in relation to Occidental art theory, anticipating ideas
which did not appear in the West until well into the nineteenth century. The paintings
produced by the literati artists were equally remarkable for their time. They usually
worked in ink only, and often used deliberately amateurish-looking techniques. Marked
distortions of form appear in their pictures: sometimes in an archaistic spirit, referring
by touches of naiveté and awkwardness to the styles of archaic periods, before certain
problems of representation had been solved; sometimes according to the whim of the
moment, making an impression of pure arbitrariness. They painted for themselves and
their friends, giving the pictures as presents, angrily refusing any offers to buy them.
The reaction among those outsiders who did not share their taste was much like the
initial popular reaction to Post-Impressionism in Europe: “Likeness is what is valued
in painting!” exclaims an indignant Southern Sung writer, aroused by the lines of
Su Tung-p’o just quoted. “Anyone who doesn’t catch a likeness might as well not
paint at all.”
If, nine centuries later, we feel a kinship of ideals with these early literati artists,
we are understandably eager to see their, provocative paintings; but very few have
survived. We must be content, for the most part, with works by their close followers,
and even these are scarce. In the absence of any reliable paintings by the leading land-
scapist of the group, Mi Fu (1052-1109), some clue to the nature of his achievements
may be sought in a few extant pictures by his son, Mi Yu-jen. Mi Fu was an antiquarian
and collector; familiar with old manners of painting, he incorporated elements from
them into his own works. Chinese critics trace the sources of his style to the tenth
century master Tung Yiian, and to one of the “ink-splashers” of the T’ang period,
Wang Mo. A distant reference to the splashing technique, in which the shapes of landscape
elements were partially determined by the chance configurations of freely spattered ink,
is probably present in the very wet application of ink and in the somewhat arbitrary
appearance of mountains and trees in landscapes by Mi Yu-jen, although these were
evidently painted with a brush. The picture in the former Abe collection, Osaka, is the
oddest of them all, with its strangely shadowed peaks and drifting mists. Some of the
vagueness of outline in it is the fault of damage and retouching, but better-preserved
works by Mi Yu-jen have the same diffuse quality, which must have been an essential
ingredient of the style. The fairly sparse scattering of tien, or dots, is at sharp variance
with the standard “Mi style” as employed by imitators of later centuries, in which
landscape forms are built up in a pointillist manner with clusters of such dots.

gi
 Mi Yu-jen (1086-1165): Mountains in Clouds. Hanging scroll. Ink on paper. (93%4x 11%")
Osaka Municipal Museum (former Abe Collection).

Another major literati painter of this age was Li Kung-lin (1040-1106), who remains
a somewhat problematic figure in spite of the many excellent works attributed to him.
Important in his painting was the element of archaism; he imitated T’ang masters,
and his most characteristic manner, the method of drawing in fine ink line known as
pai-miao, is supposed to have been based on the figure painting of Wu Tao-tzu. Among
the finest works of the Li Kung-lin school is a long handscroll attributed to one of his
followers, a Ch’an Buddhist monk of the twelfth century named Fan-lung. It is a series

g2
of portraits of Arhats, disciples of the historical Buddha who were customarily depicted
as aged recluses, and often shown in landscape settings, as is the Arhat in our detail.
He stands alone in the forest, leaning against the trunk of a pine, his loose robe billowing
in the wind. Two small deer approach, carrying flowers in their mouths as offerings.
The curving tree trunks serve here, as in the Noble Scholar under a Willow (p. 63),
to frame and echo a human mood, but the Arhat himself remains, like the poet in the
other picture, introspective. In contrast to the fluid, delicate lineament of the figure,
the landscape is built up in strokes of a less fixed character, made at some points with
a semi-dry brush to produce a rich, charcoal-like line. Occasionally rough and scratchy,
the brushwork manifests a taste quite opposed to that of the Academy, where firm,
elegant lineament was standard.

Attributed to Mu-ch’i (fl. mid-thirteenth century): Evening Glow on a Fishing Village, from Eight Views
of the Hsiao-Hsiang Region. Section of a handscroll. Ink on paper. (H. 13”) Nezu Art Museum, Tokyo.

93
 PaA

Attributed to Fan-lung (twelfth century): An Arhat in the Forest. Section of a handscroll. Ink on paper. (H. 12")
Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, p.c.

As for the paintings of Su Tung-p’o himself, it is questionable whether any at all

have survived. His favorite subjects were bamboo and old trees, and these motives
accordingly became popular among his numerous followers. A short handscroll combining
the two, painted by a nephew of Mi Fu named Wang T’ing-yiin, is the best extant repre-
sentative of the genre. The trunk and branches of an old, moss-grown tree, a few stalks
of bamboo beside it, make up the commonplace subject matter of the picture. Because
the import of such paintings depends so largely upon formal qualities bound up with
brush, ink and paper, what is represented matters less. A subject that does not assert
its own interest or beauty is in fact preferable. As an unidealized rendering of an unexcit-
ing theme, the painting might have fallen into the severe intellectuality that sometimes
afflicts works of this kind, but is saved by its surface richness. Contrasts of wetness and
dryness in the application of ink provide a varied texture, and a diversity of brush
techniques are employed: a broken, dragged stroke for the rough bark, mottled patches
for the moss, a shaded stroke made with an unevenly-inked brush for twigs, and others.

94
 An inscription by the artist is mounted in the scroll after the painting, and a series
of colophons by other writers follow. The reading of such colophons is for the Chinese
a part of the experience of seeing the picture, since they reveal how it was enjoyed and
evaluated by earlier connoisseurs. One of them on this scroll, by a fourteenth century
theorist named T’ang Hou, is especially enlightening, and worthy of translation in part:

“The scholar-gentleman turns to painting as a form of play. Often the images he paints
take on new forms beneath his random brush, and a scene comes forth, exuberant and
fresh... Wang T’ing-yiin, with the overflow of energy from his activities as littérateur
and calligrapher, devoted himself to “ink-plays”... This painting of Secluded Bamboo and
a Withered Tree is simple in substance but antique in conception... What was for him
only a means of giving lodging to a moment’s exhilaration is passed down over a hundred
generations, and all who see its torn silk and remnant paper must gaze in admiration,
loving and revering it. He may truly be called a man of accomplishment. (Signed:) T’ang
Hou, whose hand cannot forbear going on to add his encomium:

“Set forth your heart, without reserve,

And your brush will be inspired.
Writing and painting serve a single aim,
The revelation of innate goodness.
Here are two companions,
An old tree and tall bamboo,
Metamorphosed by his unreined hand,
Finished in an instant.
The embodiment of a single moment
Is the treasure of a hundred ages,
And one feels, unrolling it, a fondness,
As if seeing the man himself.”

This, the theorists maintain, is the proper response to a painting by one of the scholar
artists: one does not feel “as if he were inthe very place,” or “as if seeing the thing
itself”; but as if one had come face to face with the man. The mind of the artist, and
not the bamboo or landscape, is the real subject of the picture.
Associated with the Su Tung-p’o circle were several Ch’an Buddhist monks who
were also amateur painters. Nothing remains from their hands, nor have the works of
Ch’an painters in the following generations survived in any number—the scroll attributed
to Fan-lung is an isolated example. Numerous paintings by their artistic descendants
of the late Sung and early Yiian dynasties are preserved in Japan, however, having been
brought there along with the Ch’an doctrine. The Ch’an school of painting in the thir-
teenth century was centered in monasteries located in the hills around Hang-chou, and
especially in one of them, the Liu-t’ung-ssu. The abbot of this monastery was Mu-ch’i,
a pupil of the Ch’an master Wu-chun who is portrayed in the Tofukuji portrait (p. 48),
and the greatest of the Ch’an artists. The Chinese have never given Mu-ch’i the attention
and respect he deserves. Almost all the extant works by him or attributed to him are
in Japan, where he has, by contrast, been recognized as one of the greatest masters
of any period.
Although the number of paintings attributed to him in Japan is quite large, in only
a few cases is there any firm basis for the attribution. Among the more problematic

95
 Wang T’ing-yiin (1151-1202): Secluded Bamboo and Withered Tree. Section of a handscroll. Ink on paper. (H. 15”)
Fujii Yurinkan, Kyoto.

works, the landscapes in the series Ezght Views of the Hsiao-Hsiang Region rank high
in quality, and appear to be at least.of the period and school of Mu-ch’i. In their wet
brushwork and dissolution of form; they follow the stylistic tradition of Mi Yu-jen;
the affinities between one of them; Evening Glow on a Fishing Village, and the small
Mi Yu-jen picture reproduced on the opposite page are especially obvious. The Ch’an
artist conveys a stronger sense of swiftness and vigor, working chiefly in simple washes
and broad, scratchy strokes made with a straw brush. Drawing in line is reduced to
minimal indications: trunks of trees, roofs of houses, a few fishermen in boats. It is the
wonder of the painting that a convincing impression of light and shade, mist and space,
is created with these simple means. There is none of that sense of withdrawal from
nature that one feels in the Mi Yu-jen landscape. The expressionist demands of the
amateur school of painting are reconciled with the traditional Chinese view; the painting
is not only moving in purely ink-on-paper terms, but also functions as an image—
abbreviated, impressionistic, but nonetheless compelling—of the external world.
The same statement can be applied to the Wang T’ing-yiin painting, so that no
general distinction between the literati and Ch’an schools is intended by it. It may be
questioned whether a valid division can in fact be made, whether they should not be
regarded as a single school of amateur artists. In styles they overlap; perhaps they should
be distinguished, if at all, on the basis of attitude: the more intellectual approach of the
Confucian literatus as against the intuitive one of the Ch’an monk. The Ch’an painter’s
awareness of a single reality underlying the seemingly disjunct phenomena of nature
is communicated with the same immediacy as the truths of the Ch’an doctrine, which
cannot be conveyed by translating them into the intellectual concepts of ordinary

96
Mu -ch’ i (fl. mid- thirt eenth century) Mother Monkey and C ild. Detail from a hanging scroll Ink on s ilk.
Daitokuji, Kyoto.

97
discourse and expecting the listener to translate them back into something like the
original impulse. The Ch’an artist typically defines his subject only at a few key points,
leaving the rest ambiguous, suggestive rather than descriptive. The viewer completes
the image, as the Ch’an novice pieces out by intuition the cryptic utterances of the master.
The masterpieces of Mu-ch’i, and the works that can be most confidently ascribed
to him, are the three paintings now kept as a triptych in the Daitokuji, the great Zen
Buddhist temple in Kyoto. These are no spontaneous “ink-plays,” but works profoundly
conceived. The two side pieces, representing a crane and monkeys, were probably
complete as a pair originally, with the central figure of Kuan-yin a separate picture.
The combination into a triptych was a fortunate one, however; the three are in perfect
accord, and seem to signify a like accord between two realms of being usually considered
remote from each other, below and above humankind, the animal and the divine. Kuan-
yin, represented as a white-robed woman, sits in meditation with downcast eyes, while
the monkey mother, clasping her child, gazes into the eyes of the observer with the
disconcerting directness of a Ch’an parable. The branch on which the monkeys rest is
painted in loose, rough strokes of dilute ink, similar to those used in the Wang T’ing-yiin
picture, with no more trace of obvious skill in the technique than there is of outward
beauty in the subject.
The Liu-t’ung-ssu, in this same period, was the haven for a fugitive from the Imperial
Academy named Liang K’ai. He was not forced by failure to quit the academy; he had,
in fact, been awarded the highest honor for painters-in-attendance, the Golden Girdle.
He left this insigne of rank hanging-on the wall, the story goes, and departed—whether
for reasons of artistic dissatisfaction or a non-conformist temperament, we cannot say.
Liang K’ai’s teacher was a follower of Li Kung-lin, and Liang himself is supposed to have
used that master’s pai-miao technique in his early works. Later he developed his famous
“abbreviated brushwork” manner of figure painting. His pictures in this freer manner
presumably belong to the period of his association with Mu-ch’i and other Ch’an artists,
although, since the rough and abbreviated styles were not by any means used exclusively
by the Ch’an Buddhists, he may well have arrived at it independently.
The poet Li Po, in Liang K’ai’s imaginary portrait, walks with head raised, chanting
a poem. With deceptively simple drawing, limited to a dozen or so strokes for the head
and about as many more for the robe and feet, the exhilaration of the poet is deftly
caught. The long lines of the robe belong to the non-descriptive brushwork of the amateur
styles ;their air of freedom and relaxation has nothing to do with the fabric they outline,
but rather contributes to the whole aspect of the figure, outwardly calm but charged with
an inner vitality. Like Mu-ch’i, Liang K’ai answers two difficult-to-reconcile sets of
criteria: those of the Academy, which required that the subject be convincingly por-
trayed and adequately characterized, and those of the amateur painters, who believed
that the significance of the picture is inseparable from its formal properties, and that
the brushstrokes which compose it must be independently meaningful.
 The Early Yian Painters
Ch’ien Hsiian, Chao Meng-fu, Kao K’o-kung

9
AY the end of the twelfth century the Sung state, now confined to the area below
the Yangtze River, had achieved an uneasy kind of peace with its northern neigh-
bors, the Chin Tartars. By the beginning of the thirteenth, however, a more formid-
able threat had appeared in the north. The Mongols, led first by the great Jenghiz Khan
and later by his son Ogodai and grandson Khubilai, had begun that campaign of conquest
which was to win for them the largest empire in the history of the world. The Chin were
destroyed by 1234; Hang-chou fell in 1276, and the Sung dynasty came to an end three
years later. The dynasty set up by the Mongols to rule the whole of China, with Khubilai
Khan as emperor and a capital on the present site of Peking, was given the name Yuan.
During the perilous years of transition, many of the Confucian literati, who would
ordinarily have held positions in the central government or local administrations, went
into cautious retirement. Even after peace was restored, a great number of them declined,
out of loyalty to the fallen Sung or for more practical reasons, to emerge from seclusion
and accept office under the foreign rulers. A kind of scholarly sub-society of “recluses”
came into being, centered in the small area between the old capital, Hang-chou, and
the Yangtze River. There, in small local coteries, they devoted themselves to the favorite
scholarly activities: visiting one another, writing poems, practicing calligraphy and
painting. It was among these scholars that the school of literati painting, more or less
dormant since the early Southern Sung, began to be revived.
The early Yiian painters inherited no such healthy traditions as had those of the
early Sung. The Imperial Academy was defunct, and its styles virtually so. Ch’an
Buddhist painters, although still active, were too scattered and independent to form a
school, and no artists of major rank had succeeded Liang K’ai and Mu-ch’i. The literati
painters rejected both: the styles of the Academy as too overtly appealing (compare
the rejection of romantic values in the late nineteenth and twentieth century West),
and Ch’an painting because, in their view, it lacked discipline and had carried the rough
manners of brushwork to excess. Two courses were open to them, those always open
to artists dissatisfied with the present and the immediate past: archaism and innovation,
the revival of old styles and the creation of new ones. Like their late Northern Sung
predecessors, the literati painters of the early Yiian chose to combine the two.

99
 _—

Ch’ien Hsiian (c. 1235-1301), probably copy-after Han.Kan (eighth century): Yang Kuei-fei Mounting a Horse.
Section of a handscroll. Ink and colors On ‘paper. (H. 1154”) Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c.

The movement began in Wu-hsing, north of Hang-chou; the foremost participants

were Ch’ien Hsiian and his pupil Chao Meng-fu. Ch’ien was one of those who had gone
into retirement and refused to serve the Mongols. When Chao, about twenty years younger
and still at the threshold of his career, traveled to Peking in 1286 to become a minister
at the court of Khubilai Khan, Ch’ien remained behind and spent his time in painting,
composing poetry and drinking. He painted figures, birds and flowers, and landscapes,
nearly always with some stylistic reference to pre-Southern Sung painting. His figure
compositions were mostly based on T’ang dynasty models, with intervening influence
from the originator of this archaistic mode, Li Kung-lin. In them, a style that had once
breathed warm life and human emotion takes on, through the passage of centuries and
the veneration of connoisseurs, a cool and classicistic air. The short handscroll representing
Yang Kuei-fet Mounting a Horse is a good example. It may have been copied from a
composition by the eighth century horse painter Han Kan; but Han, a court painter
for Ming-huang himself, would surely have portrayed this subject—which combines
the emperor’s two greatest loves, beautiful women and fine horses—with more warmth
than Ch’ien Hsiian displays.

I00
 This very coolness is the essence of Chien Hsiian’s painting: unimpassioned, fasti-
dious, sensitive, seldom immediately appealing. In his landscapes he revived the blue-
and-green manner, following Chao Po-chii, who had himself employed it as an archaistic
manner derived from the T’ang dynasty masters. Art based on art based on art: with
every level of stylistic reference the work withdraws further from the original impulse,
the direct experience of nature, and begins to demand in both the artist and his audience
a higher degree of aesthetic sophistication, an acquaintance and concern with the history
of style. The archaism of the literati painters was not so much a matter of wholehearted,
admiring imitation of early painting as of stylistic allusion, the calculated evocation
of the past with all its associations. We are familiar with such evocative allusion today:
Stravinsky playing upon Tchaikowsky or the Baroque, T.S. Eliot shifting into a
Spenserian language, Picasso referring to primitive or Hellenic styles.
For his paintings in the antique blue-and-green manner, Ch’ien Hsiian chose suitably
antique themes. One of them represents Wang Hsi-chih, the supreme master of the
“erass” or cursive script, gazing at swimming geese from a lakeside pavilion, finding
in their sinuous necks a gracefulness of line worthy of imitation in his calligraphy.
The very theme is in accord with the literati painters’ beliefs: nature supplies form
to the artist, but he accepts it as form only, and feels free to utilize it for his private ends.
The drawing of rocks and trees, the decorative use of heavy color, the flatness of the
design, refer to T’ang painting; but they also, along with a childlike quality in the whole
picture, show us Ch’ien Hsiian the primitive, a more delicate and sophisticated Chinese
cousin of Henri Rousseau, without that painter’s exuberance.
In at least one other of his landscapes,Ch’ien Hsiian attempted a revival and
reinterpretation of another early manner, that of the tenth century master Tung Yuan.
The attempt was abortive; the painting is more odd than accomplished, too plainly
experimental. A more successful essay in the same direction was made by his pupil
Chao Meng-fu in the famous Autumn Colors on the Ch’iao and Hua Mountains, dated 1295.
Chao claimed to have “tried to rid himself absolutely of the styles of the Sung painters,”
and boasted that his painting, “although it may look simple and rough, will be recognized
by the perceptive viewer as being close to the ancients, and therefore truly excellent.”
His obvious allusions to the Tung Yiian manner include the wavy ground lines, the
miniature figures and the “level distance” compositional plan. The picture relates to
Tung Yiian in a more subtle way as well: the commonplace quality of the scenery, a
marshy plain from which Mt. Ch’iao rises as a breadloaf-like hill. Throughout the picture
Chao exhibits a primitivist disregard for correct size relationships, and a rejection of
outward beauty; even willows, which in paintings of the Ma Yiian school had assumed
an unearthly loveliness, are here devoid of charm. Chao Meng-fu carries the denial of
romanticism beyond Ch’ien Hsiian’s cool withdrawal, into an austerity of mood that
verges on bleakness. The achievements of the Sung dynasty are consciously sacrificed:
the graded washes are gone, there is little sense of space and no atmosphere. Since the
blank area above the horizon serves no important function in the composition, the
painter uses it to write a long inscription, describing the circumstances under which

Iot
 Ch’ien Hsiian (c. 1235-1301): Wang Hsi-chih Gazing at Geese. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and colors on paper. (H. 9%”) C. C. Wang Collection, New York.

the picture was painted. Later owners have added an abundance of seals and inscriptions
that would have seemed a defacement on a typical Southern Sung landscape, but is
quite in keeping with the “literary” character of this one.
Among the high officials who were associates of Chao Meng-fu in the Peking admin-
istration was another amateur painter, Kao K’o-kung, who held the position of

102
President of the Board of Justice. The oldest of the major Yiian landscapists, he was
revered by all his younger contemporaries. His extant works are very few, most of them
preserved in the Palace Museum Collection. A short handscroll in the same collection titled
Green Hills and White Clouds, although unsigned and labelled simply as the work of an
“Unknown artist of the Yiian period,” can be added to this small number on the basis
of its style. Like the landscapes of Ch’ien Hsiian and Chao Meng-fu, it is the product
of an attempt to create, out of a mixture of old styles and sheer originality, something
which satisfied both the archaist taste and the expressive needs of the present. Misty

Chao Meng-fu (1254-1322): Autumn Colors on the Ch’iao and Hua Mountains. Dated 1295. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and colors on paper. (H. 11%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

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Ink and colors on silk. (H. 19%") Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

groves of trees, naively drawn cottages and river banks are adopted closely from the
works of a late Northern Sung painter, Chao Ling-jang, while the drawing of the hills and
of the archaic hard-edged clouds drifting among them refers more distantly to the styles
of Tung Yiian and Mi Fu, whom Kao is said to have imitated. But the impact of the
painting depends upon a wholly new use of these old materials. The symmetry of the
range of hills, quite contrary to all canons of Sung painting, the strangely disturbing
repetition of forms and almost oppressive corporeality of the terrain, are expressionist
devices of the artist’s own, answering some inner impulse. Chinese theorists write of
“mountains within the mind,” conceived mysteriously in the painter’s unconscious to
be externalized on paper or silk in a creative act “without volition.” These are surely
such mountains of the mind.

104
 Ch’ien Hsiian, Chao Meng-fu and Kao K’o-kung, with some of their contemporaries,
inaugurated a new era in Chinese painting. In order to accomplish this, they undertook
a revolution of style that was in part destructive, involving the casting-off of outworn
and uncongenial modes that sometimes must attend epochs. Many of the achievements
of the previous two centuries they willingly sacrificed ;their bonds with the past stretched
further back, to the Northern Sung and beyond. Their innovations were brilliant but
tentative, and did not prove to be final solutions to the problems facing the literati
painters of the Yiian period: how to capture, within the limits of the amateur styles,
that pictorial coherence and look of “rightness” which they admired in Five Dynasties
and early Sung painting; how to give strength and a sense of sureness to their techniques
while avoiding an impression of professional finish; how to give freshness and interest
to depictions of commonplace subject matter. It was left for the artists of the latter
half of the dynasty, the so-called Four Great Masters and their friends and followers,
to bring the school of literati painting to full maturity.
 The Late Yiian Painters
The Four Great Masters and Sheng Mou

10
eee the death of Khubilai Khan, the effectiveness of the Mongol rule in China
deteriorated sharply. The reign of the last Mongol emperor, who succeeded to the
throne as a boy in 1333, was an era of ever-worsening turbulence, as famines,
inflation and the inevitable revolts demoralized all classes of society. More than ever,
educated men withdrew from official service and public life to remain in semi-obscurity,
awaiting the re-establishment of peaceful conditions.
One of these, and more of a genuine recluse than most, was Wu Chen. Poor by birth
and unsociable by nature, he made his living first as a diviner, and later, when his repu-
tation as a painter had spread, by presenting his pictures to friends and receiving gifts
in return—a practice unobjectionable to the literati artist, who refused only to work
on commission and to subordinate his own taste to that of a patron. Wu Chen painted
bamboo and landscapes, usually inscribing on them poems of his own composition.
The scenery of his landscapes is that of his home, the moist terrain of the Chiang-nan
region, with its network of rivers and canals, its flatness broken only by modest hills.
His style, like his subjects, is unassuming, a relaxed manner in which occasional quirks
and touches of mild eccentricity appear as small pleasantries.
His best-known work is the Fishermen handscroll, a set of variations on a simple
theme: the angler in his boat. The “fishermen” are no relatives of those in the Chao Kan
scroll, for whom fishing is a livelihood; they are amateur anglers, scholars enjoying their
leisure. They sleep, admire the scenery, sing boating songs, but seldom fish. One of them,
in the central section of the scroll, sits absorbed in contemplation of three hills of roughly
conical shape, their slopes slightly concave. Behind, ranks of similar hillocks rise and fall
like waves on the ocean. The repetition of simple forms has something in common with
that in the Kao K’o-kung landscape (p. 104), where, however, it is a bit unsettling
in effect ;here it rather lulls the consciousness. Nevertheless, there is a curious fascination
in this orderly arrangement of the terrain, a variety-in-sameness which the Chinese prize.
The viewer finds his gaze, along with that of the solitary boatman, arrested by it.
Despite the quiet amiableness of his style, Wu Chen was not a popular painter
during his lifetime. In a well-known (and probably apocryphal) anecdote, his wife
complained that while crowds of people were visiting another artist who lived nearby,

107
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Wu Chen (1280-1354): Fishermen. Painted in 1342. Section of a handscroll. Ink on paper. (H. 12%/;¢”)
Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c.

