(A History of Later Chinese Painting, 1279-1950 - V. 2) James Francis Cahill - Parting at The Shore - Chinese Painting of The Early and Middle Ming Dynasty, 1368-1580-Weatherhill (1978)

OHIO STATE
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARIES
Parting at the Shore
JAMES CAHILL
PARTING
AT THE
SHORE
Chinese Painting of the
Early and Middle Ming Dynasty,
1368-1580
Near York • WEATHERHILL • Tokyo

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This is the second in a projected series of five volumes by James Cahill

under the series title "A History of Later Chinese Painting, 1279-1950."
Published to date:
Volume 1. Hills Beyond a River: Chinese Painting of the Yuan
rtvnnsty 1 279-116 tt
Volume 2. Parting at the Shore: Chinese Painting of the Early and
Middle Ming Dynasty, 1368-1S80
A NOTE ON THE DECORATIONS. The seal on the front cover shows the au-
thor's studio name in Chinese characters reading Ching Yuan Chai. The
title page shows a section from Shih Chung's "Solitary Fisherman" (Plate
69) reproduced with high contrast effect.
FIRST EDITION, 1978
Published by John Weatherhill, Inc., of New York and Tokyo, with editorial offices at 7—6-13 Roppongi,
Minato-ku, Tokyo 106, Japan. Protected by copyright under terms of the International Copyright Union;
all rights reserved. Printed and first published in Japan.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data: Cahill, James Francis, 1 9 2 6 - / Parting at the shore. /
Bibliography: p. /Includes i n d e x . / I . Painting, Chinese—Ming-Ch'ing dynasties, 1368-1912. / I.
Title. / ND1043.5.C33 / 759.951 / 77-8682 / ISBN 0-8348-0128-0
Contents
List of Plates ix
Preface xiii
I THE EARLY MING "ACADEMY" AND THE CHE SCHOOL
1 The Reign of Hung-wu 3

"^2 Two Landscape Traditions: The Che and Wu Schools 4
3 Painting in the Hung-wu Era, 1368-98 5
Wang Li 5
Two Anonymous Paintings 7
The Early Ming " Academy'' 8
4 Painting in the Yung-lo Era, 1403-24 21
The Persistence of Conservative Southern Sung Styles 21
Pi en Wen-chin 22
5 The Hsiian-te Academy 23
Hsieh Huan 24
Shang Hsi 25
Shih Jui 26
Li Tsai 21
6 Tai Chin 45
1 Painting During the "Interregnum," 1436-65 53
vi • CONTENTS
Chou Wen-ching 53
Yen Tsung 53
Lin Liang 54
II THE BEGINNINGS OF THE W U SCHOOL: SHEN CHOU
AND His PREDECESSORS 57
1 The Wu School in the Fifteenth Century 57

Wang Fu 58
Soochow and Its Gentry-Literati Culture 59
2 Predecessors of Shen Chou 60
Tu Ch'iung 60
Yao Shou 78
Liu Chueh 79
The Relationship of Liu Chueh and Shen Chou 80
3 Shen Chou) 82
Life and Career 82
Early Works 83
The Development of an Individual Style 86
"Night Vigil" 90
Landscapes of the Late Period 9/
Plant and Animal Subjects 94
III T H E LATER C H E S C H O O L 97
1 Nanking as a Painting Center 97

2 Wu Wei 98
Life and Career 98
Landscapes with Figures / 00
Figure Painting 103
3 Hsu Lin 106
4 Painters of the Hung-chih and Cheng-te Academies 107
Lu Chi 107
Lu Wen-ying 108
CONTENTS • vii
WangE 125
Chung Li 126
ChuTuan 127
5 The "Heterodox" Masters 128
Chang Lu / 29
o
Chiang Sung 132

Cheng Wen-lin 132
"Arriving Home by Moonlight" and Chu Pang 133
IV SOME N O N C O N F O R M I S T PAINTERS OF N A N K I N G
AND ELSEWHERE 135
1 Beyond the Che and Wu Schools 135

2 The Nanking Group 136
Sun Lung, "Boneless" Painting, and Detroit's "Early Autumn" 136
Lin Kuang and Yang Hsiin 138
Shih Chung, the "Fool from Nanking" 139
Kuo Hsu / 53
TuChin 154
3 Two Painters of Soochow and One Other 157
Wang Wen 157
Hsieh Shih-ch'en 158
Hsu Wei 159
4 Life Patterns and Stylistic Directions 163
V T H E S O O C H O W PROFESSIONAL MASTERS 767
1 Chou Ch'en 168

2 T'angYin 193
3 Ch'iu Ying 201
VI WEN CHENG-MING AND HIS F O L L O W E R S : T H E W U SCHOOL
IN THE S I X T E E N T H C E N T U R Y 211
1 Wen Cheng-ming 211

The Early Decades 211
Viii • CONTENTS
Peking Interlude 2/5
The Later Years 216
2 Wen's Friends, Contemporaries, and Students 239
Lu Chih 239
Wang Ch'ung 244
Ch'en Shun 245
Shen Shih 246
3 Wen's Descendants and Followers in the Later Sixteenth Century 248
Wen Chia 248
Wen Po-jen 249
Hou Mou-kung 251
Chii Chieh 252
Notes 251
Bibliography 265
Index 275
Maps appear on pages xv and xvi

Plates
COLOR PLATES
Between pages 8 and 21:

1. Shih Jui: "Landscape with Buildings and Figures, in the Blue-and-Green Manner"
2. Hsieh Huan: "A Literary Gathering in the Apricot Garden" (section)
3. Tai Chin: "Fishermen on the River" (section)
4 - 5 . Shen Chou: from "Album of Landscapes with Figures, for Chou Wei-te"
6. Wu Wei: "Pleasures of Fishermen" (section)
7. Chang Lu, attributed to: "Su Tung-p'o Returning to the Han-lin Academy"
8. Anonymous, Ming dynasty ("Ch'ien Hsiian"): "Early Autumn" (section)
9. Ch'iu Ying: "The Lute Song" (section)
10-11. Tu Chin: "The Scholar Fu Sheng in a Garden" (detail)
12. Chou Ch'en: from "Beggars and Street Characters" (portion)
13. Wen Cheng-ming: "Living Aloft"
14. Lu Chih: "Mount Chih-hsing"
H A L F T O N E PLATES
For Chapter I, between pages 28and 45:

1-2. Wang Li: from "Scenes of Hua-shan"
3. Anonymous, Ming dynasty: "Scholars on a Lakeshore"
4. Anonymous, Ming dynasty: "Quietly Sitting in a Study Beneath Pines"
5. Pien Wen-chin: "Two Cranes and Small Birds, with Bamboo and Blossoming Plum"
6-7. Shang Hsi: "Lao-tzu Passing the Barrier"
8. Shih Jui: "Landscape"
9. Li Tsai: from "Illustrations to the Homecoming Ode of T'ao Yiian-ming" (section)
10. Tai Chin: "Bodhidharma Meditating in a Cave, with Hui-k'o" (section)
11. Li Tsai: "Landscape in the Manner of Kuo Hsi"
12. Tai Chin: "The Hermit Hsu Yu Resting by a Stream"
13. Tai Chin: "Listening to the Rain"
ix
X • PLATES
14. Tai Chin, attributed to: "Five White Deer Beneath Pines"
15. Tai Chin: "Winter Landscape" from "Landscapes of the Four Seasons"
16. Tai Chin: "Autumn Landscape" from "Landscapes of the Four Seasons"
17. Tai Chin : "Men in a House over a Stream"
18. Chou Wen-ching: "Chou Tun-i Gazing at Water Lilies"
o o
19-20. Yen Tsung: from "Landscape with Figures" (sections)
21. Lin Liang: "Phoenix"
For Chapter II, between pages 60 and 77:
22. WangFu: "River Landscape in the Manner of Ni Tsan"
23. WangFu: "Farewell Meeting at Feng-ch'eng"
24. Tu Ch'iung: "Heavenly Fragrance in a Secluded Place"
25. Yao Shou: "Landscape for Wen Kung-ta's Retirement"
26. Liu Chiieh: "Pure and Plain Pavilion"
27. Liu Chueh: "Landscape"
28. Liu Chiieh: "Landscape in the Manner of Ni Tsan"
29. Shen Chou: "Walking with a Staff"
30. Shen Chou : "Living in Retirement"
31. Shen Chou: "Landscape for Liu Chueh"
32. Shen Chou: "Towering Mountains Above a Retreat"
33. Shen Chou: "Fishermen on a River in Autumn"
34. Shen Chou: "Rainy Thoughts"
35. Shen Chou: "Landscape for Wu K'uan" (section)
36. Shen Chou: "Crab and Shrimp"
37-38. Shen Chou: "Night Vigil"
39. Shen Chou: "Thousand Buddha Hall and the Pagoda" from "Twelve Views of Tiger
Hill"
40. Shen Chou: "Drought Demon Spring" from "Twelve Views of Tiger Hill"
41. Shen Chou: "The White Cloud Spring" (section)
42-43. Shen Chou: "Three Juniper Trees" (sections)
For Chapter III, between pages 108 and 125:
44. Wu Wei: "Two Taoist Immortals"
45. Wu Wei: "Winter Landscape with Travelers"
46. Wu Wei: "Fishing from a Riverbank"
47. Wu Wei: "Lady Carrying a P'i-p'a"
48. Wu Wei: "The Iron Flute"
49. Hsu Lin: "Winter Landscape with a Man Arriving at a House"
50. Lii Chi: "Cranes by a Rushing Stream"
51. Lii Wen-ying: "River Village in a Rainstorm"
52. W a n g E : "Snowy Peaks in a High Wind"
53. Chung Li: "Scholar Contemplating a Waterfall"
54. Chu Tuan: "River Landscape with Fishermen"
55. Chang Lu: "Fisherman Under a Cliff"
56. Chang Lu: "Shih-te Laughing at the Moon"
PLATES • xi
57, 59. Chiang Sung: "Spring Landscape" from "Landscapes of the Four Seasons" (section)
58, 60. Chiang Sung: "Winter Landscape" from "Landscapes of the Four Seasons" (section)
61. Chang Lu: "Playing the Ch'in for a Friend"
62. Cheng Wen-lin: "The World of the Magic Pot" (section)
63. Anonymous, Ming dynasty: "Arriving Home by Moonlight"
For Chapter IV, between pages 140 and 153:
64. Sun Lung: "Cicada and Waterweeds"
65. Lin Kuang: "Spring Mountains"
66. YangHsun: "Landscape with Travelers"
67. Shih Chung: "Landscape"
68. Shih Chung: "Clearing After Snowfall" (section)
69. Shih Chung: " A Solitary Fisherman''
70. Kuo Hsu: "Landscape"
71. Kuo Hsu: "Woman and Child in a Garden"
72. Tu Chin: "T'ao Yuan-ming Viewing a Painting of the Peach Blossom Spring" (section)
73. Tu Chin: "Enjoying Antiques"
74. Wang Wen: "Landscape with Pavilion"
75. Hsieh Shih-ch'en: "Landscape After Rain"
76. Hsieh Shih-ch'en: "Misty Trees by a Level Lake" from "Landscapes of the Four Sea
sons
77. Hsieh Shih-ch'en: "Clearing After Snow in a Mountain Pass" from "Landscapes of the
Four Seasons"
78-80. Hsu Wei: "Flowers and Other Plants" (sections)
81-82. Hsu Wei: "Landscape with Figures" (sections)
For Chapter V, between pages 168 and 189:
83. Chou Ch'en: "Bidding Farewell at a Brushwood Fence"
84. Chou Ch'en: "North Sea" (section)
85. Chou Ch'en: "Playing Wei-ch'i Beneath Pines"
86. Chou Ch'en: "Enjoying the Dusk" (section)
87. Chou Ch'en: "Poetic Feelings Beneath Pines by a Stream"
88-89. Chou Ch'en: from "Beggars and Street Characters"
90. T'ang Yin: "Secluded Fishermen on an Autumn River" (section)
91. T'ang Yin: "Parting at Chin-ch'ang" (section)
92. T'ang Yin: "Poetic Thoughts: Traveling by Donkey"
93. T'ang Yin: "Clearing After Snow in a Mountain Pass"
94. T'ang Yin: "The Noble Scholars"
95. Ch'iuYing: "Master Tung-lin's Villa" (section)
96. T'ang Yin: "T'ao Ku Presenting a Poem"
97. Ch'iu Ying: "Waiting for the Ferry in Autumn"
98. T'ang Yin: "Trees, Bamboo, and Rocks by a River"
99-100. T'ang Yin: "Singing Bird on a Branch"
101. Ch'iuYing: "The Golden Valley Garden"
102. Ch'iu Ying: "The Garden of Peach and Pear Trees" (detail)
Xii • PLATES
103, Ch'iuYing: "Lady in a Pavilion Overlooking a Lake"
104, 106. Ch'iu Ying: "Conversation in the Shade of Wu-t'ung Trees"
105, 107. Ch'iu Ying: "Fishing Boat by a Willow Bank"
For Chapter VI, between pages 220 and 237:
108-10. Wen Cheng-ming: "Lofty Leisure Beneath a Sheer Cliff"
111—12. Wen Cheng-ming: "Spring Trees After Rain"
113. Wen Cheng-ming: "The Chih-p'ing Temple"
114. Wen Cheng-ming: "Verdant Pines and Clear Springs"
115. Wen Cheng-ming: "Landscape in the Manner of Wang Meng"
116. Wen Cheng-ming: "A Thousand Cliffs Contend in Splendor"
117. Wen Cheng-ming: " 'The Red Cliff' After Chao Po-su"
118. Wen Cheng-ming: "Cypress and Rock"
119. Lu Chih: "Portrait of T'ao Yuan-ming''
120. Lu Chih: "Jade Cave on an Immortal's Mountain"
121. Lu Chih: "Autumn Colors at Hsiin-yang"
122. Lu Chih: "Landscape"
123. LuChih: "Fisherman-Recluse at Hua-ch'i"
124—25. Wang Ch'ung: "Landscape"
126. Ch'enShun: "Landscape"
127. Ch'enShun: "Peonies" (section)
128. Shen Shih: "Sunset in an Autumn Valley"
129. Wen Chia: "Temples on Immortals' Mountains"
130. 132. Wen Po-jen: "A Myriad Ravines with Windblown Pines" from "The Four
Myriads"
131. 133. Wen Po-jen: "A Myriad Hectares of Sunlit Waves" from "The Four Myriads"
134. Hou Mou-kung: "Landscape"
135. Chii Chieh: "Spring in Chiang-nan"
Preface
This is the second volume in a projected series of five that will make up a history of later Chinese
painting. They are planned so that they may be read either in sequence or independently. The
first, Hills Beyond a River, was devoted to painting of the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), the period
of Mongol domination of China and the great watershed between earlier and later Chinese paint
ing. The present book takes up where that one left off and treats the first two centuries of the
Ming dynasty. Like the previous one, it covers a segment of the development of Chinese paint
ing that has in itself a beginning and an end, opening with the foundation of the Ming and clos
ing with that moment in the late sixteenth century when all the leading movements in Ming
painting seemed to have lost their impetus and the time was ripe for radical change. The suc
ceeding volume, which should follow this one by about a year, will deal with painting of the late
Ming period and with the radical changes that did in fact occur.
The major themes of Hills Beyond a River were: the stylistic innovations of the Yuan masters;
their uses of past traditions; the effects of historical events and circumstances on developments
in painting; the emergence of the scholar-amateur movement in painting and the theories and
attitudes that accompanied it. The Ming continuations of those themes will occupy our attention
in this book, along with a few new ones. There will be more emphasis on local schools and
traditions and on the relationship between the social and economic status of the artists and the
styles in which they worked—between, that is, the patterns of their lives and the pictures they
painted. Because more information is available about these later artists and more of their works
survive, we are better able to look for correlations of this kind. We can also present the painters
more fully as artistic personalities and will find some of them to have been very colorful char
acters indeed.
Once more, I owe a great debt to a number of colleagues who have done valuable work on
Ming painting: Richard Edwards, Harrie Vanderstappen, Yoshiho Yonezawa, Kei Suzuki, Chiang
Chao-shen, and Anne Clapp, to begin with; others are credited in the Notes and Bibliography.
Louise Yuhas provided me with useful notes on Lii Chih. Studies of Ming history and culture
have been immensely facilitated by the publication in 1976 of the monumental Dictionary of
Ming Biography, and its editors, L. C. Goodrich and Chaoying Fang, are to be congratulated and
thanked, as are the many contributors to that work.
I want to thank the owners and custodians of the paintings reproduced for permissions and
for supplying photographs; also Mr. Chiang Chao-shen, Mr. Toshio Ebine, Mr. Hiroshi
Kanazawa, Mr. Fumio Hatano of Kodansha, and Mr. Norikatsu Suzuki of Chuo Koron-sha
xiu
XIV • PREFACE
for helping me obtain color transparencies. The National Palace Museum in Taipei again merits
special thanks for its cooperation, particularly Dr. ChiangFu-tsung, Director; Mr. Chiang Chao
shen, Curator of Painting and Calligraphy; and Mr. Wang Chi-wu, Chief of the Publication
Division. Theirs is the greatest collection of Ming painting (as well as of Yuan and Sung paint
ing), and any study of the subject must begin with many hours spent in their exhibition halls and
study rooms. That those hours have been pleasant as well as fruitful is due to their unfailing hospi
tality. I also want to thank once again the officials and curators of museums in the People's Re
public of China for their kindness in showing paintings to the delegation of which I was a mem
ber, and especially the Kuang-chou Provincial Museum for special permission to reproduce for
the first time two sections of the sole surviving work of the early Ming Cantonese master Yen
Tsung.
Howard Rogers and Richard Vinograd made useful comments and criticisms on my text, which
led to a number of improvements. Marsha Weidner made many editorial corrections, compiled
the bibliography, plate captions, and index, and is generally responsible for making the book
really usable; to her I owe a special debt of gratitude. Students in my 1974 seminar on Che
school painting contributed to this book both through their own papers—among others, Mary
Anne Matteson's on Tai Chin, Holly Holtz's on Wu Wei, Geebee Hsu's on Tu Chin—and by
obliging me to organize and sharpen my own thoughts.
Adrienne Morgan again prepared the maps. (It should be noted here that both in the text and
in the maps, we have mostly used modern boundaries and place names to avoid the confusion that
would result if such names and boundaries were not consistent throughout the series. I hope that
specialist colleagues will pardon this lapse from strict scholarly scrupulousness.) The History of
Art office staff, especially Nancy Grimsley and Wanda Mar, helped again with typing and in many
other ways. Once again Meredith Weatherby and the Weatherhill editorial staff deserve my thanks
for careful but light-handed editing of the text and for the handsome design of the book.
This volume is dedicated to Max Loehr, who taught me that style has meaning. Everything else
that matters followed from that.
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Table of Contents
Parting at the Shore
A NOTE ON THE PLATE CAPTIONS
Dimensions are given, when available, in centimeters (first the height and then the width) and apply to an
entire painting, not, in the case of a detail or section, to just the portion shown. Chinese titles are given,
in parentheses, when they are particularly well known, having usually been written on the painting by the
artist.
CHAPTER ONE
The Early Ming "Academy" and the Che School
1. THE REIGN OF HUNG-WU
The founding of the Ming dynasty in 1368 began another of China's long-lasting, relatively stable
periods under native rule, like the Han, T'ang, and Sung before it. Such dynasties had regularly
alternated with periods, usually shorter, in which China was at least partly under foreign domi-
nation, as nonladic peoples or Tartars from the steppe regions of northern Asia took advantage
of the weakening of native regimes to invade North China, or the whole of China, and set up
their own states and dynasties. The most recent of these invaders, immediately preceding the
Ming, had been the Mongols, who ruled China for nearly a century as the Yuan dynasty (1279-
1368). The last decades of the Yuan were beset with famines, economic collapse, misrule by
incompetent Mongol emperors, and revolts in several parts of the country led by warlord-patriots
who aspired to the imperial throne and fought with each other as well as with the remnants of
Mongol forces. The political and social disorder of the late Yuan, and its effect on painters and
painting, were outlined in the first volume of this series (Hills B9'0nd a River-referred to here-
after simply as Hills-Chapter 3 passim).
The one among these contenders who succeeded in defeating both the Mongols and his rivals,
and who was proclaimed emperor of the new dynasty in 1368, was Chu Yuan-chang, better
known by his reign title Hung-wu (which designates also his thirty-year rule, the first era of the
Ming dynasty, 1368-98). A peasant who had lived for a time in a Buddhist monastery as a youth,
Chu was only forty when he assumed the throne of all China. The Mongol capital had been in
the northern city of Peking; Chu, whose base of power was in the south, established his capital
at Nanking, on the Yangtze River. (Nanking nleans "southern capital," Peking "northern
capital. ") Early in his reign he adopted a number of policies that seemed to promise a return to
traditional, Confucian patterns of government: a legal code based on that of the T'ang; the state
veneration of Confucius and promotion of Neo-Confucian thought; the reinstitution of an
examination system for staffing the bureacucracy based on knowledge of the classics and literary
ability; the reorganization of the Han-lin Academy of scholars and the National University.
All these measures, along with the transfer of the capital to the south and the restoration of
Chinese rule itself, encouraged educated men who had been living in retirement in the south to
emerge into public life and take their normal roles as officials under the new dynasty. Their op-
timistic expectations did not last long. As we saw in the preceding volume, many of them came to
tragic ends, including some of the leading late Yuan poets and painters. As the emperor grew
older, he became more and more distrustful, especially of southerners and the educated class, and
3
4 • THE EARLY MING "ACADEMY" AND THE CHE SCHOOL
had thousands of people arrested and put to death for suspected plots and sedition. His support
of Confucianism proved empty, since his later policies and actions were based rather on the
opposing school of political thought, the antihumanist and amoral theories of the Legalists,
which allowed, even encouraged, the most violent repression so long as it achieved the desired
end of eliminating all opposition to the state. In this way, at terrible cost, China returned to
political stability after decades of turbulence.
Restoration and oppression: the situation could only induce an atmosphere of conservatism.
It is reflected in a cessation of the innovative and progressive tendencies to be seen in late Yuan
painting and in an officially sponsored revival of Sung painting styles, especially those of the
Southern Sung Academy, which by this time represented the conservative current in painting.
2. Two LANDSCAPE TRADITIONS: THE CHE AND Wu SCHOOLS
A brief account of the landscape traditions practiced in the Yuan and early Ming must be in-
troduced here, as background for our treatment of Ming artists and paintings. While these tradi-
tions and artistic issues, so suddenly presented, may for the moment seem confuSing to readers
not already familiar with them through our foregoing volume or some other treatment of
Yuan painting, they should become clear as we proceed.
We have spoken here of a "revival" of Sung painting styles in the early Ming, although,
properly speaking, they had never quite dropped into total disuse during the intervening Yuan
dynasty. A few Yuan painters such as Sun Chun-tse and Chang Yuan (Hills, Color PI. 4 and PI.
29) had carried on, in works of high quality, the elegant, highly finished styles of Ma Yuan and
Hsia Kuei, the two leading landscapists of the Imperial Academy during the Southern Sung period
(i.e., the last half of the Sung dynasty, 1127-1279, when the capital was at Hangchow in the
south). But for the most part, these styles had been scrupulously avoided by the scholar-amateur
artists of the Yuan, who made up the progressive current of painting in that age; they were con-
sidered to be too open in their emotional appeal, too closely associated with the political debility
and effeteness (as the Yuan scholars saw it) of the Southern Sung court. They were, moreover,
associated with professionalism, and the Yuan was the age of the ascendancy of the scholar-
amateur artist. The leading painters of the Yuan were scholars by vocation, sometimes govern-
ment officials, and painted-at least in theory-as an avocation, not to make money, and never
on commission or on demand. (For a discussion of this important amateur-professional distinc-
tion, see Hills, pp. 4-6 ff.)
In rejecting the styles of Ma Yuan and Hsia Kuei (in the Chinese abbreviation, the Ma-Hsia
styles), the scholar-artists of the Yuan turned instead to older landscape traditions, especially to
one that had been inaugurated by two painters active in Nanking in the tenth century, Tung Yuan
and his follower Chu-jan. This was known as the Tung-Chu mode of landscape and was a less
polished, more earthy way of painting; it was commonly used for depicting the lush scenery of
the region south of the Yangtze River (the Chiang-nan, "South-of the-River," region), which
featured low hills and numerous waterways. (For good examples of works in this tradition, see
Hills, Pis. 13, 26, 38, 90.) Most of the leading landscapists of the late Yuan period worked in
variants of the Tung-Chu mode. (Besides the Ma-Hsia and Tung-Chu there was a third tradition,
the Li-Kuo, named after two of the greatest landscapists of early Sung, the northerners Li Ch' eng
of the tenth century and Kuo Hsi of the eleventh; but this tradition plays a relatively small part
in Ming painting, although we will encounter it later in this chapter as one of the styles popular
in the Ming "Academy.")
Yuan painting reveals already a phenomenon that is observable in much of later Chinese
painting. which will occupy OUT attention often in this book: a correlation between the social-
economic status of the artist and the stylistic tradition he follows. Painters of some standing in
PAINTING IN THE HUNG-WU ERA, 1368-98 • 5
the gentry-literati society, those who make up the scholar-amateur current of painting known
as wen-jen hua, or literati painting, tended to favor the Tung-Chu tradition, which fitted both
their expressive purposes, by lending itself to effects of poetic "blandness," and their amateur
ism, by making fewer technical demands on the artist. The Ma-Hsia tradition, along with the
style of the early-twelfth-century master Li T'ang (on which those of Ma Yuan and Hsia Kuei
were based) and others of the Sung Academy, were carried on chiefly by professionals, especially
those of the local school of Hangchow, in Chekiang Province, who were relegated, however
unjustly, to the status of craftsmen, "artists on hire," and whose achievements as painters did
little to elevate them on the social ladder.
These correlations of status and style persist into the early Ming and are recognized in the
conventional division of fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century painting into two dominant move
ments or "schools" which are known (loosely in the case of the first) as the Che and Wu
schools. These names are meant fundamentally as designations of locale, the first referring to
Chekiang Province (chiefly the Hangchow region) and the second to the Soochow area in Kiang
su Province, of which the ancient name was Wu, located to the east of the T'ai-hu, or Great Lake.
Hangchow and its environs, as we have noted already, had long been a center for artists follow
ing the conservative direction in painting that depended on Southern Sung Academy styles;
Soochow had been in the late Yuan, and continued to be for most of the Ming, the main area of
concentration for literati artists.
Thus are the issues set up, and thus they are discussed by the Ming critics and theorists: Che
vs. Wu, Sung vs. Yuan, professional vs. amateur—issues by no means identical, but so inter
locked in critical discussions as to be all but inseparable. With considerable imprecision, that is,
the situation in early and middle Ming painting was seen as one in which professional artists of
the Che school working in Sung styles were opposed to scholar-amateur artists of the Wu school
working in Yuan styles. This bipolar formulation of the history of Ming painting was to culmi
nate in the late-Ming theory of the "Northern and Southern schools" propounded by Tung Ch'i
ch'ang (1555-1636). Without accepting such formulations as more than they are—attempts to
organize a complex development and to give historical sanction to critical judgments—we will
use them as convenient and partly valid distinctions of stylistic currents, and will try to point out
as we proceed where they clarify the true development and where they are inadequate, even
misleading. We will consider the Wu school in our second chapter and again in the last; the Che
school will be treated in this chapter and the third. Before turning, however, to the artists of
the Ming Academy and the Che school, we will consider three works that illustrate in different
ways the resurgence of interest in the Ma-Hsia landscape manner in the early Ming.
3. PAINTING IN THE HUNG-WU ERA, 1368-98
W A N G L I An interesting exception to the pattern that associates the Ma-Hsia style with pro
fessionalism is the late Yuan and early Ming artist Wang Li. Born in 1322 at K'un-shan in Kiang
su Province, he studied medicine, made his living as a doctor, and was the author of several
medical texts. He was also conversant with the classics and composed both prose essays and po
etry. He thus belongs, as a painter, firmly in the scholar-amateur camp. However, he is said to
have studied the landscape style of Hsia Kuei while he was young, and later that of Ma Yiian.
Critics praised him for combining, "in his firm but supple brushwork and densely rich com
positions, the professional spirit with the scholarly."1
At the beginning of the Ming period, when he was about fifty, he climbed to the summit of
Hua-shan, the towering mountain in Shensi Province that drew pilgrims both as a Taoist holy
place and for its awesome scenery. The experience was apparently overwhelming, transforming
his life and his painting style. On Hua-shan he encountered a strange beauty in nature that tran
scended all he had known in art, and he realized that in thirty years of studying painting he had
never freed his works from the "paper and silk quality" of the artifact, nor from being identi
fiable as "school of so-and-so." When asked later who his teacher had been, he replied (con
sciously echoing an often-quoted statement by the early Sung landscapist Fan K'uan): "My teach
er is my mind; its teachers are my eyes; their teacher is Hua-shan. That's all."
Truth to an external nature or truth to one's inner nature and feelings: this was yet one
more issue, interlocked with the others. The literati artists were inclined to argue in favor of
the second kind of truth and to try to embody it in their works. Wang is not totally committed
to the first—in his formulation, his eyes and mind intervene between Hua-shan and his pictures
of it—but he insists on fidelity to nature as the fundamental requirement for a good painting:
"Although painting is a matter of forms, its main concern is the conception. If the conception
is deficient, it might be said that the forms are false. But the conception lies in the forms; if you
discard the forms, where can you look for the conception? Therefore, when you capture the
forms, the conception will pervade them. But if you lose the [true] forms, are they forms at all?
A painting of an object must resemble that object; how can you make it unrecognizable? Those
who become famous in the world by 'returning to the ancients' really achieve their effects by
groping in the dark. . . . "
The words quoted above form the opening passage of the long preface that Wang Li composed
for his album of "Scenes of Hua-shan," his sole surviving (and sole recorded) work as a painter,
represented here by two leaves (Pi. 1, 2). It is not at all coincidental that this statement, made in
direct and conscious opposition to attitudes current among the literati artists (contrast state
ments by T'ang Hou and Ni Tsan, Hills, pp. 164, 175), accompanies a series of paintings done in
a style that similarly flouts the scholar-painters' assertions about which traditions were proper
and which improper for them and their peers to follow. Wang Li in fact praises Ma Yuan, Hsia
Kuei, and their followers in another essay, "On Models for Painting," as the ones among "the
numerous painters" whose works he particularly esteems: "Even when coarse [in brush work]
they don't fall into banality; even when fine and detailed, they don't slip into prettiness. They
have the distant harmony of a pure vastness, transcending the commonplace; they are free of the
vulgarity of cloddish dullness." Wang is defending these painters against the very vices with
which they had been charged by critics and crediting them with the very virtues that those
critics had denied them.2
The album is painted, as one would expect after reading these sentiments, in a style clearly
derived from the lineage of Fan K'uan, Li T'ang, Ma Yuan, and Hsia Kuei. It is the very album
that Wang painted after his trip to Hua-shan, based on sketches made while traveling. It original
ly included over forty leaves; by the eighteenth century there were only about twenty; today,
only fourteen can be traced.3
The surviving leaves exhibit a remarkable variety in theme and composition; if we were to
ascribe this variety to an extraordinary inventiveness in the painter and remark on his nonadher
ence to existing compositional formulae and type forms, he would doubtless answer that he
was only depicting the scenery of Hua-shan as he saw it. Nevertheless, one may question wheth
er the actual landscape offers any such powerfully overhanging formations of strangely twisted
and pitted rock as the album does.
In one of the leaves (Pi. 1), such a mass occupies almost the whole space of the picture, leaving
only narrow ravines at the sides, in which travelers are visible on paths, climbing always up
ward. Wang Li is conveying the impression the landscape made on him, using his sketches as
starting points for imaginative constructions. He draws in heavy lines that taper at the ends and
thicken where they bend; it is the interrelationships of these bent lines, together with sparse
texture strokes and a limited use of ink wash, that define the shapes of the rocks and the hollows
in and around them. Bushes and trees grow from crevices or on the tops of boulders and ridges.
PAINTING IN THE HUNG-WU ERA, 1368-98 • 7
Presenting such a massive escarpment full face to the viewer may recall some Northern Sung
landscapes, but Wang Li remains essentially independent of such precedents; the animation of
his forms is very different from, for instance, Kuo Hsi's, although it similarly seems to endow
the landscape with an unearthly inner life more than it portrays the effects of natural geological
processes. Sung landscape had never exhibited such bold linearity—that is part of the heritage
of Yuan—nor violated so freely the dictates of naturalism. For all his warnings against losing the
"true forms," Wang in fact exploits almost as fully as his scholar-artist contemporaries the
increased degree of subjectivity possible in his time.
Another leaf (Pi. 2) depicts the peaks of a winding mountain ridge, with groves of low pine
trees, appearing above a sea of fog. Here it is Southern Sung landscapes that may be recalled as
precedents for this presentation of evanescent phenomena, but again Wang Li refuses to be
bound to tradition, embodying in his picture a personal interpretation of his visual and emo
tional experience. Perhaps it is the artist himself who is seen, just left of center, resting on the
path and contemplating the mist-filled depths out of which he has climbed; but whomever the
tiny figure is intended to represent, its diminutive scale within the landscape conveys the
artist's apprehension of the vastness of his surroundings far better than he could have conveyed
it by following the standard formula of the Ma Yuan school, which would have placed the figure
in the foreground and drawn him large, forcing his importance on the viewer and implicitly
reducing the vista beyond him to a function of his feeling.
T w o ANONYMOUS PAINTINGS Wang Li seems to have had little or no following, and the
old conventions continued to rule, in pictures devoted to generalized rather than specific and
personal themes. If we wonder what a more orthodox, straight-line follower of the Ma-Hsia
tradition would have been painting around this time, an answer may be found in such a picture
as the anonymous "Scholars on a Lakeshore" (Pi. 3), which probably dates from the beginning
of Ming. It is a good example of the compositional type we have just described as typical of the
Ma Yuan school. Two men, with an attendant, sit under leafy trees gazing out into the light fog
that hangs over the rippled surface of water. Brushwork is restrained and adapts closely to its
subjects; ink washes are subtly used to create a play of light and shadow that recalls Sun Chiin
tse's treatment of rocks (Hills, Color Pi. 4). The old diagonal division of the picture area still
prevails but here adjusts itself to stronger horizontal (foreground) and vertical (right side) em
phases, the latter broken, in the stream, path, tree, and rock that occupy the lower part of the
composition, into short diagonal thrusts that carry the eye upward on a zigzag course. All this
reads as surface movement, working against any pull into depth; in spite of the penetration into
limitless distance intended at the left, nothing in the picture actually seems so far away as does
the farther shore in Sun Chiin-tse's painting. Nevertheless, even though "Scholars on a Lake-
shore" lacks the haunting depths of romantic Southern Sung works, it is successful to a degree
rare for its time in recapturing some of the most attractive features of that mode: a richness of
sensitively presented detail, an elegance of execution, an invitation to the viewer to participate
in the emotions of the figures in the painting and respond with them to their surroundings.
Another anonymous work of about the same period, titled "Quietly Sitting in a Study
Beneath Pines" (Pi. 4), points more clearly the direction that painting of this stylistic tradition
was to take in the Ming. It is organized in a similar way, with strong vertical and horizontal
elements countered by shorter diagonals; even more than "Scholars on a Lakeshore," it is com
posed on the surface through a geometric division of the picture area. An allover evenness of
tonality, within which sudden dimmings of ink values create limited pockets of space, makes
the forms adhere to the picture plane; they are not only presented as distinct shapes as in the
other work but are also bounded (as are Wang Li's) by heavy outlines. (A particular linear
mannerism seen here, the addition of a rounded bump at some points where the rock outline
changes direction, appears also in Wang Li's landscapes, and even earlier in Sun Chiin-tse's; this
becomes an almost obsessive mannerism in the paintings of the Japanese artist Sessha, who
presumably learned it, with much of the rest of his style, from the Che-school masters during
his stay in China in 1468-69.) These outlines set up jerky, angular movements across the surface,
apparently guided more by inherent laws of linear motion than by the necessity to define natural
forms, creating an impression of dash rather than delicacy. In spite of the title and the solitary,
quiescent figure visible in the study, a stock symbol of seclusion, the painting is not tranquil in
mood. The texture strokes on the rocks have taken on the sharp, scratchy character that had
already begun to be evident in the work of Sun Chiin-tse.
T H E EARLY M I N G " A C A D E M Y " The differences between these two anonymous pictures,
and the new tendencies to be seen in the second—toward tighter, more geometric composition
on the picture plane, a more linear mode of brushwork that features prominent and energetic
drawing, and a consequent loss of convincing depth—can be taken as indications of the direction
that painting of this school was to take in the first half of the Ming and as introduction to
stylistic issues and innovations within the movement we are to consider next. That movement
is the painting of the so-called Ming "Academy." If we begin by trying to outline the historical
circumstances in which it occurred, we are immediately brought up against the problem of the
Ming "Academy" itself. A good deal of discussion, perhaps more than the subject merits, has
focused on the question of whether there was an "academy" in the Ming—whether, that is,
the term "academy" can be correctly applied to any phenomenon that occurred then. It seems
more useful, here as elsewhere, to define the phenomenon, and show how it differed from
related or corresponding ones in other periods, than to worry over whether the common term
for it is correctly used.
In the Southern Sung period, a well organized Painting Academy (T'u-hua Yuan) had existed
at the imperial court within the Han-lin, the academy of scholars, and many of the best painters
of the age had served in it. The Yuan emperors, as we have noted, apparently employed no organized
group of court painters, although some artists (such as Liu Kuan-tao) served in the court, and
others (such as Chao Meng-fu) were active there in other official capacities. The practice of
summoning noted painters to court and giving them official titles and imperial commissions was
reinstituted in the Ming. A number of painters were active under the first emperor, Hung-wu.
As we have noted, an examination system for the selection of officials had been re-established
at the beginning of the dynasty; scholars who attained chin-shih ("presented scholar," a kind
of doctorate degree) were eligible for appointment to the Han-lin Academy, and several who
received such appointments were painters. It is probable, however, that they were employed
mainly in other functions, as scholars and calligraphers, poets and astrologers and diviners. At the
same time, the establishment of Nanking as the new capital and the building or restoration of
palace halls created a need for wall paintings, and portraitists were in demand to produce, for
instance, state portraits of meritorious officials. For these functions, professional artists were
employed. The impression one receives from a variety of written sources is of a loose, scarcely
organized body of artists of varying skills and a diversity of stylistic backgrounds, creating
paintings as the need arose or the whim of the emperor and his ministers dictated.
Among these artists were a follower of the Ma-Hsia tradition; a nephew of Sheng Mou named
Sheng Chu; several specialists in figure compositions and portraits; and one survivor of the late
Yuan literati school of Soochow, Chao Yuan—who, as related earlier (Hills, pp. 129-30), did
not survive for long: he was beheaded at the order of the emperor, who found him incompetent
as a portraitist. Sheng Chu suffered the same fate, for representing a Taoist fairy riding a dragon
(a theme interpreted as insulting to the emperor), and so did Chou Wei, a figure painter and
List of Plates p.ix
Color Plate 1. Shih Jui: "Landscape with Buildings and Figures, in the Blue-and-Green
Go to page: 26
Manner." Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 142.8 X 74.8 cm. Private collection, J
Color Plate 2. Hsieh Huan: "A Literary Gathering in the Apricot Garden." Dated 1437. Section
of a handscroll, ink and colors on silk, 36.6 X 240.6 cm. Collection of H. C. Weng, New York.
List of Plates p.ix Go to page: 24, 28, 47, 199