Sheng Mou, bringing gifts to exchange for his pictures, there was little demand for her
husband’s works. Wu Chen replied that in twenty years it would be otherwise, and so it
was: his own reputation rose, and Sheng’s declined. Sheng Mou was less the scholar, more
the professional painter. Although a follower of Chao Meng-fu, he preserved elements of
the technique, along with the warmer mood, of Southern Sung landscape. His handscroll
titled Boating on the River in Autumn illustrates the ambivalence of his style: the boats,
drawn up side by side while their occupants converse, are drawn in delicate line with
washes of color, while the river bank and trees are brilliantly painted in freer brushwork.
But even this broader manner of Sheng Mou differs markedly from the painting of
Wu Chen; and the points of difference, however we ourselves may assess them qualita-
tively, provide some insight into Chinese criteria of judgement, since it is just these that
place Wu Chen far above Sheng Mou in the evaluations of the critics. They maintain
that Sheng’s relatively tight and crotchety drawing betrays a temperament deficient in

108
 the virtues of balance and repose. Wu Chen’s looser style, less obviously accomplished,
is in the end more admirable. It is characterized by one fourteenth century writer as
“profound and remote, with a leisurely and relaxed feeling.”
The Yiian master who was to have the most far-reaching effect on later landscape
painting, however, was Huang Kung-wang. Chinese writers are unanimous in their
enthusiastic acclaim for him. The reasons for this acclaim may not be immediately
apparent in his pictures, which are likely to seem unimpressive on first acquaintance.
Like Wu Chen, he was content with everyday scenery. Most Northern Sung landscapists
had felt obliged to make the individual elements of their picture interesting in themselves ;
the Southern Sung landscapists, to make them attractive. The literati painters of the
Yiian period felt neither compulsion. An outward “plainness,” both in subject and style,
they regarded as a virtue, and their aim was to produce within this plainness something
moving, subtly exciting, personal—“flavor within blandness,” as Wu Chen puts it. No
painter achieves this better than Huang Kung-wang. Cool and reserved, his paintings
represent for the Chinese the perfect expression of an ideal scholarly temperament.
In his technique he continues and advances a mode of painting begun by Sung
literati artists, one that departs in important ways from orthodox landscape styles.
The artist working in the orthodox styles, using firm, continuous line and clear washes

Sheng Mou (fl. c. 1310-1361): Boating on the River in Autumn. Inscription by a friend of the artist, dated 1361.
Section of a handscroll. Ink and colors on paper. (H..934") Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

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 Huang Kung-wang (1269-1354): Dwelling in the Fu-ch’un Mountains. Dated 1350. Section of a handscroll.
Ink on paper. (H. 13”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

Ni Tsan (1301-1374): Trees in a River Valley at Yii-shan. Dated 1371. Hanging scroll. Ink on paper. (37%x14%") >
C. C. Wang Collection, New York.

of ink or color, was required to plan his design lucidly before beginning to paint, and
to execute it without a trace of hesitancy; alterations and afterthoughts could not be
tolerated. Huang Kung-wang, by contrast, builds his picture through an additive process,

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 beginning with drawing in dilute ink and working toward darker and drier brushwork,
going over the surface repeatedly to slightly alter a shape, to strengthen a contour,
to add more texture strokes on the hillsides or more trees on the shore. The line,
built up in a like way with richer, drier strokes traced loosely over a pale, wet
underdrawing, attains at last the quality sought by the literati painters: strength
and character without any apparent display of skill.
Huang Kung-wang’s magnum opus is the long handscroll titled Dwelling im the
Fu-ch’un Mountains, a work of his old age. It has been one of the most influential
paintings in China, copied and imitated by countless artists. Like Wu Chen’s scroll,
it portrays the landscape that the artist knew best, in this case the region of the Fu-ch’un
mountains, west of Hang-chou. The “mountains” appear as earthy, unimposing hills,
with houses in the valleys between them and pavilions on the shore. A slight restlessness
is imparted by the wavering line used for the trunks and branches of bare trees and for
the sandy shoals that extend into the water. Groves of leafy trees are placed here and
there as dark accents, and pointed tien, or dots, applied to the hilltops, all with a wonder-
ful informality. Nothing in the picture seems stereotyped or consciously arranged.
Huang’s own inscription on it contains an enlightening account of how such a picture
was executed. He laid out the entire design in one burst of creation, working in an
exhilarated state, unconscious of fatigue. He added to it occasionally, when his mood
was right. More than three years had passed by the time he decided it was finished.
The somewhat arbitrary nature of that decision is suggested by the nature of the picture ;
it has nothing of the air of inevitability,.of an absolute consummation, that the typical
Southern Sung landscape conveys. It seems rather to be the product of a series of decisions,
some of them a bit capricious, made by the painter at successive stages in the painting
process, reflecting his state of mind-at the moments when he made them. And yet, and
paradoxically perhaps, it achieves the sense of “rightness” or inherent order which the
Chinese call Ji, and which Huang Kung-wang in his treatise on landscapes designates
as the ultimate desideratum of painting.
A young friend of Huang Kung-wang, Ni Tsan, is accorded by most Chinese writers
a rank almost equal to that of Huang himself, although he was a painter of much
narrower scope. His father and grandfather had been successful merchants, but his
own interests were scholarly and aesthetic. In his youth he used the family wealth to
surround himself with rare books, antiquities, calligraphy and paintings. Some time
before the outbreak of the rebellions in the last years of the dynasty, he dispersed his
property among relatives and friends, and took to a life of wandering. His motives were
practical, as it proved; through this renunciation he exempted himself from the pillage
that was suffered by other rich landowners, and enjoyed a relatively tranquil old age.
He moved about the lakes and rivers of the region by boat, staying sometimes with
friends, but always a lonely figure. Something of his desire for escape from human
society—unless it be the society of persons carefully selected by himself as “free from
vulgarity”—and of his almost morbid passion for cleanliness (he was forever washing
himself), lies behind the cool and chaste quality of his landscapes. No people are to be

II2
seen in them; typically, an empty pavilion hints at the occasional visit of some recluse
to the scene, but even this minimal indication is absent from certain of his pictures,
including the one reproduced here.
Like the Fu-ch’un painting of Huang Kung-wang, it is built up by overlay of dry
upon wet, dark upon light strokes. The brushwork is even more subdued and static,
revealing even less of nervous tension. The work of Ni Tsan merits most, in all of Chinese
painting, the characterization of “insipid” or “bland” which Chinese critics apply as a
term of high praise. We may find it difficult to see why “insipidity” should be a desirable
quality; but until we do, Ni Tsan remains beyond us. His interest as a painter was
clearly not directed toward the “myriad phenomena” of the physical world. The great
majority of his landscapes follow a simple pattern that he evolved early in his life and
never tired of: a river bank in the foreground, surmounted by a few undernourished
trees; a broad stretch of water; earthy hills beyond. Both the upper and lower land
masses are seen straight-on, with no adjustment in the point of view. The result is a
somewhat disjunct composition, which, with the absence of atmosphere and a uniformity
of ink tone over the whole picture area, destroys any real sense of space. In part this is
deliberate, another flaunting of amateurism; it is also the outcome of a disinclination
to master the techniques through which such “faults” might have been avoided. For
the literati artist, devices for the rendition of space, height and distance belonged, as
Su Tung-p’o’s teacher Ou-yang Hsiu had written, to “the tricks of the professional
painter, of no concern to true connoisseurship.” In any case, a landscapist whose output
is chiefly made up of endless renditions of essentially the same scene is plainly not much
concerned with the landscape as such. Ni Tsan also painted bamboo, but not in order
to express his fondness for that plant; to charges that his bamboo looked like “hemp,
or rushes,” he replied that his only aim was to “set forth the untrammeled feelings in
his breast.” Again, he is reported to have answered someone who pointed out that one
such picture (which Ni had painted the night before while drunk) didn’t look like
bamboo at all, by laughing and saying, “Ah, but a total lack of resemblance is hard to
achieve; not everyone can manage it!” This half-serious joke would have been quite as
apropos in the early part of our century, when shocking adherents of the copy theory
of art was still fair sport for the painter.
At an opposite pole from the unimpassioned Ni Tsan lies Wang Meng, a nephew
of Chao Meng-fu and the youngest of the Four Great Masters. He concerned himself
more with space, mass and tactile qualities than the others; not so much, however, to
reproduce properties of the exterior world, as to reveal an interior one. Space is used or
denied, forms molded or distorted, for expressive purposes. Like most other Yuan
painters, he professed a dependence upon Northern Sung and earlier landscapists.
Chinese critics, in analyzing his style, find affinities with Tung Yiian in the furry texture
of his surfaces, or with Kuo Hsi in the writhing rocks and cliffs of some of his crowded
compositions. The modern Occidental viewer who is unfamiliar with Chinese painting
is likely to be reminded of Max Ernst or some other Surrealist. It is surely an inner
vision embodied in the remarkable Forest Dwellings at Chii-ch’%é, a picture in which the

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 Wang Meng (c. 1309-1385): Forest Dwellings at Chii-ch’ii. Hanging scroll. Ink and colors on paper. (27x 16%")
Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

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only breaks in a dense wall of interpenetrating masses are narrow clefts out of which
streams flow, shallow pockets enclosing clumps of trees and a few buildings, and a
single small opening high at the right, through which one glimpses distant waves and
so realizes that the horizon is meant to be still higher. This is neither the grand vista
of Northern Sung landscape nor the circumscribed view of Southern Sung; there is no
stabilizing point of focus, and the boundaries of the picture can scarcely contain the
forces generated within it. Patches of brilliant red, orange and green color are spotted
about the surface, adding to the powerful unrest as effectively as the absence of color
contributes to the sense of quiet in the ink-monochrome paintings of Ni Tsan. It is
strange to discover, when one examines the picture in its details, that trees, houses and
figures are drawn with the same childlike simplicity and charm as they are in the more
restrained of Wang Meng’s works.
 The Early Ming “Academy” and the Che School
Pien Wen-chin, Tai Chin, Wu Wei

11
[Te small area of China within which all of the Four Great Masters and most other
important painters of their age lived and worked, the Chiang-nan area south of
the Yangtze River, had preserved throughout the Yiian period a degree of aloofness
from Mongol control, and sporadic individual displays of anti-Mongol feeling had
continued there since the early years of the dynasty, when nationalists stubbornly loyal
to the overthrown Sung had favored it as a place of retirement. It was appropriate, then,
that the most successful of the many revolts occurring in the late Yiian period, the one
which was to place a Chinese ruler again upon the imperial throne, should arise in this
region. Chu Yiian-chang, a former Buddhist monk, proclaimed himself prince of an
independent Chiang-nan state in 1364; four years. later, when his armies succeeded in
driving the Mongols from Peking, he ascended the throne as emperor of all China.
To the new dynasty he gave the name Ming.
Perhaps as part of a broad effort to restore:to-the imperial court some traditional
Chinese institutions that had been neglected since the Sung period, the early Ming
emperors revived the practice of summoning leading painters, conferring official titles
upon them and commissioning pictures for their imperial enjoyment and for the decora-
tion of palace buildings. These court painters are sometimes referred to collectively as
the “Ming Academy,” although there was no organized body of artists, such as had
existed in Sung times, which can properly be designated by that term. Several of the
emperors were amateur painters ;Hsiian-tsung (reigned 1427-1435) in particular produced
charming pictures of birds, flowers and animals in a very orthodox style. In this and
also as a patron of art, imposing his taste upon the painters under him, he no doubt
fancied himself a latter-day Hui-tsung; but neither he nor the artists he patronized
and encouraged were capable of matching the achievements of the great Sung emperor
and his Academy.
The virtues and the weaknesses of Ming court painting are well illustrated by the
work of Pien Wen-chin, who served two emperors in the early fifteenth century. His
Three Friends and Hundred Birds belongs to a special category of pictures executed for
the New Year’s celebrations. The “three friends of the cold” are the pine and bamboo,
which remain green through the winter, and the flowering plum, which often blossoms

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 before the last snow has melted, while most other plants still lie dormant. These three,
in Pien Wen-chin’s composition, provide perches for a lively and colorful cluster of birds
of many species, a gathering never to be seen in nature, but quite in keeping with the
symbolic and decorative intent of the picture. The artist obviously worked in emulation
of the great eleventh and twelfth century masters, but succeeds only partially in recap-
turing the refinement of their drawing, while their deep sympathy for their subjects
and orderly pictorial construction escape him entirely. The painting by its very nature

Tai Chin (fl. early fifteenth century): Fishermen on the River. Detail from a handscroll.
Ink and colors on paper. (H. 18%") Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c.

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 Wu Wei (1459-1508): The Pleasures of the Fishing Village. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and colors on paper. (H. 10%") Private Collection, Washington, D.c.

invites comparison with, for example, the Birds in a Thicket of Bamboo and Plum of
Hui-tsung’s time (p. 69), and inevitably suffers from the comparison. Still, it is an
attractive picture, and on as high a level of quality as the Ming dynasty was to reach
in this category of painting.
To work in styles that have lost their vitality, taking as models pictures he feels
to have reached, within those styles, a now-unattainable perfection, is often enough
the unhappy lot of the academician; it was aggravated, in the case of the Ming court
painters, by the disdain in which they and their conservative styles were held by members
of the scholar class. As professional painters, they were confined to a fairly low social
position, and found themselves condemned by the literati for the very conformity to
antique ideals which the demands of their imperial patrons forced upon them. Perhaps
it was the need to escape from this intolerable situation, as much as the palace intrigues
usually mentioned as a cause, which led Tai Chin, one of the most brilliant painters of

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 Pien Wen-chin (fl. early fifteenth century): The Three Friends and Hundred Birds. Dated 1413.
Detail from a hanging scroll. Ink and colors on silk. Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

the dynasty, to cut short his career at court after a few years of service under Hsiiang-
tsung. He returned to his birthplace near Hang-chou, where he attempted to earn his
living as a painter. He did not make a success of it, however, and died in poverty. Later,
when his own eminence had been recognized and the repetition of his styles by a host of
followers had reflected fame back upon him, he came to be regarded as founder of an
important school of landscape, called the Che School after his native province of Chekiang.

I20
 The tradition of Ma Yiian and Hsia Kuei had persisted in Chekiang as a local school
of minor significance since the Southern Sung period, and it was that tradition which
Tai Chin revitalized.
His surviving works range in style from careful and thoroughly derivative pieces,
done in frank imitation of Ma Yiian, to others in a much freer mode. A hanging scroll
in the Palace Museum, titled Returning Late from a Spring Outing, belongs (if the attribu-
tion to Tai Chin is to be trusted) to his conservative manner, and probably typifies the
highly finished compositions that he offered to the emperor during his days at court.
The suave assurance of the brushwork, the charm of the subject, must have pleased
the taste that commanded into existence the early Ming blue-and-white porcelains and
carved lacquers. The use of delicate graded washes to wrap the middle ground in evening
mist is worthy of Ma Yiian himself; but above this a prominent ridge, surmounted by
a thick growth of trees, fills the space that would, in a typical Southern Sung picture,
be given to undefined and evocative distance. The Ming painter, under looser aesthetic
discipline, succumbs to the temptation to elaborate, and scatters a profusion of narrative
detail about his picture: the returning wanderer knocks at his gate, a servant hurries with
a lamp to open it, farmers trudge homeward, a woman drives geese along the river bank,
a Buddhist temple and a pavilion appear beyond.
The vigorous and unacademic manner of Tai Chin, as displayed in the signed
handscroll Fishermen on the River, may be a development of his later years, or may
simply reveal the artist released from constraint, painting as he pleases. For this manner,
he is less indebted to the Southern Sung academy than to Wu Chen; the cartoon-like
drawing of boats and their occupants in thick-linerecalls the boatmen in Wu’s Fishermen
scroll (p. 108). But there is more of nervousness in the swift, scratchy treatment of trees,
reeds, rocks and marshy shoals than the quiet taste of the Yiian dynasty literati painter
would have tolerated. With well-justified pride in the brilliance of his technique, Tai Chin
gives a virtuoso performance in descriptive drawing, catching postures and gestures,
laying out tangled reeds and mud flats with a dazzling spontaneity.
Tai Chin’s leading follower was Wu Wei, who, despite a non-conformist temperament
and an unwillingness to heed criticism, served successfully under two Ming emperors.
His fondness for alcohol (he is reported to have come into the imperial presence drunk
on occasion), in combination with the wildness of his painting style, place him in that
long lineage which extends from the drunken ink-splashers of the late T’ang to Hsii Wei
and Chu Ta in the late Ming and Ch’ing dynasties. Like Tai Chin, he worked in several
markedly different manners. Most common are his large, showy landscapes with figures,
painted in ink on silk. Another manner, which follows closely the style of the Tai Chin
handscroll, is to be seen in The Pleasures of the Fishing Village. The brush line is more
rough and impulsive than Tai Chin’s, and the drawing, evidently done with a worn,
stubby brush, is more carefree. The impressionist treatment of the setting, given a special
depth and brilliance by the addition of light brown and blue tones to the splotchy
washes of ink, illustrates the statement of a critic that Wu Wei “splashed his ink like
scattered clouds.”

I2I
 Wists Gard)
A Geatte fort

I22
 The fishermen themselves are depicted with an earthy humor that was thought
suitable, in Chinese as in much European genre painting, to representations of common-
life subjects; the deep sympathy for the hardships undergone by fishermen in reality,
set forth so movingly in the greatest of fishermen scrolls, that attributed to Chao Kan,
is lost in later centuries. They cluster in boats drawn up among drying nets, chatting
companionably and drinking wine. Their naked children play beside them, their wives
busy themselves with cooking. A leisurely scholar, escaping the heat of summer in a
riverside cottage, leans from his upstairs window to regard the scene.
The drawing of the boats and boatmen again recalls Wu Chen, but if one tries to
transplant them in imagination to a Wu Chen picture, he realizes that these gregarious,
gesticulating figures would find no comfortable place there. They need the bravura of
Wu Wei’s landscape style to set off their own animation. As happens so often when the
professional artist borrows stylistic features from the amateur (or vice versa) and the
distinction between them seems about to dissolve, differences in mood and approach
prove in the end more significant than the similarities.
The Che School remained an active force in Ming painting into the sixteenth century,
but then declined, as its adherents drifted in one or the other of two directions. Many
second-rate artists, anxious to make their works appear more exciting than they really
were, carried to uncouth excess the tendencies toward nervousness, over-intensity and
mannerism that were inherent already in some works of Tai Chin himself. These are the
men chiefly responsible for the bitter condemnation that the school was to incur from
late Ming critics, who exempt only Tai Chin, and occasionally Wu Wei, from their
scornful comments. A smaller number of painters of greater sensitivity and ability
cultivated the less showy styles of the scholar-amateurs, adopting so much from them
as to be all but absorbed into the literati school. Thus, having lost its viability and to
a large degree even its identity, this movement, which takes its place in retrospect as
a kind of epilogue to Southern Sung academy painting, came to an end.

< Attributed to Tai Chin (fl. early fifteenth century): Returning Late from a Spring Outing. Hanging scroll.
Ink and light colors on silk. (66x 32%4") Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

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 The Wu School
Shen Chou, Wen Cheng-ming and their Followers

12
Ts first century of the Ming dynasty passed without bringing any notable new
developments in the literati school of painting. The generation following the
Four Great Masters of the late Yiian produced some capable artists, but for the most
part they were content to imitate and synthesize the individual achievements of their
predecessors. The activity of the school remained localized in the Chiang-nan region,
and especially in the vicinity of Su-chou, which had become a major center of the
scholarly culture. The group of painters who finally, in the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries, re-established the literati tradition as the leading force in Chinese
painting, lived in Wu-hsien, the area around Su-chou, and were known accordingly as
the Wu School. Most of them belonged to gentry families, received solid Confucian
educations and partook of the feeling of security and well-being that permeated urban
society in the middle Ming period. Few of them exhibited anything like the anti-social
bent of so many Yiian painters, or the violent non-conformism of the late Ming and
early Ch’ing individualists. The dominant tone of their paintings, one of sanity and
balance, was set by the founder of the school, Shen Chou.
Born into one of the most distinguished Su-chou families, Shen Chou enjoyed two
great advantages in his upbringing: the company of many noted scholars, poets and
artists among his relatives and their friends, and an abundant education. To these he
added talents both scholarly and artistic, along with a passionate desire to read all the
books and study all the paintings that were available to him. He learned painting from
several teachers, but also by imitating the styles of the artists whom he admired, and
he continued throughout his life to do pictures avowedly “in the manner of” various
Sung and Yiian masters. He is not, however, a mere eclectic; his are creative reworkings
of earlier styles, executed within the limits of his own individual technique and taste.
A comparison of one of his compositions in the manner of Ni Tsan, Walking With
a Staff, with a landscape by Ni Tsan himself (p. 111) reveals clearly the degree of
originality present in one of these “imitations,” and is an instructive example of the
much-misunderstood Chinese practice of “copying the old masters.” Shen Chou preserves
the basic Ni Tsan formula: sparse trees growing beside a river, with earthy, lumpy
hills beyond. His single addition, an old man walking beneath the trees, is so quiet and

125
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inconspicuous that not even Ni Tsan (who excluded all figures from his landscapes)
could have resented the intrusion. Much of the Ni Tsan technique remains also, for
example in the characteristic manner of scattering ten or dots over the slopes and
rocks. For the texture strokes on these slopes, and for contours, Shen Chou replaces
Ni Tsan’s soft, static application of broad brushstrokes with long, sinuous lines, seem-
ingly lax but charged with a subtle tension; and some of the feeling of repose in the
earlier picture is thereby lost. The most meaningful difference, however, is between the
two compositions. Out of materials taken over in large part from the Yiian master,
Shen Chou has constructed something wholly new, a tightly-knit design on a monumental
scale, rendered dynamic by suggestions of instability and surging force in the terrain.
The topmost branches of the central, tallest tree are fitted with unnatural neatness
into the stream-mouth which evenly divides the rocky shores above; such a nearly
axial arrangement, a disturbed symmetry, was unorthodox and even daring for its day.
Besides exaggerating for expressive effect two peculiar properties of Ni Tsan’s landscape
construction, the sharp tilting of the ground plane and the placing of the greatest mass
in the upper part of the picture, seemingly without adequate support, Shen Chou
introduces another oddity of his own: by avoiding horizontals, even in the shorelines,
he gives to the ponderous forms an appearance of threatening to slip sideways.
Shen Chou’s was not, however, the tempestuous and passionate spirit of Kuo Hsi
and Wang Meng; behind the complexity of design and manipulation of form in this
powerful landscape one senses a firmly disciplined intellect, much as one does, for example,
in a landscape by Cézanne. The majority of Shen Chou’s works are milder and more
relaxed than this, and reveal what was the greatest single influence in forming the
style of his maturity, the work of Wu Chen. Wu’s special blend of naiveté and lyricism,
along with his distinctive thick-line drawing, are reflected in the short handscroll titled
Watching the Mid-Autumn Moon, which Shen Chou painted when he was around sixty
years of age. It portrays the painter and three friends gathered to feast and drink wine
in a simple shed, which is open on one side to allow them to gaze at the moon. Beyond
the sharp-cut river bank, an unbroken expanse of light ink wash stands indiscriminately
for water and sky. Light from the full moon, which appears as a pale disc at the far left,
mutes the colors of trees and buildings to cool, thin tones. The autumn season, in China
as in the West, inspires meditations, usually melancholy ones; Shen Chou’s musings
on this night, as recorded in the poem he added to the painting, are autumnal in mood:

“When young we heedlessly watch the mid-autumn moon,

Seeing this time as all other time.
With the coming of age respect has grown,
And we do not look lightly
Every time we raise the deep cup to celebrate the feast.
How many mid-autumns can an old man have?
He knows this passing light cannot be held.. ”

Shen Chou (1427-1509): Walking with a Staff. Hanging scroll. Ink on paper. (62%x28%")
Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

127
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Shen Chou (1427-1509): Watching the Mid-Autumn Moon. Handscroll.