Color Plate 3. Tai Chin: "Fishermen on the River." Section of a handscroll, ink and colors on
paper, 46 X 740 cm. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
List of Plates p.ix Go to page: 51, 102

^x% m
....,
Color Plate 4. Shen Chou: from "Album of Landscapes with Figures, for Chou Wei-te." Hated
1482. Album leaf, ink and light colors on paper, 31.8 X 59.7 cm. Chung Hsing Lu collection.
Color Plate 5. Shen Chou : from "Album of Landscapes with Figures, for Chou Wei-te." Dated
1482. Album leaf, ink and light colors on paper, 31.8 X 59.7 cm. Chung Hsing Lu collection.
Color Plate 6. Wu Wei: "Pleasures of Fishermen. " Section of a handscroll,
ink and colors on paper, 21.2 X 243 cm. Ching Yuan Chai collection.

Color Plate 7. Chang Lu, attributed to: "Su Tung-p'o Returning
to t h e Han-lin A c a d e m y . " Section of a handscroll, ink and light
colors on paper, 31-8 X 121.6 cm. Ching Yuan Chai collection.
List of Plates p.ix Go to page: 131

Color Plate 8. Anonymous, Ming dynasty ("Ch'ien Hsiian"): "Early
A u t u m n . " Section of a handscroll, ink and colors on paper, 26.7 X 1 20
cm. Detroit Institute of Arts, General Membership and Donations Fund.

Color Plate 10. Tu Chin: "The Scholar Fu Sheng in a Garden." Detail from a hanging
scroll, ink and colors on silk, 157.7 X 104.5 cm. Yamaguchi collection, Ashiya
Color Plate 9. Ch'iu Ying: "The Lute Song." Section of a handscroll, ink
and colors on paper, 33.7 X 400-7 cm. Nelson-Atkins Gallery, Kansas City.
List of Plates p.ix Go to page: 156, 209, 242
Color Plate 11. Detail from Color Plate 10.
List of Plates p.ix
Go to page: 191, 193 Color Plate 12. Chou Ch'en: from "Beggars and Street Characters." Dated
1516. Portion of an album leaf mounted in a handscroll, ink and colors on paper,
32.9 X 843.9 cm. Honolulu Academy of Art, gift of Mrs. Carter Gait, 1956.
mm
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List of Plates p.ix

Color Plate 13. Wen Cheng-ming: "Living Aloft" (Lou-chii t'u).
Go to page: 217 Dated 1 S43. Hanging scroll, ink and light colors on paper, 95. 3 X
45.7 cm. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. David Spelman, Great Neck, N.Y.
• •
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List of Plates p.ix Color Plate 14. Lu Chih: "Mount Chih-hsing." Hanging scroll, ink
Go to page: 242 and colors on paper, 83.6 X 34.7 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
PAINTING IN THE YUNG-LO ERA, 1403-24 • 21
landscapist who executed many of the wall paintings in the new palace. Chou had once managed
to escape the emperor's displeasure in a clever way: ordered to paint "all the rivers and moun
tains of the empire" on a palace wall, he pleaded insufficient acquaintance with the topography
of the whole of China and asked the emperor, who (as he flatteringly pointed out) knew it from
his brilliant conquests, to do a preliminary sketch on the wall. When Hung-wu had completed
the sketch, Chou bowed his head and declared that he would never dare to touch it, for fear
of spoiling it. In the end, however, even this resourceful man was executed "through the envy
and slander of his colleagues."
Obviously, conditions were not right for the emergence of any tightly knit body, on the Sung
model, that could properly be called an "academy." Moreover, not enough reliable work by
these masters survives (except that of Chao Yuan, which antedates the fall of the Yuan) to
allow any detailed investigation of court painting during the first Ming reign.4
4. PAINTING IN THE YUNG-LO ERA, 1403-24
Hung-wu's designated successor—one of his sons—died in 1391; with the death of Hung-wu
himself in 1398, a sixteen-year-old son of this late heir-apparent was enthroned. However, an
other son of Hung-wu, Chu Ti, who as prince had established himself in the old Mongol capital
of Peking, marched south and sacked Nanking, killing supporters of the boy-emperor and seizing
the throne for himself. He ruled with the reign title Yung-lo ("Perpetual Happiness") from
1403 until his death in 1424. In 1421 he transferred the capital to Peking, keeping Nanking
as a secondary capital.
The removal of the seat of government to the north was in part a response to the continuing
threat of the Mongols, against whom Yung-lo organized a series of punitive campaigns. He also
brought much of Southeast Asia under Chinese control and launched seven great maritime
expeditions, most of them directed by a Moslem eunuch named Cheng Ho. These expeditions
reached India, the Persian Gulf, and the east coast of Africa, opening a sea route and exploring
potential sources and markets for Chinese trade, bringing back exotic commodities and strange
animals. This remarkable beginning was not followed up, however, and by the middle of the
fifteenth century China had settled into the isolationism that was to persist for the rest of the
dynasty. The end of this age of expansion and exploration seems to have been brought about by
the same anticommercial, ethnocentric conservatism among the Confucian bureaucracy and
gentry classes that we can see manifested in much of the art of the Ming; it is therefore worth
noting in an account of Ming painting.
T H E PERSISTENCE OF CONSERVATIVE SOUTHERN SUNG STYLES In writing of a re

surgence of Ma-Hsia landscape styles, we may have given the false impression that these made
up the main heritage of the Southern Sung Academy for artists of later periods. In fact, the
styles of Ma Yuan and Hsia Kuei were themselves individual departures from the basic con
servative Academy style. That style had been formed in the early twelfth century in the Painting
Academy of the emperor Hui-tsung (reigned 1101-25) and was continued by Academy artists
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as well as by professional masters outside court. While
individual variants and historical change can of course be recognized within it, the body of
painting produced by these masters, great and small, exhibits more homogeneity and common
ness of purpose than any other in Chinese painting.
In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, in particular, the Academy style attained a
point of classical equilibrium that established the basic conservative manner and canonical models
for professional artists in all the centuries to follow. In landscape it is represented by tradition
alist followers of Li T'ang; in flower, bird, and animal painting by such artists as Lin Ch'un
and Li Ti; infigures-and-landscapesor figures-in-architecture compositions, by Liu Sung-nien,
Li Sung, and others in the Academy. We can trace its continuation in the works of late Sung
painters such as Lou Kuan; it was practiced by Yuan court painters such as Liu Kuan-tao (Hills,
PI. 68); and it becomes, as we shall see, the basic manner for artists of the early Ming "Acade
my." Later in the Ming it is taken up again as the point of departure for the professional masters
of early-sixteenth-century Soochow, notably Chou Ch'en, T'ang Yin, and Ch'iu Ying. Even in
the Ch'ing dynasty it underlies the productions of some painters in the Manchu court, as well
as others outside it, such as Yuan Chiang. And all through these centuries, this style was practiced
constantly, in relatively pure form although on a qualitatively lower level, passed on from master
to pupil in local ateliers, by the myriad minor artists who continued always to supply pleasing,
decorative pictures for hanging in houses or for the enjoyment of people of conservative taste.
Their works survive by the thousands, in most cases divested of their signatures and reattributed
misleadingly to the Sung masters by hopeful dealers and collectors, and make up the bulk of
many old museum collections, as anyone knows who has spent days going through storage-room
cabinets and drawers. It is important, as we go on to consider the progressive movements and
individual contributions that must occupy us in any art-historical treatment of later Chinese
painting, that we always remember this great undercurrent of conservative styles. It is important
also to recognize these styles when they rise occasionally to the surface, elevated once more to
the level of significant art by painters who can be highly skilled without aspiring to any notable
originality, as happens in the early Ming "Academy."
P I E N W E N - C H I N Of the few court artists recorded as having been active in Yung-lo's reign,
only two, Pien Wen-chin and Hsieh Huan, can be studied in extant paintings. Both were con
servative masters of the type we have just defined. We shall consider Pien here and Hsieh in the
following section.
Pien Wen-chin (also called Pien Ching-chao) was born in the southern coastal province of
Fukien, where he must have received his early training as a painter of bird-and-flower subjects.
Nothing is clearly known of any local Fukienese school of painting in the early and middle Ming,
but a number of artists from that province served at court, and both their surviving works and
what is recorded about them suggest that a somewhat backward pocket of Sung traditions
persisted in Fukien while more progressive movements arose in the major centers farther to the
north. We can also suppose, although again without clear documentary evidence, that the early
Ming rulers, in keeping with their aim of restoring pre-Mongol institutions in government and
society, probably favored Sung styles as a matter of official policy. They probably did so also
as men of conservative artistic tastes, who besides had no reason or occasion to become ac
quainted with the revolutionary achievements of the Yuan literati painters. Whatever the reason,
artists drawn from the local traditions of Chekiang and Fukien, primarily commercial traditions
that had never quite been penetrated by Yuan attitudes and remained committed to Sung modes,
dominated court painting circles both in their numbers and in their styles during the first half of
the fifteenth century, and continued to exert a powerful influence into the early sixteenth.
Pien Wen-chin was invited to court during the Yung-lo period and made a tai-chao (painter
in-attendance), serving in a palace building called the Wu-ying Tien. This and another building
nearby called the Jen-chih Tien, both located in the palace compound at Peking, were the quar
ters where painters worked; one late Ming source says that the Wu-ying Tien housed a school of
painting and calligraphy, while the Jen-chih Tien housed the studios, but this information is not
confirmed by other evidence. Both buildings were under the administration of an office, staffed
by court eunuchs, which supervised the work of painters, calligraphers, and artisans. Pien Wen-
chin, however, probably began his service as a court artist in Nanking; his well-known picture
THE HSUAN-TE ACADEMY, 1424-35 • 23
titled "The Three Friends and Hundred Birds" in the Palace Museum, Taipei,5 is dated 1413
and inscribed as having been painted in an "official residence," so he had already taken up his
career at court by then, eight years before the move to Peking. Pien was still active as a court
artist at the beginning of the Hsuan-te era (1426-35), by which time he was over seventy years
of age. Some time during that era he was stripped of his cap and sash, the emblems of official
rank, and made a commoner for having accepted bribes in recommending two scholars to the
court—the emperor spared him from more severe punishment because of his advanced age.
Pien's painting of "Two Cranes and Small Birds, with Bamboo and Blossoming Plum" (Pi. 5),
which bears his signature and three of his seals, is typical of his surviving output. The form and
materials—a hanging scroll done in ink and heavy colors on silk—are standard for works of artists
of an academic bent, and the asymmetrical composition, with flowering plants and bamboo
disposed vertically up one side, a sloping bank of earth below, and the birds perched or walking
on both, had become orthodox already in the Yuan (cf. Meng Yii-chien's picture, Hills, Color
Pi. 8). Most of Pien's paintings are variations on this simple formula, which was followed as
well by hundreds of later bird-and-flower masters of the Ming in thousands of pleasantly dec
orative, usually undistinguished works.
It would be difficult to define an individual style for Pien, who offers a straightforward,
workman-like performance in the Sung outline-and-color manner. Somewhat distinctive are
the postures of his smaller birds, heads turned sharply or tucked down, depicted with an at
tempt at animation that does not quite succeed—neither they nor the two stalking cranes convey
the sense of organic life that Meng Yii-chien's birds had, and those, in turn, represented a loss
in liveliness over Sung works of the type. Both birds and plants, in this and other works by
Pien, seem static and arranged, and the neat drawing does little to enliven them. Paintings of
other subjects by early Ming court artists are for the most part similarly static, and much of the
later stylistic experimentation within the school, as we will find, seems directed at overcoming
this failing by one means or another.
5. THE HSUAN-TE ACADEMY, 1424-35
Before turning to a consideration of artists active at court in the Hsiian-te era, we had best
pause to consider the Hsiian-te Academy itself. (We will hereafter use the term Academy with
out quotation marks; having pointed out that no organization for the training of artists compar
able to the Sung Academy can be proved to have existed in the Ming, we mean the term to refer
to the groups of painters active in the imperial court in the successive periods.) The era was one
of retrenchment. Failing to follow up the bolder imperial exploits of Yung-lo, Hsiian-te pulled
back the Chinese forces in Southeast Asia, allowed the situation on the northern frontier with
the Mongols to deteriorate, and put a stop to the maritime expeditions. He inherited a situa
tion of serious monetary inflation brought about by his predecessor's grand-scale building in
Peking and military campaigns. Like the emperor Hui-tsung three centuries earlier, he was
himself a painter of modest talent, specializing in animals, especially cats and dogs in garden
settings, and must have exerted some influence on the painters in his court; but his own works
are so eclectic in style that it is hard to guess what the influence can have been. In any case,
whether by design or through laxer control, he effected no stylistic or aesthetic domination
comparable to Hui-tsung's (which, as noted above, set a whole new direction for court-academy
painting in the Sung).
The masters of Hsiian-te's Academy, although they mostly came from the conservative centers
in Fukien and Chekiang provinces and were trained in the "basic" Sung styles described earlier,
do not simply perpetuate those old styles but, together with a master who may never really have
been one of them, Tai Chin, accomplish the true beginning of Ming Academy painting as a dis
tinct movement. In contrast to their predecessors in the Hung-wu and Yung-lo courts, who had
represented little more than an aftermath of Sung-Yuan painting and were apparently regarded
more as performers of useful functions than as artists of individual stature, the Hsiian-te Academy
masters, or some of them, created a new and significant stylistic current, based on Sung styles
(and to a lesser degree on those of the Yuan) but not stultifyingly bound to them.
HSIEH H U A N Another painter who, like Pien Wen-chin, served at court under both the
Yung-lo and Hsiian-te emperors was Hsieh Huan, or Hsieh T'ing-hsiin (the name he used in his
later years). Born in Yung-chia in Chekiang Province, he acquired somehow an education that
went beyond that of the ordinary professional painter, and some literary ability as well. In his
later years he was, moreover, a connoisseur and collector of paintings himself and reportedly
painted, on occasion, in the styles associated with the scholar-artists.6 His career at court was
unusually long-lasting and successful: the Hsiian-te emperor had a particularly high regard for
Hsieh and "kept him close to his side" as an adviser on matters of painting. One Ming writer
reports that he played wei-ch'i (a game like Japanese go) with the emperor every day. Because
there was no regularized system for bestowing commendation or promotion on painters, they
were commonly given purely symbolic titles and, especially, pseudomilitary rank in the so-called
Embroidered Uniform Guard, the personal guard of the emperor. Established by Hung-wu in
1382, this became a kind of secret service, sometimes employed by the emperor for political
espionage and other covert operations. We do not know whether painters took part in such
operations, but since some of them were confidants to the emperors, they may well have done
so. Hsieh Huan was appointed Platoon Commander and later, in the Ching-t'ai era (1450—56),
Battalion Commander in the Embroidered Uniform Guard. How far his elevation was in rec
ognition of his excellence as a painter and how far the result of his closeness to the emperor and
of cultivating friends among high officials and the eunuchs, whose political influence had risen
sharply since the Yung-lo era, we cannot know. Other officials resented the exemption of paint
ers from the normal channels of official promotion; the practice of giving high rank to them for
(as the others saw it) trivial skills, and the practices of favoritism and bribery in their promotion,
were criticized severely by two censors in the fifteenth century, but without result. Painters con
tinued to be among the favorites of the art-loving emperors, receiving salaries much higher than
court painters in the Sung had received, and sometimes, as we will see, they took extraordinary
advantage of their status.
Hsieh Huan's best surviving work, "A Literary Gathering in the Apricot Garden" (Color Pi.
2), testifies to his associations with people in high places: it portrays a gathering held in the
spring of 1437 in the garden of the villa of Yang Jung, one of the "Three Yangs" who as members
of the Grand Secretariat were the most trusted and honored advisers to the emperors of this
period.7 All three Yangs are portrayed in the painting, along with seven other scholar-officials,
one of them Hsieh Huan himself. Inscriptions by Yang Shih-ch'i (1365—1444) and others ac
company the painting, identifying the occasion and the participants.
In the section we reproduce, the old man in the center is Yang P'u (1372-1446). He and a
man named Wang Ying (1376-1450) are admiring a scroll painting suspended from a bamboo
hanging rod held by a boy servant; another boy at the left is untying the fastening string on
another scroll. To their right, a Mr. Ch'ien Hsi-li, seated at a table, raises a brush above a
spread-out roll of paper, his head cocked thoughtfully as if he were completing a poem in his
mind before inscribing it. In portraying these men, Hsieh Huan uses conventions that were
well established in formal and state portraiture, thus making a pictorial statement of their
eminent status as court officials. At the same time, by investing them with the attributes of the
scholar-aesthete, he tells us that they were intellectuals and connoisseurs as well. Perhaps they
THE HSliAN-TE ACADEMY, 1424-35 • 25
were; but we may be reminded of portraits of weightyfiguresof other times and places—princes,
corporation executives—that present these subjects as men of both worldly power and intel
lectual-artistic prowess. That is the image they want to project, and there are always "establish
ment" artists who will oblige them by making paintings that project it.
Behind the figures, wisteria vines grow on a bamboo trellis; also framing the scene are palm
and cypress trees, and in the foreground a garden rock and low apricot trees in bloom. The
enclosed setting, the massiveness of the main figures in their heavy official robes, and their im
passive faces speak of a comfortable security that was partly real (the controlled environment of
a high official's garden, where he and his friends could indulge in time-honored aesthetic
pastimes, surely offered as much of security as Ming China could afford) and partly, as had been
the case with Southern Sung court painting and its relationship to reality, a Confucian ideal
enshrined in a glorious past and never quite realizable in the present.
The style of the painting suits its theme in being traditional and unadventurous, fully ac
cepting the Southern Sung Academy mode in only slightly altered form. Paintings by Liu Sung
nien, Li Sung, and other masters of that age provide such close sources for Ming works in this
style that we are sometimes at a loss over whether to date them, in the absence of trustworthy
signatures or other evidence, to the twelfth century or to the fifteenth. The contour lines of
rocks and tree trunks have taken on, in this later work, a slightly crotchety character, with small
bumps and points protruding at close intervals, produced by pushing down and raising the
brush rhythmically as it moves; such line drawing is typical of the most conservative academic
paintings of early Ming. The forms are compact, distinctly set off, neatly spaced, heavily and
individually textured. This clear division of the picture surface into dense and empty areas as
a basic means of composition had begun, probably, with Li T'ang in the early twelfth century
and characterized the academic styles thereafter.
SHANG HSI An artist with whom this tight, restrained style is especially associated in the
second quarter of the fifteenth century is Shang Hsi, who was born at P'u-yang in Kiangsu
Province. Called to court in the Hsiian-te era, he eventually became Commander in the Em
broidered Uniform Guard. His subjects included tigers and other animals, flowers, and figures
in landscapes. A good example of the last category is his painting of "Lao-tzu Passing the
Barrier" (Pi. 6). It is unsigned, but an inscription mounted above, by a writer of the later
fifteenth century, identifies Shang as the artist. The picture illustrates one of the didactic
anecdotes or events from history and legend that the Chinese call ku-shih, "events of antiquity,"
which supply the themes for a great number of Ming academic paintings, even many of those
that seem at first glance to be pure landscapes or landscapes with purely conventional figure
groups. Such painting, favored by Academy or academic painters (and their patrons) in all
periods, is the Chinese equivalent of "history painting" in Europe.
Here it is a story from the late Chou period that is illustrated: Lao-tzu, the semilegendary
Taoist philosopher, leaving China in an ox-drawn cart on his way to the Western Regions, de
livers the text of his Tao-te ching ("The Way and Its Power" in Waley's rendering) to the keeper
of the barrier, Yin Hsi. Lao-tzu is presented in his traditional image, with bulging forehead and
white beard, his yoga-like seated posture an expression of his quietist thought. Yin Hsi, kneeling
before him holding a scepter of office, wears the costume of a Ming official—the artist makes no
attempt at historical accuracy, or even at a general air of antiquity. The cart is also, we may
suppose, an up-to-date Ming model. Where the serious professional excelled in scenes of this
kind—and this is why the amateurs seldom tried their hands at them, and were usually out of
their depth when they did (cf. Ch'en Ju-yen's picture, Hills, Pi. 71)—was in giving an impression
of precision by means of firm-lined, detailed drawing; actual fidelity to either history or nature
was beside the point. The landscape elements in Shang Hsi's picture are similar to those in
26 • THE EARLY MING "ACADEMY ' AND THE CHE SCHOOL
Hsieh Huan's in being firmly bounded and heavily textured and are similarly used to enclose
a shallow stage for action.
SHIH JUI Another of the backward-looking court painters of the period was Shih Jui, a
native of the Hangchow region in Chekiang who was called to court in the Hsiian-te era and
served as a painter-in-attendance (tai-chao) in the Jen-chih Tien. He is said to have used the
style of the Yuan master Sheng Mou in some of his landscapes and to have worked in the blue
and-green manner; he was also a specialist in chieh-hua, or "boundary painting," the meticulous
delineation of architectural subjects. Among his surviving pictures are three illustrations to ku
shih, and two handscrolls and two hanging scrolls in the blue-and-green manner.8 One of the
hanging scrolls, probably his finest surviving work (Color Pi. 1), bears two seals of the artist.
The blue-and-green mode of landscape painting originated in the T'ang dynasty or earlier but
was probably not thought of as a distinct manner, or given a name, until the Sung period. It took
its name from the blue and green mineral pigments, the copper carbonates azurite and malachite,
finely ground and held by a glue binder, that were applied heavily in coloring earth surfaces and
rocks. Sometimes gold was added (brushed on as a pigment) along the edges of rocks and else
where to render a glow of sunlight; an alternative name for the manner was "gold-and-green
landscape." In the Sung period and especially the twelfth century, when ink monochrome or
lightly colored styles were most popular, the blue-and-green landscape was revived as an
archaistic manner, with deliberate reference to antiquity; but at the same time, the heavy miner
al coloring was used in styles that otherwise represented, along with other works of that period,
the apogee of naturalism in Chinese painting. Yuan-period blue-and-green landscapes, by con
trast, emphasize the element of decorative archaism and move consciously away from naturalism
in their flat coloring and highly conventionalized drawing (see the example by Ch'ien Hsiian,
Hills, Color PI. 1).
The early Ming Academy, in this mode of painting as in others, reverts to Sung practice,
restoring a degree of naturalism to the style by providing enough space within the paintings for
houses to be set and figures to move around, and offering the careful, descriptive delineation of
detail that makes the picture believable in the viewer's eyes. To accomplish this, to recapture
so much of the Sung manner, the Ming artists must have had actual paintings of that period to
study. We know that the great landscape handscroll ascribed to the mid-twelfth-century Chao
Po-chii, now in the Peking Palace Museum, was in the imperial collection in the early Ming
period, since the Hung-wu emperor wrote a long inscription for it, and this was probably a
principal model for Shih Jui's essays in the blue-and-green mode.9 A crucial factor in the for
mation of the court painters' styles, or in the transforming and refining of their styles after
they came to court, was their access to early works in the imperial collection. Ordinary painters,
unless they had some special entree to good private collections, could hope for no such famili
arity with the masterworks of the past.
Shih Jui's painting follows Chao Po-chii's in many features but reflects its own age and the
intervention of Yuan in others. The blue and green pigments are not laid on so flatly or so sepa
rately within the outlines as in Ch'ien Hsiian's version of the style, but neither do they model the
masses through subtle shading as in Chao's. Figures are spotted about the scene as they are in
Chao's scroll, admiring the vistas, climbing the paths, approaching the houses or restino inside;
but when we view them close up they are seen to be less individualized, more conventional. The
mountain ridges, like Chao's, are represented as winding upward and back, and yet in the end
are read as flat and frontal. Chao's composition is unified by a hierarchical ordering of forms,
while Shih's trees, rocks, figures, etc., are more or less uniform in size and tone and are dis
persed evenly throughout the picture space. The proliferation of composition elements is obvi
ous if the picture is compared with Sun Chiin-tse's (Hills, Color Pi. 4), which begins with a
THE HSiiAN-TE ACADEMY, 1424-35 • 27
similarly arranged foreground but is far simpler as a whole. This tendency to overelaboration
and the episodic treatment offiguresand architecture are characteristic of large-scale landscapes
of the Academy and the Che school. Later examples, however, in pursuing bolder effects, were
to lose the refinements of execution that can still be admired in this one. The Ming re-creation
of Sung style as an elegant, courtly art is seen here in its truest, and in some respects its finest,
form.
An impressive and hitherto unpublished landscape, signed by the artist, can be added to Shih
Jui's small oeuvre (Pi. 8). Painted in ink and fairly heavy colors on silk, it represents a river
shore with a steep mountain rising in the distance. Three men sit at a table in a foreground
pavilion, attended by servants; beyond the farther shore is a villa among leafy trees. Here, the
composition in its scale and plan recalls Yuan-period evocations of Northern Sung and earlier
landscapes: the nearest land-mass is already in middle distance and is separated from the viewer
by water; there is no clear focus to the composition; the shores and mountain slopes are treated
in an archaistic manner derived from the Five Dynasties and early Sung mode that combined
schematic parallel-fold divisions of the surface with a heavy, graded application of texture
strokes. The furry appearance given to the earth masses by this method may remind us of Wang
Meng's "Fisherman-Recluse at Hua-ch'i" (Hills, PI. 52) and of the schematic archaisms of Ch'ien
Hstian's "Dwelling in the Floating Jade Mountains" (Hills, Pi. 7), but comparison with either
work reveals immediately that Shih Jui is after all the academician: nothing in his painting seems
arbitrary or spontaneous; there is nothing of the partly intentional awkwardness of the amateur
nor much sense of original creation to counter the uneventfulness of a performance in an
established style. Like Shang Hsi's picture or Shih's own blue-and-green landscape, this one is
neat, stable, clearly readable, involving more the eye with richly tactile forms than the mind
with any emotions or concepts that might underlie them.
Li TSAI The two leading landscapists among Hsiian-te's court painters were Li Tsai and
(insofar as he was ever a court painter at all) Tai Chin. Li was born in Fukien Province, where
he presumably learned painting from some local master. For reasons not recorded he moved to
K'un-ming in Yunnan Province, in the far southwest. Written accounts go on to say that he was
summoned to the capital and installed as a painter-in-attendance in the Jen-chih Tien during
the Hsiian-te era; but his collaboration with two other painters of whom the same is reported,
Hsia Chih and Ma Shih, on a handscroll10 dated 1424, two years before the beginning of that
era, suggests that he and the others were already in the capital by that year, perhaps hoping for
appointments at court. The growth of Nanking and Peking, and the concentration in both
cities of money and patronage, must have attracted artists from faraway places; and when we
read of one who was "invited to court," the truth may well be that he had come to the capital
on his own, still little known but ambitious, or perhaps at the invitation of some official from his
home province who was serving in the capital, and there won a name for himself and eventually
come to the attention of some higher official or eunuch who recommended him to the emperor.
It was in such channels of recommendation that the possibility of regional favoritism and bribery
arose. This is, of course, speculation, but is a more likely pattern of events than the idealized
one suggested by standard accounts written long afterwards, in which the emperor hears of the
fame of some painter in far-off Fukien and calls him to his side.
Concerning Li Tsai's landscape style, written sources and extant works agree in indicating
that he followed two traditions: that of Kuo Flsi and that of Ma Yuan and Hsia Kuei. Beyond this
simple observation, however, they diverge. The critics write that he used the Kuo Hsi manner
for his refined or careful works, the Ma-Hsia for his rough or coarse ones; surviving paintings
seem to say just the opposite.
Good examples of his work in the Ma-Hsia manner are the three pictures he contributed to
the handscroll mentioned above, painted in 1424 and representing scenes from the "Home
coming Ode" by T'ao Yuan-ming. The one from which we reproduce the central section (Pi. 9)
illustrates the line: "I sit by a limpid stream composing poems." The poet is seated on the
bank, beneath a pine tree, his brush poised, head tilted (like that of the calligrapher in Hsieh
Huan's scroll, Color Pi. 2—such expressiveness of posture and arrested movement was a feature
of the Academy figure style). His boy servant stands behind him, careful not to block his view,
and grinds his ink. On the opposite shore are two herons. The stream banks are rendered in
smoothly graded ink washes, which set off the river elegantly and then fade into fog above.
All this is very old-fashioned, in a somewhat homogenized, late-romantic Ma-Hsia manner.
The same could be said of the anonymous "Scholars on a Lakeshore" (Pi. 3), but there the
execution was more polished and meticulous. Li Tsai has effected some interesting alterations
in the manner. The figures are larger, the trees not so attenuated or so impressive. In Sung
compositions of this type, and even in "Scholars on a Lakeshore," foreground figures are set
in one corner and gaze into distance, directing the attention of the viewer outward to the
landscape. Here, by contrast, the figure of the poet is drawn large and located centrally, while the
surrounding landscape is reduced to a minimal role (instead of gazing into misty space, the poet
looks at a nearby pair of birds); one's attention cannot easily escape from the figures themselves.
The matter-of-fact pose and action of the servant (whose facial expression and crumpled gar
ment assign him to a lower social order—we will see a superlative exploitation of this means of
indicating status by style in a later chapter, in "Beggars and Street Characters" by Chou Ch'en)
work also to deprive the picture of the air of ideal perfection, and of mystery, that the style had
originally carried with it. For all its elevated theme, the untrammeled pleasures of the country
gentleman, the painting seems rather mundane, as do the others in the scroll. This effect is
partly due to the absence of all ambiguities from the composition, partly to the heavier, more
mannered drawing of the figures in jagged brushstrokes. Such drawing was intended, no doubt,
to recapture the figure style of the Southern Sung masters Ma Yuan and Liang K'ai but falls
far short of their reconciliation of sensitivity and sureness. (Among the heirs to this more heavy-
handed Ming derivative of Sung styles were the painters of Muromachi-period Japan and the
Kano-school masters of still later periods.)
We begin to perceive the dilemma faced by the Hsiian-te court painters: while some of them
seem to have been content to continue in old styles, others felt the necessity to break out of
them, if only because they recognized that anyone trying to compete with the Sung masters on
their own ground could be sure of losing the competition. However, attempts to move into a
new style raised new dangers. The inclination of any good painter of any school in this period,
with the examples of the great Yuan masters behind him, must have been toward the more in
dividual and expressive kinds of brushwork practiced by the scholar-artists of the Yuan. But the
history of Chinese painting offers numerous instances of what happened, typically, when one of
the professionals, trained in the technically disciplined and precise modes of drawing, tried to
"loosen up" and join the amateurs: unable to break easily the ingrained habits of tightly con
trolled movement, to relax and "trust the hand'' or "trust the brush'' (Chinese phrases referring
to spontaneous acts of creation) so as to attain the nuances of touch and the implications of a
lighter, slightly capricious approach that characterized the scholar-artists' drawing, they tended
to slip into nervous mannerisms, obtrusive and obsessive eccentricities of brushline that seem
too obviously aimed at effects of animation. On the one hand, then, the safe but deadening option
of academicism; on the other, alternatives that involved serious risks—beyond, thatjd? the
normal ones that a painter runs when he departs from the style in which he feels secure, and
which he knows will please his patrons. But good artists do not avoid risks, and the best of the
Academy artists did not; their experiments proved rewarding, in ways we will see. By under
/ - % • * \ \ /
1-2. Wang Li: from "Scenes of Hua-shan." Album leaves, ink and light colors on
paper, each 34.7 X 50.5 cm. PI. 1, collection unknown; PL 2, Shanghai Museum.
3. Anonvmous, Ming dynasty: "Scholars on a Lakeshore." Hanging scroll, ink and light colors on
silk, 179.3 X 109.4 cm. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
List of Plates p.ix
4. Anonymous, Ming dynasty: "Quietly Sitting in a Study Beneath
Go to page: 7
P i n e s . " Hanging scroll, ink on silk, I 7 O X 1 0 6 . 7 cm. Nanking Museum.
5. Pien Wen-chin: "Two Cranes and Small Birds, with Bamboo and Blossoming Plum." Hanging
scroll, ink and colors on silk, 163.5 X 86.6 cm. Collection of KozO Yabumoto, Amagasaki.
6. Shang Hsi: "Lao-tzu Passing the Barrier." Hanging scroll, ink and
light colors on paper, 61 X 121.3 cm. Atami Art Museum, Japan.
TW HH -
7. Detail from Plate 6-

List of Plates p.ix
Go to page: 27, 50 8. Shih J u i : " L a n d s c a p e . " Hanging scroll, ink and colors
on silk, 148.9 X 64.7 cm. Walters Art dallcrv, Baltimore.
t
9. Li Tsai: from "Illustrations to the Homecoming Ode of T'ao Yuan-min?."