The most important among Shen Chou’s pupils was Wen Cheng-ming, who was
more than forty years his junior.. Wen.was.born and educated in Su-chou, but served
for a time at the capital, Peking, as a scholar in the Han-lin Academy, assisting in the
compilation of the official history of the Yiian dynasty. He soon abandoned this official
career to return to his home in the south, where he devoted the remainder of his long
lifetime to literary composition, calligraphy and painting. He became renowned for all
three, as well as for the nobility of his character. Like Shen Chou, he studied and imitated
the old masters, and worked in various manners. The large picture in the Palace Museum
titled Old Trees by a Cold Waterfall, painted when he was seventy-nine, represents his
finest work in the most dynamic of these manners, one in which Wen the calligrapher
strongly impinges upon Wen the painter.
In this display of calligraphic brilliance, delicacy is sacrificed to forcefulness as the
brush moves swiftly and fluidly across the surface to build a dense and disordered
tangle of pine and cypress trees. Twisting and climbing, they fill most of the tall, narrow
frame. Like Wang Meng (p. 114), Wen Cheng-ming drastically limits space in his picture;
the trees, constricted in the shallow space before the rock cliff, are all but denied the
dimension of depth and flattened into a restless surface pattern. A further extreme from
the spacious scenery of Sung painting could hardly be imagined.
We are presented in this picture with something harsh and uningratiating, to which
the somber color scheme contributes. It goes beyond the ordinary scholar-painter’s

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 Ink and light colors on paper. (12x 53”) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

disinclination to please the eye or the facile emotions. Wen Cheng-ming, as revealed
in his most characteristic paintings, is a more austere figure than Shen Chou. He was
admired for the stern virtues that are symbolized in China by the evergreen trees he
portrays here: purity, integrity, unfluctuating devotion to principle. But while a certain
affinity exists between such traits in his character and his predilection for pines and
cypress, it would be a mistake to suppose that he favored those subjects purely for their
symbolic value. The role of symbolism in Chinese painting is often overstressed; the
artists were concerned with producing paintings, not symbols to be read intellectually,
and with making pictorial and personal statements, not generalized metaphysical or
moral ones. A theme was chosen because it was somehow in harmony with the painter’s
temperament, or with his momentary mood. A Yiian dynasty artist, for example, writes
that he always painted bamboo when angry and orchids when happy, and explains
that the bristling leaves of the bamboo, sticking outward like spears, allow the expression
of anger, while the buoyant and graceful lines of the orchid are suited to feelings of
elation. It is expression through form that is involved in this revealing remark, since
the bamboo does not ordinarily carry any associations of anger, nor the orchids of
happiness. Wen Cheng-ming was partial to winter scenery, both in his own works and
in those of earlier artists. He writes in an inscription on a winter landscape of his own:
“The lofty scholars and recluses of the past loved to play with the brush, painting
landscapes to amuse themselves. Often they did snow scenes; they chose to make use

129
130
of that subject in order to embody their feelings of noble loneliness, of freedom from
vulgarity.” Even when the subject was chosen for its standard connotations, there was
still no conflict with the literati painters’ ideal of individual expression, since the choice
itself reflected the nature and mood of the artist.
With two such creative and prolific artists as Shen Chou and Wen Cheng-ming at
its head, the Wu School expanded rapidly, until it included a good many of the leading
Su-chou scholars. Among those counted as friends and disciples of Shen and Wen, the
best-known are Lu Chih and Ch’en Shun. Both lived unworldly lives, little concerned
with practical affairs, absorbed in studies of the Confucian classics; both practiced
poetry and calligraphy as well as painting, all on a non-professional status, rounding
out the accomplishments considered proper for the ideal scholar-gentleman. Since
amateurism in art and such phrases as “play with the brush” carry suggestions of
dilettantism for us in the Occident, we may be surprised that so many of these amateurs
attained major rank, overshadowing all but a few of the professionals who were their
contemporaries. The fact is that their avocations were much more than hobbies or
occasional pastimes, and that, in any event, painting as they pursued it required more
of poetic sensibility and the connoisseur’s familiarity with earlier styles than of the kind
of technical skill that comes from laborious practice. Besides, their activities inter-
penetrated to a remarkable extent: their training as calligraphers helped to provide
them with the mastery of brush technique and sense of design which they needed as
painters, and their poetic imagination supplied-suitable themes.
The poetic element is especially strong in- the work of Lu Chih, for example in his
River Scene in Spring, a free transposition of the Ni Tsan landscape type into a more
lyrical mode. Lu Chih manages to capture theclean, spare quality of Ni Tsan’s style
even while elaborating the scene with additional hills, trees and buildings, and relieving
the ink monochrome with washes of light colors, the combination of pale red-brown
and blue-green tones which was favored by adherents of the Wu School. He draws in
loose strokes, his brush lightly charged with ink, building his gently swelling forms into
slow rhythms. Some contours are traced over with drier, darker ink to give solidity
to the structure, but the tien, clusters of black dots that are customarily applied as the
last stage in the production of a literati school landscape to give a special resonance to
the painting surface, are omitted altogether. The season is spring; the river is swollen
by melting snows, and the trees put forth sparse new foliage. A man sits immobile at
the entrance to his cottage, immersed in the tranquillity of his surroundings. No sound
or excitement intrudes upon his contemplation. Lu Chih states in pictorial terms his own
ideal, which was shared by many of the traditional poet-scholars: an existence in which
one’s consciousness becomes like clear water, emotions cleansed, all gross passion refined
away, the “dusty world” transcended.

Wen Cheng-ming (1470-1559): Old Trees by a Cold Waterfall. Dated 1549. Hanging scroll.
Ink and colors on silk. (76%x23%") Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

131
 His Autumn Colors at Hsiin-yang, a short handscroll illustrating the famous “Lute
Song” (p’i-p’a hsing) of the T’ang poet Po Chii-i, is in a style more thoroughly Lu Chih’s
own, although it is not without distant allusions to Ni Tsan and a certain homage to
Wen Cheng-ming. In Po Chii-i’s narrative poem, composed in 816 when he was serving
as a minor official in the south, the poet relates how he was saying farewell to a friend
one night in a boat moored at the shore, and heard the sound of a ~’1-p’a, a kind of lute,
being played in a neighboring boat. It proved to be an aging courtesan, once popular
in the capital, who was performing the melancholy music. Listening to it, Po Chii-i
realized the poignancy of his own long exile from the society of his friends at the capital.
Lu Chih aims at approximating the atmosphere of the poem in his painting, rather than
at representing its particulars. The red-leafed maple and reeds belong to Po Chii-i’s poem,
but the narrative details, the boats and figures, are rendered in such miniature scale
that they are likely to escape one’s notice at first. It is the broad expanse of the river,

Lu Chih (1496-1576): River Scene in Spring. Dated 1535. Section of a handscroll.

Ink and light colors on silk. (H. 14”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

132
 Lu Chih (1496-1576): Autumn Colors at Hsiin-yang. Dated 1554. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and light colors on paper. (H. 8%”) Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c.

ruffled with light waves, and the green islets floating upon it, that create an aura of
loneliness and nostalgia in harmony with Po Chii-i’s theme. The delicacy and refinement
of the drawing are hard to match in Ming painting.
Most of the Wu School artists retained in some form the traditional emphasis on
linear drawing in their styles, with only occasional essays into those varieties of painting
in which line had been all but eliminated. Ch’en Shun was alone in adopting as his
speciality the landscape manner of Mi Fu and Mi Yu-jen. His fluency in this manner is
brilliantly demonstrated in the handscroll Mountains in Clouds, painted, according to
his own inscription, in imitation of Mi Yu-jen. By this time, there was nothing startling
about the Mi manner in itself; its novelty had worn off long ago, and it had become one
of the classical modes. As employed by Ch’en Shun, it takes on a slight air of formalization
in spite of its seeming spontaneity. Nothing of the mysterious shapes and modeling of
Mi Yu-jen’s mountains and mists (p. 92) is to be seen. Ch’en Shun is concerned more
with the actual execution of the picture: the wet, impressionistic treatment of the
terrain and trees, small idiosyncrasies of brushwork such as the hooked strokes occurring
at several places in the clouds, and the rich interplay of color and ink, warm and cool
tones mixed with the grey wash.
As a last specimen of Wu School landscape, we offer an enchanting album leaf
by Wen Chia, Wen Cheng-ming’s son and one of the two most interesting (the other was
his nephew Wen Po-jen) of the more than twenty of his descendants who took to painting.

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 Ch’en Shun (1483-1544): Mountains in Clouds. Dated 1535. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and light colors on paper. (H. 12”) Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, pD.c.

It is labeled “In the spirit of verses by Tu Fu,” and the verses are written by the artist
above his picture: “Blue water flows from afar and falls in a thousand torrents; jade
mountains stand in lofty array, cold on their summits.” Using this couplet as a point
of departure, Wen Chia conjures up a dream vision of strange rain-washed spires and
waterfalls streaming down a cliff into a turbulent sea. The flatness of the forms, and
the wavering line used for contours, add to the unworldliness of the scene, as do the pale
washes of color. The only spots of brighter hues are on the childishly drawn trees.
The picture, concealing a high degree of sophistication within an apparent naiveté,
fulfills an aesthetic ideal of the Chinese literati painters, who detested ostentatious
cleverness and “slickness” above all else. One has only to consider the composition to
realize how far removed it is from true simplicity. Like Shen Chou in the landscape
reproduced at the beginning of this chapter, Wen Chia avoids the asymmetrical, diago-
nally arranged design that had long been standard in Chinese painting, and disposes

134
 Wen Chia (1501-1583): Landscape in the Spirit of Verses by Tu Fu. Dated 1576.
Album leaf (upper section, with inscription, not included). Ink and light colors on paper. (w. 14”)
Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

135
his forms in reference to an imaginary axis bisecting the composition vertically. Prece-
dents for this mode of construction can be found in Northern Sung landscape, for example
in the Kuo Hsi picture (p. 36), and in some Yiian compositions, but it was still a depar-
ture from the norm. Even more striking is the extreme discrepancy in the angle of view
and tilting of the ground plane between the two halves of Wen Chia’s picture. The same
device, with horizons mismatched at either side of a central mountain mass, was later
to be developed by the early Ch’ing master Wang Yiian-ch’i.
Such displays of originality as this were fairly uncommon among the later adherents
of the Wu School. Instead, a growing formalization and a gradual loss of creative impetus
marked its decline. The dilution of emotional content that may be admired as poetic
mildness in works of the masters became unrelieved dullness in those of some lesser
followers. Nevertheless, the Wu School in the late Ming period remains a stabilizing force,
a strong appeal for rationality, in the face of the rather frantic posturing of the later
Che School figures and the violent eccentricities of some of the individualists. If we are
tempted to yield to the fashion of dismissing these middle Ming painters as only modera-
tely interesting conservatives and to turn all our attention to the more exciting experi-
ments of later centuries, we might well pause and try to understand why Chinese critics
have preferred the disciplined art of Shen Chou, Wen Cheng-ming and their school to
the unrestrained styles of such “wild” masters as Hsii Wei, whom we shall encounter
in a later chapter. The quiet and subtle taste of the Chinese literati has much to
recommend it, if only as a corrective to. the sensationalist fondness for the products of
neuroticism and aberrations of the-artistic temperament, to which the Chinese have
occasionally succumbed, although.not.nearly so regularly as we have in recent times.
 Chou Ch’en, T’ang Yin and Ch’iu Ying

[3
[:the early sixteenth century, at a time when the professional and amateur branches
of painting were moving in such divergent directions, a trio of highly gifted artists
took a position between the two factions and set out to reconcile them. Although
the situation was such that they might have seemed foredoomed to failure, they were
in fact remarkably successful; two of them are numbered among the half-dozen greatest
Ming artists. But theirs were personal triumphs, the flowerings of individual genius;
the kinds of painting they practiced demanded a refinement of expression seldom found
among the professionals of their age, and a technical equipment equally rare among the
amateurs. Therefore, although there were a few lesser artists who are counted as their
followers, they can hardly be said to have formed.a school. Such terms as “eclectics”
and “neo-academics” have been applied to them, but fall short of adequate characteriza-
tion ;nor can they be named for the locality in which they worked, since it was the same
Su-chou, or Wu-hsien, that held the Wu School, just then at the height of its prosperity.
Nevertheless, these three are best treated together, both because of similarities in their
styles and because of their close personal association.
Chou Ch’en, who was probably the oldest of them, is said to have been the teacher
of the other two, T’ang Yin and Ch’iu Ying. He was born in Su-chou, learned painting
from a master now forgotten, and lived as a professional painter. He received little notice
from the critics, who were prejudiced in favor of their own literati class. His connection
with T’ang Yin probably brought him into contact with members of the circle of Wen
Cheng-ming, to which T’ang Yin had easy access, and a definite “literary” flavor is to be
felt in certain of his works. The chief source of his style, however, was the landscape of
Li T’ang, who had been strangely neglected since the Sung dynasty. The literati painters
professed an admiration for and dependence on the Northern Sung and earlier masters,
especially Tung Yiian and Chii-jan; the Che School artists followed the Southern Sung
academy, especially the styles of Ma Yiian and Hsia Kuei. It was logical (perhaps too
much so to have entered their minds at all) that the painters who attempted to bridge
the gulf between these schools should turn to the transitional era of Sung painting,
during which the Northern Sung austerity had relaxed but the apogee of the romantic
lay yet ahead, the era dominated by Li T’ang.

137
 3
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Probably by Chou Ch’en (fl. c. 1500-1535): Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched Cottage. Section of a handscroll.

Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched Cottage, a handscroll in the Freer Gallery

of Art, bears an inscription signed “T’ang Yin,” but there are sound reasons for doubting
the authenticity of this inscription and attributing the painting instead to Chou Ch’en,
with several of whose works it agrees closely in style. The affinities with the Li T’ang
manner (p. 42) are immediately apparent, in the shapes of rocks and the technique of
depicting their surfaces, in the pine trees, in the composition. Other features were
probably original with Chou Ch’en, although they appear also in works by T’ang Yin:
for example, a fondness for pronounced tonal contrasts, especially on the rocks, where
they indicate strong but somewhat arbitrary lights and shadows. The drawing combines
a consummate mastery of brush technique with a power of draftsmanship and freedom
from mannerism seldom met with in post-Sung painting.
The subject has to do with a poem by Po Chii-i about a man who dreamed he had
attained the state of immortality through Taoist practices. The scholar in Chou Ch’en’s
painting is seen through the open window of his mountaintop cottage, asleep, leaning

138
 Ink and colors on paper. (H. 11%”) Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c.

on his desk. Then, as the scroll is unrolled further, he appears again in his dream ;having
sublimated his gross corporeal part, he is floating off to the land of the immortals.
We are transported magically from a substantial world, made convincing by the strong
modeling of rocks and superb rendering of detail, to a realm of space, an abyss ringed
by dim peaks, above which the tiny figure is suspended in midair. Rarely has the
handscroll form been so effectively employed.
It may seem odd that the work of a painter of such imagination and ability should
have been furnished with false inscriptions and credited to someone else. The reason lies
in the far greater popularity of Chou Ch’en’s pupil, T’ang Yin. It is even said that T’ang,
when the demand for his pictures became greater than he could fulfill, sometimes asked
Chou to paint them for him. If true, the story would be another blot on T’ang Yin’s
already blemished character. His beginnings were brilliant; he took first place twice in
provincial examinations, the first time when he was only fifteen years old. Su-chou
scholarly society befriended and supported him, and at the age of twenty-eight he set

139
 off for the capital with high hopes, to take the state examination that was the entrance
to a career as government official. Again he passed in first place; but it was later disclosed
that a playboy friend had bribed the servant of the examiner to get advance information
of the essay subjects; T’ang Yin was involved in the ensuing scandal, and degraded.
Finding himself thus barred from the standard vocation of the literatus, and, unlike
Wen Cheng-ming and others, too poor to live in elegant retirement on private means,
he settled into an in-between existence, selling paintings when he needed money,
forgetting the bitterness of his disgrace in the taverns and pleasure quarters of Su-chou
one day, transcending it through Ch’an Buddhist meditation the next. Throughout all
this he kept the friendship of that paragon of virtue Wen Cheng-ming, who admonished
him in vain for his profligacy.
Artistically, too, he stands between; some of his works are in a thoroughly scholarly
style and taste, others follow the more professional Li T’ang-derived manner of Chou
Ch’en. One of the finest of the latter kind is a handscroll in the Palace Museum, Secluded
Fishermen on an Autumn River. In a poetic passage toward the center of the composition,
two scholar-fishermen relax in their boats, one trailing his foot in the water and playing
a flute, the other keeping time by clapping. Fallen red leaves drift on the waves and lie
scattered on the rocks. The autumnal mood of the scene is set by imagined sound,
the melancholy notes of the flute blending with the soft plash of the waterfall behind.
The harmony of colors is exceptionally lovely, and reveals a different attitude toward
color from that current among the literati artists, who generally use it only deco-
ratively, in standardized schemes, and-often as an unessential embellishment to ink
monochrome painting. Washes of blue-green and red-brown tones help to give substance
to the rocks, especially to the large boulder at the left; its texture is conveyed by short
strokes in ink, derived from Li T’ang’s “axe-cut ts’un” and applied, like Li’s, with a
partially dry “squeezed brush” (ts’a-pi). The result is a more convincing rendition of
mass and solidity than is common in Ming dynasty painting, which ordinarily pays little
attention either to natural textures or to the plastic properties of the surfaces they cover.
The elaborate, often restless modeling of surfaces was a special preoccupation of T’ang
Yin; it turns to a mannerism in the works of his imitators and, to a lesser degree, in
T’ang’s own paintings: the rocky cliff to the right of the waterfall, for example, is covered
with pale strokes that hardly function as modeling at all, but merely repeat, in their
angularity and the rhythm of their spacing, the pattern of waves on the river below.
The drawing is fluid and elegant; a Ming critic speaks of T’ang Yin’s brushwork as
“more refined” than that of Li T’ang, but this statement may be regarded as a reflection
of the prejudice of a period when brushwork was more esteemed for its own sake, and
a recognition of T’ang’s brushline as more suave, and more conspicuous, than that of
the Sung master.
T’ang Yin’s small picture titled Clearing after Snow in a Mountain Pass is patterned
upon another Li T’ang painting type, the monumental landscape. The season is early
winter, probably just after the first snowfall, since leaves are still on the trees; the time
early evening, as heavily laden oxcarts approach the end of their day’s journey, a village

140
Ch’iu Ying (c. 1510-1551): Passing a Summer Day beneath Banana Palms. Section of a hanging scroll
(cropped at top and bottom). Ink and colors on paper. (w. 39”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

I4I
 T’ang Yin (1470-1523): Secluded Fishermen on an Autumn River. Inscription by a friend, dated 1523.
Section of a handscroll. Ink and colors on silk. (H. 11%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

in the pass. Like Kuo Hsi in his Early Spring, T’ang Yin uses delicate gradations of ink
tone to suggest a few local areas of haze filling pockets in the terrain, but otherwise
presents his scene with the utmost sharpness, as viewed through the clear, cold wintry air.
In place of atmospheric perspective, a system of piled diagonals establishes the desired
depth, and the painting seems unusually spacious for a Ming work. T’ang Yin attempts,
with considerable success, to recover the firm structure and solidity of form found in
Northern Sung landscape, perhaps in deliberate opposition to the flatter, less substantial
constructions of the Wu School literati.
Such paintings as these, along with others in his “literary” manner, were no doubt
admired and purchased by discerning men of Su-chou, and prized by later connoisseurs.
The pictures which brought him his greatest popular success, however, were colorful
figure studies, especially of beautiful women. They seem to us rather vapid today, but
are much praised by Chinese writers, who remark slyly that his intimate acquaintance
with the courtesans of Su-chou must have given him a special competence in the portrayal

142
T’ang Yin (1470-1523) Clearing after Snow in a Mountain Pass. Hanging scroll.
Ink and light colors on silk. (27%x14% ") Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

143
 of feminine beauty. Ch’iu Ying, the other student of Chou Ch’en, was equally popular
for pictures of this kind, and the two younger men founded together (probably without
intending to do so) what is perhaps better regarded as an industry than as a school,
made up of hosts of hack artists who labored at decorative paintings, book illustrations,
erotic works and the like, all ostensibly in the manners of T’ang and Ch’iu. A good propor-
tion of the imitations were furnished with “signatures” of the masters, and they still
abound. Ch’iu Ying has suffered especially from being burdened with spurious pictures;
the first task of anyone seeking to understand and appraise him, in fact, is to clear away
an accretion of innumerable forgeries, works of minor followers, dull and academic
productions misattributed to him. This mass of mediocrities has until fairly recently
clouded his reputation, giving the false impression that he was an industrious but
hardly imaginative artist. He was much more than that; seeing his genuine works, many
of which are not yet widely known, we can credit him with sensitivity as well as skill,
and with a considerable power of invention as well, although this last was not his forte.
Most of the styles in which Ch’iu Ying worked are based in some way on T’ang and
Sung painting. His scenes of women’s quarters in the palace, for example, are in the long
tradition extending back by way of Ch’ien Hsiian and Chou Wen-chii to the T’ang
masters Chang Hsiian and Chou Fang. Perhaps the finest of his few surviving works in
this genre is the long handscroll Spring Morning in the Han Paljace. A court painter is
engaged in portraying an empress or imperial concubine, in the portion reproduced here,
while her maids cluster around them like brightly colored birds, and two palace eunuchs
stand guard outside. This is just the-kind of painting for which Ch’iu was best known;
in the standard biographical sketch of him, for example, we read: “Ch’iu’s paintings
were beautiful and elegant, full of delicate and graceful detail. The brushwork was so
refined that the pictures looked as ‘though they had been carved in jade... He was parti-
cularly skilled in painting gentlemen and ladies; they were all brilliantly colored and
looked alive. If Chou Fang came back, he could not surpass Ch’iu Ying.” Our admiration
may stop short of agreement with this final remark; Ch’iu’s figures lack the naturalness
of posture, and his faces the character, of Chou Fang’s. But delicate, graceful and jadelike
they surely are, and the reasons for their popularity are easily apparent. Transmitted
by imitations in woodblock prints of the late Ming period, they influenced profoundly
the Ukiyo-e school, the popular art of the Edo period in Japan.
Also in an archaistic mode, Ch’iu Ying painted blue-and-green landscapes, ostensibly
based on the T’ang masters but actually more dependent on Ch’ien Hsiian’s transforma-
tions of this manner. Excellent examples are to be seen in both the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston and the Nelson Gallery, Kansas City. His preoccupation with the past, and the
classicistic spirit of much of his work, was no doubt the fruit of his close association
with the literati, especially with the circle of Wen Cheng-ming. It was through them,
and through such local collectors as the famous Hsiang Yiian-pien, that he was able
to see the old paintings which were the models for his archaistic works; such paintings
were all kept in private collections, public museums being unheard of in pre-modern
China. The literati painters praised his pictures, often adding laudatory inscriptions to

144
 2:

Ch’iu Ying (c. 1510-1551): Spring Morning in the Han Palace. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and colors on silk. (H. 12”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

them. The allusions to old styles in their own works were more distant, partly because
they lacked the technique to reproduce them as accurately as Ch’iu could, but also
because of their more individualistic aims; nevertheless, they recognized a similarity
of approach. Thus, although Ch’iu’s whole genius was directed toward painting— he was
not, that is, a scholar, poet or calligrapher—he moved among the literati, and evidently
tried to conform to their aesthetic standards in some of his work, as did Chou Ch’en and
T’ang Yin. One might say, were it not too neat and narrow an explanation, that the
stylistic variety within the paintings of these three men mirrors the whole multi-layered
society of Su-chou.

145
 Close to the “literary” pole within Ch’iu Ying’s euvre are three huge figures-in-
landscape compositions which survive from a set of four, corresponding to the four
seasons. The summer scene, Passing a Summer Day beneath Banana Palms, is preserved
in the Palace Museum collection, along with one other from the set. It portrays two
scholars sitting on the ground, in the shade of banana palms and tall rocks, escaping

Ch’iu Ying (c. 1510-1551): Landscape in the Manner of Li T’ang. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and colors on paper. (H. 10") Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c.