Dated 1424. Section of a handscroll, ink on paper, 28 X 74 cm. Liaoning Museum.
10. Tai Chin : "Bodhidharma Meditating in a Cave, with Hui-k'o." Opening section
of a handscroll, ink and light colors on silk, 39 X 220 cm. Liaoning Museum.
List of Plates p.ix 11. Li Tsai: "Landscape in the Manner of Kuo Hsi." Hanging scroll,
Go to page: 45, 50 ink and light colors on silk, 833 X 39 cm. Tokyo National Museum.
List of Plates p.ix
12. Tai Chin: "The Hermit Hsu Yu Resting by a Stream." Hanging scroll, ink and
Go to page: 47 light colors on silk, 138 X 7 5 . 5 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund,
*
List of Plates p.ix

IB. Tai Chin: "Listening to the Rain." Hanging scroll, ink and light
Go to page: 49, 52 colors on paper, 122.3 X 5 0 . 5 cm. Collection of Yeo Teng Young, Tokyo.
List of Plates p.x
14. Tai Chin, attributed t o : "Five White Deer Beneath Pines." Hanging scroll,
Go to page: 49
ink and colors on silk, 142.5 X 72.4 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
List of Plates p.x 15-16. Tai Chin: from "Landscapes of the Four Seasons." Left, "Winter
Go to page: 49, 52, 130 L a n d s c a p e " ; right, " A u t u m n L a n d s c a p e . " Dated 1444. Hanging scrolls,
ink and colors on silk, each 134.8 X 51.5 cm. Collection unknown.
List of Plates p.x
17. Tai Chin: "Men in a House over a Stream." Hanging scroll, ink
Go to page: 50, 107 and colors on silk, 184-5 X 109-4 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
List of Plates p.x
18. Chou Wen-ching: "Chou Tun-i Gazing at Water
Go to page: 53, 101 Lilies." Dated 1463. Hanging scroll. Collection unknown,
List of Plates p.x 19-20. Yen Tsung: from "Landscape with Figures." Sections
Go to page: 54 of a handscroll, ink on silk. Kuang-chou Provincial Museum.
List of Plates p.x 2 1 . Lin Liang: " P h o e n i x . " Hanging scroll, ink and light
Go to page: 55 colors on silk, 164.S X 96.5 cm. Shdkoku-ji, Kyoto.
TAI CHIN • 45
standing their dilemma we are better prepared to understand the later development of this
branch of Ming painting, in both its successes and its failures.
Li Tsai's best-known work, "Landscape in the Manner of Kuo Hsi" (Pi. 11), is a good intro
duction to the new direction within Academy painting. It is undated but must represent the
style of his later years, when he was probably influenced by Tai Chin, the artist most responsible
for that new direction. Comparison with T'ang Ti's "Traveling in the Autumn Mountains"
(Hills, Pi. 31) and with the masterpiece on which that is based, Kuo Hsi's "Early Spring" of 1072
(Hills, Pi. 92), reveals at once that this is still another reworking of that famous composition.11
It seems to be based more on T'ang Ti's version, or some other intermediary, than on Kuo's
original, which Li Tsai may never have seen (although he could have, since it was in the early
Ming palace collection): the temple-in-the-valley passage, for instance, is again located in the
left center. The distant mountains that T'ang inserted at the opposite side, to block off the deep
recession, have been enlarged to fill the whole space, allowing no penetration at all. Li Tsai's
masses have lost even the degree of rotundity that T'ang Ti's preserved. Moreover, he treats
complex masses neither as organic wholes in the Kuo Hsi manner nor as composites of lumpy
units in that of T'ang Ti but as overlapping flat shapes, set off from each other by simple con
trasts of light and dark, the smaller shapes superimposed upon the larger. The ridge that zigzagged
into depth at the summit of Kuo Hsi's central mountain survives only as a two-dimensional zig
zag pattern on the front face of Li Tsai's.
All this represents a general abandonment of concern with illusionistic rendering of space and
mass, light and shadow; and by giving these up, acknowledging that he is no Sung painter and
exploiting the characteristics of a new style, Li Tsai achieves a far more pleasing work than T'ang
Ti's, a work that in relinquishing Northern Sung monumentality conveys a monumentality of its
own, in powerful forms rendered with sureness of purpose but also with an air of semi-spon
taneity. Untroubled by the need to define relative distance, he can construct his picture out of
blocky units that interlock for compositional tightness; content with creating a generalized
effect of sunlight and shade (in which, following probably the lead of Tai Chin, he is quite suc
cessful), he is relieved of the task of trying to portray their interaction on individual forms. The
effect of fussiness (from which T'ang Ti does not escape) he avoids through broader, more dash
ing brushwork that sacrifices much of its form-defining properties to gain a sense of ease, a degree
of relaxation.
The roughness of the brushwork which is more visible in details (and more pronounced in
other works by Li), gives us a clue to why his style was described by Yiieh Cheng (1418—72) as
"wild and disorderly." Brushwork of this kind tends to flatten whatever it depicts, but the
flatness is here accepted, presented as an aspect of an interesting new style. The implications of
impulsiveness and temperament that this style carries signal at least a partial liberation of the
court painter from the servile position of a maker of images, allowing him the status of a creator
of works of art. Here style corroborates history: the greater prestige that court painters en
joyed in the Hsiian-te period and afterward is evident even from the meager biographical material
that we have for them. The artist who probably deserves most credit for raising the qualitative
level and prestige of the Academy was Tai Chin.
6. TAI CHIN
The events and circumstances of Tai Chin's life, and his influence on contemporary and later
artists, have recently become clearer through the research of Kei Suzuki.12 Tai was born in 1388
in Ch'ien-t'ang (the region of Hangchow) in Chekiang Province and presumably learned painting
from some master of the local school. He made at least one trip, and perhaps two, to the capital
(then Nanking) while still in his twenties. One later Ming source relates an anecdote that has
him arriving there in the early Yung-lo era: a porter disappears with his luggage, whereupon Tai
sketches the man from memory so accurately that the townspeople recognize him and conduct
Tai to his house, where the luggage is retrieved. Another source, the biography of Tai by Lang
Ying (b. 1487), which is the fullest account of Tai Chin's life that we have, tells of his coming to
Nanking late in the Yung-lo period with his father, who had received an official appointment (?
the text is not clear). Although Tai was already a painter of uncommon ability, he failed to make
a name for himself, even with his father's support, and returned to Ch'ien-t'ang to work on per
fecting his skill. His fame grew, and early in the Hsiian-te era, probably around 142S, he was
recommended at court by a eunuch named Fu, who submitted four of Tai's paintings, landscapes
of the four seasons, for the emperor's appreciation. The viewing was held in the Jen-chih Tien.
There are several varying accounts of what happened at this viewing, but they agree that Tai
fell victim to the envy of other painters in the Academy, especially of Hsieh Huan. In Lang Ying's
version, Hsieh (who was, we should recall, the emperor's trusted artistic adviser) unrolled
first the spring and summer scenes, and expressed admiration for them: "These are beyond
what your subject [i.e., I myself] could attain." But when Hsieh looked at the autumn scene, he
expressed anger. The emperor asked why, and Hsieh replied that the fisherman portrayed in the
picture was not suitably humble in appearance. Other accounts are more specific about his ob
jection: the figure wore a red coat, which, Hsieh maintained, was proper garb for gentlemen-
officials but not for a common fisherman. Gentlemen garbed as fishermen-recluses had often
appeared in Yuan paintings, where they suggested a high-minded avoidance of public life and
service under the Mongols; perhaps Hsieh meant to read such an antigovernment implication
into Tai Chin's picture.
That possibility is strengthened by his response to Tai's winter scene: upon examining it, Lang
Ying goes on to relate, Hsieh Huan exclaimed that the "Seven Worthies Passing the Barrier" (a
ku-shih of unclear origin which was evidently the theme of the picture) was "an incident from a
disorderly age"—it represented seven men fleeing from some unsettled, ergo badly ruled, state
and hence could be interpreted, however forcedly, as a slur directed at the emperor and his re
gime. Hsiian-te concurred and waved the paintings away; Tai Chin had lost, at least for the time,
all chance of an appointment to the Academy. Lang Ying tells us that the emperor ordered the
eunuch Fu executed (which would seem an excessive punishment if this were not Ming China,
when executions for trivial offenses were common) and that Tai Chin and his student Hsia Chih
escaped to Hangchow, leaving at night to escape notice.
This bitter episode is so crucial to Tai Chin's career that it must be assessed and somehow
understood. It would be a mistake to interpret it as indicating that Tai's contact with Hsiian-te
court painting circles was so brief as to be inconsequential. A more plausible interpretation,
suggested but not developed by Suzuki, is that it represents the climax, but not the entirety, of
a serious conflict between Tai and the conservative artists at court, of whom Hsieh Huan was
the eldest and most powerful. The young Tai Chin, coming from the same Chekiang background
as Hsieh and following the same stylistic tradition but already (we may assume) engaged in a
creative reworking of it, could be seen only as a potential rival; as one outside the established
hierarchy of age and rank but at least implicitly challenging it, he may well have represented a
real threat. The court artists described in the texts as envious of Tai cannot have known his work
only through this single showing at court; he may have been at the capital for some time before
this, as was suggested above in the case of Li Tsai, looking for high-level patronage and eventual
ly a position at court. The same artistic excellences that raised his reputation in Hangchow and
Peking may have provoked alarm in the Academy.
Lu Shen (1477—1545), our earliest source on the life of Tai Chin, introduces his account of
the incident with this: "Serving at court under Hsuan-te were Hsieh Huan, Ni Tuan, Shih Jui,
TAI CHIN • 47
and Li Tsai, all of whom were famous; but when Tai Chin came to the capital, they were all jeal
ous of him." 13 Hsieh Huan, as the most powerful spokesman for this point of view, probably
invented his objections to the fisherman's red coat and the Seven Worthies theme on the spot
to mask a deeper opposition; and his choosing issues of subject rather than style to discredit Tai
before the emperor suggests another gap between old and new. Court painters up to this time
had devoted a great deal of attention to depicting specific subjects, historical, legendary, or con
temporary (Shang Hsi, for instance, painted a huge picture of Hsiian-te and his courtiers on a
hunt, which still survives). They accepted the fact that their works would be evaluated, as those
of Sung academicians had been, on the "correctness'' of their portrayal of the chosen or assigned
themes. Later painters in this tradition are much less concerned with such subjects and the
correct portrayal of them. The transition seems to have been in the period of Tai Chin, whose
early works sometimes contain ku-shih but whose fully mature works seldom if ever do.
At Hangchow, Tai hid out in Buddhist temples and made his living painting images for them.
He had not yet escaped, however, from the enmity of Hsieh Huan, who employed an agent to
seek him out, forcing him to flee once more, this time to Yunnan, where he entered the service
of an art-loving nobleman named Mu Ch'en (1368—1439). Another painter favored by Mu Ch'en
was Shih Jui, who, presumably on a visit to Mu's residence, saw and admired paintings of gate
guardians that Tai had done for him and, ascertaining that the artist was a fellow townsman (both
were from Ch'ien-t'ang), housed and fed him for some time. Shih was apparently not one of the
painters hostile to Tai during his brief appearance at court, or else had relented afterwards.
Later, probably around 1440, Tai returned at last to Peking.14 The Hsiian-te emperor had died
in 1435 and was succeeded by his son, who was only eight at the time. The Yangs (who were
portrayed in Hsieh Huan's scroll of 1437, Color Pi. 2) and later a eunuch named Wang Chen
were the effective rulers. Tai received the favor and support of two high officials, Yang Shih-ch'i
(1365—1444) and Wang Ao (1384-1467), who considered him to be the equal of the old masters.
His life in this period, Lang Ying tells us, was ' 'well ordered and contented" ; people took pleas
ure in having him for a friend, and his works were in great demand. There is no evidence that he
entered service in the Imperial Academy—in fact, since it is difficult to identify much activity in
court painting circles between the Hsiian-te and Ch'eng-hua reigns, i.e., 1435-65, we may won
der to what extent there was an Academy, even in the loose sense in which we have used the
term. But Tai's patrons were on the highest levels of the government, and he was probably the
most esteemed and influential painter in the capital during his years there. Nevertheless, he
eventually returned to his home in Hangchow, as we are told by, among others, Tu Ch'iung
(whom we will encounter as an amateur painter in the next chapter): "Late in life he begged to
return to Hangchow, where his fame had increased." He died there in 1462; a number of
sources state that he died in poverty, but none takes the trouble to tell us why.
Only a few of Tai Chin's surviving works are dated, and whatever development we may trace
in them must accordingly be on the basis of their style. It is natural to begin with paintings that
preserve most faithfully the Ma-Hsia mode, on the assumption that this was what he learned as
a youth in Ch'ien-t'ang and practiced in his early years. There are a number that seem to rep
resent that stage, among them a landscape with figure recently acquired by the Cleveland Mu
seum of Art (Pi. 12). The composition, like some others treated in this chapter, is a compromise
between the diagonally divided plan of late Sung, with free-flowing spaces, and a new tendency
to locate the focus of the picture centrally, constructing the remainder around it in a tight, even
rigid relationship to the frame. The theme may at first recall a famous work by Ma Lin dated
1246, "Listening to the Wind in the Pines,"15 and parts of the setting, including trees and rocks,
resemble those of Ma Lin, except that they have lost the suppleness of Ma Lin's delineation to
become harder and more angular in the Ming manner. The figure is framed by them but not
comfortably set in them—the branches projecting inward toward him and the harshness of the
sharp-cut banks with their nail-like texture strokes preclude that. He is shown as a weary
traveler who sprawls gracelessly on a path, resting his weight on one arm, his walking stick laid
starkly before him, and looks out at the viewer. Unidealized, his head sunk between his shoul
ders, he seems to assert himself as a modern man inhabiting, or passing through, a Sung world
gone slightly wrong. Granting that this is unlikely to have been the conscious expressive intent of
the artist, we can still sense in the painting a degree of disillusionment with the Sung artistic ideal
to which it ostensibly conforms.
Wai-kam Ho has recently proposed a more specific theme for the painting. He notes the
similarity in size and style to another work by Tai Chin representing "Emperor Wen-wang Vis
iting T'ai Kung-wang"16 and suggests that the two may have belonged to a series depicting virtu
ous recluses of legend. When the Chou-dynasty emperor Wen-wang came to visit T'ai Kung
wang on the shore of the Wei River, where the hermit was fishing, to invite him to serve as a
minister at court, T'ai loftily refused. Wai-kam Ho identifies the figure in the Cleveland picture
as Hsu Yu, another legendary recluse of even mistier antiquity, who, when the sage-emperor Yao
offered to yield the throne to him, not only refused but washed his ears to remove the contamina
tion they had suffered. On another occasion Hsu Yu said: "When the water is clean I wash my
cap; when it is muddy I wash my feet.'' The fact that the cap and feet of the figure are prominent
ly displayed in the Cleveland picture supports this suggestion, which is especially interesting in
view of the possibility that related themes (cases of seclusion or withdrawal to avoid involvement
with official or court service) may have been portrayed in the two paintings denounced by
Hsieh Huan. Hsieh's patronage, if we can take the "Apricot Garden" scroll of 1437 as indica
tive, was from among established officials and men of high ministerial rank. Were Tai Chin's
patrons, in the early period probably represented by these works, men somehow out of office,
who found in such paintings flattering suggestions that they were so by their own choice ? While
we can only speculate, the paintings of the two clearly express opposite attitudes toward govern
ment service, and for painters active in the capital the choice of such themes was surely sig
nificant with respect to the status of their patrons.
A handscroll by Tai Chin portraying the first six patriarchs of the Ch'an Buddhist sect in a
mountainous landscape must be another relatively early work, perhaps done during his period
as a painter for the Buddhist temples of Hangchow, although this scroll, as we know from the ded
ication, was done for an individual patron or friend named P'u-hsiin. The scroll opens with the
scene of the First Patriarch, Bodhidharma, seated in meditation in a cave facing a stone wall
(PI. 10). Hui-k'o, who was to become the Second Patriarch but who at this point was still aspir
ing to disciplehood, stands behind him, ankle-deep in snow. Bodhidharma ignores him; a mo
ment afterward, in a desperate and totally convincing demonstration of his seriousness, Hui-k'o
was to draw a knife and cut off his left arm. The best known illustration to the story is of course
the one painted in 1496 by Sesshu, who, as noted already, took much of his stylistic and thematic
repertory from the Che school.17 Sesshu's picture is simpler but quite similarly composed; it
may be based on this one, or both on a still older model.
To those familiar with Sesshu's austere work, Tai Chin's will seem busy, even cluttered—he
shows us the furnishings of Bodhidharma's cave, even to a bamboo water conduit emptying into
a large pot, with a towel hanging over it. Again, an elevated theme is brought down to the
mundane level: one could scarcely imagine a treatment of it further removed in spirit from what
we are accustomed to think of as Ch'an painting. The outline drawing of trees and rock masses
exemplifies that kind of nervous mannerism, referred to above, to which the academically
trained artist was prone when he attempted to escape, through experiments in calligraphic acti
vation, from the stiffness of the style he had inherited. Tai Chin is here pushing to the point of
absurdity—as, apparently, an artist sometimes must before discarding entirely an outworn fea
ture of style—the linear mode we have associated with the most conservative masters of the
TAI CHIN • 49
early Ming, turning it into a sort of dotted line. The landscape forms are otherwise close to those
in the other picture, which must in an ideal chronology antedate this one, both preceding the
artist's full maturity.
The records of Tai's life are too spotty to give us clues as to how the crucial alterations in
style came about; we have no information, for instance, on what he saw and studied in painting
of the past. But on his trips to the capitals, and later during his stay with Mu Ch'en, he must
have had opportunities to see Sung and Yuan works that expanded the range of styles on which
he could draw, and his increasing fame in Chekiang art circles doubtless opened doors to collec
tions there. Some of his extant paintings suggest that in his break from the hardened Sung man
ner he was inspired by the more conservative Yuan artists, especially Sheng Mou, Wu Chen, and
Kao K'o-kung; the first two were of course Chekiang painters themselves. As examples of his
essays in these Yuan manners we may consider two works that, standing somewhat outside what
ever development we can postulate for him, are difficult to assign even provisionally to any
particular stage in his career.
One is a hanging scroll painted in ink and light colors on paper, titled "Listening to the Rain"
(Pi. 13). The title has been inscribed by the artist at the upper right and is followed by: "Tai
Chin of Ch'ien-t'ang drew this in an official residence at Yii-ho." Yii-ho (Jade River) is located
in the western environs of Peking; the picture must have been painted during one of Tai's stays
there. It is clearly based on the style of Sheng Mou—compare, for instance, Sheng's "Singing
While Boating on an Autumn River" (Hills, PI. 25)—in both composition and rendering of
motifs: the foreground and distant hills are strikingly similar, as is the device of framing the boat
between the shore and overhanging tree branches. So successfully is the style recaptured, in
fact, that little besides the composition—vertically disposed at left, horizontally at right (cf.
PL 15)—-reveals the Ming date of the picture or the hand and taste of Tai Chin.
Imitating Sheng Mou was in itself nothing unusual for an Academy or academic painter of the
early Ming; as we have already noted, the artist's nephew Sheng Chu was a painter in the Hung
wu court, and a number of extant early Ming works testify that Sheng's style was practiced in
hardened form by academic artists of that period, for whom it was, along with the landscape
manner of Kao K'o-kung, among the few exceptions to their general rejection of the Yuan
masters. But Tai Chin's use of the Sheng Mou style is fresh and direct—it must have been based
on familiarity with good originals—and avoids the crotchety mannerisms that had crept into
standard Ming renderings of it. His brushwork is as soft and sensitive as Sheng's own, re-creating
not merely the superficials but the expressive essence of his model, making one more conscious
of the scene and its poetic flavor than of the style. A man lies in his boat, sheltered by a woven
canopy, listening to the patter of raindrops on the water. The rain is suggested only in a sky
darkened with washes of dilute ink and in an agitated river surface.
A more problematic and controversial work is "Five White Deer Beneath Pines" (Pi. 14). It
is unsigned, but an inscription by Wen Cheng-ming (1470-1559) attributes it to Tai Chin. Both
the authenticity and the quality of the painting have been repeatedly called into question, and
it has been little published or discussed. Part of the problem has been identifying the stylistic
tradition it follows and understanding how a master of the Che school could come to do such an
odd picture. The tradition is in fact that of Kao K'o-kung, whose landscape of 1309 (Hills, PL
19), however dissimilar in whole effect, provides a parallel for the basic plan and some motifs:
a stream separating the foreground into two banks, on which trees grow; cottony fog in the mid
dle ground (which Tai Chin otherwise eliminates by increasing the sizes of his trees and bringing
the mountains closer); the mountain itself, made up of steep-sided, round-topped pinnacles,
which are already split apart by deep fissures in Kao's work and in Tai's scarcely cohere as a
single mass. Several landscapes by followers of Kao K'o-kung could be introduced to fill the
SO • THE EARLY MING "ACADEMY" AND THE CHE SCHOOL
stylistic gap between the two pictures ;18 they corroborate what we learn from written sources:
that the following of that arch-amateur Kao K'o-kung, after the end of Yuan, was not so much
among the scholar-artists as (somewhat surprisingly) among the Academy painters and other pro
fessionals.
Five deer, white with brown spots, have come to drink at a stream in a pine grove. Deer are
auspicious symbols in China, because the word for deer (lu) is a homonym with that for good
fortune. Wen Cheng-ming's poem underlines this symbolic content in the painting, which was
probably commissioned for presentation on some occasion such as the birthday of an official; it
speaks of the "five auspicious [symbols] assembled" and of "deities and immortals on earth."
The artist, perhaps aiming at an impression of otherworldliness, dematerializes his mountain
peaks until, descendants though they are of Kao K'o-kung's ponderous masses, they seem quite
weightless. He transforms the horizontal tien ("dots," or small strokes) that lined the edges of
Kao's slopes into elongated grassy strokes that are repeated by vertical piling throughout the
picture, as if threaded on the long, wavering contour lines. He adds to the visual ambiguities of
clouds and hilltops by drawing both with the same curling outlines. Throughout, most of all,
he denies solid substance by setting up vibrating movements, interweavings of restless line,
flickering plays of light and dark. Where Kao K'o-kung presented us with a basically stable con
struction of strangely plastic but inert matter, Tai Chin (if it is indeed he) gives us a vision of
shimmering mountains, fluidly twisting pines, shifting mists, and mysterious deer that seem suit
ably unearthly denizens of such a world. The picture is worthy of Tai Chin, and Wen Cheng
ming's attribution can provisionally be credited until more evidence either substantiates or
disproves it.
The four Tai Chin paintings we have considered fall either prior to or somehow outside his
typical mature style. Enough of his work survives, and with enough consistency within it, for us
to define that style clearly and see how it developed out of the harder, tighter manner of his
early period, a development that set the direction for the whole Che school. A good starting
point is a large, signed painting representing "Men in a House over a Stream" (Pi. 17). Three
men sit in a room opening onto the water, while another approaches on a path along the river.
The lower part of the composition is roughly symmetrical and fairly stable, but the placing and
drawing of the beetling bluff that rises above offsets both symmetry and stability. Since some
features of style to be seen here will affect powerfully the later phases of the school, it is worth
while to identify them now, at first encounter (or, for some of them, second, since they were
noted already in Li Tsai's landscape, PI. 11):
1) The scale offiguresto their setting belongs neither to the monumental landscape type (Shih
Jui, Li Tsai: Pi. 8, 11), in which figures were small and inconspicuous, nor to the narrative or
anecdotalfigures-in-landscapetype (Shang Hsi, Li Tsai: Pi. 7, 9) in which they were the center
of attention. Here they are large enough and numerous enough to enliven the scene without
dominating it, while the mountains are scaled down to modest proportions by the relative sizes
of trees, building, waterfall, etc. The scale, to put the matter simply, is closer to that of Yuan
painting than to that of Sung.
2) The painting is composed in large units, none dominant; they lock together and echo each
other in shape for a unity that does not depend on well-defined spatial relationships—there is
little sense of separation in depth—or on any flow of force or forms from one part to the next,
but on an effective organization of the painting surface.
3) The landscape masses, and especially those in the upper part, are not treated as truly plastic
or tactile forms; the artist neither models them nor renders their texture with the patiently re
peated strokes called ts'un. Instead, washes and broad overlapping strokes of dilute ink create
an impression of light and shadow, conveying the corporeality of a mass by distinguishing
TAI CHIN • SI
simply its sunlit and shaded sides, and its weathered, irregular surface through highlights
(standing out as reserve in the areas of wash) and dark strokes that read as recesses.
4) Landscape forms are dynamically conceived; they push and lean, like those in Yuan paint
ings, thrust answered by counterthrust, and overhang at some points for effects of instability.
5) All this is accomplished in brushwork that is itself dynamic and achieves something of the
quasi-improvisatory character of the late Yuan scholar-artists' works. Outlines meander fluidly
across the surface, and scratchy, split-brush configurations have taken the place of texture
strokes. Tai Chin is venturing into the alluring, perilous realm of style that we referred to, in
discussing Yuan painting, as the transformation of mass into movement; it is a relatively cautious
venture so far, but is already successful in several respects. It communicates to the viewer a sense
of swiftness and ease of execution, thus involving him visually in the making of the picture; it
allows the artist (since the swiftness was no doubt real) to produce more quickly a work that is
no less formally strong or decoratively beautiful than he could achieve with the older, more pains
taking methods.
Another way of characterizing this direction in style has been suggested by Sherman Lee, who
speaks (in describing Yuan departures from Sung practice) of pictures that are "written" rather
than (in the old sense) painted.19 Tai Chin's pictorial "writing" is the brush-idiom of the sem
icursive "running" script, hsing-shu, or even of the cursive ts'ao-shu in some of its brusquer
manifestations. Tai's most extreme excursion into this manner is also his most brilliant: the cele
brated handscroll in the Freer titled "Fishermen on the River" (Color PI. 3). Here the influ
ence of Wu Chen seems obvious: in the thick-line, cartoon-like drawing, in the depiction of
shoals with reeds stretching into distance, and in the placing of boats as bold diagonals against
the river, which in some sections fills the entire height of the scroll, as in Wu Chen's own
"Fishermen" scroll of 1342 (also in the Freer Gallery).20 But these stylistic borrowings are
used in a context that is fundamentally different from Wu Chen's.
Tai Chin's fishermen are not the gentlemen-recluses whom Wu depicted, out on the river for
quiet contemplation; some of them, at least, are actively earning their living by catching fish.
Others pole their boats, sit in them conversing in gregarious groups, or gather on the bank to
drink wine, surrounded by their wives and children. All are highly animated, both by their
postures (turned heads, bent knees) and by the drawing itself, done in short, jerky strokes. Trees
and rocks (seen elsewhere in the scroll) seem animated as well, not so much by any dynamism in
the forms themselves as by a nervous energy in the brushwork that brings them into being. Tai
Chin works with an air of unrestraint or even abandon, but a rigorous technical training under
lies his seeming looseness, preventing him from ever really losing control; the effect is one of
spontaneity, but everything is in place. We can admire this nice balance that he strikes between
freedom and discipline; few later artists were to strike it so successfully. The energetic and deci
sive execution of this scroll might be condemned by the more fastidious literati critics as showy,
but it impresses us today as a dazzling virtuoso performance by a master whose technical bril
liance is as apparent in his spontaneous works as in his careful ones, perhaps even more so.
The few dated works of Tai Chin that survive are clustered in the period 1439-46, with a
single painting, a hard-edged and severe winter landscape dated 14S2, standing apart from
these. They all belong to a period, probably during his later stay in Peking, when he worked con
fidently, in well-mastered styles, producing works that were not too demanding of his time or
taxing of his inventiveness, to supply a demand created by his new popularity. A hanging scroll
dated 1445 in the Shanghai Museum and a handscroll dated 1446 in the Berlin Museum are both
made up of fairly conventional Ma-Hsia school motifs rendered in a blunt "shorthand" manner.
More admirable are two hanging scrolls dated 1444, autumn and winter scenes from a set of
landscapes of the four seasons, which are known only through reproductions in an old Japanese
book (Pi. 15—16). They are handsome, strongly decorative pictures that retain little of the old
academicism, and the fact that the style they display became in time the basis of a new academi
cism is of course irrelevant to their quality. Both can serve to establish for us compositional
types that were probably original with Tai Chin (cf. his "Listening to the Rain," Pi. 13) and
were endlessly repeated by later artists. In the autumn scene (Pi. 16), an overhanging cliff rises
the entire height of the picture, with trees and bushes growing out from it, and fishermen's boats
placed below and beyond the cliff define simply a horizontal extension into depth to counter the
dominant vertical. Variants of this type were to become the stock in trade of later artists such as
Chang Lu. The winter scene (Pi. 15) is similarly vertical in its main emphasis, with rocks, trees,
and peaks piled up on the left side; the river stretches to a high horizon at right, with stages in the
recession marked only in the foreground, by a bank and bridge with a group of travelers, and
in the background by a boat and the distant shore. Both formulas provide means for the easy con
trivance of effects of deep space, which are neither so rationally achieved as in Northern Sung
painting nor so visually as in Southern Sung but rely on long-established conventions that are
effective because they are familiar. Similarly, the profusion of trees, diverse in their branch pat
terns and leafage, affords an impression of rich textural variety to compositions that would other
wise seem very stark.
The drawing adapts sensitively to the nature of the objects it portrays; supple for the trees of
autumn, stubby and stiffer for those of winter; firmly bounding for the rocks, compact and sure
for the figures and boats; everywhere with the right degree of tension for its function; clean
and exact, with none of the sloppiness or hardness that were to afflict later imitations. When
we add to these excellences the attractiveness of the subjects, with their bucolic nostalgia, to offi
cials and other residents of the capital, we are at no loss to understand Tai Chin's popularity;
and these two pictures alone would prove that it was well merited.
Chinese writers of later ages credit Tai with founding the Che school, named after his native
province, Chekiang, where he began and ended the ups and downs of his career. Many later
artists, court painters and others, were his followers; whether or not we can properly call them
a school is another of those questions of definition on which it seems fruitless to spend one's
time. (The designation "Che school" is commonly expanded, as we noted at the beginning of
this chapter, to cover court painters and others stylistically related to them as a group, includ
ing those who neither came from Chekiang nor followed Tai.) The decline of this school (or
whatever we choose to call it), which will be traced in a later chapter, affected also Tai Chin's
reputation. In his time and shortly after, he was praised by some as the finest painter of his age.
Lu Shen (1477—1545), quoted earlier, says: " Of the painters of this dynasty, Tai Chin of Ch'ien
t'ang must be considered the foremost" ; and Lang Ying writes: "After the master died, there
were dozens who became illustrious through their paintings—Li Tsai and Chou Ch'en in land
scape, Lin Liang and Lii Chi in birds and animals, Tu Chin and Wu Wei in figures . . . but they
each attained only one branch [of his art]. Who was there who combined beauties and skills as
the master did? He was truly a sage among painters." Others in the sixteenth century, however,
felt obliged to praise him a bit defensively as "the best among the Academy masters" or as hav
ing been more than a mere academician, an artist whose styles contained elements of Yuan
painting as well as Sung and of the amateur tradition as well as the professional.
Wang Shih-chen (1526-90), a highly influential critic of literature as well as painting, says
of him (Siren's translation): "Tai Chin from Ch'ien-t'ang painted incessantly during his whole
life, yet he could never buy a full meal. This was his minor misfortune. After his death he was
famous in Wu [Soochow], but when a hundred years had passed he was no longer considered
equal to Shen Chou. This was his greater misfortune. But in the eyes of real connoisseurs he
will be considered the foremost of all Ming painters." Wang's further defense of Tai Chin, how
PAINTING DURING THE "INTERREGNUM," 1436-65 • S3
ever, betrays in itself some prejudice: he tells of seeing a series of seven landscapes by him, which
he mistook at first sight for works by the slightly later scholar-artist Shen Chou (who is hailed as
founder of the Wu school, as Tai is of the Che); there was, he said, "no trace of the Ch'ien-t'ang
feeling in them." 21
It was already difficult, a century after Tai's death, to reconcile an admiration for his paintings
with an all-but-obligatory condemnation of the tradition he belonged to. By the late Ming, the
issues had become even more polarized and doctrinaire. Tung Ch'i-ch'ang, the most powerful
of all the later critic-theorists, writes equivocally about Tai Chin, perhaps in recognition of his
inescapable excellence; but still later authorities (e.g., Hsieh Chao-che, ca. 1600) include him
in the despised lineage of the "Northern school" and speak of the "low quality" of his works.
7. P A I N T I N G D U R I N G T H E " I N T E R R E G N U M , " 1436-65
For the period between the Hsiian-te and Ch'eng-hua reigns, 1436-65, records of painters at
court are scant. Hsieh Huan was still alive and presumably active as a painter in the Ching-t'ai
era (1450—56), and Lin Liang, to whom we will turn shortly, probably entered service at court
during this period; but for the most part the period is a blank. The same is true in the production
of blue-and-white porcelains for imperial use; the absence of pieces datable by reign marks to
this intervening period has led scholars of Ming porcelains to refer to it as an "interregnum."
The explanation usually given is that the country was impoverished by the necessity of launching
further campaigns against the Mongols (who dealt the Chinese a disastrous defeat in 1449); al
though this view has recently been questioned,22 some significant falling-off of imperial patronage
of the arts seems to have occurred.
C H O U W E N - C H I N G A single work datable to the end of this period is a landscape by Chou

Wen-ching dated 1463 (Pi. 18), which is said to represent the eleventh-century philosopher
Chou Tun-i (1017—73) gazing at water lilies from a waterside pavilion. The artist was born,
like Li Tsai, in P'u-t'ien in Fukien and entered court service in the Hsuan-te era—not at first, it
would appear, as a painter but as a diviner or geomancer of the Yin-Yang school. He rose to prom
inence as a painter when the emperor awarded first prize, in some competition, to his picture
of "Wintry Crows in an Old Tree." He is said to have revered Hsieh Huan, whose support may
have contributed to his success at court.
Chou Wen-ching signs the 1463 work as "Painter in the Jen-chih Tien" but dedicates the
painting to an individual—it was not, that is, done for the emperor. It is an impressively old-
fashioned work, which, if it lacked the dated inscription, would doubtless be assigned by its
style to an earlier period. Influence from Tai Chin is minimal if present at all. The forms of the
picture are incompletely defined and suggestive, their contours subdued, like those in paintings
by Hsia Kuei (cf. Hills, Pi. 87); they appear successively, overlapping in a slanting echelon, sep
arated by hollows of misty space, back into deep distance. The artist paints as if nothing of
significance had occurred in this style between the Southern Sung and 1463. The statement that
he "revered Hsieh Huan" agrees with the conservative outlook he evidences here. One Ming
source says that he followed Hsia Kuei and Wu Chen; two other signed works that (in contrast
to this one) are done in thick-line drawing must represent his debt to the Yuan master.23
YEN TSUNG A surprisingly large number of professional painters in the Ming period came
from port cities on the central and southern coast—P'u-t'ien and others in Fukien, Hangchow
and Ningp'o to the north, Kuang-chou (Canton) farther to the south. Artistic production in these
centers perhaps began as a byproduct, on a higher level, of handicraft industries located in these
ports to supply the foreign and coastal trade in which they were actively engaged. It must also
have been, as elsewhere, nurtured by the presence of affluent patrons. The importance of
Hangchow as an artistic center is commonly explained as the survival of a local school there since
the Southern Sung, when it was the capital, and this is of course part of the reason; but another
part was surely its importance as a center of trade. Less is known about any local school in Fu
kien, as we have noted, and still less about any in Canton, for this period.
The earliest Cantonese artist whose work can still be seen is Yen Tsung, painter of a land
scape handscroll preserved in the Kuang-chou Provincial Museum (Pi. 19—20). Born around
1393, Yen Tsung became a second-degree graduate (chii-jen) in 1423 and by the early 1450s was
a minor official in the Board of Military Affairs; he served earlier as magistrate of Shao-wu Dis
trict in Fukien. He probably died in 1454.M Lin Liang, a more famous Cantonese master to
whom we will turn presently, reportedly praised Yen's landscapes as having "a naturalness unat
tainable by others."
Naturalness is not the quality that comes first to mind when we view Yen's landscape, a
thoroughly eclectic work with elements of both the Li-Kuo and the Ma-Hsia traditions. That the
artist was following old traditions instead of painting what he saw around him is evident also in the
kind of scenery represented, which does not resemble the lush terrain around Canton so much as
the valley of the Yellow River, far in the north, Kuo Hsi's homeland. Yen Tsung conceives it in
silhouettes that are skillfully graded in tonal value according to their placement in space. The
middle ground is pervaded by a light fog, which dims the objects within it—bushes, temple
roofs, a farmer plowing with an ox. The rusticity of the scene may have been what Lin Liang
found so admirably ' 'natural'' in Yen's style, along with a pleasant disorder in the tangled clumps
of trees and a looseness both in brushwork and in composition.
LIN LIANG Lin Liang, who may have known Yen and even studied with him at some time,
seems to have learned painting in Canton when he was young. According to an anecdote, he was
employed as a youth in the Provincial Administration Office. On one occasion the com
missioner, whose name was Ch'en Chin, undertook to make a copy, as a forgery, of a famous
painting he had borrowed. Lin Liang, watching from the side, criticized Ch'en's performance—
whether on moral or aesthetic grounds is unclear. Ch'en became enraged and wanted to have
him flogged. Lin, in his defense, claimed some ability as a painter; Ch'en tested this claim by hav
ing the young man make the copy and was amazed by his "divine talent." While it does not spe
cifically say so, the story opens the possibility that Lin himself was employed as a forger.
From this time on, his fame increased among the local officials. Later he was given a post at
the capital as vice-administrator of the Bureau of Construction in the Board of Works; from this
he moved to the position of court artist in the Jen-chih Tien, eventually reaching the honorary
rank of Commander in the Embroidered Uniform Guard. He was probably working as a painter
at court by the late 1450s or early 1460s; the dates of his activity are not well established.25 He
could, then, have known Tai Chin, or at least seen his works; and even in the absence of any
firm evidence, we may hypothesize that his exposure in the capital to the new landscape style
probably inspired him to attempt a corresponding transformation of the old, by now unexciting,
mode of painting birds and their habitats which he had presumably learned in Canton.
A few of Lin Liang's paintings are in a heavily colored, very traditional manner that suggests
(as does at least one written source) that he began as an imitator of Pien Wen-chin; but most of
them, and the best, are done in ink monochrome with broad, characterizing brushwork—
brushstrokes that adapt in shape to the subject, that is, a single stroke describing (rather than
delineating) a bamboo leaf or feather. A late Ming source, Hua-shih hui-yao, makes this distinc
tion : "His colored pictures, done in a highly detailed and skillful style, do not escape [the vices
PAINTING DURING THE "INTERREGNUM," 1436-65 • 55
of] hardness and stiffness, while in his ink-monochrome works, where he pursues his conceptions
using fewer brushstrokes, as if he were writing in the cursive script, he has been able to get rid
of all sense of banality." The association of the former style with descriptive realism and concern
for the outward appearance of the subject, and of the latter with a more spontaneous "setting
down the idea" (hsieh-i), goes back to Sung-period theoretical discussions of two tenth-century
flower-and-bird specialists, Huang Ch'uan and Hsu Hsi; centuries later, when no one could be
quite sure how those two masters had really painted, the issue was still presented in the same
way, and the preference of literary critics was still consistently on the side of the less meticulous,
less colorful manner associated with Hsu Hsi.
It is not surprising, therefore, that these scholar-critics accord far more praise to Lin Liang
than to either Pien Wen-chin or Lii Chi, Lin's successor in the Academy. Many laudatory poems
composed as inscriptions for Lin's pictures are preserved in Ming literary collections. Li Meng
yang (1475-1531), for example, writes:26
Of painters of birds, over more than a hundred years,
He is followed [only] by Lii Chi and preceded by Pien Wen-chin.
Those two were skilled at likeness, but not at conveying ideas;
Sucking their brushes and straining their eyes, they worked with
hair-splitting care.
Lin Liang draws his birds using only ink;
He spreads the silk and, with a half-sweep, evokes black clouds and wind.
Water birds and land birds, all of the utmost wonder—
Hanging his picture fills the hall, moving us to passion.
This "moving" quality of Lin's works was in their subjects as well as their style: instead of the
small, chirpy, decorative birds favored by other painters, or those that had served for so long as
symbols (cranes for immortality, pairs of mandarin ducks for connubial harmony, etc.) that they
could scarcely elicit any more direct response, Lin chose to paint large, strong, sometimes fierce
birds that asserted their particular natures independently of charm or literal symbolism. Hawks
and eagles, often shown attacking their prey; wild geese on marshy shores; crows, cormorants,
and peacocks (the last excellently represented by a painting in the Cleveland Museum of Art):
these are Lin's favorite ornithological subjects. Their environment consists more often of rocks,
bare trees, and bamboo than of flowering bushes and blossoming plum; and autumn and winter
are more often the seasons than spring and summer. In short, Lin inclines toward toughness rath
er than prettiness; and since the same inclination underlay the critical attitudes of the literati,
their praise for him is not based simply on a preference for bold brush work.
A unique painting by Lin Liang preserved in a Zen temple in Kyoto (PI. 21) portrays a phoenix
standing on a projecting boulder, silhouetted against morning fog and staring off at the rising sun,
which is colored with a wash of red (the painting is otherwise in ink monochrome). The mythi
cal bird stands on one leg in a stately and static pose, its talons locked tightly to the rock, its
single splendid tail feather balancing the twisting neck and head. Like the dragon, the phoenix
in China had sustained such a vivid existence in artistic images for so many centuries that one can
almost speak of a "realistic" representation of it. Lin Liang's phoenix is not an exception to
what was said above concerning his subjects; it is not presented as a symbol but as a living crea
ture, with nothing especially bizarre or fanciful about it. Its powerful presence dominates the
picture, which must indeed have "filled" any room in which it was hung. The ink-monochrome
medium permits strong tonal contrasts, which, with the bold diagonals of rock and bird, increase
the dramatic, arresting quality of the work. It also permits the virtuoso brushwork for which
Lin Liang is famous, here seen at its most versatile, modulating in all its aspects to convey the
texture, pliancy, and structure of the things it describes.
There is little more evidence for court painting in the Ch'eng-hua era (1465-87) than there
is for the "interregnum." Some of the older painters, such as Ni Tuan, were still alive, and a
few others, mostly from Fukien, are recorded as having entered court service then, but none of
their works seem to have survived. The only major figure to appear on the scene in this period is
Wu Wei (1459-1508), who began his extraordinary career as a painter in and out of court in the
latter part of the Ch'eng-hua reign, as a favorite of Emperor Hsien-tsung. His career and his
paintings will be treated in a later chapter, where we will find in them the features that will
bring about a second flowering of Ming Academy painting as well as those that will bring about its
decay.
CHAPTER TWO
The Beginnings of the Wu School

Shen Chou and His Predecessors
1. THE WU SCHOOL IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
The city of Soochow and the region surrounding it, known as Wu-hsien, had by the late Yuan
period become the main center of the literati current in painting. The purges that scholars and
intellectuals of that city underwent during the reign of the first Ming emperor, however, nearly
extinguished the cultural brilliance of Soochow. Moreover, the most lively developments in
painting during the first century and a half of the Ming seem to have taken place in other centers,
chiefly the capitals, Nanking and Peking, but also in Hangchow and other cities of Chekiang and
farther south, where traditions from the Sung dynasty still survived. Imperial and official pa
tronage was bestowed principally on professional artists from those centers, the ones treated
in the preceding chapter and in the two that follow. The interval of nearly a century from the
destruction of Soochow artistic circles in the 1370s until the maturity of the first great Wu-
school master of the Ming, Shen Chou, around 1470, represents a hiatus not only in the local
development but also in the whole course of literati painting.
Standing forth as modest eminences from this otherwise flat expanse are a few artists of inter
est who work in styles derived closely from the Yuan masters. In some of their works they
imitate particular painters and paintings more closely, and more consciously, than artists before
them had done. Yuan artists themselves, such as Chao Meng-fu and Wu Chen, had of course
advocated and practiced the imitation of the past; but with them it was a matter of reviving and
utilizing styles they admired either in a conscious evocation of the past or for the betterment of
their own works and the cleansing (as they saw it) of their own tradition. In the Ming something
different begins: the institutionalization of such imitation as a normal part of the activity of the
scholar-painter, who could assume the persona of some earlier master for one work, then shift
easily, as an actor changes roles, to another for the next work. Wang Fu, the first artist we shall
consider in this chapter, was probably the earliest to exemplify this phenomenon.
More often, however, these early Ming masters combine elements of style from different
masters, often suppressing those stylistic features of their models that we now find most
distinctive and stimulating, eliminating tensions and dissonances, reducing individual modes
to more manageable stylistic systems. Neither manner of utilizing the past encouraged original
ity, and originality is not among the strengths of these artists. (One can make a qualified excep
tion to this judgment in the case of one of them, Liu Chiieh, as we will see.) Even their eclecti
cism was in a sense secondhand: the process of homogenization of Yiian styles had begun already
in the works of secondary late Yiian masters such as Chao Yiian, Ma Wan, Ch'en Ju-yen (Hills,
57
58 • THE BEGINNINGS OF THE WU SCHOOL
pp. 128-30); the painters now to be considered are the heirs of these lesser, as well as of the
greater, masters.
W A N G FU The earliest of them was Wang Fu (1362-1416). He was not from Soochow prop
er but from nearby Wu-hsi, distinguished already in the history of painting as the birthplace of
Ku K'ai-chih and Ni Tsan. He took his chii-jen degree ("recommended man," the second de
gree) in 1376, and two years later he went to Nanking in search of employment. However,
through some unfortunate circumstance—perhaps suspicion of involvement with the same Hu
Wei-yung who was responsible for Wang Meng's tragic end—Wang Fu was banished, with his
wife and two sons, to the far northern frontier. There he served, with considerable hardship,
as a frontier guard. He finally returned to the south around 1400 and spent a few years there
painting and writing. He was fond of composing songs and poems in old styles. This literary bent
and his skill as a painter, together with his dignified bearing and severe manner of speech, made
him an admired personage. Around 1403 he was given a post as a calligrapher in the Wen-yiian
ko, one of the halls in the Nanking palace where the imperial library was housed and where
noted scholars, members of the Han-lin Academy, were assembled. In 1412 he became a drafter
in the Central Drafting Office. Two years later he moved to Peking, and died there in 1416.1
Literary accounts tell of his painting only infrequently, while traveling, and especially after
drinking; at such times he would "let the ink flow freely . . . splashing and soaking with the
brush." This has the ring, however, of a conventional pronouncement: scholar-painters were
supposed to be free souls. The nature and quantity of Wang's surviving work suggest instead a
serious, hard-working dedication to the art. Wen Cheng-ming, the great Soochow master of the
early sixteenth century, offers this more sober characterization: "The quality of his painting is
above [mere] competence; the critics say that the artisan's [technique] and the scholar's spirit
are both provided by his works. His personal quality was superior, and he was not used by his
art. He would not give away even his small works to anyone whom he did not consider to be the
right kind of man."
Wang Fu's inscriptions on his paintings do in fact indicate, in many cases, that they were oc
casional works, done for his hosts at banquets and parties or for people in whose homes he
stayed. Often the pictures bear poems composed for the occasion and inscribed by other schol
ars present at such gatherings. His "River Landscape in the Manner of Ni Tsan" (PI. 22) was
painted in 1401 as a parting present for a certain Mr. Wu Shun-min, at whose riverside retreat
Wang had stayed. Wu brought out a piece of paper and asked Wang for a painting; the two had
not met for ten years, Wang says, and now, recalling their old friendship, he painted the pic
ture and composed the poem to "express the emotions of parting."
The mood, then, is one of somewhat conventionalized sadness and nostalgia, and it is a mood
to which the Ni Tsan landscape mode was perfectly suited (cf. Hills, pp. 114—20 and Pi. 47-50).
Ni Tsan's own works had carried that connotation, partly through the sense of loneliness (phys
ical and emotional distance) attaching to the wide separation of river shores; the use of a bor
rowed set of expressive means implied another degree of detachment from simple feeling; and
such a painting subtly complimented the recipient by assuming in him an appreciation for the
spare style of Ni Tsan, which was already considered a mark of elevated connoisseurship. With
those aims, the painter clearly set out to paint "a Ni Tsan" rather than a river landscape or a
Wang Fu (although, of course, the painting is both of those as well). He immerses himself in the
Ni Tsan manner so completely, so self-effacingly, that the painting could, if Wang's inscription
was removed and a false one of Ni Tsan added, deceive anyone not thoroughly familiar with the
brushwork of the two artists. Far from adding to Ni Tsan's compositional plan, Wang subtracts:
Ni Tsan seems always to have worked interesting variations on the basic formula; what Wang Fu
THE WU SCHOOL IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY • 59
gives us is the formula itself. The painting is thus an early and extreme example of what Max
Loehr has termed "art-historical art."
Other works by Wang Fu imitate Wang Meng, although not quite so closely as this one follows
Ni Tsan. Still others, the most numerous—and these represent as much of a distinctive style as
Wang can be said to have—follow that eclectic mode best exemplified in the previous generation
by Chao Yuan (Hills, Pi. 63). The softly irregular forms and their earthy, tactile textures, built
up with dry-brush ts'un, the suppression of washes and richness of dotting, are staples of late
Yuan landscape and reappear now in Wang's works little changed.
The undated "Farewell Meeting at Feng-ch'eng" (Pi. 23) was painted to commemorate a
gathering of some thirteen scholars held on the occasion of the departure of one of their number
for his home town, Wu-sung, where he meant to live in retirement. All thirteen have inscribed
farewell poems in the sky. Several of the writers identify themselves in signatures or seals as
members of the Han-lin Academy, so the painting can probably be dated to the period when
Wang was serving in the Wen-yiian-ko; its stylistic similarity to his well-known "Literary
Gathering" of 1404, also in the Palace Museum, Taipei,2 supports that assumption. The paint
ing is done in slow-moving, unexcited brushwork that builds the softly contoured masses firmly,
without ever becoming heavy or assertive. The integration of brushwork and ink tone blends
the forms together, rooting the trees stably in the earth, smoothing the transitions from shore
line to shoals to water. The composition has the same qualities of stability and assurance. The flat
recession displays an easy mastery of distance and is underscored by a systematic diminution in
the trees; this is countered by a rapid increase in the heights of hills, until the scale drops off at
last to the farthest, low hills marking the horizon. In his handling of space, Wang Fu feels no
compulsion to go beyond what had already been accomplished; no more, generally, did later
artists of the Ming, who seldom retain so much as this of what the Yuan had achieved in render
ing far distance and a continuous ground plane.
Wang Fu was also a capable painter of bamboo, in which he followed the style of Wu Chen;
his best extant work in this genre is a long handscroll in the Freer Gallery of Art, dated 1410.
He was in turn followed as a bamboo painter by Hsia Ch'ang (1388-1470), whose handsome
compositions, in both hanging-scroll and handscroll form, survive in greater numbers. The ab
sence of significant innovations from the works of both artists suggests that this branch of paint
ing was already, at a relatively early stage in its development, nearing a point of exhaustion of its
limited capacities. The subject and the technique continued to be favored by amateur artists, but
in the later centuries, ink-bamboo was usually more a performing than a creative art.
S O O C H O W AND ITS GENTRY-LITERATI CULTURE The artistic career of Wang Fu might