146
the heat. One plucks a kind of banjo, the other listens; a servant boy prepares flowers
in a bronze vase nearby. Those qualities which bear most upon the narrative import
of the scene are emphasized: the coolness of the shady retreat by a predominance of blue
and green tones, its isolation by the foreground boulders, which are felt as a block by
the spectator. The painter has carried his scholarly pose to the point of signing “Playfully
drawn by Ch’iu Ying,” a disclaimer of serious intent that was common among the
amateurs, who typically asserted a free-and-easy aesthetic attitude, but seems odd in
a professional. Despite his simulation of a relaxed manner (note the scribbly texturing
of the rocks), Ch’iu Ying never lapses from his customary elegance of form and excellence
of drawing; nor is the line, however swift and fluid, anywhere allowed to become as rough
or imprecise as it does in Che School works. A composition on this scale, executed
throughout with such absolute assurance, is the performance of a great painter, which
Ch’iu Ying surely was.
He was so obviously a great painter, in fact, as to pose a dilemma for literati critics
after his time. T’ang Yin was no problem; however wayward, he was still a scholar and
a gentleman of a sort. But how could they, consistent with their principles (“the quality
of the painting reflects the quality of the man”), give full approval to an “artisan-
painter,” as the professionals were condescendingly called, of no special eminence
otherwise, who was besides given to immodest displays of technical proficiency? On the
other hand, it was difficult to find a basis on which to disparage Ch’iu’s pictures. One
charge made against him is over-elaboration—a contemporary critic remarks that he
“could not refrain from adding feet when painting a snake.” Such a charge might be
brought against one of Ch’iu’s masterpieces, the long handscroll in the Freer Gallery
of Art painted in the Li T’ang manner. The profusion of anecdotal detail, the careful
application of spots of bright color, the precision of the drawing, bring it perilously
near to fussiness; few post-Sung artists could have handled such a composition without
falling into academicism. But under the enlivening brush of Ch’iu Ying it sustains a high
pitch of interest, even excitement, from beginning to end, and individual passages, such
as the cliff-enclosed ravine in our detail, have a fairyland quality of ideal beauty.
To infuse new life into the old, conservative styles and techniques was not, at this
late date, an easy task. Chou Ch’en, T’ang Yin and Ch’iu Ying were perhaps the last
artists to accomplish it with complete success. For a few decades, these three restored
to professional painting some qualities it had lacked since the Sung dynasty, notably
the kind of discipline in both technique and taste that prevented such vices as showy
brushwork and meretricious appeal, and a revived respect for that accuracy and clarity
of presentation that had been the ideal of the Sung academy. But these reforms were
short-lived, scarcely surviving the reformers. Even so, their influence in other directions
was far-reaching and salutary; the indebtedness of Ch’en Hung-shou (p. 152) to Ch’iu
Ying, or Tao-chi (p. 181) to T’ang Yin, is no less real for not having been acknowledged.
All three may be credited, also, with stimulating a new interest in pictorial content,
narrative and descriptive, and thus helping to counteract the severe limitation of themes
which threatened to impoverish the literati school; for, while concentration on a narrow

147
range of motifs may be allowable and even necessary in the truly creative masters,
leaving them more free to pursue their individual formal concerns, it can make the works
of their unimaginative followers seem even more drearily repetitive than they otherwise
would. Most important of all, these brilliant artists demonstrated once more a truth
that was constantly being doubted and denied in the later centuries in China: that tech-
nical skill is in no way incompatible with genius, nor is dullness the inevitable outcome
of careful craftsmanship.
 Tung Ch’i-ch’ang and Late Ming Painting

14
To proliferation of separate stylistic currents or schools of painting in the late
Ming dynasty is one of the many astonishing features of that fascinating period.
It resembles the modern Western situation in this way, and also in being an age
of endless discussion of principles, of the formulation of theories and their application
to painting of the past, in an attempt to categorize and evaluate all that had gone before.
The painters themselves, affected by this intellectual activity and as often as not partici-
pating in it, adhered to one or another faction according to their beliefs and preferences,
or, to some degree, according to the locality in which they worked. At the same time,
some of the most interesting figures of this period remained relatively isolated, more
so than painters had tended to be since the Ytian dynasty, and are properly to be
classified as individualists.
Dominating the age stands the imposing figure of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang. As a high
official, one of the leading scholars and calligraphers of his day, and by far the most
eminent authority on painting, he was a man of enormous self-confidence, not to say
self-esteem. In addition to his voluminous published writings on painting, in which he
restates and elaborates the tenets of literati painting theory, he composed hundreds of
colophons for particular pictures, delivering dogmatic judgements and making attri-
butions that, for better or worse, carry considerable weight even today. Many of them
still seem very perceptive; others may strike us as arbitrary—it was Tung, to take an
example, who decided that the fan-shaped picture reproduced on p. 81 is a work of
Chao Po-chii, although there is no stylistic or other evidence that it has anything at all
to do with Chao, and some to the contrary. Tung Ch’i-ch’ang undertook also to codify
painting styles, and classified the old masters according to his famous system of the
“Northern and Southern Schools,” a system too complex and controversial to be treated
here; we can only remark that, although not explicitly designed to do so, it glorified
the literati painting tradition and belittled the academicians and professionals, especially
the Che School painters. In short, he attempted to bring the whole history and art
of painting into a state of order satisfactory to himself and convincing to his contem-
poraries. He succeeded so well that most books about painting written in China after
his time are strongly under his influence.

149
150
 In his own painting, he submits nature to the same kind of systematization; he
observes, analyzes, compares it with the visions of earlier artists, borrows what he
pleases from them, but in the end reorganizes the visual material according to personal
principles. Although his attitude was intellectual, it would be a mistake to regard his
pictures purely as objectifications of his theories. Forms, not concepts, occupied Tung
Ch’i-ch’ang the painter. One may find his works uncomfortable, with their deliberate
dissonances, but one cannot deny their power, or continue to assume (as many Western
scholars once did) that the oddness of his style is the product of incompetence.

< Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1555-1636): Autumn Landscape. Hanging scroll. Ink and light colors on silk. (56x23%")
Nii Wa Chai Collection.

Sun K’o-hung (1532-1610): The Moon Rises, from Elegant Diversions for Leisure Hours. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and light colors on paper. (H. 11”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

151
 Ch’en Hung-shou (1599-1652): Boating on the Lake. Album leaf. Ink and colors on paper. (13%
x10%”)
J. P. Dubosc Collection, Lugano.

152
 The autumn landscape in the Nii Wa Chai collection, one of his finest paintings,
uses the standard Ni Tsan compositional formula (cf. p. 111). Unlike Shen Chou (p. 126),
who preserves much of the Ni Tsan technique but uses it to construct a landscape on
a very different pattern, Tung retains the basic design but renders it in a technique
totally unlike Ni Tsan’s. If we search for sources of the style, it must be in such pictures
as the Green Hills and White Clouds of Kao K’o-kung (p. 104), in which some precedent
for the strangely sleek forms, the repetition of mound shapes and bulging, round-topped
cones, may be seen. Tung’s composition is at once more monumental and less stable,
with its leaning masses in a state of uncertain equilibrium. Neither the somber coloring
nor the drawing of the trees, themselves devoid of charm, helps to relieve the starkness
of the scene. Tung Ch’i-ch’ang avoids anecdotal content as scrupulously as Ni Tsan,
and the exclusion of figures from his landscapes is nearly as rigorous. If we believe
with the literati theorists that the painting reflects the man, we receive an impression
of Tung as a high-principled and austere personality.
Some painters, in the same period, continued to work in the milder and more
lyrical mode of Shen Chou and the Wu School. Among these was Sun K’o-hung, an older
contemporary and friend of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, who is classed with Tung in the Hua-t’ing
School, named after the town near Su-chou where they both lived. He was a scholar,
collector and antiquarian, in whose life painting played a smaller part than it did in
Tung Ch’i-ch’ang’s. His handscroll made up of twenty scenes representing Elegant
Diversions for Leisure Hours illustrates once more how far a poetic sensibility can
compensate for the lack of any great technical proficiency. Sun K’o-hung, without the
temperament to undertake the grand explorations of the major individualist masters,
nevertheless joins in the experimental spirit of the age to develop a personal manner
reminiscent of the color woodcut, combining heavy line with pale, flat washes of color.
In the section titled The Moon Rises, the cool tones of early evening moonlight on the
trunks of the wu-t’ung trees and on the rocks are admirably suggested, although not
by any means accurately reproduced. The composition is unhackneyed, and drawn
with an artless air—the fact that the scholar gazes from his open window in a direction
quite away from the moon he is supposedly observing does not disturb the artist at all.
Despite some obvious influence of Shen Chou in style and theme, the picture as a whole
seems strikingly fresh and original.
Some of the late Ming painters were involved, to greater or lesser degrees, in the
political feuds that weakened the central administration in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, and many more were affected by the rebellions of the last years
of the dynasty, and by its final collapse before the invading Manchus. It may be that
a certain inwardness of feeling in painting of this age, and the fond reversions to an
idealized antiquity to be felt in some of its styles, express, like the same features in
Yiian painting, a desire for escape that could not be adequately realized in actuality.
The works of Ch’en Hung-shou, for example, would never lead one to suppose that he
was a man susceptible of involvement in the fortunes of governments, but he was in fact
involved, although perhaps against his will. Born in Chekiang Province, he painted from

153
 Wi
Hsii Wei (1521-1593): Bamboo. Section of a handscroll. Ink on paper. (H. 1235/54")
Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, p.c.

Chang Feng (fl. c. 1645-1673): Gazing at a Red-leafed Maple across a Ravine. Dated 1660. >
Hanging scroll (cropped at top). Ink and light colors on paper. (w. 17%”) Yamato Bunka-kan, Osaka.

boyhood, developing an accomplished technique and a very individual manner based

in a curious way on antique styles. When his fame reached the Ming emperor, he was
invited to the Peking court, where he served a short term around the year 1640 in an
official position, although not as a court painter proper. In 1642, he was nominated
to the Academy of Learning and accepted, but declined the rank of “painter-in-atten-
dance” that was also offered him. Perhaps the general castigation of “academy painters”

154
155
 by such contemporary scholars as Tung Ch’i-ch’ang affected his decision to refuse.
The reports on his movements during the confused period of the Manchu conquest are
vague and somewhat contradictory; one story has it that he was imprisoned upon the fall
of Nanking in 1645, but released because of his artistic eminence by the Manchus, who
were on the whole reasonable and lenient as conquerors. He entered the Buddhist
priesthood for a time, then returned to his home, where he died in 1652.
Most of the archaistically-inclined painters of his time talked grandly of T’ang
and pre-T’ang styles, but what we find in their works are only fairly standardized
references to the manners of certain canonical Sung and Yiian masters. Ch’en Hung-shou,
almost alone among painters of his time, made a genuine study of pre-Sung painting,
and the results of it are to be seen in his own works. In the landscape album leaf we
reproduce, the simply-drawn hills seen across the water are quoted from T’ang landscape,
as are the composition and the sharp-cut, blue-and-green rocks. Such allusions to
antiquity do not, however, account for the special quality of Ch’en Hung-shou’s work,
which is not at all derivative in the ordinary sense of the word. Through playful dis-
tortions of form and space, quirks of drawing, linear eccentricities, he creates something
thoroughly original and personal. The emotional content of his pictures is as complex
as their styles, and as far removed from the straightforward statements of early painting.
The melancholy lady gazing from an upstairs window recalls the themes of many poignant
T’ang poems, but this motif functions here as a once-removed reference to feeling, rather
than as a direct expression of feeling. It does not, and is not intended to, ring entirely
true. Such an oblique mode of expression is familiar to us in the modern Occident,
for example in the subtle, semi-facetious plays on romantic style in the music of certain
modern French composers, which is.somehow akin, in its bitter-sweet flavor, to such
paintings as this.
Ch’en Hung-shou was best known for his figure paintings, most of them imaginary
portraits and representations of histcrical or Buddhist subjects. Outstanding among these
is a handscroll illustrating the long poem titled “Homecoming” by T’ao Yiian-ming, the
same fourth century poet who is probably portrayed in the anonymous Sung picture on
p. 63. T’ao was fond of wine, music and chrysanthemums, and he is shown enjoying all
three in the first section of Ch’en’s scroll: seated on a rock, he inhales the fragrance of a
bunch of his favorite flowers, his lute beside him, a bowl of wine on a flat stone in front.
For the costume of the figure, Ch’en has returned to the stylistic stage of the Ku K’ai-chih
painting (p. 14), when drapery was drawn with continuous lineament in long curves,
and revealed little about the body beneath. The drawing of the rock is based closely
on the T’ang manner which may be seen in the Emperor Ming-huang’s Journey to Shu
(pp. 28 and 57), so closely—even to the particular movement of line and the “nail-head”
endings—as to indicate that that picture, or a very similar one, must have been known
to Ch’en Hung-shou. The addition of light shading to the fine, even lineament and thin
color wash also agrees with early styles. But again, the whole effect of the picture is
personal and novel; the insistent rhythms of repeated line are Ch’en’s own, and there
are hints of the distortion that makes others of his figure paintings distinctly grotesque.

156
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Ch’en Hung-shou (1599-1652): Illustrations to the “Homecoming” Ode of T’ao Yiian-ming. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and light color on silk. (H. 1134") Honolulu Academy of Arts.

157
 Pretending to aim at recapturing the ingenuous air of painting that seemed to his age
primitive and unspoiled, he deliberately overdoes the element of awkwardness, revealing
thereby, paradoxically perhaps, an extreme point of sophistication.
As final specimens of late Ming painting, we have juxtaposed two works separated
by seven or eight decades in time; the Chang Feng picture, in fact, was painted in the
early part of the following dynasty, the Ch’ing. Both are executed in a bold and free
brushwork, which goes back ultimately to the rough brush techniques of the 7-p’im or
“untrammeled” manner of the T’ang and Sung painters; in both, the movements of
the brush seem sometimes to have been dictated more by expressionist than by represen-
tational motives, and certain strokes have no descriptive function at all. But these
common features, significant as they are, clearly have not decided the expressive
character of the two pictures, which employ the same calligraphic looseness of brushwork
for very different purposes. The Hsii Wei bamboo appears to be the product of a furious
attack of brush on paper, a swiftness not entirely under control, as if the excited artist
had been impatient to exteriorize some force pressing upon his mind and could not
take time for thought. The Chang Feng picture, although there is as much arbitrariness
in the drawing, conveys a gentler and poetic mood. The line is relaxed where Hsii Wei’s
is tense, slow-moving where Hsii’s is impetuous. We may account for these differences
as we please, or deny any need to account for them at all. For the Chinese critics,
however, they are to be explained in only one way: by reference to the individual
temperaments of the painters themselves.
Hsii Wei was, like T’ang Yin, a child prodigy, showing outstanding literary ability
by the time he was ten. Attaching himself as secretary to an ambitious governor, he rose
rapidly to prominence, but fell even more rapidly when the governor was imprisoned
for political intrigue. Hsii feared for his own life, and pretended madness. His behavior
had always been extremely odd, so his performance was no doubt convincing. He
escaped prison on that occasion, but not on the next, when he was convicted of murder,
having beaten his second wife to death. He attempted suicide while in prison, but
was unsuccessful, and a friend finally secured his release. After a stay in the capital,
he returned to his home in Chekiang, poor, ill, and embittered. He drank to excess,
managed a precarious living by selling his paintings and calligraphy, and treated
most of his fellow townspeople with rudeness and contempt. “People thought he was
too strange,” we read in his biography, “and nobody liked him.” He died penniless at
the age of seventy-three.
Much less is known about the life of Chang Feng, partly because he was never so
famous as Hsii Wei, but also because his was a less colorful and eventful life, and so less
rewarding for the chronicler. He was a minor official until the fall of the Ming, but then,
like so many late Ming intellectuals, retired into semi-poverty to avoid serving the
Manchus. Noblemen and high dignitaries entertained him in the hope of being presented
with one of his landscapes or figure pictures. “He lived in peace with everybody, never
showing bad temper, because he was by nature very retiring...” says one writer.
“He found satisfaction within himself.”

158
 With these facts and opinions about the painters in our minds, and the pictures
before us, we may return to the question of what relationship, if any, there is between
them. To what extent does the vehemence of expression in the bamboo picture, that is,
derive from the tormented and neurotic person of Hsii Wei, or the relaxed charm of
the composition titled Gazing at a Red-leafed Maple across a Ravine from the amiable
Chang Feng? To no extent at all, reply adherents of some current Western aesthetic
theories, which hold that the feeling embodied in a work of art need never have been
experienced by the artist himself, and that the artist is in fact more or less irrelevant
to his work. The contention of the Chinese critics was exactly the opposite. A man
cannot apply brush to paper, they believed, without revealing something of his inner-
most self. Given the facts and the paintings, they would not have hesitated long before
deciding which could have been done by a man who had murdered his wife, and which
by one well adjusted and well liked.
 Early Ch’ing Painting: The “Orthodox” Masters

I5
W= the end of the Ming and beginning of the Ch’ing dynasty, Chinese painting
entered a third phase. During the first, which had lasted until the eleventh
century, it had been predominantly a professional tradition, made up of various
schools but preserving a certain uniformity of style and attitude, from which individual
deviations were relatively minor. The foundation of the literati branch of painting by
Su Tung-p’o and his circle in the late Northern Sung period began the second, a long
period of schism between two great movements, marked by the steady rise of one of
them, that of the scholar-amateurs, and the decline of the other, that of the professional
artists. By the seventeenth century the contest was ended; the professional schools of
painting were quite stagnant, devoid of imagination and impetus, and merit no more
serious attention now than they received from their contemporary critics, which was
virtually none at all. The literati tradition; meanwhile, had split into divergent currents,
and from this time onward the polarities of orthodoxy v. individualism, imitation
v. innovation, were to be found within this literati tradition itself. The rich diversity
of Chinese painting was sustained.
There appears to be a correlation, of the most general kind, between the artistic
inclinations of early Ch’ing painters and their modes of response to the Manchu conquest:
many of those termed “individualists,” as we shall see in the next chapter, retired into
Buddhist or Taoist temples and became monks, while the “orthodox” artists typically
felt less urge toward withdrawal, and either went into dignified seclusion in their homes,
or, ih many cases, accepted positions in the new administration after a few decades
had passed. As painters, they were mostly followers of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, who, although
not by any means a conservative in his own paintings, had been so authoritative in his
choice of styles, so dogmatic in his opinions and uncompromising in his judgements, as
to found a new orthodoxy, which allowed certain kinds of brushwork, certain compo-
sitions, certain attitudes, and strictly forbade others. The output of Tung’s following
in the generation after him may seem to Occidental eyes tamely homogeneous. Chinese
connoisseurs, more sensitive to stylistic subtleties within their own tradition, could recog-
nize and admire (to take a not untypical case) a landscape by Wang Shih-min following
Tung Ch’i-ch’ang in imitating Wang Meng’s interpretation of the Tung Yuan manner.

161
 Wang Shih-min (1592-1680): Landscape in the Manner of Chao Meng-fu. Dated 1670. Album leaf.
Ink and colors on paper. (105x 14%") C. C. Wang Collection, New York.

The leaders of the orthodox school in this generation were the two older of the
so-called Four Wangs, Wang Shih-min and Wang Chien. Wang Shih-min came from a
prominent family of scholars, and studied painting under Tung Ch’i-ch’ang while still
young. He held an official position in the Ming government, but retired and lived quietly
after the fall of the dynasty, writing and painting, entertaining artists and scholars,
teaching pupils. He bought or borrowed pictures by his favorite artists whenever he
could, in order to study and copy them and so enrich his own stock of techniques and
motives. He followed Tung Ch’i-ch’ang in esteeming above all the Yiian masters,
especially Huang Kung-wang, whose method of building the picture slowly, stroke on
stroke and wash on wash, as Well as his choice of plain, unexciting subjects, had a

162
Wu Li (1632-1718): Boating on the River below a Buddhist Temple. Album leaf.
Ink and light colors on paper. (155x10%") Palace Museum Collection, Taichung.

163
 profound appeal to the quiet taste of the Ch’ing orthodox painters. The salient qualities
of Wang Shih-min’s style, and that of many of his associates and followers, derive more
from Huang than from any other early painter: a denseness of surface, achieved through
close interweaving of brushstrokes; blends of wet and dry in the application of ink;
a technical consistency that was always in danger of falling into monotony when
production outran inspiration. Characteristic of this school is the avoidance of firm,
continuous line and simple surfaces; linear contours are constantly disrupted with heavy
applications of ten, small strokes of varying shape, and surfaces are roughened with
uneven washes and texture strokes.
Wang Shih-min’s landscape after Chao Meng-fu is from an album of pictures done
“in imitation of” various masters. The making of such albums, as demonstrations of
the painter’s repertory, had been popular among the literati artists since the time of
Shen Chou. The “Chao Meng-fu” elements are not easily detectable; the archaistic
clouds, heavy green color and cramped, tortuous composition evidently refer to Chao’s
reworking of a T’ang or Five Dynasties landscape type. There is no sense of space or
atmosphere, no real body to the forms, no feeling of grandeur in nature, nothing that
can be called skillful drawing. The fact that one finds it easiest to characterize painting
of this kind in such negative statements is itself significant, since much of the style is
in fact the end product of a long process of stripping away, in which all that the artists
disapproved or found uncongenial—all obvious blandishments, easy effects and recog-
nizable technical tricks, all elements-designed to charm, to appeal, to impress, to
make the picture immediately admirable,or likeable—had been ruthlessly eliminated.
This is not to argue that all the flatness and awkward touches in the painting are
intentional. But the question of -how:farsuch an amateur as Wang Shih-min could
have moved in the direction of illusionistic rendering of three-dimensional space and
form, or of more representational drawing, had he wished to do so, is not only unanswer-
able but really irrelevant as well, since his paintings were clearly executed with other
aims than these in mind. Their positive virtues are not so easily isolated and described
as their negative qualities; words of praise for their richness of texture, or (to fall back
on Chinese criteria) harmony and resonance of surface, will be all but meaningless to
anyone who does not admire them to begin with. It is unlikely that painting of this
school will ever be popular outside China. Even the Japanese, for all their concern with
Chinese painting, have never quite seen the point of it, and it lacks the simplicity
and boldness of design, the candid air and expressive transparence, which make some
exotic arts attractive to us today, and which we sometimes mistake for marks of
artistic excellence.
The works of Wang Shih-min’s contemporary Wang Chien are often so similar to
his own that it requires a sharp eye to distinguish them. More individual manners appear
in the following generation, in the two younger of the Four Wangs, Wang Hui and
Wang Yiian-ch’i, and in two other artists, Wu Li and Yiin Shou-p’ing, who are commonly
grouped with the Wangs as the Six Great Orthodox Masters of the Early Ch’ing.
Wang Hui, the best known of them, was enormously prolific without being outstandingly

164
 inventive. He began as a highly gifted eclectic, passed through a relatively fertile middle
period, and ended by turning out a profusion of paintings in a monotonous manner,
without, it would appear, expending much thought or feeling on more than a few of
them. His work thus ranges from very good at best to dreary at worst. The less abundant
output of Wu Li, while it also varies in quality, sustains on the whole a higher level of
interest. The two men were almost exactly the same age, and both studied under
Wang Shih-min.
The life of Wu Li has held a special attraction for Occidental scholars, because he
was converted to Christianity at the age of fifty, entering the Jesuit order. Chinese
records state that he visited Western countries, but the fact is that he never traveled
further than the southern coastal island of Macao, on which there was a Portuguese
colony. There he received religious instruction for a number of years. Upon his return
to the mainland, he was sent as a missionary to Shanghai and Chia-ting. He continued
to paint after his return, but only occasionally, his main energies being devoted to his
duties as a Catholic father. This reduction of output was probably the only effect that
his adoption of the Christian faith had on his painting; no trace of western influence
appears in it.
Like all the other orthodox masters of his time, he worked often “in old styles.”
The manner most original to Wu Li himself is that represented in our plate, a leaf from
one of his albums ostensibly done in homage to Sung and Yiian masters. It is a dry and
intellectual kind of painting, which, in the Chinese phrase, “used ink as sparingly as if
it were gold.” Certain forms in it are the artist’s personal property: peaks and ridges
twist in distinctive ways, and the large masses are made up of smaller, bulging shapes,
often oddly pointed at the top or side, which.are thus made to thrust in particular
opposed directions and so to give tension to the whole body. Some precedent for this
mode of construction can be found in the works of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang. The insistent
repetition of rows of tien along the contours of rocks and the edges of tree trunks, giving
a furry texture to these bodies, is a feature derived from Wang Shih-min and shared
with Wang Hui, who carried it to a point of excess. Here, it does not detract from the
crispness of the composition.
The youngest of the group, and perhaps the most original of them all, was Wang
Shih-min’s grandson Wang Yiian-ch’i. He studied painting under his grandfather, and
became a high official, placed in charge of the imperial collection of painting and calli-
graphy by the K’ang-hsi Emperor (reigned 1662-1722). Although never a court painter
in the true sense—he held a much higher administrative rank—he dominated the court
academy during the latter decades of his life. Wang Yiian-ch’i perpetuated what had
been one of the main strengths of the literati tradition: the capacity for using old forms
and techniques in fresh ways, taking advantage of the discoveries of predecessors and
the evolution of centuries, but utilizing them for personal statements. This variety of
traditionalism, which seems peculiarly Confucian in intent, might be likened to a
conservative poet’s or prose writer’s employment of the rich language of literary English,
with its established imagery and formal devices, for his own expressive needs and new

165
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Wang Yiian-ch’i (1642-1715): River Landscape, in the Manner of Ni Tsan. Dated 1704. Hanging scroll.
Ink and light colors on paper. (37%4x 19%”) J. P. Dubosc Collection, Lugano.

166
content. The basic material of Wang Yiian-ch’i’s pictures is orthodox: the dry, dragged
brushline over light, wet underdrawing, the gradual building of form by accumulation
of strokes, limited areas of wash tying it all together. His coloring, although sometimes
put to unusually effective use in defining forms, remains within the confines of the
orthodox literati school, combining pale blue-green and red-brown tones with the ink
in subtle harmonies. His compositions, however, make his classification as “orthodox”
quite meaningless, since they are among the most imaginative and daring in all of
Chinese painting.
In one of his two inscriptions on the landscape in the Ni Tsan manner reproduced
here, he writes that he painted it after his memory of a picture by his grandfather
Wang Shih-min, which had been done in imitation of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang. And behind all
this, of course, was Ni Tsan, the ultimate source—ultimate, that is, until we go further
and trace the sources of Ni Tsan’s style. That a painting burdened with so many layers
of stylistic allusion can have room left for originality may seem unlikely, but it is in
fact highly original. Wang Yiian-ch’i’s large masses, like those of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang
and Wu Li, are constituted of smaller bodies, but without the same sense of cohesion.
The central mesa appears fragmented into a pile of lumpy boulders, heaped against
the flat-topped, columnar core. More bizarre motives include the leaning rock near the
shore and the absurdly low pavilion. Wang Yiian-ch’i’s paramount concern, however,
apart from the ever-major one of brushwork, was for the formal construction of the picture
—the organization of dense or empty areas, balance or unbalance of masses, repetition
of lines and shapes. Like Shen Chou in his Walking with a Staff (p. 126), he takes the
Ni Tsan composition as a starting point and plays upon it with complex deviations and
distortions, including some inherent in his model—the irregularly tilted ground plane,
the ponderous mass at the top “supported” by curving trees—but also some of his own,
such as the intricate off-symmetrical arrangement, and the fantastically mismatched
horizons at the two sides of the picture.
Jean Pierre Dubosc, who was one of the first Occidental scholars to arrive at a real
understanding of the very specialized values of this school of painting, has likened
Wang Yiian-ch’i to Cézanne, and the comparison is both stimulating and valid. Like
Cézanne, Wang protested always that his art was founded in nature, and recommended
constant observation of real scenery to his pupils; but also like Cézanne, he was absorbed
with problems not so much representational as abstract—with, in his own words, “that
which is produced by an interaction of the empty and the solid,” with erecting new
structures in a new space, with an intellectual reordering of the physical world. He was
not interested in descriptive color (his use of simple warm and cool tones is another
link with Cézanne), or in characterizing individual trees or rocks, or in effects of weather,
season, light or shade, excepting a few perfunctory indications. It is important to realize
all this in approaching Wang’s works or those of a great many other literati painters;
to stand before them and continue to talk, in the accepted manner, about the Chinese
artist’s profound penetration of nature, is much like maintaining that Cézanne’s primary
aim was to reveal the inner essence of his apples.