be better regarded as an aftermath of late Yuan painting than as initiating the renewed activity of
the literati-painting movement in the Ming. That revival began shortly before the middle of the
fifteenth century. By this time, the part of present-day Kiangsu Province below the Yangtze Riv
er, with Soochow as its principal city, was the richest area of China and the home of the largest
number of men of letters. Soochow itself had recovered the position of cultural prominence that
it had held in the late Yuan.
The vicissitudes of Soochow and its citizens in the late Yuan period were recounted briefly
in the preceding volume (Hills, pp. 115, 120-21, 128-31). It had been the seat of a short-lived
government under Chang Shih-ch'eng, one of Chu Yuan-chang's chief rivals, between 1356 and
1367, when Chang was defeated by Chu's forces after a long siege of the city. Chu's punitive
actions against Soochow when he became emperor included the banishment of thousands of its
people and the execution of hundreds of officials and others on suspicion of treason. But the pros
perity of Soochow, based on its geographical position and its commerce and industry, was
largely restored by the mid-fifteenth century. Located on the Grand Canal near the point where
it crosses the Yangtze River, Soochow was the center of a network of transportation canals that
bound together the communities of the agriculturally rich Yangtze delta region. In China it was
the leading producer of textiles, both silk and cotton, and in addition had a thriving handicraft
industry that supplied luxury goods of many kinds to the whole country. The wealth that ac
cumulated in the hands of families of merchants and gentry was used for buying land, developing
estates and gardens, and also for cultural pursuits. The arts flourished along with the commercial
activity: literature, music, and the theater, calligraphy and painting.3
One advantage of wealth was that its possessors could give good educations to their sons, who
could then, by entering official service and pursuing careers that were both prestigious and lu
crative, further enrich their families. But government service was not so rewarding as the educated
class had hoped it would be when Chinese rule was re-established under the Ming: the suspi
cion and prejudice that Chu Yuan-chang felt toward scholars did not entirely disappear under
the reigns of his successors. The strong emperors ruled despotically, the weak ones inefficiently;
they tended to favor and trust their court eunuchs instead of (as tradition dictated) their Confu
cian ministers. Sometimes it was the eunuchs who in fact held the power and controlled the
emperor. Imperial rule during the remainder of the Ming was continually rendered unstable and
ineffective by the influence of these eunuchs, by dissensions over the succession of emperors, and
by court intrigues and struggles between cliques. Scholar-officials who came to the capital with
high intentions frequently found some excuse to retire early and return to their homes. These,
and other educated men who for various reasons never entered official service at all, made up a
class of "retired scholars" whose affluence, either inherited or acquired during their periods of
service, enabled them to spend their leisure in elegant and aesthetic ways: building gardens and
libraries, collecting books and works of art, exchanging invitations to literary banquets, practic
ing calligraphy and painting.
Soochow painting in this period, then, as in the late Yuan, was created in an atmosphere of
scholarly intercourse, coteries, poetry clubs, exchanges of visits and poems; like poems, the
pointings served as a kind of social currency, of accepted value because they embodied accepted
values. But the Soochow scholars now enjoyed also a feeling of security that the warfare of the
last decades of the Yuan had precluded for their predecessors, and that sense of security per
meates their paintings, which tend, like themselves, toward the mild-mannered and stable.
2. PREDECESSORS OF SHEN CHOU
Tu C H ' I U N G Three older contemporaries of Shen Chou prepared the way for his revitaliza
tion of the Soochow painting tradition. The oldest was Tu Ch'iung (1396—1474), who does not
in fact fit the pattern of affluence described above. A native of Soochow, he was orphaned and
impoverished early in life. He learned to read by severe self-discipline and in time gained such a
reputation for learning and literary composition that he was repeatedly recommended by the
famous K'uang Chung, who served as prefect of Soochow from 1430 to 1443, for official appoint
ments, which Tu repeatedly refused. The brief treatments of him in Chinese books give no indi
cation of how he made his living; they state that he "amused himself with painting," but, like
Wu Chen and others, he may also have supported himself with it, at least partially, and probably
earned money by writing as well. He built a small "Garden of the Eastern Plain" in an orchard
near the city and settled there peacefully, eating simple food, planting bamboo and flowers, liv
ing to be nearly eighty.
As a landscapist he is said to have followed the tradition of Tung Yuan; by his time, to say
this meant only that he took his natural place in the lineage established by the "imitators of Tung
Yuan" in the Yuan dynasty, a lineage now firmly dominant within literati painting and approach
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of Ni Tsan." Dated 1401. Hanging scroll, ink on ch'eng." Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 91.4
paper, 95 X 32 cm. Private collection, Tokyo. X 31 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
List of Plates p.x Go to page: 58, 59, 81
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List of Plates p.x Go to page: 78, 211

26. Liu Chiieh: "Pure and Plain Pavilion" (Ch'ing-pai

HsiianJ. Dated 14S8. Hanging scroll, ink on paper,
97-2 X 35 4 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
27. Liu Chiieh: "Landscape. " Dated 1471. Handscroll, ink on paper, 33.6 X
57-8 cm. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
List of Plates p.x Go to page: 80, 84, 93, 94, 238

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paper, 148.9 X S4.9 cm. Music Guimct, Paris. Photo Musics Nationaux, Paris.
Shen Choui "Walking with a Staff." Hanging scroll, ink
List of Plates p.x on paper, 159.1 X 72.2 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei,
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32. Shen Chou: "Towering Moun-

tains Above a Retreat." Dated
1470. Hanging scroll, ink on paper,
112.5 X 27.4 cm. National
Palace Museum, Taipei.
33. Shen Chou: "Fishermen on

a River in Autumn." Painted in
1471, according to inscription
dated 1477. Hanging scroll, ink
and colors on paper, 233.7 X 54
cm. Honolulu Academy of Art,
gijt oj Mrs. Robert P. Grijjing,
Jr., in memory of her mother,
Mrs. William H. Fraser, 1961.
34. Shen Chou: "Rainy Thoughts." •

Dated 1487. Hanging scroll, ink on
paper, 67.1 X 30.6 cm. National
Palace Museum, Taipei.
"]'; r
35. Shen Chou: "Landscape for Wu K'uan." Dated 1479. Section of a hand-
scroll, ink on paper, 31.1 X 1093-2 cm. Collection of Gengi Kadokawa, Tokyo.
List of Plates p.x Go to page: 87
•••I
36. Shen Chou: "Crab and Shrimp." Dated 1494. Album leaf,
ink on paper, 34.7 X 55.4 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
&n&* taints.
37. Shen Chou: "Night Vigil." Dated 1492. 38. Picture area from Plate 37.
Hanging scroll, ink and colors on paper, 84.8
X 21.8 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
List of Plates p.x Go to page: 91, 215 39-40. Shen Chou: from "Twelve Views of Tiger Hill." Left, "Thou-
sand Buddha Hall and the Pagoda" ; right, "Drought Demon Spring."
Album leaves, ink and light colors on paper, 31-1 X 40-1 cm. Cleveland
Museum of Art, purchased under the Leonard C. Hanna, jr., bequest.
List of Plates p.x 4 1 . Shen Chou : "The White Cloud Spring." Section oj a handscroll, ink and light
Go to page: 93 colors on silk, 37.3 X 936 cm. Collection of George J. Schlenker, Piedmont, California.
List of Plates p.x
42-43. Shen Chou: "Three Juniper Trees." Dated 1484. Sections
Go to page: 95, 239
of a handscroll, ink on paper, 11.5 X I 20.6 cm. Nanking Museum.
PREDECESSORS OF SHEN CHOU • 77
ing already the status of an orthodoxy. Tu Ch'iung himself, in a rather turgid piece of verse
(an example of the Chinese scholar's often unhappy practice of versifying where expository prose
would have better served his purpose), provides an early statement of a manner of formulating
the history of painting that Would later be codified in Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's theory of the Northern
and Southern schools (to be discussed in a later volume) :4
The "gold-and-green" landscape manner goes back to the two Lis [Ssu-hsiin and
Chao-tao];
The high antiquity of ink monochrome, to Wang Wei. . . .
The Assistant Commissioner of the Rear Park was called Master Tung Yuan.
His use of ink was deep and antique; his texture strokes, hemp fibers.
Chii-jan, in his luxuriant and moistly-rich style, carried on the true lineage. . . .
Then we come to Li T'ang, who was particularly outstanding. . . .
The Mis, father and son, were peers in excellence, equal in fame.
Ma Yuan and Hsia Kuei formed their own iron-hard manner,
But this cannot be compared with these other schools.
Chao Meng-fu of the Crystal Palace
Walks alone in Yuan times, a figure from Heaven.
Old Ch'ien Hsiian from Cha-ch'uan emphasized delicacy.
The one who gave rein to his ideas and captured moods was Huang Kung-wang.
Ni Tsan, the "Foolish Old Fellow," was excessively pure and simple.
The Plum Blossom Taoist, Wu Chen, was quite without fetters.
[Kao K'o-kung from] Ta-liang and Ch'en Lin captured the styles of calligraphy [in their
painting]. . . .
Wang Meng and Chao Yuan were not inferior to them.
In many houses, on screens their paintings shine with scattered brilliance.
All these worthies stemmed from the school of Wang Wei of Wang-ch'uan;
Others are dispersed in disorder, not meriting inclusion.
I have been born too late, and am too addicted to painting—
I could not receive the guidance [of the masters] to assuage my starvation.
Wang Fu and Shen Yii truly had "Immortals' bones" ;
When they wielded their brushes they immediately transcended the common herd. . . .
I have tried to learn from all their strengths, as well as from the old masters,
But however much I wave [the brush] and splash [the ink], I cannot catch up.
Ignoring the expected (and probably insincere) expression of modesty at the end, we may
note in Tu's listing and assessment of painters the slighting reference to the Ma-Hsia school and
the marked emphasis on the scholar-artist tradition, a lineage that he traces to the T'ang dynasty
master Wang Wei (699-759), who, as a great poet and amateur painter, had come to be revered
as the founding father of literati painting. This "true lineage" runs through Tung Yuan, Chao
Meng-fu and the artists associated with him, the Four Great Masters of the late Yuan (not yet
grouped under that designation, and joined here by Chao Yuan), and the early Ming followers
of that tradition, down to Tu Ch'iung himself. Later literati theorists, while keeping in the
main the contents of Tu's list, emphasize even more the separation of the lineages within it and
extend it successively to include themselves and their friends. It was an art-historical formulation,
that is, continually invoked to establish the writer's own, or his favorite painter's, privileged
place in art history. Tu Ch'iung's strong praise for the Yuan masters, moreover, can be seen as
providing a historical basis for the pursuit of a quality of "Yuan-ness" in painting, as opposed
to the "Sung-ness" of the Che-school works. In Tu's paintings, and those of other fifteenth-
century literati masters, this aim in part supplants the older aims of creating beautiful, or power
fully expressive, or strikingly original, pictures. The same is of course true of much contempo
rary Academy and Che-school work, except there it is "Sung-ness" that is pursued, in a similarly
deliberate way.
Tu Ch'iung's finest surviving work (judging from a reproduction—the present whereabouts

of the original is unknown) is a river landscape, titled "Heavenly Fragrance in a Secluded Place,"
which he painted in 1463 for a friend named Sun-hsiieh (Pi. 24). A diagonally disposed fore
ground, within which a visitor is about to cross a bridge to reach a house where two men are
already conversing, is echoed in the middle distance by a diagonally placed slope, down which a
waterfall pours. The farther distance is marked by a conventional row of conical hills. The
pleasures of cultivated seclusion are suggested by the comfortable enclosure of the house within
a woven bamboo fence and luxuriant trees; and the marshy fertility of the Chiang-nan terrain by
dotting the earthy forms for a generalized effect of vegetation. Nothing in the picture or its
style is especially distinctive, or striking, or stimulating; the excellence of the work lies rather
in the skill and assurance with which it incorporates established materials into a stable, pleasing
composition.
YAO S H O U Another of these epigones of the Yuan masters was Yao Shou (1423-95). He was
from Chia-hsing and liked to pay tribute in his paintings, partly no doubt for reasons of local
pride, to artists from that area: Chao Meng-fu, Wu Chen, Wang Meng. He took his chin-shih
degree around 1464 and held positions as an investigating censor and, in the late 1460s, as a
prefect. Eventually, probably in the early 1470s, he "hung up his cap" (retired from official
service) and went home. His dated paintings begin around this time, suggesting that he may have
begun painting seriously only after his retirement. He was excessively, possessively, attached to
his own paintings, the story goes, and would sometimes buy them back at high prices from
people who had somehow succeeded in acquiring them. Most Chinese writers praise him for
his faithful imitations of Yuan styles. Wen Cheng-ming, whose opinion of Wang Fu we quoted
above, writes that painting was for Yao the "overflow" of his refined and skillful literary pro
duction; no one seems quite able to define for him an individual style.
Most of his extant paintings are pictures of bamboo, old trees, or flowers-and-birds. His few
landscapes, more ambitious productions, are mostly copies or close imitations of Chao Meng-fu,
Wu Chen (whose famous "Fishermen" handscroll of 1342, now in the Freer Gallery of Art, he
owned) or Wang Meng. His copy, dated 1476, of Chao's "Fishermen on an Autumn River,"
which he also owned, is the best evidence we have for Chao's having used, and perhaps origi
nated, this river landscape type that is the stock-in-trade of his followers.5
One of Yao's more interesting pictures forms part of a long handscroll presented in 1479 to
Wen Kung-ta, grandfather of Wen Cheng-ming, on the occasion of his retirement (PI. 25). The
scroll begins with an essay by Li Tung-yang (1447—1516), famous as a calligrapher and as Grand
Secretary; this is followed by Yao's painting and a series of poetic colophons by seventeen
scholars of the time, including Wu K'uan (1435-1504), a good friend of Shen Chou. Yao Shou's
painting, which bears his seal, probably represents the riverside cottage in which Wen Kung-ta
planned to spend his post-retirement years. But it represents it only in a limited sense; it does
not inform us about specifics of the actual locale. Probably the general situation of buildings,
trees, and hills is true enough to the real scene for the picture to be recognizable, but all partic
ularized references have been absorbed into an ideal image. Much as a European portrait painter
would flatter his sitter by dressing him not in his everyday garb but in ceremonial or symbolic
robes suggesting that he reincarnated some illustrious figure of the past, so would a Ming artist
portraying some friend's retreat (which was a kind of portraiture—Chinese scholars regularly
use their studio names to designate themselves and are called by those names) invest the image
with an air of historical sanction by recalling images and styles from the past.
Yao's composition is based closely on Yuan models, chiefly those of Chao Meng-fu and his
followers; the texture strokes and dotting on the hills are in the manner of Wang Meng; the
fishermen in their boats are lifted directly from Wu Chen's "Fishermen" scroll. That Yao Shou
could accomplish this eclectic performance with such ease, avoiding any effect of pastiche, keep
ing the spatial scheme clear and the proportioning of parts harmonious, is what makes the
picture admirable. He builds his composition out of discrete, repeated units but foregoes all
opportunities to set up dynamic interactions between them. Like Wang Fu and Tu Ch'iung, he
is content with what he has inherited, uninterested in experimentation.
Liu C H U E H None of the early Ming scholar-painters treated thus far would require revision
of the standard accounts in which Shen Chou finally ends the long lull and rescues literati paint
ing from the doldrums where it had been drifting. The account is essentially correct; but it is
incomplete if it does not give due consideration and credit to another of Shen's elders, Liu
Chiieh (1410-72), both as a more original and capable painter in his own right than those we
have been treating and as an important influence on Shen Chou.
Liu was born in 1410 in Soochow. While still young he was offered a position as a minor
clerk in the local administration by the prefect of Soochow, K'uang Chung; Liu wisely refused,
asking instead to be admitted as a student at the National University. The request was granted,
and Liu, after thus acquiring a good education, took his chii-jen degree by examination in 1438.
Later he held positions as a secretary in the Ministry of Justice and as deputy-assistant surveil
lance commissioner for Shansi Province. When he reached the age of fifty, he asked and was
granted permission to retire; he returned to Soochow and built a house and garden, where he
lived the rest of his life. His friends included many of the leading scholars and poets of the city.
Shen Chou, his junior by seventeen years, regarded him affectionately as an uncle, and took him
as a model in both painting and calligraphy. He died in 1472.
Liu Chueh's "Ch'ing-pai Hsiian" ("Pure and Plain Pavilion," PI. 26) is another depiction
of a scholar's retreat, in this case Liu's own. It was painted in 14S8, when Liu was about fifty,
and one of the poems written on it (by Shen Heng, 1409—77, Shen Chou's father) speaks of his
"returning" after "ten years' travel in official service to the rim of the world" ; so the gathering
represented may well have been held to celebrate Liu's retirement from the bureaucracy. In the
summer of 1458, Liu relates in his own inscription, a man called Hsi-t'ien Shang-jen brought
wine to Liu's house, and other friends gathered there. Hsi-t'ien asked Liu for a painting as a
parting gift; Liu obliged, andfiveof those present, including Shen Chou's father and grandfather
(the latter then aged eighty-three), wrote inscriptions on it. Shen Chou, only twenty-two at the
time, was evidently not there; but in 1474, after Liu's death, he added a final poem, using the
rhyme words of Liu's, beginning: "The old pleasures of poems and wine now lack my master
Liu; / The man himself has passed into silence, the pavilion is deserted."
The "Pure and Plain Pavilion" is in fact a group of low, open buildings, raised on posts
above the water, set on a river shore at the foot of steep hills. As in Tu Ch'iung's picture (Pi.
24) the buildings are set far back, separated from the viewer by a succession of barriers—water,
banks, and trees. One is not encouraged to move smoothly, in imagination, back to the house
and participate in the gathering; it is a private party. Two men sit facing each other inside the
house, while another leans on a railing and gazes across the water, or perhaps at a scroll painting
of bamboo that hangs in the entrance hall.
The fabric of the painting, the brushwork, differs little from that of Wang Fu and others:
thick, dry strokes, heavy dotting, washes sparingly applied, some finer drawing for details. But
now we arc once again in the presence of an artist with a serious concern for formal structure
and complex formal relationships. The basic repertory of abstract materials owes most, probably,
to Huang Kung-wang: clusters of round rocks, uniform in size and edged with dark moss or
grasses, in the foreground and the middle ground, and on the mountaintop; upward-pointing
masses, barrel-shaped boulders, sheer cliffs topped by slanting plateaus, rhythmically articu
lating the background. (Compare, for this somewhat schematized version of Huang's style, the
landscape by Ma Wan dated 1366, Hills, Pi. 62.) The composition is arranged in relation to a
central, vertical axis, with one heavy element balanced by another, one thrust countered by
another, on either side, so that the whole is remarkably stable. Most satisfying is the clarity with
which the picture is put together out of strong, easily legible forms.
In the early spring of 1471 Liu Chvieh, Shen Chou, and a man named Shih Chien set off to visit
West Lake near Hangchow. When they reached the region of Chia-hsing, they were stopped by
a snowfall and (as Shen Chou relates in the inscription on a painting of his own, which he did
on this same trip) were forced to stop over for several days at the home of a friend. Liu Chiieh
painted a small picture (Pi. 27), perhaps to pass the time, as a present for Shen Chou's younger
brother Chi-nan. Liu, Shen, and Shih all wrote poems on it; Shen Chou added a prose note
recounting the event; and three other people added poems later. (One might wish that these
latecomers had restrained their hands and not so crowded the sky.) Shen Chou's poem reads:
As clouds pass over, lights merge on the stream;
The moon comes out, and bamboo shadows scatter.
Why do we have to reach West Lake?
Already we and the hills have seen each other.
Liu Chiieh's painting itself contains no indication of either snow or moonlight; it seems full
of wind, with sunlight perhaps breaking through clouds. Like some works of Wu Chen, who is
clearly the principal model here, it offers nothing but the plainest scenery: grassy hills between
which a stream winds, a pair of ungainly trees, some stalks of bamboo. What makes it one of the
most satisfying small pictures of the period is the sense of excitement, perhaps an expression
of the exhilaration of travel with good companions, that is caught in the play of brushstrokes and
the movements implicit in the forms. The foreground banks slope toward a central base from
which arching movements rise, the trees curving leftward, the bamboo stalks rightward, the
central hill beyond completing and enclosing this rhythmic swelling. Once more, groups of
darker boulders or hillocks weight down a few points in the composition, and clusters of black
dots serve to slow the flowing surfaces. The easy but dynamic rendering of mass and space,
giving an extraordinary vitality to a stable, earthy structure, must have impressed and affected
the young Shen Chou, who creates similar effects in some of his works.
T H E RELATIONSHIP OF L I U C H U E H AND SHEN C H O U TWO powerful landscapes in