167
 Early Ch’ing Painting: The Individualists

16
T= practice of retiring from human society during difficult periods of history was
relatively free, in China, from the stigma of ivory-tower escapism. Under certain
circumstances, such as those prevailing at the outset of a dynasty, and especially
if the new rulers were foreign, it was seen not as evasion of civic responsibility but as ideal
ethical conduct. Further resistance was futile, collaboration distasteful, and disengage-
ment the only remaining course. Numerous precedents could be cited from the past,
the most recent being the actions of the early Yiian scholars. Now in the early Ch’ing
period many educated men renounced their lives of worldly affairs, either through
physical withdrawal from the urban centers into Buddhist or Taoist monasteries, or
through a psychological withdrawal into a private world of eccentricity, where they were
exempted from social and political responsibilities by the traditional Chinese tolerance
of erratic behavior.
In the cases of those who decided to enter religious orders, then, the decision was
frequently dictated by a mixture of factors, practical and temperamental, which had
little to do with religion proper. Some who became Buddhist monks did not even trouble
to take the tonsure. Nor were many of the “recluses” genuine misanthropes; the severing
of their attachment to urbane society was often formal and short-lived, and most of them
continued to play some part in the secular intellectual community. An exception was
K’un-ts’an, or Shih-ch’i, who seems to have had little liking for his fellow men. The fact
that he became a Buddhist monk before the fall of Ming suggests a stronger spiritual
motivation in his case, along with, perhaps, a more urgent desire for solitude. His own
inscription on one of his works, a picture of a monk perched in a tree peering distrustfully
downward, states his feelings strongly: “The question is how to find peace in a world
of suffering. You ask how 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 trouble, like a bird in its nest.
People call me a dangerous man, but I answer: ‘You are like devils.’”
K’un-ts’an’s landscape painting, while it betrays some influence of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang
in details, seems to derive more directly from observation of nature than do the land-
scapes of the orthodox masters in this same period. Some of his pictures evidently
represent the particular scenery of places where he lived. Beginning with the first rise
 K’un-ts’an (c. 1610-1693): The Pao-en Temple. Dated 1664. Detail from a hanging scroll.
Ink and colors on paper. Collection of the late Kanichi Sumitomo, Oiso (Japan).

170
of landscape painting in the fourth and fifth centuries, and continuing with its great
development in the tenth, periods of political stress and the accompanying movement
of educated men away from the cities had tended to stimulate innovations in this art,
as the painters came once more into intimate contact with nature. Later occurrences
of the phenomenon are less clear cut, and it is in no event a simple cause-and-effect
matter. While a return to commonplace reality in its subjects, leaving the idealized
realms of the late Sung Academy, is one aspect of Yiian dynasty landscape painting,
another is the attitude of detachment that the painters develop toward these subjects,
in line with the new ideals of the literati school. The situation in the early Ch’ing is even
more complicated. Wang Shih-min and others inherit from the Ming masters the tradition
of art-based-on-art, of stock motives and standard compositions, or else, like Wang
Yiian-ch’i, engage in intellectualized manipulations of form. The individualists, mean-
while, exhibit on the one hand the most violent departures from visual truthfulness,
and on the other appear to have turned back to nature for a reconsideration of the old
concept of landscape painting as the outcome of a direct encounter between the artist’s
mind and the exterior world.
The subject of K’un-ts’an’s most famous composition is the Pao-en Temple, which
overlooked the Yangtze River near Nanking. The artist was living there in 1664 when
he painted the picture, and reveals in it the fondness he felt toward these old buildings
and their setting. He seems not to have imposed his will so severely upon them; in his
crumbly, dry-brush drawing, they take on the unplanned and slightly disorderly air of
reality. Bluff and knolls are earthy, there are no-fantastic forms, all is on a reasonable
scale. Thick streams of vapor flow down the slope and curl about the temple, reddened,
along with the rest of the scene, by the glow of a setting sun. Most remarkable of all
is the coloristic treatment of the distant hills, in which K’un-ts’an abandoned all consi-
derations of strong or distinctive brushwork to capture in wet, sketchy strokes a quick
impression of fading light.
K’un-ts’an’s style exemplifies the quality that the Chinese critics term “luxuriance”
or “denseness.” A perfect illustration of its opposite, “sparseness,” is to be seen in
the painting of another Buddhist monk, Hung-jen, whose handscroll Rivers and Mountains
Without End was painted three years earlier, in 1661. Hung-jen was born in Anhui
Province, slightly to the west of the main cultural centers of the Chiang-nan region,
and was the foremost painter of an Anhui School that flourished in the early Ch’ing
period. The critics, and the painter himself in some inscriptions, assure us that he
followed Ni Tsan in his landscapes; but so little of the Ni Tsan manner remains in his
mature style, and that so thoroughly transformed, that it is difficult to distinguish more
than a similarity in taste. What he shares with the Yiian master is a cleanness and
clarity, best exemplified in a few of his most striking compositions and in some passages
of his handscrolls, such as that reproduced here. He draws his angular rock towers in
overlapping faces with long, straggly lines, lays on dilute washes of ink and occasionally
the palest of colors, adds a sparse growth of wispy trees and bushes, a few toylike houses
and a pavilion on the shore. The resulting landscape is like a construction of thin wires

171
 and glass, fragile and without solid substance. Still, it imparts a mood of lonely quiet,
and seems a cool, very sensitive abstraction of mountain scenery viewed through clear air.
The real world, however radically he may abbreviate and formalize it, lies just behind,
unobscured by overlays of archaism or a preoccupation with brush techniques. In his
odd way, then, Hung-jen represents another aspect of the return to nature.
Living in Nanking at the same time as K’un-ts’an, and perhaps acquainted with
him, was another of the great individualists, Kung Hsien. He is credited as the leader
of a Nanking School, but there was in fact no true school. He associated sometimes with
a coterie of Nanking poets and scholars, composed of political dissidents who, like Kung
himself, cherished nostalgic feelings for the fallen Ming regime. Most of the time, how-
ever, he kept to himself, living in a hut outside the city and cultivating his half-acre
garden. A friend described him as “of an eccentric nature; only with difficulty does he
get along with other people.” He was singular also as a painter, and said of himself:
“There has been no one before me, and will be no one after me.” Kung Hsien professed
some dependence on the past, as did virtually all Chinese painters—he speaks of having
studied the works of Mi Yu-jen, for example, over a period of forty years—but he seems
in the end to have chosen, like the other individualists, the lonely path into a new artistic
province. The world of his paintings is wholly his own, existing only in terms of his
private pictorial language.
This language is relatively simple, with a consistent syntax and a very limited
vocabulary. The tireless reiteration of.a few basic elements, strokes of similar size and
shape, produces the larger forms, which in turn make up the composition. Dots of ink,
clustered or scattered, purport to stand for ground vegetation, but serve primarily to
give a special vibrancy to the surface: Countless short strokes are applied in overlay to
define the shapes of rocks, or massed for tree foliage. The forms seem at times partially
dissolved, existing as loose aggregations of particles. Where Hung-jen delineates and
delimits sharply the objects in his landscapes, arranging them in orderly structures,
Kung Hsien blurs their outlines and the distinctions between them, reducing the
diversity of natural forms and phenomena to a strange homogeneity. Unusual also are
the highlights and shadows on the rocks. The painter, who said of himself that his
handling of ink was superior to his brushwork, subtly controls his scale of tone values
from deepest black to the bare paper which he is fond of leaving in streaks about the
composition, and so suggests a fitful play of light over the terrain. Dense white mists
drift slowly along the ravines. Houses are seldom seen, and people never. This is a
somber and forbidding vision, far removed from the Sung painters’ “landscapes one
can walk around in.” No one is likely to feel any urge to enter Kung Hsien’s paintings.
With the works of these three artists before us, there will scarcely be any need to
point out that the refusal of the individualists to follow accepted modes and employ
standard forms, their insistence on first-hand interpretations of reality, did not by any
means lead to “realistic” styles. In a sense, their works still adhere to the literati concept
of painting in being personal expressions; while they are products of an interactio
n
between the artist’s mind and the world outside it, the former remains the decisive

172
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Hung-jen (c. 1603-1663): Rivers and Mountains without End. Dated 1661. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and light colors on paper. (H. 11%") Collection of the late Kanichi Sumitomo, Oiso (Japan).

173
 en
Kung Hsien (c. 1620-1689): Trees in a Landscape. Section of a handscroll. Ink on paper. (H. 103%”)
William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City.

factor. When the painter’s temperament was odd, the paintings became very odd indeed.
Yet Chinese painting never develops into a full-fledged non-objective art, however
closely it may approach it, probably because, in the Chinese view, the expressive value
of the pictures depended not only upon non-descriptive qualities of brushwork and
form, but also on the ways in which the artist transformed visual appearances into the
matter of art. Cut off altogether from its correlative in nature, the pictorial image
would have lost most of its point. The same was true in calligraphy: the written character
might be made quite illegible in the wilder modes of writing, but always stood in some
relationship, however distant, to the standard script.
There is no better illustration of all this than the person and the painting of Chu Ta,
who called himself Pa-ta Shan-jen. Born in 1625, he was a descendant of one branch
of the Ming imperial family. Upon the fall of the dynasty, when he was about twenty,
he became a Buddhist monk. Beyond that point his biography becomes obscure, since

174
sources for it do not agree either on the events or on the order in which they occurred.
He fell victim, it would appear, to a severe mental disturbance, which drove him
continually into violent fits of elation and depression. At a:certain moment in his life
he affixed to his door a sign bearing the single character ya, “dumb”; and from that
moment he never uttered a word to anyone. He laughed, cried, gesticulated, drank
wine, wrote and painted, but never spoke. “When he felt inclined to write,” recounts
one of his contemporaries who composed a brief biography of him, “he would bare his
arm and grasp the brush, at the same time emitting loud cries like a madman.” Most
of his paintings were done while he was drunk. The same biographer, writing without
the benefit of modern psychology, expresses bewilderment that works of such power
could be accomplished under these conditions. “Alas and alas,” he exclaims, “one can
get drunk as he did, but not crazy as he was!”
The accounts of Chu Ta’s madness and drunkenness recall the life of Hsii Wei,
and there are similarities also in their paintings, which suggest that some part of Chu’s
style was taken from the deranged Ming painter. But while Hsii’s personal aberration
manifested itself in an unleashed and passionate impulsion of the brush (p. 154), the
characteristic works of Chu Ta convey rather a sense of constraint and repression that
agrees with what we are told of the man himself. Painting was for Chu Ta a means of
communication, and his use of it expressive but seldom truly fluent. His brush moves
slowly, often with an odd twisting motion, which is to be observed especially when
the stroke changes direction. Whatever impression of laxity and clumsiness it may
give must be understood as purposeful deception; no brushline in Chinese painting is
further from true weakness. Where the stroke was made with a brush unevenly loaded
with ink, marked variations in tone appear within it..Spots of ink are sometimes applied
so wet that the edges blur as the ink suffuses outward. At other points the stroke is
dry and scratchy. Through all this variety of brushwork runs a constant and very
distinctive quality, which prevents Pa-ta Shan-jen’s works from being confused with
those of any other painter—barring, of course, deliberate imitations. They seem tightly
disciplined, but by inherent and mysterious rules that have little to do with ordinary
canons of painting.
His pictures appear to be making particularized statements; one would be at a
loss to translate them into verbal statements, but the artist himself was, after all,
incapable of doing that. Are the misshapen birds that inhabit so many of his pictures,
usually balancing unsteadily on one leg, symbols that had for the painter some definite
meaning, or was this simply a private joke of which he never tired? Some of his birds
and other creatures have square or lozenge-shaped eyes, the significance of which, if
any, is equally unfathomable. He seems to endow them, at times, with human attri-
butes: a crow, or a fish, will glower malevolently from the picture, and small fluffy birds
such as those in our reproduction display more self-satisfaction than one would expect
to encounter in the animal kingdom.
Chu Ta’s landscapes carry the same bizarre taste into more intricate compositions.
In the leaf from the landscape album in the Honolulu Academy of Arts, which is among

175
 his few works in color, a particular stroke, a bent arc, is repeated throughout the picture.
This, with the insistent ten, horizontal and vertical—the former serving also as the
foliage, and the latter as the trunks, of smaller trees—provides an extraordinary surface
consistency. The whole structure is pulled forward to the picture plane by a scattering
of dark accents and the contrived elimination of space. The painting agrees formally,
then, with dominant tendencies in recent Occidental art. It preserves an additional
dimension of meaning, however, by remaining a landscape, although a fantastic one,
representing a tilted, boulder-strewn promontory on a river shore, dominated by a
central spire.
The hanging scroll in the Shokokuji, a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, is a landscape
of a different sort, more sparse and less tightly knit in design, with even more of an air
of improvisation. Evidences of change of plan are visible here and there, and ambiguous
passages which are likely to have been only partially intentional. Despite a certain cold,
withdrawn quality in them, Chu Ta’s landscapes never appear so rationally controlled
as, for example, those of Wang Yiian-ch’i. They are more subject to momentary,
intuitive decisions, made by the artist as the painting proceeded. The twisting, rising
progression of rocks and ridges cannot be understood logically at every point, nor is
this a picture in which every stroke has a precise function and significance. Yet the
landscape has the organic unity of a natural growth, and a monumentality that evokes
echoes of the Northern Sung artists whom Chu Ta revered.
The supreme master among the individualists, the painter with greatest breadth of
vision and the finest technician as well, was Tao-chi, also known as Shih-t’ao. Like Chu a;
he was descended from one of the- Ming emperors, and took the vows to become a
Buddhist monk in 1644. He did not settle for long in any single place until his late years,
which were mostly spent in and around:the city of Yang-chou. Before that he traveled
constantly, visiting friends and climbing the famous mountains in various parts of China.
He followed the precepts of Kuo Hsi, absorbing sensory impressions from nature but
trying also to “understand the hidden forces of heaven and earth.” In setting forth his
understanding in paintings, he depended very little on existing styles; he is perhaps the
most inventive of all later artists. He states as a credo what was accepted, to varying
degrees, by the other individualists as well: “When asked if I paint in the manner of
the Southern or the Northern School, I reply with a hearty laugh that I do not know
whether I am of a school, or the school of me; I paint in my own style.”
Tao-chi’s belief in the “single brushstroke” as “the origin of existence and root of
the myriad phenomena,” alluded to briefly at the beginning of this book, and his develop-
ment of that theme in the first chapter of his treatise on landscape painting, establishes
once more the mysterious affinity between natural and artistic creation which the Sung
theorists had recognized. Once the artist has grasped this “method that is no-method,”
the principles with which all natural phenomena comply will govern also the formation
of his paintings. Out of a diversity of visual stimuli he composes a limited and ordered
system of forms which Victoria Contag, author of a study of Tao-chi and his treatise, has
identified with the “second reality” of Confucian thought. By pondering his perceptions,

176
Chu Ta (1625-c. 1705): Two Birds. Album leaf. Ink on paper. (121%4x 10%")
Collection of the late Kanichi Sumitomo, Oiso (Japan).

177
 Chu Ta (1625-c. 1705): Landscape. Album leaf. Ink and light colors on silk. (9%x11”)
Honolulu Academy of Arts.

Chu Ta (1625-c. 1705): Landscape. Hanging scroll. Ink on paper. (62%4x 18%") be
Shékokuji, Kyoto.

the artist becomes aware of the general in the particular, and a relationship between
seemingly disparate parts. Tao-chi often portrayed the scenery of specific places, relying,
no doubt, upon sketches or memories of his travels; but he so universalizes his experience
that one mountain becomes all mountains.

178
179
 Tao-chi (1641-c. 1717): A Man in a House beneath a Cliff. Album leaf.
Ink and light color on paper. (9%x11") Nii Wa Chai Collection.

The leaf in the superb album of the Nii Wa Chai collection represents a man in a
hut built beneath an overhanging cliff. But the movement of line in the drawing of rocks
is too grand, too sweeping, to be limited to particular objects, and the use of multiple
contours suggests the artist’s refusal to fix such limits. Tao-chi is not so much depicting
rocks as presenting to our senses the forces that mold and destroy rocks. Experiencing
empathically the movements of his hand as it wielded the brush, we take part in an

180
awesome act of creation. As in the landscape album leaf by Chu Ta, a combination of
calligraphic line and ten (Tao-chi introduces the novel method of applying them in
colors, here light blue and brown) pulls the picture forward for the most immediate
impact upon the viewer, besides supplying an extraordinary surface excitement. Tao-
chi’s leaf has even more of organic character than Chu Ta’s; the lines that serve as
contours and crevices of the rocks penetrate the forms as a vivifying network, like veins
and arteries in a living thing.
His short handscroll illustrating T’ao Ch’ien’s “Peach-blossom Spring” story achieves
nearly the same intensity of pictorial excitement, diluted only slightly by the addition
of literary content. It illustrates the tale of a fisherman who, by following a stream to
its source among blossoming peach trees, discovered a hidden valley in which the descen-
dants of refugees from the tyranny of the first Ch’in emperor had been dwelling in
secluded peace for centuries. When he returned to his home and reported the existence

Tao-chi (1641-c. 1717): The Peach-Blossom Spring. Section of a handscroll.

Ink and colors on paper. (H. 9%”) Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c.

181
 of this Elysium, a search party was sent out to locate it; but the valley could never be
found again. In Tao-chi’s painting we see the fishing boat moored at the head of the
stream, and the fisherman himself, still carrying his oar, being welcomed by the village
elder. Powerfully-formed spurs of earth and rock, washed with deep green and spotted
with colored tien, compartmentalize the composition, and divide the ideal, visionary
realm from the mundane one. Houses, figures and trees are depicted with a childlike
simplicity. Notably absent from the drawing are stereotyped forms and brushstrokes
of a predetermined, “ready-made” character. Tao-chi, the advocate of “the method
that is no-method,” adapts his technique to his needs, often avoiding even a complete
consistency within a single work. In spite of having thus sacrificed a fundamental
unifying device, however, he succeeds in preserving in his pictures the indispensable
quality of coherence.
A height of grandeur and universality is reached in Tao-chi’s masterwork, the great
Waterfall on Mt. Lu, a huge landscape painted on silk. The artist’s inscription refers to
Kuo Hsi, and appropriately: Tao-chi has indeed recaptured, for a brief moment, the
precarious balance between subjective and objective modes of vision, which had been
the triumph of Northern Sung landscape six centuries earlier. The painting is surely
not an accurate rendition of a particular scene. Yet it could not have been achieved before
the artist had acquired, through accumulated apprehensions of reality, a penetrating
knowledge of light, mist, the nature and structure of mountains. Perhaps it is Tao-chi
himself, the tireless climber of mountains, who stands on a jutting ledge near the bottom,
attended by a patient friend. An image of quiescence, he gazes not up toward the water-
fall, but down into the dense vapor that flows past, enveloping all but the top fringes of
pine trees and lapping around his feet. Beyond is a misty hollow, which opens back into
another; still another hollow lies further back, above an obscuring layer of fog, and
another beyond that. The waterfall pours over sheer precipices, from one level of the
vast chasm to the next. Mass and space seem to fuse, with the mists as flux. In the mind
of the musing scholar, one feels, the worlds of matter and spirit are similarly reconciled
by this overpowering vision.
In such works as these, the individualists of the early Ch’ing dynasty brought
landscape painting to still another great culmination. They drew the materials of their
paintings more directly from nature than had many of their scholar-artist predecessors
and contemporaries, even though the worlds they created out of sensory data, through
personal modes of organizing and generalizing, were sometimes so thoroughly transformed
as to preserve only the most tenuous ties with the physical world. Their brush techniques
were unorthodox and distinctive, but, except in the case of Chu Ta, seldom took on such
an independently expressive function as they had in the works of some other literati
painters. Their interpretations of reality were as individual as their pictorial styles, and,

Tao-chi (1641-c. 1717): The Waterfall on Mount Lu. Hanging scroll (upper section, with inscription, not included). »
Ink and light colors on silk. (w. 241%") Collection of the late Kanichi Sumitomo, Oiso (Japan).

182
183
like those of the Sung landscapists, depend ultimately on no extraneous philosophical
or religious systems. The question of whether the artist was Buddhist, as was K’un-ts’an,
or Confucianist, as Kung Hsien probably was, or one of the complex and personal
mixtures exemplified by Chu Ta and Tao-chi, seems to have had little to do with the
nature of the paintings. The landscapes stand as ace sca statements in themselves,
self-sufficient and compelling.
The Eighteenth Century: The Yang-chou Eccentrics and Others

Fi
Ss time in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, Wang Yiian-ch’1
wrote: “In painting of the late Ming period, there were mannerist tendencies and
degenerate movements, of which the Che School was the worst of all... The corrupt
practices of the Yang-chou and Nanking painters today are quite as bad as were those
of the Che School, and anyone who aims at a mastery of brush and ink must take pains
to avoid them.”
It was the protest of a guardian of tradition—Wang, for all his originality, was
that—against the growing favor with which stylistic unorthodoxy was being received.
Kung Hsien in Nanking, Tao-chi in Yang-chou, and the other individualists treated
in the previous chapter, while they had not, founded true schools, had set persuasive
examples; their admirers adopted less of their styles than of their attitude of refusal to
be bound by conventions. Wang Yiian-ch’i.and.the.other orthodox masters had their
following as well, but it consisted of more or less slavish imitators of manners of painting
already dangerously tinged with imitativeness, and came to nothing. Wang Yiian-ch’i’s
warning was heeded by few, and the strongest current in the eighteenth century was
individualism. Its character was affected, however, by the fact that individualism
now was not merely tolerated, but. had become positively popular. The boldness of
some eighteenth century eccentrics is the boldness of circus performers subduing
well-tamed lions.
An example of how the new situation affected painting may be seen in the career
of Kao Ch’i-p’ei, a Manchu by birth and an accomplished painter from the time he was
eight years old. His landscapes in a conservative style were much admired at the imperial
court, where he served in a high official post. Besides working in the traditional manner
with a brush, however, he developed an elaborate technique of finger painting, not only
employing the balls of his fingers and the side of his hand to apply broad streaks and
washes of ink and color, but also growing one fingernail to extra length and splitting it
like a pen, so that it could be used for drawing lines. The method was not entirely
new, but still served to give an air of novelty to the pictures, and, along with Kao’s
virtuoso technique and lively imagination, to make them very much in demand.
He eventually gave up the brush altogether, and his more meticulous style with it,

185
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Kao Ch’i-p’ei (c. 1672-1734): Landscape with Tall Peaks. Album leaf.
Ink and light colors on paper. (105x13”) Museum of Asiatic Art, Amsterdam.

to devote all his energies as an artist to the production of finger paintings. He is even said
to have employed assistants to add the colors, so as to be able to increase his output.
It is not surprising, in view of this mass-production method, that the level of
quality in his finger paintings is not uniformly high; too many of them seem more
vigorous than refined, and some are unpleasantly coarse. Like many other artists in
the late period, he is at his best in the album form, where he allows his imagination
full freedom in sustaining variety among the motives and compositions of the successive

186
leaves. The album of landscapes in the Museum of Asiatic Art, Amsterdam, is among
the finest, containing a number of striking and original pages, of which we reproduce
one. It presents a sinister vista of needle peaks and sickly trees, seen through the smoky
atmosphere of sunset. At the foot of the tallest peak, in what should perhaps be under-
stood as a valley, is a single house, forlorn-looking in this scarcely habitable place. The
effects of the finger painting technique are evident in the scratchy line—a fingernail,
however skillfully used, cannot produce so firm and continuous a line as a brush can—
and in the overlaid streaks of wash. Chinese critics liken Kao’s style to that of Wu Wei,
and although it is figure painting they refer to, some resemblance can be seen also
between the landscapes of the two (cf. p. 119): both combine rough, imprecise lineament
with uneven washes of ink into which light color is blended freely. Some influence of
the Che School lingers in the works of Kao Ch’i-p’ei, as Chinese writers remark.

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 With unorthodoxy now so generally accepted, independently inclined artists had
little fear—or hope—of shocking their contemporaries. Kao Ch’i-p’ei, as a part-time,
somewhat commercialized eccentric, appears in many of his works to have been trying
his best to startle and impress, even at the risk of falling into what the Chinese term
“vulgarity”. Nevertheless, his brushwork (or, properly, fingerwork), for all its abandon,
carries relatively little of true expressionist fervor. A more credible eccentric, but
another whose wildness often seems forced, was Kao Feng-han. Like Kao Ch’i-p’ei, he
appears in some of his works as a stylistic conservative, but is best known for pictures
in a freer, more extemporaneous manner, especially those done after he had lost the
use of his right arm through severe rheumatism and had begun to write and paint with
his left. He is seen at his best in the album in the former Abe Collection, Osaka, from
which we reproduce the first leaf. It is a swirling composition of swift, fluid line and
clean washes of ink and cool colors. The outlines of the peony petals are repeated in the
contours of the rocks, and the stamens of the flower in scattered patches of moss.
Kao Feng-han gives some suggestion of volume to his rocks with graded wash, then
negates it deliberately by writing a long inscription on the face of one of them. The
whole seems in the end more a display of calligraphy than a proper picture, but as such
it is a brilliant performance.
Kao Feng-han is sometimes connected loosely to the Yang-chou school, and has
occasionally even been numbered among the Eight Eccentrics of Yang-chou, even
though he was neither a native nor a resident of that city. The group known as the
Eight Eccentrics properly includes;three who can be recognized as major painters:
Chin Nung, Hua Yen and Lo P’ing, and five of lesser rank, all of whom lived in Yang-chou
for some portion of their lives. They gathered in the salons of rich merchants who had
made their fortunes in the salt trade or some other variety of commerce, and who now
competed as patrons of the arts, providing lavish entertainment for scholars, poets and
painters. The special tone of Yang-chou culture in this period was set by such gatherings,
at which wealth paid tribute to genius, and after genius, to eccentricity.
The most prominent among the Yang-chou painters around the middle of the
eighteenth century was Chin Nung. Far from displaying any artistic talent at an early
age, he began painting, we are told, only after turning fifty. In Chin Nung we may observe
once more, in a compound that no scientific analysis will ever resolve, the ingredients
of a genuine amateurish lack of proficiency and deliberate gaucherie. Su Tung-p’o had
written that in literature “it is not skill that is hard to achieve, but awkwardness” ;
the same paradoxical notion had been applied to painting theory in the literati school,
and a late Ming writer had gone so far as to advise against the cultivation of skill, on the
grounds that innate awkwardness, once lost, could never be recaptured. Chin Nung
guarded his amateurism carefully, allowing no technical refinements to spoil it. He was
nonetheless proud of his paintings, and his admiration for them was shared by his
contemporaries.
The leaf we have chosen from the album owned by Mr. H.C. Weng, which bears
a poem in Chin’s peculiar square-cut calligraphy, returns to the old theme of man

188
enjoying nature. A youth gazes across a lotus pond from a covered walk, resting one foot
on a low stool and leaning on the railing. The figure strikes an ungainly pose, but without
revealing in it any very distinct quality of temperament or mood, aside from a simple
relaxation. Similarly, the oddness of the composition seems not to result so much from
expressionist distortion as from sheer disregard for conventional canons of arrangement.
As in his other works, Chin Nung flattens his forms and composes them on the surface
in conformity with a special system of proportions—needless to say, his own. His
distinctive brushline is best seen here in the drawing of the figure and in the wavering
lines of the architecture. Any suspicion that this unsteadiness in the drawing might be
attributable merely to the effects of old age is dispelled by the firmly written inscription
above. Throughout the picture, and most of all in the lush and colorful setting—the
willow and other trees, the grassy shore, the pond itself—Chin Nung gives the impression
of being as aimless and relaxed as his subject, and of having nothing more substantial
to convey than the warm atmosphere of a summer day. The picture makes this genial
statement with such untroubled assurance that one accepts it as somehow significant.
The most versatile and technically accomplished of the Yang-chou masters was
Hua Yen. His pictures of birds, flowers and animals were highly praised in his time; his
landscapes received less attention. One of his contemporaries criticized them for “leaving
out too much.” Today the best of his landscapes, especially those in album-leaf form,
can be admired as small masterpieces of abbreviation. They recapture something of the
lyricism of Southern Sung album leaves, although they are very different in style and
reflect a less serious approach both to nature.and.to the art of painting, treating familiar
themes with a light, sometimes playful touch. It is just this lightness, this hint that the
painter himself did not take an entirely serious. view of his subject, that saves from senti-
mentality such a picture as the one reproduced here, an evocation of autumnal feeling
refined to a point just short of preciousness. A strolling scholar pauses to look pensively
across the water at a distant peak, his attitude of passive contemplation implicit in his
stance. A few red leaves drift down from the branches of the tallest tree, delicately
enhancing the mild melancholy of the scene. Neither the dry-brush lineament, soft but
never weak, nor the subtly off-balance composition carries any strong sense of purposeful
non-conformism. The intensely conceived and sometimes somber visions of the seven-
teenth century individualists have given way to less ambitious creations in a warmer,
gentler spirit. The artist seems no longer driven by any urge to set forth his private
understanding of the world at large, or to remake it according to some grand design
as a manifestation of his personal temperament, but is satisfied to muse quietly, a bit
distantly, on small aspects of nature and human experience.
By the beginning of the last quarter of the century, all but one of the Eight Eccen-
trics were dead. Lo P’ing remained, a solitary survivor of the last major school in Chinese
painting. His association with Chin Nung, who had been his teacher, had continued only
about seven years before it was terminated by Chin’s death. It is difficult to imagine
what Lo, a painter of some facility, could have learned about painting technique proper
from the determinedly amateurish Chin. One can suppose that he absorbed rather the

189
 Chin Nung (1687-after 1764): A Youth Gazing across a Lotus Pond. Album leaf. Ink and colors on paper. (11x9%")
H. C. Weng Collection, Scarsdale, New York.

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Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c.

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 special taste, along with some points of style, that had gained Chin his high esteem.
Lo P’ing himself became one of Yang-chou’s most popular painters, partly because he
was regarded as Chin Nung’s artistic heir, and partly also through a curious caprice of
his own: he painted ghosts, and claimed that his pictures of them were based on first-hand
observation. But this was another conscious eccentricity; the days when a painter could
see ghosts, or detect spiritual essences in rocks and trees, were long past, and it was
now difficult to transcend the matter-of-fact with any real conviction.
In the winter of 1798, less than a year before his death, Lo P’ing re-encountered
briefly an old friend called I-an, whom he had not seen for nine years, and painted for
him as a farewell present the picture with which we shall conclude our consideration
of Chinese painting. It is simultaneously a portrait of his friend and of the T’ang poet
Meng Hao-jan, whose fondness for blossoming plum is recalled in the branch held by
the figure. Lo P’ing’s poetic inscription refers to another poem, by Meng Hao-jan’s great
contemporary Li Po, in which Li tells of finding a line of poetry while wandering in the
forest, and resolves to save it to present to his friend Meng, implying that Meng, of all
people in the world, was the one who would best understand it and use it. Lo P’ing’s
allusion thus suggests, by analogy, the depth of his friendship with I-an. The old man
stands beside a fantastically hollowed rock, his head slightly bent, inhaling the fragrance
of the blossoms with conscious aestheticism. The sensitively drawn face wears a look of
world-weary melancholy so intense as to seem a bit grotesque. But this is not caricature,
or satire; it is the same subtle playfulness that gave its special flavor to the autumn scene
of Hua Yen. It is a kind of undirected-irony, serving only to suggest that emotions
once presented seriously, with an implicit demand that they be taken at face value,
can no longer be so treated, however’sincerely they may be felt in actuality. In spite
of this, perhaps partly because of it, the pathos of the figure is strangely affecting.
Lo P’ing draws in a style derived largely from that of Ch’en Hung-shou (cf. p. 157), who
had himself formed his figure style through half-serious play upon an archaic manner.
The whole expressive character of the picture and its inscription thus depends upon an
elaborate dialogue between present and past, between an individual of the highest
sensibility and a cultural heritage of which he was perhaps excessively aware.
The painting contains so many levels of meaning as to invite one to read still more
into it. Admitting this, we may still wonder, as we look at it, whether Lo P’ing was not
conscious of standing near the end of a long evolution, contemplating the past with the
same mild sadness as the figure he portrays. The painting sums up the special virtues of
the last phases of that evolution, but also exemplifies the paradoxes and contradictions
that had penetrated to the very heart of Chinese painting: awkwardness sublimated into
a kind of skill, individuality manifested in archaism, straightforward feeling set forth
through oblique allusions, serious points disguised as pleasantries. Every further degree
of concern with such interplay of opposites, every additional layer of stylistic reference,
had separated the artist that much more from the once-possible forthright approach
to the world. Thirteen centuries had passed since Tsung Ping had gazed at the landscapes
painted on the walls of his room and relived the travels of his youth, eight since Chao

192
 eg Clee roux
? 2 =

Lo P’ing (1733-1799): Portrait of the Artist’s Friend I-an. Dated 1798. Section of a hanging scroll
(cropped at top and bottom). Ink and light colors on paper. (w. 17%”) Private Collection, Washington, D.c.

493
Ch’ang had held a flower in his hand and “transcribed it” in painting. A good part of
the later history of Chinese painting testifies that withdrawal from nature as a direct
source for the content of an art need not mean the death of that art; but when the
withdrawal has proceeded so far as this, when simple aesthetic values have been so
thoroughly replaced by those so very sophisticated, the sustaining of a high level of
quality requires artists more sensitive, and endowed with more creative force, than
were to appear after Lo P’ing. The rest of Chinese painting was to remain, although
not always so explicitly as Lo P’ing’s work and seldom so movingly, a meditation
upon the past.

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ee
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ee
ee
ee
ae
ee
NSes
e
ee
e
a ee
 Table of Dynasties

PR ee 206 B.C 228 AD:

Chin, Three Kingdoms and Six Dynasties Periods 221 - 589
Oe a a ge OS
Ae ee Bees e ee = BIS = 908
Rive aie le es = OB -- 900
See 8 ee RD = 1290
Northern Sung. . . = Rly oe e D0 = 1127
Southern Sung. =. wo ERT - 1299
Wie 8 C.F 170 - 1968
Me SC «A308 = 1044
a a ee 1644 - I91I
 Selected Bibliography
of Book and Articles on Chinese Painting in Western Languages

General Victoria ContaG, Die sechs beriihmten Maley der Ch’ing

Dynastie, E.A. Seeman, Leipzig c. 1940. (Concerns the
James F. CanILi, Chinese Painting, r1th-14th centuries, Four Wangs, Yiin Shou-p’ing and Wu Li.)
Crown Publishers, New York 1960.
RIcHARD Epwarps, The landscape art of Li T’ang, in
Victoria ContaG, The unique characteristics of Chinese Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America, v. XII,
landscape pictures, in Archives of the Chinese Art Society 1958, p. 48-60.
of America, v. VI, 1952, p. 45-63.
RIcHARD Epwarps and TSENG HSsIEN-cuHI, Shen Chou
JEAN-PIERRE Dusosc, A new approach to Chinese at the Boston Museum, in Archives of the Chinese Art
Painting, in Oriental Art, n.s., v. III, 1950, p. 50-57. Society of America, v. VIII, 1954, p. 31-46.
SHERMAN E. LEE, Chinese Landscape Painting, The
WEN Fone, A letter from Shih-t’ao to Pa-ta-shan-jen and
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland 1954. (New edition
the problem of Shih-t’ao's chronology, in Archives of the
in preparation.)
Chinese Art Society of America, v. XIII, 1959, pp. 22-53-
Aran Priest, Aspects of Chinese Painting, Macmillan,
New York 1954. Jan Fontein, Een album van Kao Ch’i-p’ei, Bulletin of
the. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 1956, No. 3, p. 67-71.
SHojIrRG SHIMADA and YONEZAWA YOSHIHO, Painting
of Sung and Yiian Dynasties, Mayuyama Ryisendé, Tokyo HERBERT FRANKE, Dschau Mong-fu, das Leben eines
1952. chinesischen Staatsmannes, Gelehrien und Kiinstlers unter
LAURENCE SICKMAN and ALEXANDER SOPER, The Art
der Mongolenherrschajt, in Sinica, v. XV, 1940, p. 25-48.
and Architecture of China, Penguin Books, London and HERBERT FRANKE, Zur Biographie des Pa-ta shan-jen,
Baltimore 1956. in Asiatica, Festschrift Friedrich Weller, Otto Harrassowitz,
OsvaLD S1rEN, Chinese Painting, Leading Masters and Leipzig 1954, p. 119-130.
Principles, Lund Humphries, London 1956-1958. AscHWIN Lippe, Kung Hsien and the Nanking School,
PETER C. Swann, Chinese Painting, Editions Pierre in Oriental Art, n.s. v. II, 1956, p. 21-29; v. IV, p. 159-170.
Tisné, Paris 1958. (English and French editions.)
Max Loenr, A landscape attributed to Wen Cheng-ming,
ARTHUR WALEY, An Introduction to the Study of Chinese in Artibus Asiae, v. XXII, no. 1/2, 1959, p. 143-152.
Painting, Charles Scribner’s Son, New York 1923.
BENJAMIN RowLanpD, The problem of Hui-tsung, in
YONEZAWA YOSHIHO, Painting in the Ming Dynasty,
Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America, v. V,
Mayuyama Ryitsendé, Tokyo 1956.
1941, Pp. 5-22.

Individual Artists and Special Subjects SHodyrr6 Suimapa, Concerning the “‘i-p’in’’ style of
painting (transl. by James Cahill), in Oriental Art (to be
Bryutsu KeEenkytdsHo, Tokyo, Liang K’ai, Benridé, published in near future).
Kyoto 1957. (Japanese text with English résumé) OsvaLp S1REN, Shih-t’ao, painter, poet and theoretician,
James F. CanILL, Ch’ien Hsiian and his figure paintings, in Ostasiatiska Samlingarna, Bulletin n° 21, Stockholm
in Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America, v. XII, 1949, Pp. 31-62.
1958, p. 11-29.
ALEXANDER SoPER, Early Chinese landscape painting,
James F. CanILi, Confucian elements in the theory of in The Art Bulletin, v. XXIII, 1941, p. 141-164.
painting, in Arthur Wright, ed., The Confucian Persuasion,
ALEXANDER SoPER, Life-motion and the sense of space
Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 1960.
in early Chinese representational art, in The Art Bulletin,
HELEN BurwELt Cuapin, A long roll of Buddhist images v. XXX, 1948, p. 167-186.
in the Palace Museum, in Journal of the Indian Society
of Oriental Art, v. IV, 1936, p. 1-24, 116-125; v. VI, 1938, WERNER SPEISER, T’ang Yin, in Ostasiatische Zeit-
p. 26-67. (Concerns the handscroll painted by Chang schrift, 11. Jahrg., Heft 1/2, 1935, p. 1-21; Heft 3/4,
Sheng-wen.) p- 96-117.
Victoria ContaG, Die beiden Steine, Hermann Klemm, Sir AUREL STEIN, The Thousand Buddhas, B. Quaritch,
Brunswick c. 1950. (Concerns the painters K’un-ts’an Ltd., London 1921. (Concerns the paintings found at
and Tao-chi.) Tun-huang.)

199
 MICHAEL SuLLivan, On the origin of landscape represen- TsEene Yu-Ho, The “seven junipers” of Wen Cheng-ming,
tation in Chinese art, in Archives of the Chinese Art Society in Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America, v. VIII,
of America, v. VII, 1953, p. 54-65. 1954, P. 22-30.
MicHaxt SuLtivan, Pictorial avt and the attitude toward ArtHuR Watery, A Catalogue of Paintings Recovered
nature in ancient China, in The Art Bulletin, March 1954, from Tun-huang by Sir — Stein, The British Museum,
p. I-19. London 1931.
ARCHIBALD GIBSON WENLEY, “Clearing autumn shies over
Tsznc Yu-Ho, Notes on T'ang Yin, in Oriental Art, mouniains and valleys” attributed to Kuo Hsi, in Archives
n.s. v. II, 1956, p. 103-108. of the Chinese Art Society of America, v. X, 1956, p. 30-41.
TsENG Yu-Ho, A report on Ch'en Hung-shou, in Archives NeEtson Wu, The toleration of eccentrics, in Art News,
of the Chinese Art Society of America, v. XIII, 1959, May, 1957, Ppp. 27-29, 52-54. (Concerns the early Ch’ing
pp. 75-88. individualist painters.)
 Index of Names and Subjects

Abe Collection (Osaka) 16/18, 91, 92, Journey to Shu, 11th century copy Bodhidharma in the early 6th cen-
187, 188. of an 8th century composition (?) 26, tury 21, 47, 52, 96, 140;
Academy of Painting 38, 54, 85; 28, 55, 57, 67, 156; The Han Palace Ch’an Buddhist painters 47, 48,
of the Sung dynasty 38, 39, 43, 59, (misleading attribution to Chao 89, 92, 95, 96, 98, 99.
62, 70, 73, 74, 76, 80, 99, 117, 171; Po-chii), late 12th century 79, 81; Chang Feng (fl. c. 1645-1673), early
of the Southern Sung dynasty 76, A Market Village by the River (11th Ch’ing dynasty 156, 158;
79, 84, 85, 87, 93, 98, 137; or 12th century) 39, 43; Monkeys Gazing at a Red-leafed Maple across
of the Southern T’ang dynasty (at and Horses (toth century?), attri- a Ravine (dated 1660), Osaka,
Nanking) 46, 76; buted to Han Kan (8th century) 70, Yamato Bunka-kan 156/159.
of the Ming dynasty 117; 71; A Noble Scholar under a Willow Chang Hsiian (8th century), court
of the Ch’ing dynasty 161, 165, 185. (11th century?) 62, 63, 93, 156; painter 19/20, 45, 144;
action painting 29. Tokyo, Commission for the Protec- Ladies Preparing Newly-woven Silk,
America 80. tion of Cultural Properties: Two copy by Emperor Hui-tsung (early
Amitabha Buddha 1o, 23. Patriarchs harmonizing their Minds 12th century), Boston, Museum of
Amsterdam, Museum of Asiatic Art (Patriarch and Tiger) (copy after Fine Arts 19, 21;
186, 187. Shih K’o, toth, century?), 13th Lady Kuo-kuo and her Sisters
Anhui Province 171; century (?) 47, 49. Setting Forth on an Outing (12th
Anhui School of painting 171. Arhats (disciples of the historical century copy?, attributed to Li
animal painting 67, 70, 73/77, 100, Buddha) 16, 93, 94; pictures of Kung-lin), Taichung, Palace Mu-
117, 189. Arhats 93. seum Collection 19, 20.
Anonymous masters: Chang Seng-yu (early 6th century)
Baroque art Ior.
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts: ¥5, 16;
bird, flower and animal painting 67,
Figures painted on a tomb tile (2nd wall paintings in the Buddhist
70, 73/77, 100, 117, 189.
or 3rd century A.D.) 12, 13;
“blue-and-green” manner of land- temples of Nanking 15;
Kamakura, Sugahara Collection: The Planet Saturn, from The Five
scape 27, 79, IOI, 145.
A Branch of White Jasmine (mis- Planets and Twenty-eight Constella-
Bodhidharma (reputed founder of
leading attribution to Chao Ch’ang), tions, attribution (copy of the 11th
Ch’an Buddhism in China) 47.
12th century 75, 76; or 12th century?), Osaka Municipal
Bodhisattva 23, 52.
Kyoto, Ninnaji: The Peacock King Museum, former Abe Collection 15,
Book of Changes (divination text) 12.
(11th century) 50, 51; 16, I9.
Book of Documents 17.
Kyoto, Téfukuji: Portrait of the Ch’ang-sha (Hunan Province), tombs:
Book of Odes (c. 800-600 B.c.) 55.
Ch’an master Wu-chun (dated 1238) two fragments on silk (c. 3rd century
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts 12, 13,
48, 52, 53; B.C.) II.
21, 128, 129, 144.
London, British Museum: The Para- Chang Sheng-wen (active in the late
boundary painting (chieh-hua) 54.
dise of Amitabha Buddha (8th cen- 12th century in Yiinnan) 51, 52;
“broken ink” method (p’o-mo) in
tury?) from Tun-huang 10, 52; Sakyamuni Buddha Preaching
landscape painting 27.
New York, Metropolitan Museum (painted in the period 1173-1176),
Buddha 10, 23, 51, 52.
of Art: “The Tribute Horse” (The Taichung, Palace Museum Collec-
Buddhism 15, 16, 47, 49, 51, 153, 156,
Emperor Ming-huang’s Journey to tion 51, 52.
161, 174, 176, 184;
Shu?), 12th century 61, 62; Chang Yii, marquis under Ch’eng-ti
Buddhist monasteries 169; Bud-
Osaka Municipal Museum (former 59, O61.
dhist painting 21, 23, 52, 67, 156.
Abe Collection): Portrait of the Chao Ch’ang (early 11th century) 76,
Burning of the Books 17.
Scholar Fu Sheng (attributed to 192, 194;
Wang Wei, 699-759), 9th century calligraphy 12, 99, I0I, 112, 128, 132, A Branch of White Jasmine, mis-
16/19; 149, 158, 165, 174, 188. leading attribution (12th century),
Taichung, Palace Museum Collec- Caves of the Thousand Buddhas near Kamakura, Sugahara Collection 75,
tion: Birds in a Thicket of Bamboo Tun-huang, paintings discovered in 76.
and Plum (early 12th century?) 69, 10, 21, 23, 52, 67. Chao Kan (1oth century) 59, 123;
74/76, 119; Breaking the Balustrade Central Asia 15, 21. A River Journey at First Snowfall
(12th century?) 59, 60; Deer among Cézanne, Paul (1839-1906) 127, 167. (attribution), Taichung, Palace Mu-
Red-leafed Maples (10th century) Ch’an Buddhism (Japanese Zen), seum Collection 38, 58, 59, 62,
68, 70; The Emperor Ming-huang’s transmitted from India to China by 107.