the Ni Tsan manner by Liu Chiieh (PI. 28) and Shen Chou (Pi. 29) may help us understand the
artistic relationship between the older and the younger master before we go on to consider the
individual development of Shen Chou. Neither is dated; Liu's painting bears poetic inscriptions
by himself and Shen, the latter once again deferentially using the rhyme words of Liu's poem.
Thus Shen Chou, while he may have painted his picture long after, was certainly familiar with
Liu's and seems to have taken from it important ideas to use in his own work, along with all
he had learned through his study of Ni Tsan originals.
The paintings thus illustrate also a truth about the practice of "following an old master" in
Chinese painting: it is, among other things, a form of reverence, bestowing immortality not
onlyfigurativelyupon the man, but also, in more tangible form, upon his style. The man may be
long dead, but the mode of painting and the compositional types he created continue to evolve
in the works of successive "imitators." Each painter thus inherits the cumulative resources of
all that has led up to his own point in the development; while he will usually acknowledge his
debt, if at all, only to the progenitor, he is likely in fact to be also in the debt of others who have
preceded him in similar obeisances to that progenitor. Each such imitation, then, stands not only
on the same warp line as its contemporaries—the "period style" of art historians—but also on a
woof strand extending back through a "linked series" (Kubler's term) to the creator of that
particular lineage. The difficulty of reconciling these individual "linked series" of works with
larger chronological developments—of determining, that is, the precise art-historical coordi
nates of a given work—is part of what makes the history of later Chinese painting so resistant to
conventional art-historical formulation.
No work of Ni Tsan survives that could serve as a basis, in more than the most general way,
for Liu Chiieh's composition (PI. 28); we must conclude that it is, in contrast to Wang Fu's
essay in the same manner (Pi. 22), essentially original. Comparison with Ni Tsan's "Mountains
Seen (from a Riverbank" of 1363 (Hills, PI. 48), perhaps as close a model as we can point to,
reveals how radically Liu has altered the formula, turning the Yuan master's placid scene into a
more monumental and dynamic structure. The foreground is expanded into a substantial base,
on which he sets a more extensive array of bare and leafy trees, rocks, bamboo, along with the
usual thatched rest-shelter. The area of river beyond is compressed, the distant mountains pulled
forward; they loom more imposingly, filling the upper part of the composition. The emotional
effect of the wide disengagement of parts in Ni Tsan's picture does not suit Liu's expressive
purpose, and he fits his pieces more tightly together. His upper section is composed, as in the
formally similar "Pure and Plain Pavilion" (PL 26), of a multiplicity of clearly demarcated
forms, carefully ranked in size and varied in shape, fitted together into a spatially intelligible
whole, within which they engage in dynamic interaction. Ni Tsan's soft texture strokes are re
placed by long, bending lines that both define three-dimensional form and emphasize the
implied movements.
All aspects of this new stylistic direction are taken up and developed further in Shen Chou's
monumental work titled "Walking with a Staff" (PL 29). The massiveness of the foreground
bank is asserted with a power that is almost harsh; the eight trees are arranged in a spatial
pattern and represent a range of types more in keeping with Liu's picture than with any of Ni's.
Instead of the standard shelter on posts as the sole and minor human intrusion into the land
scape, a solitary walker, his advanced age conveyed by a staff and a hunched posture, now trudges
along the path. The river area is further compressed and so crossed by trees that little open
space remains. The far shore is brought even closer, and the top of the tallest tree is fitted un
naturally into an inlet there. The almost oppressive top-heaviness of the composition, the draw
ing in long, taut lines, the upward arching of the land forms in the upper part and their formal
complexity, are all extensions of ideas found in Liu's work.
Shen Chou introduces a new compositional principle, not unknown in the landscapes of Ni
Tsan (cf. Hills, Pi. 49-50) but perhaps never before carried through so systematically: the upper
segment of the composition partially forms a reversed mirror-image of the lower. The near and
far shores, each slanting slightly, begin this system of echoed forms in the central zone; one
stream divides the near bank downward to the left, another the far one upward to the right; a
slanting table of land at the lower left is answered by a slanting plateau at the upper right; a
curving ridge in the foreground, enfolding a group of "alum stones," is repeated in reverse in
the uppermost ridge. Moreover, the studied avoidance of stable horizontals, carried to the point
where the huge masses seem to slip sideward and give a feeling of uneasiness to the whole, is new
with Shen Chou and is another feature in which he not only departs from, but also positively
rejects, the standard affective associations of the Ni Tsan landscape type.
Our argument about "linked series" could of course be carried further if that were not be
yond our present purpose; for instance, the superb "Coming of Autumn" by the seventeenth-
century master Hung-jen, now in the Honolulu Academy of Arts,6 would be seen clearly to
take as its point of departure this middle Ming stage in the evolution of the Ni Tsan landscape
type (the resemblance to Liu Chiieh's picture is striking), or perhaps some later derivation from
it, once again no doubt augmented by the artist's studies of Ni Tsan originals and, in Hung-jen's
case, Northern Sung landscape as well. For now, an analysis of these two paintings leads us to an
understanding of the position of Liu and Shen in the history of Ming painting, which is borne
out when we consider their works as a whole. Liu was a more creative, innovative artist than
Wang Fu, Tu Ch'iung, or Yao Shou seem to have been (judging from their preserved works);
he was also an important influence on Shen Chou. But Shen Chou stands forth nonetheless as the
first great Soochow master in the Ming and thus deserves the accolade that history has given
him as the founder of the Wu school.
3. SHEN CHOU
LIFE AND CAREER Shen Chou's life was so comfortable and uneventful that he should not,
according to some romantic theories concerning the wellsprings of artistic creation, have become
a great painter at all.7 His great-great-grandfather had established the family fortune in the late
Yuan, acquiring a large estate about ten miles north of Soochow. The family income derived from
this and from the designation of the head of the family, since the beginning of Ming, as a col
lector of local taxes. It was thus unnecessary for the sons, well educated though they were, to
pursue official careers in order to enrich themselves and the family. Shen Chou's grandfather,
father, and uncle had all lived as retired scholars, dedicating themselves to the pleasant duties
of entertaining literary and artistic friends, to the continual rounds of visits, to poetry and
calligraphy, collecting and painting.
Shen Chou naturally followed that pattern; he read widely and learned literary composition,
but he is said by his biographers to have given up all intention of attempting the examinations on
the death of his father, claiming afterwards that he had to take care of his widowed mother. One
suspects this to have been an excuse for a course he had decided upon long before; Shen was
already fifty when his father died in 1477. He continued to plead this excuse whenever those in
authority attempted to persuade or press him into service, and since his mother obligingly lived
to nearly a hundred, he was able to continue the life of a "recluse" to the end, winning besides
a reputation for filial piety.
In 1471 he built a home of his own on the family estate, calling it the Bamboo Dwelling. For
his tzu, or style name (which one assumed on reaching twenty), he took Shih-t'ien, "Field of
Stones," a name that signifies uselessness (after a line in the Tso-chuan: "To get what you want
in Ch'i is like capturing a field of stones: it is of no use"). But we can be sure that he was not
expressing in it any real feeling of guilt over spending his time in a socially unproductive way;
Shen Chou was perfectly satisfied with the life of a country gentleman. Three successive prefects
of Soochow tried to enlist him on their staffs, all without success. On the first occasion, Shen
consulted the Book of Changes, which informed him that the auguries were inauspicious (again,
one suspects some special shuffling of the yarrow stalks).
The third of these prefects, so the story goes, misunderstanding the basis of Shen's fame as a
painter or maliciously misinformed (the incident is reminiscent of Chao Yiian's troubles with
the Hung-wu emperor), summoned Shen to take part in a project to decorate the walls of his
yamen with paintings. Shen Chou, rejecting a friend's advice that he go over the prefect's head
to some higher official and have the order rescinded, reported meekly and executed the paint
ings. The prefect later, on a visit to the capital, was made aware of the true stature and reputa
tion of the man he had treated in this way, and on his return he paid Shen an apologetic visit;
SHEN CHOU • 83
he was received politely. To have acted otherwise, Shen Chou felt, would have been shameful.
The story may be apocryphal, but it reveals Shen's ambiguous position: in spite of his family's
hereditary wealth and social standing and his own attainments, he still, because he did not hold
official rank, was classed as a commoner and no doubt at times treated as one—or perhaps, be
cause of his success as a painter, treated as though he belonged to the artisan class. He may in
fact have painted on a semiprofessional basis, probably following the "exchange of gifts" con
vention to avoid the stigma of accepting cash payment for his works.
Shen Chou learned painting first from a certain Ch'en Meng-hsien, now completely forgotten
except as his teacher. His uncle Shen Chen and father Shen Heng were both painters; the latter
studied under Tu Ch'iung; both are represented today by works of small merit but apparently
were well thought of in their time. Shen Chou himself knew Tu Ch'iung well and may have
studied with him. One of his earliest dated works, an album painted in 1466, with leaves
imitating various Sung and Yuan masters, bears an inscription by Tu written in 1471. (The
practice of doing albums made up of leaves in a variety of established "styles" or modes begins
around this time, very likely with Shen Chou—no reliable earlier examples are known.) The
artist who most importantly influenced Shen Chou, however, was probably Liu Chiieh. The
closeness of their association during Liu's last years is apparent from the number of inscriptions
they wrote on each other's paintings.
Shen Chou's pupil Wen Cheng-ming, in a colophon composed for one of Shen's early works,
provides a brief account of his master's development that is a good starting point for our con
sideration of that development (translation by Siren): "Shih-t'ien [Shen Chou] was a man by
nature deep and bright. His taste and knowledge were unusual. While still a youth he freed
himself from the traditional manner of the family. The old masters were his teachers and he
copied many of them so successfully that his pictures could not be distinguished from theirs.
Most of the pictures he did then (in his early years) were only a foot square. When he was over
forty [i.e., after 1466] he began to paint large scrolls, rugged trees with large leaves, in a freer
manner. He no longer followed rules and measures, nor did he use colors with the same refine
ment as in earlier years. Yet his pictures were true to nature and most expressive."
A later critic, Li Jih-hua (1565-1635), states that Shen began by imitating various masters,
settled upon Huang Kung-wang as his principal model in his middle age, and in his late years be
came "intoxicated" with the style of Wu Chen, imitating it so closely that his late works could
be confused with Wu's.
EARLY W O R K S The earliest of Shen Chou's survivingto works, a hanging scroll dated 1464
(Pi. 30), fits the pattern suggested by Wen Cheng-ming; it is small in size and delicate in execu
tion. Inscriptions on it, besides Shen's own, are by his uncle, his brother, and three others,
one of them a teacher in the Shen household. The artist's inscription is a poem, to which he
added this note: "Shu-shan has for a long time been asking me for one of my ill-made and de
plorable creations; so at last, unhurriedly, I have done this one, and written a poem on it, to
give him."
The scene is, as usual, a gentleman's secluded dwelling by a river. The house is set back in
middle ground among trees and bamboo; the owner, presumably the Sun Shu-shan for whom
the painting was done, appears in the lower right, returning home from a trip to the market in
an ox-drawn cart. Strange-shaped cliffs rise above the misty valley, tamer offspring of the
mysteriously animated mountains of Fang Ts'ung-i (Hills, PI. 59, 61). Otherwise the picture is
characterized by stylistic cautiousness. The drawing in constrained dry-brush and the fine
dotting recall the work of Tu Ch'iung (cf. PI. 24). The composition, while simple, shows more
independence; as in "Walking with a Staff" (Pi. 29), the upper half reflects the lower, with the
angle of the riverbank below repeated exactly in the rising skyline above, and a horizontal zone
84 • THE BEGINNINGS OF THE W U SCHOOL
of tree foliage answering a band of mist, each veering outward at the left. All of this converges
on the house at the far left and a group of dark trees that act as a kind of backstop to the com
positional forces. Something of the poetic intimacy that Shen Chou brings to Ming painting can
already be felt in this rather contrived picture.
Another small work, painted for Liu Chueh, is undated but was probably done around the
same time (PI. 31); the script style and language of Shen's inscription, with the style of the
painting, relate it closely to the 1466 work, even though the two may seem very dissimilar at
first. The picture for Liu Chueh, however, is a spontaneous, even casual production where the
other is a careful one. It was done while the painter was drunk, according to the testimony of
his own inscription, which is itself written with a calligraphic abandon and an oddness of language
that have led to its being misunderstood and mistranslated (several characters are completely
illegible).
In the first line, Shen refers to Mi Fu and Huang Kung-wang, suggesting cryptically that his
picture both is and is not in the style of either or both: 8
"[It looks like] Mi but doesn't [look like] Mi; [looks like] Huang but doesn't [look like]
Huang—
Dripping-wet ink washes, it overflows with pure luxuriance.
Flinging away the brush with a loud laugh, I am on the point of madness—
I am ashamed of [being] Mo-mu [a virtuous but ugly lady of antiquity] and emulate
Mao-ch'iang [a famous beauty].
Yes! I am ashamed of [being] Mo-mu and emulate Mao-ch'iang.
"T'ing-mei [Liu Chueh] doesn't consider my awkward and deplorable pictures to be alto
gether despicable; whenever we meet he keeps after me, trying to get one by any means he can.
It doesn't matter whether I'm sober or drunk, busy or idle, whether it's windy or rainy, cold or
hot; even if the painting has to be done by lamplight, he still presses for it. This picture is one I
did last night, after drinking; it is all mixed up and wrong, but T'ing-mei still won't throw it
away. You can see how badly he wants one.
"Inscribed by [Shen] Shih-t'ien."
The painting, in spite of a decided touch of the bizarre in its composition, is in a much milder
mood than Shen's inscription might lead us to expect. Again the drawing is sensitive and re
strained. The composition divides into three areas that echo but do not encroach upon each
other. Treetops and mountaintops mark a simple diagonal progress upward and back; the
bisected angle of the middle-ground mountain is repeated upside down, not only in the nearer
bank, but also, rather facetiously, in the pair of fishing boats. The plan of the picture is in fact
so simple as to be almost simplistic; it might seem overcontrived were the painter's aim more
serious, but his capriciousness disarms criticism. Also, the three inscriptions add needed weight
to the picture. Shen's first is at the upper left; a friend named Ch'en Meng wrote the one at the
upper right, filling the sky and even infringing on the mountaintop (he committed the same
transgression in his inscription on Liu Chiieh's picture, Pi. 27) ; Shen wrote another inscription
in response to Ch'en's, filling the remaining sky area. A slight scribbliness in some parts of the
painting tightens the visual bonds between painting and calligraphy; the filling of the sky makes
the quiet areas of misty space all the more satisfying as relief. Like Liu Chiieh's small picture,
this is an unassuming but absorbing work, created extemporaneously under somehow auspicious
circumstances. Part of its strength lies in its freshness. Even in such modest works as this,
Shen Chou is genuinely concerned with exploring new ways to compose a landscape painting,
instead of following established designs that required no compositional inventiveness at all, as
most of his contemporaries were doing (Liu Chueh being again an exception).
SHEN CHOU • 85
Shen Chou's originality is even more evident in his large pictures. His "Walking with a Staff"
in the manner of Ni Tsan, a brilliantly original creation, we have already seen (PI. 29). The first
large dated work from his hand is an elaborate landscape in the manner of Wang Meng, "Lofty
Mount Lu," done for the birthday of his teacher and dated 1467.9 By this time, there is nothing
tentative or playful about Shen Chou's style; it is an imposing, totally serious picture, filled with
convoluted mountain forms, firmly and skillfully composed even though it may appear at first
to be a single teeming mass of texture and detail.
Even more revealing of Shen Chou's experimental attitude in this early period is a less well
known work titled "Towering Mountains Above a Retreat" (Pi. 32), painted in 1470 as a
gift for Liu Chiieh's brother Liu Hung when he went to Peking to take the examinations in the
spring of that year. Liu Chiieh inscribed the painting then; in the autumn of 1472, shortly after
Liu's death, Liu Hung asked two of Shen Chou's friends who were then in the capital, Wu K'uan
and Wen Lin, the father of Wen Cheng-ming, to inscribe it, and still another friend named Li
chai added a poem, undated. Shen Chou himself, while his seal is on the painting, wrote no
inscription on it; when he saw it again in 1501 and was moved to add an inscription, no space
was left, and he wrote on a separate sheet of paper that is now mounted above the picture.
Shen notes sadly that all but two of the writers, and Liu Hung as well, were by then dead. All
this now seems dusty history; it is impossible for us to appreciate fully the associations such
paintings carried among the people for whom they were intended. Even when the scenery seems
generalized to us, it doubtless portrayed recognizably some features of the natural setting of the
recipient's house. It might well contain also stylistic references to some famous work owned by
one of the group and well known to all. With its poetic inscriptions and written accounts of
parties and gatherings, it thus became, in addition to whatever merit it had as a picture, a record
of friendships, emotional attachments, meetings and partings.
"Towering Mountains Above a Retreat,'' in such a context, seems powerful but austere; more
of intimacy might have seemed in order. It is tall and narrow in shape. A tendency toward such
compositional attenuation, with a dominant verticality, was apparent already in some late Yuan
landscapes and some paintings by Wang Fu but was never before carried to such a point. Such
vertically-stretched-out compositions were to be a specialty of Wu-school artists until the end
of Ming. Beyond a foreground screen of trees, a bridge crosses a river, and a path continues left
ward, beyond the limits of the picture, to re-enter above and lead to a house among bamboo,
within which a man, presumably Liu Hung, sits reading. Other buildings are seen farther up the
valley. The effect is less of comfortable seclusion than of an almost oppressive constriction. At
the right is a tall waterfall; between this and the valley a columnar mass, topped by plateaus,
serves as foundation for a ridge that climbs steeply to the summit, where more plateaus end the
progression. This whole passage follows closely the schematic mode of construction used by
Huang Kung-wang in his "Stone Cliff at the Pond of Heaven" (Hills, Pi. 40); but in some places,
especially near the top, Shen Chou slips into the manner of Wang Meng (cf. Hills, PI. S3). Shen
Chou's performance here is at once eclectic and virtuoso, demonstrating a mastery both of old
styles and of the manipulation of complex assemblages of abstract form that none of his contem
poraries could equal.
Seeing this painting as a complex and experimental formal construction, and observing the
same character in several others by Shen Chou and Liu Chiieh that we have already considered,
as well as in still others to be treated in our chapter on the later Wu school, can serve to intro
duce another aspect of the Che vs. Wu, Sung vs. Yuan set of artistic issues. Such compositions
were not painted by the Che-school masters, whose landscapes tended to follow well-established
and simpler compositional types. The orderly, architectonic principles underlying many Wu-
school landscape pictures had been developed in the Yuan dynasty by Huang Kung-wang and to a
lesser extent by Wang Meng and others. Behind these developments, in turn, lay the monumental
landscapes of the Northern Sung, which, although sometimes simpler in plan, were similarly the
products of elaborate workings out of formal programs and problems. They conveyed a sense
of vastness and universality through offering a richly prolonged visual experience to the viewer,
who could move in imagination through them, finding his way among believable masses and
spaces, discovering details carefully placed by the artist for rhythmically timed encounters. The
paintings seemed, that is, to contain extended stretches of time as well as expanses of space.
In some of the best Yuan landscapes—works by Huang Kung-wang, Wang Meng, and a few
others—richness of naturalistic detail gave way to richness of formal interplay, of line and mass,
textures and patterns, composite wholes and component parts. The paintings are visually absorb
ing in a new way, then, but to similar effect in prolonging and enriching the experience of view
ing them, and thus conveying a sense of extended time. The same can be said of many of the finest
Wu-school landscapes of the Ming.
Che-school paintings, by contrast, tended to follow Southern Sung models in this feature as
in others. In the Southern Sung, compositions were simplified and focused so that the matter and
message of the picture could be taken in instantly, or nearly so; they were not to be read in
parts, or studied, and the experience they offered was immediate and intense. Looking at them
longer could deepen the impression but not effectively alter or expand it. Ming works in this tra
dition are, as we have seen already, more elaborate and less unified in effect, but are still experi
enced typically as a series of instantaneous sensations; their bold brushwork and forms register
suddenly and decisively on the consciousness. Exceptions can of course be found—some Che
school works are more Yuan-like in this respect and many of the Wu school are simple and im
mediate—but the distinction remains valid for the majority of the output of both schools.
Returning to Shen Chou, his "Fishermen on a River in Autumn'' (Pi. 33) was painted in 1471,
the year after "Towering Mountains Above a Retreat" ; six years later Shen Chou, seeing the
painting again at the owner's home, "idly added the distant mountains in blue,'' as he tells in his
inscription dated 1477. "Then, putting aside my brush, I went out the door by quiet lamplight;
the garden was filled with frosty moonlight, and my guest's robes were cold." The owner at
that time must have taken the opportunity of a visit from the artist to show him the picture,
which bore only Shen's seal, and ask for an inscription. Once again, Shen Chou responded by
building a bridge across time, recalling and supplementing the original creative act.
The model here was clearly Wang Meng, not only in the twisting, richly textured mountain
but also in the way the viewer's gaze is drawn through a constricted opening between rocks
and trees to perceive the human focus of the scene, the pair of fishermen in their boats.
The establishment of a high vantage point is carried through with unusual consistency. Although
the scale is more intimate and the brushwork softer, the picture agrees in its strongly vertical
orientation and spatial complexity with "Towering Mountains"; to penetrate the recesses
of either picture involves one in the devious traversal of tortuous terrain. The 1471 picture,
however, is based not so much on clear formal developments as on the gathering of composi
tional energies at a few vortical points (the center of the tree branches, a cluster of rocks on the
slope above) and the dispersal of those energies elsewhere.
T H E DEVELOPMENT OF AN INDIVIDUAL STYLE These works of Shen Chou's forties