201
 Chao Ling-jang (late Northern Sung Ch’iu Ying (c. 1510-1551) 137, 144/147; Fan K’uan (early 11th century), Sung
painter) 104. two landscapes in blue-and-green dynasty painter 31, 32, 35, 39, 40,
Chao Meng-fu (1254-1322), Yiian manner, Boston, Museum of Fine 43, 79;
painter 100/103, 105, 108, 113, 162, Arts and Kansas City, Nelson Traveling among Streams and Moun-
164; Gallery 144; tains, Taichung, Palace Museum
Autumn Colors on the Ch’iao and Passing a Summer Day beneath Collection 31/35, 38;
Hua Mountains (dated 1295), Banana Palms, Taichung, Palace Fan-lung (Ch’an Buddhist monk of
Taichung, Palace Museum Collec- Museum Collection 141, 146; the 12th century), painter of Arhats
tion Io, 103. Spring Morning in the Han Palace, 92, 94, 95;
Chao Po-chii (early 12th century), Taichung, Palace Museum Collec- An Arhat in the Forest (attribution),
painter of landscapes and palaces tion 144, 145; Washington, D.c., Freer Gallery of
79, 10%; Landscape in the Manner of Li T’ang, Art 94.
Tha Han Palace, misleading attri- Washington p.c., Freer Gallery of figure in Chinese painting 18, 25, 45,
bution (late 12th century), Taichung Art 146. 46, 61, 67, 100, 156, 187.
Palace Museum Collection 79, 81, Chou dynasty 55. finger painting 185/188.
149; Chou Ch’en (fl. c. 1500-1535) 137, 138, Five Dynasties period (906-960) 29,
Chao Yen (10th century), painter of 140, 144, 145, 147; 45/47, 58, 59, 70, 105, 164.
the Five Dynasties period 59; Dreaming of Immortality in a Four Great Masters of Yiian dynasty
Eight Riders in Spring (attribution), Thatched Cottage (probably by Chou painting 105, 113, 117, 125.
Taichung, Palace Museum Collec- Ch’en), Washington, pb.c., Freer Four Wangs 162, 164.
tion 56, 59. Gallery of Art 138, 139. Fu-ch’un mountains 109, 112, 113.
Chardin, Jean-Baptiste Siméon (1699- Chou Fang (second half of the 8th Fu Sheng, Confucian scholar (early
1779) 21. century), court painter 19, 21, 45, Han dynasty) 16/19.
Che School 117, 120, 123, 136, 137, 144;
147, 149, 185, 187. Ladies Playing Double Sixes (attri-
Chekiang Province 120, 121, 153, 158. genre picture in Occidental painting
bution), Washington, p.c., Freer
Chen-hsing (the planet Saturn) 16. Gallery of Art 22. 21.
Ch’en Hung-shou (1599-1652), painter Chou Wen-chii, figure painter of the
of the Ming dynasty 147, 153, 156, Southern T’ang dynasty 45, 46, haiku, Japanese poets 8o.
158, 192; 1443 Han dynasty (206 B.c.-22I A.D.) 12,
Boating on the Lake, Lugano, J. P. A Palace Concert (School of Chou 15, 16, 25, 593
Dubosc Collection 152; Wen-chii, roth century), Taichung, literature of the Han dynasty 12.
Illustrations to the “Homecoming” Palace Museum Collection 45, 46. Han Kan (8th century), horse painter
Ode of T’ao Ytian-ming, Honolulu Christianity 165. 70, 100;
Academy of Arts 156, 157. Chii-jan (1oth century), painter of the Monkeys and Horses (attribution),
Ch’en Shun (1483-1544), painter of the Five Dynasties, pupil of Tung Taichung, Palace Museum Collec-
Wu School 131, 133; Yiian 29, 137. tion 70, 71;
Mountains in Clouds (dated 1535), Chu Ta._(or Pa-ta Shan-jen, 1625-c. Yang Kuei-fei Mounting a Horse,
Washington p.c., Freer Gallery of 1705), Buddhist monk and painter copy (?) by Ch’ien Hsiian (13th
Art 133, 134. 121, 174/176, 184; century), Washington, D.c., Freer
Ch’eng-ti, Han emperor 59, 60. Landscape, Honolulu Academy of Gallery of Art 100.
Chengtu (capital of the Shu State) 46. Arts 175, 176, 178, 181; Hang-chou, capital of the Southern
Chia-ting (city) 165. Landscape, Kyoto, Sh6kokuji 179; Sung dynasty (1127-1279) 32, 38,
Chiang-nan region (South-of-the- Two Birds, Oiso, Collection of the 76, 79, 84, 100, 112, 120; defeated
River) 45, 79, 107, 117, 125, 171. late Kanichi Sumitomo 175, 177. by the Mongols (1276) 99.
Ch’iao mountain 101, 103. Chu Yiian-chang, Buddhist monk Hellenic style tor.
chieh-hua, boundary painting 54. (became first emperor of the Ming Honolulu Academy of Arts 157, 175,
Ch’ien Hsiian (c. 1235-1301), Yiian dynasty) 117. 179.
painter 100/103, 105, 144; Chu Yiin, minister under Cheng-ti Hsia Kuei (fl. c. 1190-1230), Academy
Wang Hsi-chih Gazing at Geese, 59, 60. landscapist, co-founder of the Ma-
New York, C.C. Wang Collection classical art of the Mediterranean Hsia School 80, 82, 84, 85, 121, 137;
IOI, 102; region 15. A Pure and Remote View of Rivers
Yang Kuei-fei Mounting a Horse (copy Commission for the Protection of the and Mountains, Taichung, Palace
after Han Kan?, 8th century), Cultural Properties, Tokyo 49, 90, Museum Collection 84, 85.
Washington, p.c., Freer Gallery of 98. hsiang (images) I1.
Art 100, Confucianism 12, 16, 18, 25, 125, F347: Hsiang Yiian-pien (1525-c.1602),
Ch’in dynasty (221-206 B.c.) 181. 165, 176, 184; collector 144.
Chin Nung (1687-after 1764), eccen- Confucianists 12, 15; Hsiao-Hsiang region 93, 96.
tric painter 188, 189, 192; Confucian literati 47, 89, 96, 99. hsieh-sheng (“transcription from life”)
A Youth Gazing across a Lotus Pond, Contag, Victoria 176. 76.
Scarsdale, N.Y., H. C. Weng Collec- Hsin Ch’ing, minister under Ch’eng-ti
tion 188, 190. Double Seven, autumn festival 79. 60, 61.
Chin Tartars 38, 79, 99. Dubosc, Jean Pierre 167; collection Hsii Tao-ning (follower of Li Ch’eng),
Chinese poetry 16, 55. (Lugano) 152, 166, landscape painter 32.
Ch’ing dynasty (1644-1912) 121, 158, Hsii Wei (1521-1593), “wild” master
161, 171, 184; Eccentric Painters 185, 188. 21, 136, 158, 159, 175;
court academy 161, 165, 185; Edo period, Japan (1615-1867) 144. Bamboo, Washington, D.c., Freer
individualist painters of the period Eight Eccentrics of Yang-chou 185, Gallery of Art 154, 158, 175.
125, 136, 164, 169, 184. 188, 189, 192. Hsiian-tsung (emperor, reigned 1427-
Ching Hao (active in the late 9th and Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888) tor, 1435), amateur painter 117, 120,
early 1oth centuries) 29. Ernst, Max (1891), 113. 121.
Ch’ing-ling, Liao tombs and wall Europe 80; European painting 11; hua (to paint) 11.
paintings (11th century) 67. genre painting 21. Hua-t’ing (near Su-chou), School 153.

202
Hua Yen (1682-1765), Yang-chou Kao K’o-kung (1248-1310), amateur Chang Hsiian attributed to him),
painter 188, 189, 192; painter, President of the Board of Taichung, Palace Museum Collec-
An Autumn Scene, dated 1729, Justice in Peking under Khubilai tion 19, 20.
Washington, D.c., Freer Gallery of 102, 103, 105; Li Po (c. 705-762), T’ang poet 84, 90,
Art 189, IgI. Green Hills and White Clouds (pro- 98, 102.
Huang Kung-wang (1269-1354), Yiian bably by him), Taichung, Palace Li Sung (12th-13th century), member
master 109, I10, I12, 162, 164; Museum Collection 103, 104, 107, of the Southern Sung Academy 53,
treatise on landscape 112; 153- 54;
Dwelling in the Fu-ch’un Mountains, Kao K’o-ming (landscapist of the The Knick-knack Peddler, dated
dated 1350, Taichung, Palace Mu- Sung dynasty) 40; 1210, Taichung, Palace Museum
seum Collection 109, 112, I13. Clearing After Snow on the River, Collection 53, 54.
Hui-tsung (emperor in 1101-1125), dated 1035, New York, John M. Li T’ang (fl. early 12th century), land-
bird-and-flower painter 18, 38, Crawford, Jr. Collection 38, 41. scapist 38, 39, 40, 42, 79, 80, 137, 140,
73/77) 117; Khitan Tartars, Liao dynasty 67. 146, 147;
Ladies Preparing Newly-woven Silk, Khubilai (1215-1294), grandson of landscape, dated 1124, Taichung,
copy after Chang Hsiian (8th cen- Jenghiz Khan 99, 100, 107, Palace Museum Collection 39, 42;
tury), Boston, Museum of Fine Arts Korea 80. handscroll in the Palace Museum 42;
19, 21; Ku K’ai-chih (born c. 345) 14/16, 26, A Myriad Trees on Strange Peaks
Two Finches on Twigs of Bamboo, 156; (probably by Li T’ang, early 12th
New York, John M. Crawford, Admonitions to the Court Ladies century, misleading attribution to
Jr. Collection, 73/75; (attribution), London, British Mu- Yen Wen-kuei, 1oth-11th century),
Academy of 74, 76, 117; seum 14/16; Taichung, Palace Museum Collec-
Birds in a Thicket of Bamboo and The Nymph of the Lo River (attribu- tion 40, 42, 80, 138.
Plum, early 12th century, Taichung, tion), copy of the 12th or 13th Li Yii (937-978), poet-emperor of the
Palace Museum Collection 69, 74/ century, Washington, D.c., Freer Southern T’ang dynasty 45, 46;
76, 119; Gallery of Art 26, 27, 55, 62. Academy of Li Yii 45, 46, 76.
catalogue of the emperor’s collection Kuan T’ung (active in the late 9th Liang K’ai (fl. mid-13th century),
45, 59, 74, 76. and the early roth centuries) 29. figure painter 90, 98, 99;
human figure in Chinese painting 18, Kuan-yin (a Bodhisattva) 98. Li Po Chanting a Poem, Tokyo,
25, 45, 46, 61, 67, 100, 156, 187; K’un-ts’an (c. 1610-1693) 169, 171, Commission for the Protection of
in Occidental art 25. 172, 184; Cultural Properties 98.
Hunan Province It. The Pao-en Temple, 1664, Oiso, Liao dynasty (of the Khitan Tartars,
Hung-jen (c. 1603-1663), painter 171, Collection of the late Kanichi 1oth-11th centuries) 67.
P72; Sumitomo 170, 171. literati painting (wen-jen-hua) or
Rivers and Mountains Without End, K’ung-chiao Ming-wang (Peacock painters 89, 91, 92, 96, 99, IOI, 105,
dated 1661, Oiso, Collection of the King, deity) 50, 51. 107, 109, 112, 113, 110, 132;/.134,
late Kanichi Sumitomo 171, 173. Kung Hsien (c. 1620-1689), painter in 136, 137, 140, 142, 144, 147, 149,
Nanking 172, 184,9185; 153, 161, 164, 165, 167, 171, 172,
I-an, Lo P’ing’s friend 192, 193. Trees in a Landscape, Kansas City, 184, 188;
Ikkoku, Japanese priest, founder of William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of the Sung dynasty 109, 161;
the Téfukuji, temple at Kyoto 52. of Art 174. of the Yiian period 105, 107, 109,
India- 15, 16,21, 47. Kuo Hsi, landscapist of the Northern 121;
individualist painters 125, 149, 153, Sung period 32, 35, 37, 38, 40, 70, of the Ming dynasty 123, 125;
TOI, 160, 171%,.172;- 176,185, 189. 79, 80, 113, 127, 136, 176, 184; literati writers 89, 147.
“ink-splashers” (T’ang period) 91. treatise on landscape 35, 40, 74; literature of China 21.
ink monochrome painting 19, 29, 31, Autumn in the River Valley (attri- Liu-t’ung-ssu (monastery near Hang-
46, 47, I15, 131, 140. bution), Washington, D.c., Freer chou) 98.
Gallery of Art 37, 38, 40; Lo P’ing (1733-1799), eccentric pain-
i-p’in (“untrammeled” styles) 29, 46, Early Spring, dated 1072, Tai- ter 188, 189, 192/194;
47, 89, 158. chung, Palace Museum Collection Portrait of the Artist’s Friend I-an,
Japan 46, 52, 80, 95, 164; collections
35/38, 40, 136, 142. dated 1798, Washington, D.c., Pri-
Kuo-kuo, Lady 19, 20. vate collection 192, 193.
in Japanese temples 49, 52;
Edo period (1615-1867) 144. Kyoto (Japan), Daitokuji, Zen Bud- London, British Museum 10, 14, 23.
dhist temple 97, 98; Lu mountain 182/184.
Jenghiz Khan (1162-1227) 99.
Buddhist temples: Ninnaji 50; Lu Chih (1496-1576), painter of the
Jesuit order 165.
Shokokuji 176, 179; T6fukuji 48, Wu School 131, 132;
K’ai-feng, capital of the Northern 52; Autumn Colors at Hsiin-yang, dated
Sung period (960-1127) 32, 38. Fujii Yurinkan 96. 1554, Washington, D.c., Freer Galle-
K’ang-hsi, Ch’ing emperor (reigned ry of Art 132, 133;
1622-1722) 165. “level-distance” composition 58, 101. River Scene in Spring, dated 1535,
Kansas City, William Rockhill Nelson ii (natural order, or “rightness”) 105, Taichung, Palace Museum Collec-
Gallery of Art 30, 144, 174. 112. tion 131, 132.
Kansu Province 21. Li Ch’eng (roth century) 29/32, 35, Lu T’an-wei, 5th century painter 15.
Kao Ch’i-p’ei (c. 1672-1734), Manchu 58, 70;
painter 185/188; A Buddhist Temple in the Mountains Ma-Hsia school 80, 84, 85, 87.
Landscape with Tall Peaks, Amster- (attribution, probably 11th century Ma Lin (son of Ma Yiian, fl. mid-13th
dam, Museum of Asiatic Art 186, in actual date), Kansas City, century), Academy landscapist 84/
187. William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of 87;
Kao Feng-han (1683-after 1747), Art 30, 32. The Fragrance of Spring: Clearing
eccentric painter 188; Li Kung-lin (1040-1106), literati paint- After Rain, Taichung, Palace Mu-
Peonies and Rocks, dated 1734, er 20, 92, 98, 100; seum Collection 85, 87;
Osaka Municipal Museum (former Lady Kuo-kuo and her Sisters Listening to the Wind in the Pines,
Abe Collection) 187, 188. Setting forth on an Outing (copy after seal with the date 1246, Taichung

203
 Palace Museum Collection 62, 64, Metropolitan Museum of Art 61, 62; Walking with a Staff, Palace Mu-
65, 80, 84, 85; C. C. Wang Collection 82, 83, 102, seum Collection 125/127, 134, 153,
Wanting for Guests by Lampblight, TIO, 113, 162: 167;
Taichung, Palace Museum Collec- Ni Tsan (1301-1374), landscape paint- Watching the Mid-Autumn Moon,
tion 84, 86, 87. er III, 112, 115, 125, 127, 132, 153, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts 127/
Ma Yiian (fl. c. 1190-1230), Academy 166, 167, 171; 129.
landscapist, co-founder of the Ma- Trees in a River Valley at Yii-shan, Sheng Mou (fl. c. 1310-1361) 108;
Hsia school 62, 80, 82, 84, 85, 87, dated 1371, New York, C. C. Wang Boating on the River in Autumn
TOL, 12E,. 137; Collection 110, III, 113, 125. (inscription by a friend of the artist,
A Scholar and His Servant on a “Northern and Southern Schools” of dated 1361), Taichung, Palace Mu-
Terrace, New York, C.C. Wang painting 149, 176. seum Collection 108, 109.
Collection 82, 83; Nii Wa Chai Collection 150, 151, 153, Shih-ch’i (see K’un-ts’an) 169.
Walking on a Mountain Path in 180. Shih K’o (artist of the Five Dynasties
Spring, Taichung, Palace Museum period) 46, 47;
Collection 80, 82. Occidental art 16, 25, 43, 62, 91, Two Patriavchs Harmonizing their
Macao, Portuguese colony 165. 99, 176. Minds (Patriarch and Tiger, copy
Manchu invasion of China, cf. Ch’ing genre painting 21. after?; roth century), Tokyo, Com-
dynasty 153, 154, 156, 158. Ogodai (1185-1241), son of Jenghiz mission for the Protection of Cultu-
Manchuria 67. Khan 99. ral Properties 47, 49.
Mao I (12th century), Academy artist Oiso, Collection of the late Kanichi Shih-t’ao (see Tao-chi), individualist
of the Southern Sung 76, 77; Sumitomo 170, 173, 177, 182, 183. painter 176.
Mother Cat and Kittens in a Garden “orthodox” masters 161, 164, 165, Shu (Szechwan Province) 26, 55, 57,
(attribution), Osaka, Yamato 167, 169, 185; 61, 62, 67, 156.
Shu state (Five Dynasties period) 45,
Bunka-kan 76, 77; Six Great Orthodox Masters of the
Bitch and puppies 76. Early Ch’ing 164. 46.
Mediterranean, classical art of the 15. Osaka, Municipal Museum (former Shuo wen, first Chinese dictionary
Meng Hao-jan (689-740), T’ang poet Abe Collection) 16/18, 91, 92, 187, (100 A.D.) II.
192. 188; Six Dynasties period (220-589) 12, 19,
Mi Fu (1052-1109), painter, antiqua- Yamato Bunka-kan Collection 77, 25, 62;
rian and collector 91, 94, 104, 133- 156, 157.. Six Dynasties painters 15.
“Mi-style” 1. Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-1072), writer 113. Spenser, Edmond (1552-1599) ol.
Mi Yu-jen (1086-1165), son of Mi Fu, Strawinsky, Igor (1882) trot.
literati painter 91, 92, 96, 133, 172; pai-miao (drawing in fine ink line) 92, Su-chou (Chiang-nan region) 125, 128,
Mountains in Clouds, Osaka Muni- 98. 131, 137, 139, 140, 142, 145, 153.
cipal Museum (former Abe Collec- Palace Museum Collection at Taichung Su Tung-p’o (Su Shih, 1036-1101),
tion) 91, 92, 96. 20, 31/33, 37, 39, 42, 46, 51/53, poet and painter 89, 9I, 94, 95,
Ming dynasty (1368-1644) 117, I19/ 56/58, 60;°63, 64, 67/72, 81, 82, 113, 161, 188,
I2I, 136, 144, 154, 161, 162, 169, 85/87, 103, 104, 109, II0, 114, 120/ Sugahara collection, Kamakura 75,76.
172, 174/176, 185, 188; 1225 126/128, 130/132, 135, 140/ Sui dynasty (589-618) 16.
Academy Painting 117; 143, 145, 146, 151, 163. Sun K’o-hung (1532-1610), painter of
blue-and-white porcelains 121; Pao-en Temple, near Nanking on the the Hua-t’ing School 151, 153;
court painting 117, 119, I2I, 123, Yangtze River 170, 171. The Moon Rises, from Elegant Diver-
125, 133, 137, 140, 142, 147, 153, Pa-ta Shan-jen (see Chu Ta), painter sions for Leisure Hours, Taichung,
158, 171. 174. Palace Museum Collection 151, 153.
Ming-huang, emperor of the T’ang Peking (capital of China) 99, 100, 102, Sung dynasty (960-1279) 32, 45, 47,
dynasty (reigned 713-756) 26, 62, 117, 128, 154; 54, 58, 67, 79, 84, 89, 99, 117, 137;
100; Han-lin Academy 128; painting 29, 32, 35, 52, 67, 70, IOI,
Emperor Ming-huang’s Journey to Academy of Learning 154. 104, 105, 125, 128, 137, 140, 144, 147,
Shu 26, 28, 55, 57, 61, 62, 67, 156. Picasso, Pablo (1881) tor. 156, 158, 165, 172, 184;
Mongolia 67. Pien Wen-chin (fl. early 15th century) sculpture 52;
Mongols, invasion of the (13th centu- 117, 118, 120; writers of the 25, 34, 70, 76, 91;
Ty) 99, 100, 107, I17. The Three Friends and Hundred Northern Sung period (960-1127)
monochrome painting (cf. ink mono- Birds, dated 1413, Taichung, Palace 32, 35, 38, 52, 70, 79, 103, 137, 161;
chrome painting). Museum Collection 117, 118, 120. Northern Sung landscape painting
Mu-ch’i (fl. mid-13th century), Ch’an Po Chii-i (772-846), T’ang poet 138; 31, 41, 70, 76, 80, 99, 105, 109, 113,
painter, abbot of Liu-t’ung-ssu 93, Lute Song (816) 132, 133. 115, 136, 137, 142, 176, 184;
95, 96, 98, 99; poetry of China 16, 55. Southern Sung period (1127-1279)
Evening Glow on a Fishing Village, pointillism in Chinese painting gr. 32, 39, 54, 75, 80, 95, 99, 121;
from Eight Views of the Hsiao- p’o-mo (“broken ink” method of Southern Sung landscape painting
Hsiang Region (attribution), Tokyo, painting) 27. 40, 75, 83, 100, 102, 108, 109g, 112,
Nezu Art Museum 93, 96; Post-Impressionism in Europe 91. II5, 121, 123, 137, 189.
Mother Monkey and Child, Kyoto, Surrealism 113.
Daitokuji 97, 98. Renaissance painting 16. Szechwan Province 26, 46.
romanticism in Occidental art 62, 99.
Rousseau, Henri (1844-1910) tot. Tai Chin (fi. early 15th century),
Nanking 45, 46, 155, 171, 172, 185; landscapist 118, 119, 121/123;
Academy 46, 58; Sakyamuni Buddha 23, 51. Returning Late from a _ Spring
School of painting 172; Scarsdale, New York, H.C. Weng Outing, attribution, Taichung, Pa-
fall under the Manchus (1645) 156. Collection 188, 190. lace Museum Collection 120/122;
Near Eastern painting 67. Shanghai 165. Fishermen on the River, Washington,
Neo-Confucianism 32, 43, 47. Shen Chou (1427-1509), founder of the D.c., Freer Gallery of Art 118, 121.
New York, John M. Crawford, Jr., Wu School 125, 127/129, 131, 136, Taichung, Palace Museum Collection
Collection 41, 73; 153, 164; (see Palace Museum).

204
T’ang Dynasty (618-906) 15, 16, 18, Autumn Landscape, Nii Wa Chai Wen Chia (1501-1583), son of Wen
25, 29, 45/47, 52, 67, 91; Collection 151, 153. Cheng-ming 133, 134;
painting of the T’ang dynasty 19, Tung Yiian (907-960), painter 29, 43, Landscape in the Spirit of Verses
21, 23, 26, 27, 32, 52, 55, 59, 61, 76, 58, 91, IOI, 104, 113, 137, 161. by Tu Fu, dated 1576, Taichung,
79, 92, 100, IOI, 121, 144, 156, 158, Palace Museum Collection 134/136.
164; wen-jen-hua (see literati painting)
Ukiyo-e school (during the Edo period
sculpture 19; in Japan) 144. 89.
poetry 80, 84, 132, 156, 192; Wen Po-jen (1502-1575?), nephew of
unknown painters (see anonymous
Southern T’ang period 45, 46, 75; Wen Cheng-ming 133.
masters).
Southern T’ang painting 45/46. “untrammeled” styles (see i-p’in) 29,
Weng H.C., Collection, Scarsdale,
T’ang Hou (14th century theorist) 95. N.Y. 188, Igo.
T’ang Yin (1470-1523) 137/140, 142,
46, 47, 89, 158. West Lake 79.
144, 145, 147, 158; woodblock prints of the Ming period
Secluded Fishermen on an Autumn Vermeer, Jan (1632-1675) 21.
144, 153-
River (inscription by a friend, dated Wu Chen (1280-1354), one of the
1523), Taichung, Palace Museum Waley, Arthur 23. “Four Great Masters” 107/109,
Collection 140, 142; Wang, C.C., Collection 82, 83, 102, 12T,; 123; 127;
Clearing After Snow in a Mountain TIO; I21;. 162. Fishermen, painted in 1342, Wash-
Pass, Taichung, Palace Museum Wang Chien (1598-1677), one of the ington p.c., Freer Gallery of Art
Collection 140, 143. “Four Wangs 162, 164. 107,212,120.
Tao-chi (1641-c. 1717), or Shih-t’ao, Wang Hsi-chih (321-379), calligrapher Wu-chun (Ch’an master), portrayed in
individualist painter in Yang-chou Ior. a picture now in the Tdfukuji,
147, 176, 178, 181, 182, 184, 185; Wang Hui (1632-1717), one of the Kyoto (1238) 48, 52, 53-
treatise II, 113, 176; “Four Wangs” 164, 165. Wow-hsien (region around Su-chou) 125,
A Man in a House beneath a Cliff, Wang Meng (c. 1309-1385), one of the 137;
Nii Wa Chai Collection 180, 181; “Four Great Masters” 113, I15, the Wu School 125, 131/133, 136,
handscroll illustrating T’ao Ch’ien’s 27, TOz; 137, 142, 153.
Peach-blossom Spring, Washington, Forest Dwellings at Chii-ch’ti, Tai- Wu-hsing, city north of Hang-chou
p.c., Freer Gallery of Art 181, 182; chung, Palace Museum Collection 100.
The Waterfall on Mount Lu, Oiso, 113, 114, 128. Wu Li (1632-1718), painter 164, 165,
Collection of the late Kanichi Sumi- Wang Mo (8th-gth century), painter 167;
tomo 182/184. gl. Boating on the River below a Buddhist
T’ao Yiian-ming or T’ao Ch’ien (365- Wang Shih-min (1592-1680), land- Temple, Taichung, Palace Museum
427), poet 62; scapist 161, 162, 164, 165, 167,171; Collection 163.
The Peach-blossom Spring (illustrat- Landscape in the Manner of Chao Wu Tao-tzu, figure painter of the
ed by Tao-chi), Washington, D.c., Meng-fu, dated=1670, New York, T’ang dynasty 19, 92.
Freer Gallery of Art 181; C. C. Wang Collection 162, 164. Wu Wei (1459-1508) 119, 121/123,
“Homecoming” Ode (illustrations by Wang T’ing-yiin (1151-1202), nephew 187;
Ch’en Hung-shou), Honolulu Aca- of Mi Fu, landscapist and literati The Pleasures of the Fishing Village,
demy of Arts 156, 157. painter 94/96,°98; Washington, D.c., Private Collection
Taoism, influence of 25, 26, 43, 47, Secluded 'Bamboo'and Withered Tree, IIg, 121, 123.
138, 161; Taoist monasteries 169. Kyoto, Fujii Yirinkan 95, 96.
Tchaikowsky, Peter (1840-1893) Io1. Wang Wei (699-759), T’ang poet, ink- Yang-chou, city 176, 185, 188, 192;
tien (dots of painting) 91, 112, 127, monochrome landscape painter 19, Eight Eccentric painters 185, 188,
132, 164, 165, 176, 181, 182. 273 189, 192.
Tokyo, Nezu Art Museum 93; Portrait of the Scholar Fu Sheng Yang Kuei-fei, consort of T’ang
Commission for the Protection of (attribution), Osaka, Municipal Mu- Emperor Ming-huang 19, 62,
Cultural Properties 49, 90, 98. seum (former Abe Collection) 16/19. 100.
ts’a-pi, “squeezed brush” 140. Wang Yiian-ch’i (1642-1715), one of Yangtze River 29, 38, 45, 79, 99, 117,
Ts’ui Po (11th century) 70, 74; the “Four Wangs” 136, 164/167, FyTs
Hare and Jays, dated 1061, Tai- 171, 176, 185; Yellow River (Huang-ho) 45.
chung, Palace Museum Collection River Landscape in the Manner of Yen Wen-kuei (r1oth-11th century
Ni Tsan, dated 1704, Lugano, J. P. painter), misleading attribution:
72174. A Myriad Trees on Strange Peaks,
ts’un, texture strokes 29, 70; Dubosc Collection 166, 167.
“axe-cut ts’un” 38, 40, 140; Washington, p.c., Freer Gallery of probably by Li T’ang, Taichung,
“raindrop ts’un” 34, 40. Art 19, 22, 26, 27, 37, 38, 40 94, Palace Museum Collection 40, 42,
Tsung Ping (375-443) 26; Preface on 1oo, 108, 118, 133, 134, 138, 146, 80, 138.
Painting Landscape 25, 26, 35, 192. 147, 154, 181, 191. Yiian dynasty (1280-1368) 80, 87, 95,
Tu Fu (712-770), poet 134, 135. Wen Cheng-ming (1470-1559), Shen 99, 109, 112, 117, 128, 149, 169;
Tun-huang (Kansu Province), Caves Chou’s pupil, painter and calli- Yiian dynasty painters 99/105, 107,
of the Thousand Buddhas, paint- grapher 128, 129, 131/133, 136, 109, 113, 121, 125, 127, 129, 136,
ings discovered in 10, 21, 23, 52, 67. 140, 144; 153, 156, 162, 165, 171.
Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1555-1636), painter Old Trees by a Cold Waterfall, dated Yiin Shou-p’ing (1633-1690), painter
149/151, 153, 156, 161, 162, 165, 1549, Taichung, Palace Museum 164.
167, 169; writings on painting 149; Collection 128, 130, 131. Yiinnan Province 52.
 List of Colorplates

Anonymous (second or third century A.D.): Figures painted on a tomb tile. Ink and colors on a clay
surface. (H. 7%”) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston . os 13
Anonymous (eighth century?): The Paradise of Amitabha Buddha. Hangingscroll from Ton-huang
Ink and colors on silk. (54x40”) British Museum, London . : : Io
Anonymous (eleventh century copy of an eighth century composition?) : The hued Ming-huang’s
Journey to Shu. Detail from a hanging scroll. Ink and colors on silk. Palace Museum Collection,
Taichung . ; sities 28
Idem, another detail 57
Anonymous (ninth century?); attributed to Wang Wei ¥ (699-759): Portrait of the Scholar Fu Sheng.
Section of a handscroll. Ink and colors on silk. oepe ¢ Osaka Municipal Museum a Abe
Collection) : 18
Anonymous (tenth century): Deer among Red-leafed neni Detail from a sini scroll. Ink and
colors on silk. Palace Museum Collection, Taichung~. : rots 68
Anonymous (tenth century?) ;attributed to Han Kan (eighth century) :ickeys and Horses.eos
scroll (cropped at top). Ink and colors on silk. (w. 19”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung 71
Anonymous (eleventh century): The Peacockpee Detail from a — scroll. Ink and colors
on silk. Ninnaji, Kyoto : ore 50
Anonymous (eleventh century?): A Noble Scholar under a Willow. Hangings scroll. Ink and colors
on silk. (25%x15%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung. est Reape pe 63
Anonymous (eleventh or twelfth century): A Market Village by the River. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and light colors on paper. (H. 11%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung. SResces 39
Anonymous (early twelfth century?): Birds in a Thicket of Bamboo and Plum. Detail from a bene
scroll. Ink and colors on silk. Palace Museum Collection, Taichung. epee 69
Anonymous, twelfth century (misleading attribution to Chao Ch’ang): A Branch of White Jasmine.
Album leaf. Ink and colors on silk. (9%4x10%”) Sugahara Collection, Kamakura (Japan) . 75
Anonymous (twelfth century?) :Breaking the Balustrade. Hanging scroll (cropped at mp andoe
Ink and colors on silk. (w. 40”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung ‘ 60

Anonymous (twelfth century?): “The Tribute Horse” (The Emperor Ming-huang’s oun to Shu?).
Detail from a hanging scroll. Ink and colors on silk. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 61

Anonymous: Portrait of the Ch’an Master Wu-chun. Dated 1238. Detail from a —— scroll. Ink
and colors on silk. Téfukuji, Kyoto : lore e 48

Anonymous (late twelfth century), misleading attribution to Chao Po-chii: The Han Palace. Album
leaf. Ink and colors on silk. (w. 95”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung. ee 81

Anonymous (thirteenth century?), see Shih K’o? (tenth century): Patriarch and Tiger . 49

207
 Chang Feng (fl. c. 1645-1673): Gazing at a Red-leafed Maple across a Ravine. Dated 1660. Hanging
scroll (cropped at top). Ink and light colors on paper. (w. 17%”) Yamato Bunka-kan, Osaka . 155

Chang Hsiian (eighth century), after; copy by Emperor Hui-tsung (early twelfth century): Ladies
Preparing Newly-woven Silk. Section of a handscroll. Ink and colors on silk. (H. 14%”) Museum
OFSINE ATES] SOSEGE Sot toiae c otic atin asta ee oa teria art eae Ta age aa ead a o Se ate ae nao 2I

Twelfth century copy (?) after Chang Hsiian, attributed to Li Kung-lin: Lady Kuo-kuo and
Her Sisters Setting Forth on an Outing. Section of a handscroll. Ink and colors on silk. (H. 13%")
Palace: Museum=Collection:: Taichung 20 Ss 5 Na al t GP ge ge ea 20

Chang Seng-yu (early sixth century), attribution (copy of the eleventh or twelfth century?): The
Planet Saturn, from The Five Planets and Twenty-eight Constellations. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and colors on silk. (H. 1034”) Osaka Municipal Museum (former Abe Collection). . . . 17

Chang Sheng-wen: Sakyamuni Buddha Preaching. Painted in the period 1173-1176. Section of a long
handscroll of Buddhist images. Ink and colors on paper. (H. 12”) Palace Museum Collection,
MaiGhane jer tena se tra) mete tea akSue ge race ieee oka tide era Nerang ae i aaa (cane

Chao Ch’ang (early eleventh century), misleading attribution; see Anonymous (twelfth century):
A: Branch: of ‘White Jasmine 7122 - sss se See es Un a a a one NER Gar yy

Chao Kan (tenth century), attribution: A River Journey at First Snowfall. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and colors on silk. (H. 10%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung. . . . . .. . 58

Chao Meng-fu (1254-1322): Autumn Colors on the Ch’iao and Hua Mountains. Dated 1295. Section
of a handscroll. Ink and colors on paper. (H. 11%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung . . 103

Chao Po-chii (early twelfth Bea eases attribution; see we (late twelfth century):
The Han Palace. . . : pS Reese Gent ees 81

Chao Yen (tenth century), attribution: Eight Riders in Spring. Hanging scroll (cropped at top and
bottom). Ink and colors on silk. (w. 40%”)"Palace Museum Collection, Taichung. . . . 56

Ch’en Hung-shou (1599-1652): Boating on the.Lake. Album leaf. Ink and colors on paper.Baus x10%”")
J.P. Dubosc Collection, Lugano . ©." Rute tee e Ee eESe

Illustrations to the “Homecoming” Ode of T’ao Yiian-ming. Section of a handscroll. Ink and light
eoloron: sille.- (a 114%,"): Honolulu Academy- of Artsw530 ie a er ee 87

Ch’en Shun (1483-1544): Mountains in Clouds. Dated 1535. Section of a handscroll. Ink and light
colors on paper. (H. 12”) Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c.. . . . . gists Peed

Ch’ien Hsiian (c. 1235-1301): Wang Hsi-chih Gazing at Geese. Section of a handscroll. Ink and colors
on paper. (H-. 9%"): -C2€.- Wang ‘Collection= New: York! 3 2572s sj a a e a OS
probably copy after Han Kan (eighth century): Yang Kuei-fei Mounting a Horse. Section of a
handscroll. Ink and colors on paper. (H. 11%”) Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c.. . . 100
Chin Nung (1687-after 1764): A Youth Gazing across a Lotus Pond. Album leaf. Ink and colors on
paper.) (11x90 4"): H.C, Weng: Collection; Searsdale). NeW. ee 190
Ch’iu Ying (c. 1510-1551): Landscape in the Manner of Li T’ang. Section of a handscroll. Ink and
colors on paper. (H. 10”) Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c.. . . . . . . . . +. 4146
Passing a Summer Day beneath Banana Palms. Section of a hanging scroll (cropped at top and
bottom). Ink and colors on paper. (w. 39”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung . . . . 141
Spring Morning in the Han Palace. Section of a handscroll. Ink and colors on silk. (H. 12”) Palace
Museum Collection, Taichung BE Sitar s sare Genre ota as Sune aae mn Arey rae at eecul
Chou Ch’en (fl. c. 1500-1535), probably by: Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched Cottage. Section
of a handscroll. Ink and colors on paper. (H. 11%”) Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c. . 138-139

208
 Chou Fang (eighth century), attribution: Ladies Playing Double Sixes. Detail from a handscroll.
Ink and colors on silk. (H. 12%”) Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c. . Fans Pee 22

Chou Wen-chii’s School (tenth century): A Palace Concert. Hanging scroll. Ink and colors on silk.
(19%x27%") Palace Museum Collection, Taichung . Bein ace eg Ge etn hp Sages 46

Chu Ta (1625-c. 1705): Landscape. Album leaf. Ink and light colors on silk. (9%x11”) Honolulu
Academy of Arts CS Se Se as cp Or caer ae nape el Seng a ay

Landscape. Hanging scroll. Ink on paper. (62%x18%%" Shdkokuji, Kyoto 179

Two Birds. Album leaf. Ink on paper. (12%x10%") Collection of seh late Kanichi Sumitomo,
Oiso (Japan) S ONE ear ees e ae 177
Fan K’uan (early eleventh century): Traveling among Streams and Mountains. Hanging scroll.
Ink and light color on silk. (61x29%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung . 33
Idem, detail . 31

Fan-lung (twelfth century), attribution: An Arhat in the Forest. Section of a handscroll. Ink on
paper. (H. 12”) Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c. . Blgiae er lee east ne aage eS 94
Han Kan (eighth century), attribution; see Anonymous (tenth century?): Monkeys and Horses 71

probably copy after Han Kan; see Ch’ien Hsiian (c. 1235-1301): Yang Kuei-fei Mounting a Horse 100

Hsia Kuei (fl. c. r190-1230) : A Pure and Remote View of Rivers and Mountains. Section of a handscroll.
Ink on paper. (H. 18%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung . 85
Hsii Wei (1521-1593): Bamboo. Section of a handscrolly-Ink on paper. (H. ia Freer Gallery
of Art, Washington, D.c. pare Her s aN RIOR IS (ETRE ee geiny entan ene aos 154
Hua Yen (1682-1765): An Autumn Scene. Dated 1729. Album leaf. Ink and oh es
color on eee
(9x6%”) Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c: “ Be enh aes Igl

Huang Kung-wang (1269-1354): Dwelling in the Fu-ch’un Mountains. Dated 1350. Section of a hand-
scroll. Ink on paper. (H. 13”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung. aa IIo

Hui-tsung (early twelfth century): Two Finches on Twigs of Bamboo. Section of a handscroll. Ink and
colors on silk. (H. 12%”) Collection of John M. Crawford, Jr., New York . 73
copy after Chang Hsiian (eighth century) ;see Chang Hsiian: Ladies Preparing Newly-woven Silk 2I

Hui-tsung’s Academy, see Anonymous (early twelfth century?): Birds in a Thicket of Bamboo and
Plum . Beier reer pS ee 69
Hung-jen (c. 1603-1663): Rivers and Mountains without End. Dated 1661. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and light colors on paper. (H. 11%”) Collection of the late Kanichi Sumitomo, Oiso (Japan) 173
Kao Ch’i-p’ei (c. 1672-1734): Landscape with Tall Peaks. Album leaf. Ink and tatk colors on vos
(105x13”) Museum of Asiatic Art, Amsterdam . 186

Kao Feng-han (1683-after 1747): Peonies and Rocks. Dated 1734. Album leaf. Ink and light colors
on paper. (I1%x16%”) Osaka Municipal Museum (former Abe Collection). a aes 187

Kao K’o-kung (1248-1310), probably by: Green Hills and White Clouds. Section of a handscroll. Ink
and colors on silk. (H. 19%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung . e nticn syiySoe 104

Kao K’o-ming: Clearing after Snow on the River. Dated 1035. Detail from a handscroll. Ink and
colors on silk. (H. 16%”) Collection of John M. Crawford, Jr., New York . 41

209
 Ku K’ai-chih (born c. 345), attribution: Admonitions to the Court Ladies. Section of a handscroll.
Ink and colors on silk. (H. 9%”) British Museum, London . Ae hd Si ae eae 14
attribution: The Nymph of the Lo River (copy of the twelfth or thirteenth soa aneSection of a
handscroll. (H. 9%”) Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c. Spats 27
K’un-ts’an (c. 1610-1693): The Pao-en Temple. Dated 1664. Detail from a hanging scroll. Ink and
colors on paper. Collection of the late Kanichi Sumitomo, Oiso (Japan). nee 170
Kung Hsien (c. 1620-1689): Trees in a Landscape. Section of a handscroll. Ink on paper.ee 10%”)
William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City. PUREED ea 174
Kuo Hsi: Early Spring. Dated 1072. oe scroll. Ink and ne colors on silk.a ") Palace
Museum Collection, Taichung pase 36
attribution: Autumn in the River Valley. Section of a handscroll. Ink and light colors on silk.
(H. 10%") Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c. . SEE Smee mR oat a 37
Li Ch’eng (tenth century), attribution; but probably eleventh century in actual date: A Buddhist
Temple in the Mountains. Detail from a hanging scroll. Ink and light color on silk. William
Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City . : a a, 30

Li Kung-lin (1040-1106), copy of the twelfth century?, attributed to: see oe Hsiian Sejm
century): Lady Kuo-kuo and Her Sisters Setting Forth on an Outing. 20

Li Sung: The Knick-knack Peddler. Dated 1210. Album leaf. Ink and laa colors on silk.
a ssx mle
Palace Museum Collection, Taichung : 53
Li T’ang (early twelfth century), probably by; misleading attribution to Yen Wen-kuei (tenth to
eleventh century): A Myriad Trees on Strange Peaks. Album leaf. Ink and— colors on silk.
(9%x10%") Palace Museum Collection, Taichung. : : 42
Liang K’ai (fl. mid-thirteenth century): Li Po Chanting a Poem. Hanging scroll (cropped at top). Ink
on paper. (w. 12%”) Commission for the; Protection of Cultural Properties, Tokyo. . . go

Lo P’ing (1733-1799): Portrait of the Artist’s-Friend I-an. Dated 1798. Section of a hanging scroll
(cropped at top and — Ink and hee colors on ia (w. 17%”) Private Collection,
Washington, D.c. ies sp uenays ruRe Near ey nea 193
Lu Chih (1496-1576): Autumn Colors at Hsiin-yang. Dated 1554. Section of a handscroll. Ink and
light colors on paper. (H. 8%”) Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, p.c. aaa 133
River Scene in Spring. Dated 1535. Section of a handscroll. Ink and — colors on silk. (H. 74")
Palace Museum Collection, Taichung. ieee ; ee Sees 132
Ma Lin (fl. mid-thirteenth century): The Fragrance of Spring: Clearing After Rain. Album leaf.
Ink and light colors on silk. (10%x16%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung
87
Listening to the Wind in the Pines. Seal with the date 1246. Hanging scroll (cropped at e and
bottom). Ink and colors on silk. (w. 43%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung. : 64
Waiting for Guests by —* Album leaf. Ink and colors on silk.eee Palace Museum
Collection, Taichung ; : : Aaitee 86
Ma Yiian (fl. c. 1190-1230): A Scholar and His Servant on a Terrace. Album leaf, Ink and light colors
on silk. (9%x10%”) C.C. Wang Collection, New York. : PES age ct nes ee 83
Walking on a Mountain Path in ve Album leaf. Ink and= colors on silk. en x ¥) Palace
Museum Collection, Taichung : ; i 82
Mao I (twelfth century), attribution: Mother Cat and Kittens in a Garden. Album leaf. Ink and
colors on silk. (10x10%”) Yamato Bunka-kan, Osaka . oe eree Rae e ene 77
Mi Yu-jen (1086-1165): Mountains in Clouds. semaeclyscroll. Ink on Hie Lames 0 Osaka Muni-
cipal Museum (former Abe Collection) ate g2

210
 Mu-ch’i (fl. mid-thirteenth century): Mother Monkey and Child. Detail from a hanging scroll. Ink
on silk. Daitokuji, Kyoto 97
attribution: Evening Glow on a Fishing Village, from Eight Views of the Hsiao- a —
Section of a handscroll. Ink on paper. (H. 13”) Nezu Art Museum, Tokyo . 93
Ni Tsan (1301-1374): Trees in a River Valley at Yii-shan. Dated aeDimes scroll. Ink on paper.
(37%x14%”) C. C. Wang Collection, New York . III
Pien Wen-chin (fl. early fifteenth century): The Three Friends and Hundred Birds. Dated 1413.
Detail from a hanging scroll. Ink and colors on silk. Palace Museum Collection, Taichung . 120

Shen Chou (1427-1509): Walking with a Staff. ence scroll. Ink on paper. Cea) Palace
Museum Collection, Taichung ee Nic Neer e emia nti1

Watching the Mid-Autumn Moon. Handscroll. Ink and ee colors on ig oe (12 x53”) Museum
Ol Pine Ariss Boston es yous to cia a a ee etn Maus enhOO)

Sheng Mou (fl. c. 1310-1361): Boating on the River in Autumn. Inscription by a friend of the artist,
dated 1361. Section of a handscroll. Ink and colors on paper. (H. 9%4”) Palace Museum Collection,
Taichung . es ag pe SS Re cs a sae Fe 109

Shih K’o? (tenth century), thirteenth century copy after: Patriarch and Tiger. Detail from one of
a pair of hanging scrolls representing Two Patriarchs Harmonizing their Minds. Ink on paper.
Commission for the Protection of Cultural Properties, Tokyo . Sete ie ean rae 49

Sun K’o-hung (1532-1610): The Moon Rises, from Elegant Diversions for Leisure Hours. Section of
a handscroll. Ink and light colors on paper. (H. 11”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung . I5I

Tai Chin (fl. early fifteenth century): Fishermen on the River. Detail from a handscroll. Ink and
colors on paper. (H. 18%”) Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c. . Bie Scie ra tone ee MLO

attribution: Returning Late from a Spring Outing. Hanging scroll. Ink and nem colors on silk.
(66x32%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung. : ; Mpegs. a EOD

T’ang Yin (1470-1523): Clearing after Snow in a Mouritain Pass. Hanging scroll. Ink and light colors
on silk. (27%x14%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung .. Sienna ats ESO. 5

Secluded Fishermen on an Autumn River. Inscription by a friend, dated 1523. Section cf a hand-
scroll. Ink and colors on silk. (H. 11%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung . 142

Tao-chi (1641-c .1717): A Man in a House beneath a Cliff. Album leaf. Ink and ie color on dea
(9%x11") Nii Wa Chai Collection Spee ean : 180

The Peach-Blossom Spring. Section of a handscroll. Ink and colors on paper. (H. 9%") Freer
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c. a ee eae ne ati oe EO

The Waterfall on Mount Lu. Hanging scroll (upper section, with inscription, not included).
Ink and light colors on silk. (w. 24%") Collection of the late Kanichi Sumitomo, Oiso (Japan) . ~ 183

Idem, detail (on the title page) . 3

Ts’ui Po: Hare and Jays. Dated 1061. Hanging scroll ele at eae Ink and colors on silk.
(w. 40%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung. eee Set e ete e na tae 72

Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1555-1636): Autumn Landscape. Hanging scroll. Ink and light colors on silk.
(56x23%”) Ni Wa Chai Collection . eae ge ig eee re en a Sas e et TO)

Wang Meng (c. 1309-1385): Forest Dwellings at Chii-ch’ii. ——— scroll. Ink and colors on paper.
(27x16%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung . é = aad
Wang Shih-min (1592-1680): Landscape in the Manner of Chao Meng-fu. Dated 1670. Album leaf.
Ink and colors on paper. (10%x14%”) C. C. Wang Collection, New York. : se 5O2

211
Wang T’ing-yiin (1151-1202): Secluded Bamboo and Withered Tree. Section of a handscroll. Ink on
paper. (H. 15”) Fujii Yirinkan, Kyoto . eke ee 96

Wang Wei (699-759), attribution; see Anonymous (ninth century?): Portrait of the Scholar Fu Sheng 18

Wang Yiian-ch’i (1642-1715): River Landscape in the Manner of Ni Tsan. Dated 1704. gio scroll.
Ink and light colors on paper. (37%x19%") J. P. Dubosc Collection, Lugano . : 166

Wen Cheng-ming (1470-1559): Old Trees by a Cold Waterfall. Dated 1549. taseaudescroll. Ink and
colors on silk. (76%x23%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung . . 130
Wen Chia (1501-1583): Landscape in the Spirit of Verses by Tu Fu. Dated 1576. Album leaf nie
section, with inscription, not included). Ink and light colors on paper. ie 14 ? Palace Museum
Collection, Taichung SPN toe ne Roane eri i eR ar see re 135
Wu Chen (1280-1354): Fishermen. Painted in 1342. Section of a handscroll. Ink on gatas ae Tae)
Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c. . ee 108
Wu Li (1632-1718): Boating on the River below a Buddhist Temple. Album leaf. Ink and ose colors
on paper. (15%x1I0%”) Palace Museum Collection, Taichung. 163
Wu Wei (1459-1508): The Pleasures of the Fishing Village. Section of a handscroll. Ink and colors on
paper. (H. 10%”) Private Collection, Washington, D.c. ; deaea sie 119
Yen Wen-kuei (tenth to eleventh SRY) oy set attribution; see Li T’ang: A ae Trees
on Strange Peaks : Mac prs ERE eee Sa ier ar vats pier 42

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 RT Rea

CHINESE
PAINTING
by James Cahill

100 REPRODUCTIONS IN FULL COLOR

The eyes of the world are turning again

toward Asia, immemorial fountainhead of
wisdom and magnificence, and toward
China in particular, with her venerable tradi-
tions. The Chinese themselves have always
regarded painting as the supreme art — the
only art which demands more than mere
craftsmanship can give, the only art pure
and lyrical enough to stand on an equal
footing with poetry and contemplative
thought, and indeed with its incomparable
refinements of design and subtle insight
into nature and man, Chinese painting is
unique in world art
It is pre-eminently an art of painting on silk
and paper, mounted on rollers and forming
vertical or horizontal scrolls. Many of
China’s greatest painters were also scholars
CHINESE PAINTING and poets. Since the beginning of this
century, the museums of Europe and above
by James Cahill all of the United States have acquired some
fine examples, but the most precious scrolls
are still jealously preserved in the Imperial
collections now in Formosa and in inacces-
sible temples and private collections in
PERSIAN PAINTING Japan. They have only been shown on rare
occasions, and then only to a favored few,
by Basil Gray for the enjoyment of painting in the Orient is
a privilege reserved for initiates
Long and delicate negotiations were
needed to gain access to these hidden
ARAB PAINTING treasures. We commissioned the author,
the brilliant young American specialist,
James Cahill of the Freer Gallery in
by Richard Ettinghausen Washington, to go out and study them on
the spot, accompanied by our technicians,
and to photograph the finest unpublished
paintings among them. No expense has
been spared to make this book a memorable
event in art publishing. Perfected by the
research work and experience of many
years, our techniques of color reproduction
faithfully render the fine shades and subtle
nuances ofan art which is probably the most
accomplished in the world. In these pages
you will find a magnificent panorama of
nearly twenty centuries of Chinese Painting,
a revelation of one of the most precious, yet
least known contributions to the art heritage
of mankind.

Color plate on the jacket:

After Chang Hstian, eighth century
(twelfth century copy (?)attributed to Li Kung-lin)
These titles were originally published in the Lady Kuo-kuo and Her Sisters Setting Forth on
an Outing. Section of a handscroll
ISBN 0 333 22371 3 TREASURES OF ASIA Ink and colors on silk
Palace Museum Collection, Taichung (Formosa)
series created by Albert Skira

MACMILLAN LONDON
LIMITED
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LONDON WC2R 3LF
PRINTED IN SWITZERLAND