(among which ' 'Walking with a Staff, " P I . 29, can probably be included) are all mature, creative
explorations and expansions of old styles, and apart from their individual excellence, they had the
salutary effect historically of demonstrating that those styles were viable, not merely repeatable;
that a reverence for the Yuan masters, expressed in one's own painting, was compatible with
stylistic inventiveness; that an art-historical art need not be art-historically static, but could de
SHEN CHOU • 87
velop in its own right. However, one would be hard put to define the individual style of Shen
Chou on the basis of these, although they have of course important features in common; they do
not exhibit any more overall stylistic consistency than the works of Tu Ch'iung, Yao Shou, or
Liu Chueh. It was probably not until the middle or late 1470s that Shen Chou developed a
distinct personal style, the one that identifies immediately what we think of as his "typical"
works.10
A major example of the new style is the long handscroll that Shen Chou painted for one of his
best friends, Wu K'uan (Pi. 35). Wu and Shen were from the same county and knew each other
from boyhood. Wu was born into an artisan family but rose spectacularly, taking first place in
the metropolitan and palace examinations of 1472 and eventually becoming president of the
Board of Rites and tutor to the Hung-chih emperor, besides being a famous writer. He composed
the memorial inscription for the tomb of Shen Chou's father, who died in 1477; and when, in
1479, Wu was to return to Peking after a stay in Soochow to mourn the death of his own father,
Shen Chou made him a farewell present and at the same time discharged his debt by painting this
scroll.
It is about thirty-six feet long, and required three years to finish. Chinese connoisseurs have
considered it to be one of Shen's masterworks; the great literary critic Wang Shih-chen (1526—
90) owned it and held it to be Shen's finest painting. It is now in the collection of a publisher in
Japan, where it has slipped into unwarranted obscurity through the reluctance of some Japanese
scholars to recognize its authenticity.
The scroll takes the viewer on a long journey through the countryside around Soochow, fol
lowing a path that crosses bridges and disappears at times behind hills but always reappears, so
that one never loses his way for long. The view is close-up; except at a few points where the
horizon or open sky is visible, the scenery fills the entire scroll, with cliffs, trees, rivers, even
walls, cut off by its upper boundary. Shen Chou has again opened a rich quarry of compositional
possibilities by exploiting this manner of perspective (which was not unknown before, as an
occasional feature of spatial development in handscrolls and album leaves) and making it the bas
ic principle of an entire, large-scale composition.
The passage we reproduce portrays a path-side rest-shelter in which four gentlemen are
eating and drinking, while one of them performs on the ch'in. Shen continues to compose his
scene on a system of strong diagonals, as we have observed him doing in several earlier works.
But there is no sense of contrivance to the composition now, no mirroring of shapes. The masses
are still powerfully rendered, with tactile surfaces, but are no longer instilled with tension or
any feeling of instability by twisting or tilting or attenuation. They are in themselves stable and
make up a structure distinguished by a nice dynamic balance. The brushwork is firm, exhibiting
an allover consistency—an important feature of Shen Chou's new style—even while it varies in
order to produce a rich range of textures.
Chinese writers virtually never discuss directly the question of patronage as a factor in the
creation of paintings, except in conventional references to the professional-amateur distinction,
and we must deduce what we can from inscriptions. In a long one on this painting, the artist tells
how his father's tomb biography was composed by Wu K'uan and ends: "Hurrying to carry out
the mourning rites for his father, [Wu K'uan] returned to Soochow. When this period was over
and he was to go back, his friend Shen Chou made this [painting], a parting present which, com
pared with my forebear's tomb inscription, is nothing."11 The implication is that the painting
was done to discharge the obligation assumed when Wu composed the tomb biography.
This exchange probably exemplifies a type commonly carried out between the literati painters
and those they considered their social equals (who did not have to be of landed-gentry origins—
Wu K'uan was not), men among whom the use of money to repay such debts was considered low
class, even insulting. A professional ' 'artisan'' painter, on the other hand, could be paid in a more
straightforward way, either in cash or in goods easily convertible to cash. Something like this
system persists today in Taiwan and Japan, where the person of rank pays tradesmen and other
social inferiors with money but engages his friends and peers in an elaborate interchange of fa
vors and gifts through which he incurs and discharges obligations. The actual practice behind the
theoretical distinction of amateur and professional artists is probably best explained by this dif
ference in modes of exchange, although such an explanation still does not, to be sure, make the
distinction perfectly clear-cut.
At the same time that Shen Chou was painting the scroll for Wu K'uan, he was also at work on
another major production, an album of twenty-two landscapes (perhaps originally twenty-three)
from which we reproduce two (Color PI. 4—5). The album was painted over a five-year period
for a certain Mr. Chou Wei-te and finished in 1482, when Shen wrote the following inscription
on the last leaf:
"I have a natural liking for painting landscapes but have never attained the samadhi [a state of
perfect concentration of mind similar to yoga] of the truly skilled artist—I do them, that is, but
am not satisfied with them. When the right mood of exhilaration comes, then 'trusting my
hand' I wield the brush and spread on the ink. It is only a way of employing my leisure and a
sense of well-fed well-being. I certainly have no intention of making them look attractive to
people.
"Mr. Chou Wei-te had this album mounted [i.e., a blank album] and has been asking me for
a long time [to do paintings in it]. Sometimes I did only one leaf a year, at other times several in
a month—in five years, twenty-three leaves have heaped up. But Wei-te is still eager; with the
paintingsfinished,now he wants an inscription. He won't let me off lightly—it is enough to make
the avaricious seeker give up after seeing him! Wei-te's intention, however, is futile. Since the
paintings don't satisfy me, how can they satisfy others? If they don't satisfy others, what is his
reason for insisting on having them? It is as ridiculous as a hungry hawk going after a rotten rat!
But Wei-te wishes to take full responsibility for it. What a laugh! Jen-yin year of the Ch'eng
hua [era, 1482], fifth day of the intercalary eighth month, inscribed by Shen Chou."
This is another piece of conventional self-deprecation: Shen Chou has in fact devoted a great
deal of time and his best efforts to these leaves, some of which are among his most imaginatively
conceived works. His debt to Chou Wei-te, whatever its nature, must have been a large one.
Also, we may guess that some real exasperation may underlie the ostensibly joking complaints
about Mr. Chou's impatience and importuning, and that Shen Chou may have felt genuinely re
lieved when the work was completed and could be delivered. The burden of fulfilling such prom
ises, which could pile up to become oppressive, led some artists, such as Tung Ch'i-ch'ang in
the late Ming and (according to an anecdote to be quoted in a later chapter) Shen Chou's pupil
Wen Cheng-ming, to employ "ghost painters" to do pictures in their styles for them to sign
and present to less favored recipients. There is no indication, however, that Shen Chou ever
followed such a practice.
The paintings in the 1482 album are landscapes in a variety of manners, in which small figures
are seen in houses and boats or walking on paths and bridges. In one (Color Pi. 4) a man is sit
ting on the edge of a sharp-cut bank under a thatched four-posted shelter, looking across a
stream at a cascade on the opposite shore. A series of flat-topped banks begins at the lower right
and continues, rhythmically repeated, to the upper right. Three groups of leafy trees provide a
countermovement leftward, and both these diagonals are crossed by a horizontally disposed
series of three dark clusters of blocky boulders. Beyond, the farther bank is composed of two
large similarly shaped earth masses, partly obscured in mist. The clear formal scheme made up
of these ordered and interlocked units, which makes the composition stable and easily readable,
SHEN CHOU • 89
extends to the coloring, which is also used more formally than descriptively: the tops of the
banks are a uniform pale blue-green, their sides pale yellow, and very light cool washes are ap
plied over the ink elsewhere. The brushwork is in the broad, relaxed manner of Shen Chou's
mature style.
Another leaf (Color PI. 5), which follows loosely the manner of Kao K'o-kung (a manner
infrequently used by amateur artists in the Ming, as we noted before), is traversed by a river of
windblown fog. The fog flows down from the left, nearly enveloping two houses, and on into a
valley between a grove of trees and a steep hill, to hang at last over the base of a waterfall at the
far right. Below, a stocky figure stands with a staff, pausing in his journey to observe this swirl
ing interaction of air, water, and earth, in which these different states of matter seem transmuted
into a unified flux. A heavily drawn dark tree, its branches bare and blunt, leans down over the
figure, focusing upon it the disquieting feeling of the whole scene. Paintings so dark in mood
are rare among Shen Chou's works and make us expand our ideas of his expressive range.
In the late winter of 1487 Shen Chou sat through a rainy night talking with Shih Yung-ling,
who was the husband of the youngest ofShen's three daughters. Some time during the night he
painted a landscape (Pi. 34) representing the house and its setting as it might have been viewed
by someone outside, and later he wrote on it this poem and note in remembrance of the oc
casion :
"Doing a painting in the rain, I borrow its rich wetness.
Writing poems by candlelight, we pass the long night.
Next morning, in sun, we open the gate; the spring freshet has spread.
At the lakeshore you leave me among the singing willows.
"On the third day of the last month of winter, in the ting-wei year [1487], I sat up at night
with Te-hui [Shih Yung-ling]. In a chance moment of exhilaration I painted this as a present
for him. Shen Chou."
The painting has been given the title "Rainy Thoughts." It is perhaps the most pictorially
conceived of Shen Chou's works, seemingly devoid of conventions, type forms, references to the
past (although a Chinese connoisseur might still detect echoes of the school of Kao K'o-kung);
one is nowhere conscious of brushwork or technique (although the technique of controlled suf
fusion of strokes in wet areas to convey the murky atmosphere is masterly); the suggestive, un
defined rendering of tree foliage and the glimpses of wooded hills through the mists seem extem
poraneous, unlearned, invented for the occasion. As in the similarly inspired "Night Vigil" of five
years later (Pi. 37—38), Shen Chou creates a feeling of seclusion by setting his house and figures
back in the middle ground, flanking them closely with rocks and trees, and providing the viewer
with no easy access to this area of the picture. Shen and Shih sit talking at the open window of a
thatched house built over a stream, their room a pocket of light in a dark and drizzly landscape.
We are made to feel not only the wetness and cool of the scene but also the sound of rain on
leaves, a steady, quiet dripping. Comparison with the more romantic depictions of rainy land
scapes by the Che-school masters (such as Lii Wen-ying's, PI. 51) or the Southern Sung works
they followed (an ideal example is the "Landscape with Rainstorm" ascribed to Ma Yuan, in
the Seikado, Tokyo), in which the fall of rain is rendered in dramatic diagonal strokes of wash
across the sky, reveals Shen Chou's as a more intimate and immediate conveying of a private ex
perience, deeply felt and sensitively set forth, not reworked as a public performance. Once
more, the purposes of the paintings must be kept in mind: one cannot imagine Shen Chou's
painting hung as a decorative piece, or Lii Wen-ying's as the object of prolonged, thoughtful
contemplation.
" N I G H T V I G I L " Shen Chou's "Night Vigil" (PI. 37-38), painted in 1492, is another picture
of the same kind, an extraordinary record, in picture and prose, of an experience he had one
autumn night in that year. The importance of this record in understanding Shen Chou and his
painting warrants our quoting the inscription at length (although still somewhat abridged,
particularly in the paraphrased portions, which are enclosed in parentheses, along with some
brief interpretive notes):12
"On a cold night, sleep is very sweet. I woke in the middle of the night, my mind clear and
untroubled, and as I was unable to go to sleep again, I put on my clothes and sat facing my flicker
ing lamp. On the table were a few folders of books. I chose a volume at random and began to
read but, tiring, I put down the book and sat calmly doing nothing. A long rain had newly
cleared, and a pale moon was shining through the window. All around was silence. Then after a
long time absorbing the fresh brightness, I gradually became aware of sounds."
(He listens to sounds farther and farther off—the wind in the bamboo, the growling of dogs,
the drumbeats that mark the hours, and finally, near dawn, the sound of a distant bell. His medi
tations turn to the difficulty of breaking through the constant operation of his own intellect,
which seeks for knowledge more in books than in direct experience.)
"My nature is to enjoy sitting in the night. So I often spread a book under the lamp, going
back and forth over it, usually stopping at the second watch. Man's clamor is not at rest, and
the mind is yet bent on bookish learning. Until now, I have never attained a state of outer tran
quillity and inner stability [restj.
"Now tonight all sounds and colors come to me through this state of tranquillity and rest;
they serve thus to cleanse the mind, spirit, and feelings [instead of, as ordinarily, muddying
them] and to arouse the will." (But this will, this central point of consciousness, cannot easily
dissociate itself from attachment to sensory data.) "It is not that these sounds and colors do
not exist at other times, or that they do not strike one's ears and eyes. My outward form [body]
is [usually] slave to external things, and my mind takes its direction from them. [True perception
through] hearing is obscured by the sounds of bell and drum; [true perception through] seeing is
obscured by patterns and beauty. This is why material things benefit people seldom, harm
them often." (Once, however, he has arrived at a state of inner tranquillity, the effect of sen
sory stimuli is very different.) "Sometimes it happens, though, as with tonight's sounds and
colors, that while they do not differ from those of other times, yet they strike the ear and eye
all at once, lucidly, wonderfully becoming a part of me [absorbed into my very being]. That
they are bell and drum sounds, patterns and beauty, now cannot help but be an aid to the ad
vancement of my self-cultivation. In this way, things cannot serve to enslave man."
(Physical sensations are ephemeral, while the will remains more constant.) "Sounds are cut
off, colors obliterated; but my will, absorbing these, alone endures. What is the so-called will?
Is it inside me, after all, or outside? Does it exist in external things or does it come into being
because of those things? In this [i.e., the realization I am now experiencing] there is a means of
deciding these questions. Ah! I have, through this, decided them.
"How great is the power of sitting up at night! One should purify his heart and sit alone, by
the light of a newly trimmed, bright candle. Through this practice one can pursue the principles
that underlie events and things, and the subtlest workings of one's own mind, as the basis of
self-cultivation and [a proper mode of] response to external things; through this, we will surely
attain understanding.
"I have composed this record of my night vigil in the Hung-chih era, jen-tzu year [1492],
fifteenth day of the seventh month. Shen Chou of Ch'ang-chou."
While Shen Chou does not specifically relate these meditations to the process of artistic
creation, it is probably not unwarranted to use them to illuminate his beliefs, and those of Ming
SHEN CHOU • 91
literati artists in general, on the relationship between external phenomena and one's experience
of them—or, by extension, perceived images in nature and the transformation of them in art.
Sensory stimuli are in themselves too bewilderingly diverse, press upon the consciousness too
constantly and demandingly, to be absorbed fully by the mind or represented in their raw state
in art. The literati artists' continual insistence that verisimilitude, "form likeness," is not their
aim is based on a conviction that attempts to represent the world as it appears miss the point;
realism in art does not truly reflect human experience of the world, or understanding of it; and
it is that experience and understanding they mean to convey—insofar as they choose to engage
themselves, as artists, with nature at all. At moments of extraordinary clarity, when the mind is
receptive but at rest, uncluttered by distracting considerations—moments such as Shen Chou
records so movingly here—one's perceptions become a part of one's self, in an undifferentiated
"passage of felt life." The cumulative absorption and ordering of such perceptions is the "self
cultivation" of the Confucian system, and this in turn is the proper stuff of art.13
In the painting below this inscription Shen Chou has portrayed himself sitting at the open door
of his house, with a candle and books on the table beside him. The figure is drawn small and
simply but, placed in the precise center of a composition that in every way directs attention
toward it, is undeniably the focus. From it the composition spirals outward, beginning with
the closest elements, the buildings, through the trees, the stream and a band of mist, finally to
the farthest, the banks, slopes, and hills. This simple scheme is effective in conveying visually the
mood and sense of Shen Chou's essay, in which the artist's interior experience absorbs and en
compasses the world around him as it is perceptible to his senses, first his immediate surround
ings and then, through sounds, things farther and farther away. Night and moonlight are sug
gested in the painting only by paleness of color in some parts and a slight darkening in others.
The painting is in harmony with the essay also in its drawing, which, like that of the "Rainy
Thoughts," is broad and loose throughout, with no effect of forcefulness, offering thus a visual
equivalent for the essay's unassertive, meditative tone. Such drawing, rather than analyzing and
defining the objects of the picture intellectually, from outside, seems to become the brush-equiv
alent of those objects, identical with them; here is still another way in which the painting is
analogous to the essay in its approach to the experience of reality.
LANDSCAPES OF THE LATE P E R I O D A number of Shen Chou's finest works, in his most
characteristic style, are undated but can be placed in his late period, roughly the last two dec
ades of his life, by comparison with dated pictures that are stylistically similar. The poetic and
lovely "Gazing at the Midautumn Moon" in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts should date from
around the beginning of this period, i.e., the late 1480s, since Shen Chou speaks of himself in
his inscription as being around sixty.14 Others include the "Scenery of Ch'ang-chou" handscroll
in the Palace Museum, Peking,15 and an album and handscroll representing well-known sights
in the environs of Soochow.
The album is in the Cleveland Museum of Art and consists of twelve leaves, some painted in
ink only and some with light color, on paper. They represent the renowned Tiger Hill, a pilgrim
age place and landmark a few miles northwest of Soochow, identifiable always in paintings by
its shape, by the Buddhist temples on its slopes and summit, and by its famous pagoda, visible
from afar. It was a favorite picnicking place, since one could view the surrounding countryside
from the top of the hill.
We reproduce two leaves from the Cleveland album, one depicting the Thousand Buddha Hall
and the pagoda (Pi. 39), and the other the Drought Demon Spring (Pi. 40). Each leaf portrays a
single scene as viewed from a particular vantage point. One sees the Thousand Buddha Hall from
above, perhaps from higher on the hill, and looks beyond over a river and rice fields. The
Drought Demon Spring, a roadside well under great oak trees, is seen from a closer and lower
viewpoint; this allows Shen to fill his composition as he was fond of doing, cutting the trees off
at the top. The stocky figures of strolling scholars appear throughout the album, making their
way (and so directing the observer's attention) along paths and up stairways, or pointing out the
places of interest to each other—two of them stand beside the Drought Demon Spring, probably
discussing the suitability of its water for brewing tea.
We would recognize easily Shen Chou's main stylistic model in these leaves even if we did
not recall Li Jih-hua's statement that Shen was "intoxicated," in his old age, with the painting
of Wu Chen. Wu's fascination with the parallel-line, gridlike patterns of freehand architectural
drawing and the interplay of angles that could be set up within clusters of buildings drawn in this
way has been brilliantly caught by Shen Chou in the Thousand Buddha Hall leaf, which also sets
this busy pattern against patches of wetly dotted foliage and a misty distance rendered in soft ink
washes, as Wu Chen might have done. Similarly, the swelling slope behind the Drought Demon
Spring, given a tactile bulk by thick modeling strokes in pale ink and bunches of fat tien in deep
black, is in the Wu Chen mode, as are the strongly rooted trees and the figures.
Nevertheless, it would be a serious mistake if we were to see Shen Chou's artistic career, by
misunderstanding Li Jih-hua's account of it or the practice of "following old masters" more
generally, as a succession of derivative phases in which he imitated this artist, then that artist,
then another artist. For one thing, surviving works do not allow any such neat division; he could
work in one mode today, another tomorrow. For another, such a formulation misstates the mo
tivation : rather than a shifting of favor from one old model to another, with a resultant shift in
style, Shen Chou's development (like that of any good artist) represents a series of shifts in
interest from one set of formal problems to another, and from one set of technical and expressive
materials to another. His choice of favored models changed, that is, as different modes from the
past came to suit his concerns and his needs at different times. If restated on these terms, Li Jih
hua's three stages noted earlier in this chapter—first imitating various masters, then following
Huang Kung-wang, and finally adopting Wu Chen's style—would probably be truer to Shen's
development, although still oversimplifying it.
In his early period, one would then say, he is occupied with possibilities of active, sometimes
rather fanciful, compositions featuring dynamic forms such as twisting mountains and sensitive
dry-brush drawing in which the brushstroke itself, sharp-ended, seems sometimes to twist. Wang
Meng is accordingly a favorite model, and there are echoes of Fang Ts'ung-i. Later, Shen comes
to prefer more tightly constructed, architectonic structures and is less concerned with rich
textures; the styles of Ni Tsan and Huang Kung-wang become more attractive to him. In his late
years his line broadens, takes on a thick substance that partly supplants, instead of augmenting,
any sense of three-dimensionality in the forms it delineates; it tends rather, by lying so flat on
the page, to flatten those forms, reducing them to strong patterns that can then be composed into
a picture that is conceived in terms of bold, flat design. At the same time, the artist's whole out
look seems to become warmer, more poetic, and the world he depicts more congenial to the
people who increasingly inhabit it. For this mood and these qualities, no painter could better
serve as model than Wu Chen.
Under this new set of conditions or "rules of the game," Shen can create brilliantly innovative
compositions with a greater sense of ease, dividing his picture space in new and striking ways,
adopting unusual viewpoints, chopping off his scenes with daringly unconventional placing of
boundaries. The Cleveland album offers a series of surprises and delights of this kind, which can
only be suggested by the two leaves we have chosen.
That these innovations occur here in an album is not accidental. The album made up of a suc
cession of leaves by a single artist (as distinct from the earlier type formed by collecting small
pictures by different masters), within which the artist normally establishes some unifying theme
or program, becomes popular in the Ming; the album of scenes of Hua-shan by Wang Li (Pi.
1—2) is an isolated fourteenth-century example, and it may be questioned whether this type of
SHEN CHOU • 93
landscape album was painted before the Ming at all. (Extant albums of this type ascribed to late
Sung or Yuan masters—Wu Chen, Ni Tsan, Ts'ao Chih-po—all appear to be spurious.) The new
format had its effect on style, encouraging compositional experimentation in the individual leaves
to avoid monotony and setting new compositional problems by not permitting the vertical or
lateral extensions of the scroll forms. Moreover, the leaves were intended to be seen close up
and for short intervals (before one turned to the next); intimacy and immediacy were qualities
to be expected and pursued.
Such a chopped-off view as Shen Chou gives us in the Drought Demon Spring leaf, for instance,
had seldom if ever been attempted in a hanging scroll; one might see it as a segment of a hand-
scroll, such as the one Shen Chou had painted in 1479 for Wu K'uan, but to see it that way does
not make it, as a complete composition, any the less unconventional. The path enters through the
lower margin and disappears out the right, continuous, unarticulated; the bank of earth and the
wall behind similarly seem segments of a lateral continuum, as do the trees of an upward one.
Liu Chiieh's travel scene (Pi. 27) had provided the germ for such a conception, giving, although
less radically, the effect of a momentary pause in a continuing progress. Shen Chou seems, as it
were, to be opening the window of a sedan chair in which he is escorting the viewer around
the Tiger Hill and allowing him to see what the window happens to frame. To note this impres
sion of chance cutting is not, of course, to deny that the picture is in fact strongly and successful
ly composed; the central focus of the well, the diverging of the two large trees directly over it,
the placing of figures at both sides, most of all the symmetry of the swelling bank, hold it power
fully and stably within its space.
The Thousand Buddha Hall leaf combines in a like way, as do other leaves in the album, impli
cations of quasi-arbitrary cutting of borders with a tight composition within them. Its basic plan
may recall earlier works by Shen Chou in which the upper area was made to mirror the lower;
but here the effect is less of unification than of sharp contrast, with the highly active and linear
foreground answered by a blurred, quieting passage in the distance. A row of strictly horizontal
walls and buildings across the bottom provides a stable base from which pictorial tension builds
upward, through structures set at dynamic diagonals, to the pagoda, from which the accumulat
ed energy is dispersed outward into the distance.
Less exciting but belonging to the same late style is the long handscroll titled "The White
Cloud Spring" (Pi. 41), which takes the viewer on a long tour of notable sites in the vicinity of
Soochow, beginning with the same Tiger Hill. The last half of the scroll has been cut off (two
other versions of the composition, less convincing as being from the hand of Shen Chou himself
but complete, preserve the whole composition) and a spurious inscription has been added at the
end of this surviving portion, which bears Shen's seal at the beginning. It is one of the few Shen
Chou paintings on silk and therefore contains little dry-brush drawing, for which silk is unsuited.
The use of silk was more common among professional artists, since it was better adapted to firm,
controlled styles of painting than to the more spontaneous and was the ideal material to use
when one wanted to display sureness of hand and technical mastery. Moreover, paintings on silk
usually (other things being equal) had a higher market value than those on paper.
These considerations, and the nature and subject of Shen's "White Cloud Spring" scroll,
suggest that it may be an example of a kind of painting he produced on a semicommercial basis,
once he had become famous enough for his works to fetch good prices. His early paintings, done
for friends on particular occasions, were modest in size and specific in their references to times
and places (even when the references are not clear to us); their value was in considerable part
associational. In contrast to them, this carefully put together and firmly painted scroll offers a
generalized, matter-of-fact presentation of famous sights around Soochow, such as any visitor to
the area might like to take home as a remembrance of his stay and as a treasure, to be shown with
pride, from the hand of the famous Mr. Shen. Throughout the scroll, labels in small characters
identify the places depicted; we cannot be sure that these were written in by the artist himself,
but they indicate that the scroll was intended, or at least adapted, for someone not familiar
enough with the region for such labeling to be unnecessary. In short, this seems clearly to be a
painting less intimate in approach, more public in purpose, than most of the works of Shen Chou
we have seen.
The section of the scroll that we reproduce begins (at the right) with a pass in the hills, a place
that the label identifies as Mud Flat Ridge. A bent figure with a staff descends the path below, a
wood-gatherer is seen coming over the pass, and a crane flies overhead, all arranged in a vertical
row and tied into a visual unit by the outline of a distant peak. Farther on, a rocky mountain fills
the whole height of the scroll; this is T'ien-p'ing Shan, or Heavenly Peace Mountain. A small
waterfall on its slope, with a rest-shelter at its base, is labeled the White Cloud Spring, after
which the scroll takes its name. Below is a Buddhist temple, within which the largest, two-story
structure, seen through pine trees, is the Ancestral Hall of Fan Chung-yen. Two visitors to the
shrine stand in the foreground. At the end of this section, in another gap in the hills, the path
proceeds, and another traveler continues the forward progress of the scroll toward the next
section.
The mode of composition is a familiar one, of which a simpler version was seen, for instance,
in Liu Chiieh's 1471 painting (Pi. 27): two inward-sloping banks in the foreground, through
which one moves into middle ground; above, framed by these, a central mass, the upper contour
of which repeats, mirror-fashion, the wide-angled gap below. The hills are powerfully rendered,
composite forms, still echoing faintly the Huang Kung-wang formula with their even-sized units
and jutting ledges. The broad, relatively pale line drawing and the freely placed ts'un which model
the masses simply but effectively belong to Shen's late style. Nothing of spatial clarity is lost in
the screening of the temple behind trees; the construction of walls and buildings is easily but
firmly rendered. Even such a detail as the insetting of flat stones, large ones alternating with
small, at the base of the wall as facing for the foundation and to reinforce the part that is most
subject to erosion and wear, is observed and accurately reported.
In these late works Shen Chou sacrifices stylistic variety and finesse in execution to effect a
greater strength of surface design, a greater firmness and massiveness in his forms, and a new
clarity. His purpose was probably, and his achievement certainly, to correct some of the weak
nesses that literati painting had fallen into—overemphasis on sensitive brushwork, too slavish
imitation of past styles. Some features of his late style were taken up by later Wu-school artists
—Wen Cheng-ming, Lu Chih, Ch'en Shun—whom we will consider in a later chapter. His
influence was not limited to the Wu school, however; it is to be seen clearly in certain of the
late Che-school masters—certainly in Li Chu, who studied with him, and perhaps in Wu Wei—
and in artists who took an intermediate position between the literati and academic trends, such
as Hsieh Shih-ch'en and later Sung Hsu. These artists adopt elements of Shen's late style, no
tably the drawing in thick, blunt line, that the Wu-school painters of the generations after him
seem, on the whole, to reject.
In any case, we know that already by the time of his old age Shen Chou's paintings were ex
tremely popular and widely imitated. There is even a story, of unascertainable credibility, that
toward the end of his life he decided to buy back some of his earlier pictures and that the for
geries were by then so numerous and so convincing that he unwittingly bought some of them
himself.16 True or not, the story should warn us against overconfidence when we try to separate
the "real Shen Chous" from among the hundreds of spurious works that pass under his name.
PLANT AND ANIMAL SUBJECTS Besides landscapes, Shen Chou occasionally painted bird
and-flower subjects and animals, including crabs and shrimp. His best surviving pictures of this kind
SHEN CHOU • 95
are contained in an album of nineteen leaves, painted in 1494 and titled "Drawings from Life."
The double leaf representing a crab and a shrimp (Pi. 36) is especially fine in its portrayal of the
living creatures with wet, sure strokes of ink wash that describe closely, even in their apparent
freedom, the stiffness of the shells and flexibility of the jointed legs. Earlier fifteenth-century
artists had been experimenting with a manner of painting in wetly applied strokes either of color
(the so-called "boneless style," which we will see exemplified in a painting by Sun Lung, Pi. 64)
or of ink, and Shen Chou probably knew their work. The style suited the subject, in the Chinese
view; neither was quite respectable in scholar-artist circles—the great Ch'an Buddhist master
Mu-ch'i of the late Sung period, for example, had been dismissed by later critics as a "vulgar"
painter for doing paintings that offered just this combination of commonplace subjects, including
shrimps, and brushwork that was too fluid and free, too responsive to representational needs,
to meet the established standards for acceptable brushstroke types.
Shen Chou is careful, in his inscription that accompanies the album, to inform the viewer
that his purpose was not serious:
"In themes of things that wriggle and things that grow,
By playing with my brush, I can still work transformations.
On a bright day, by a small window, sitting alone,
The spring wind in my face, this mind with subtle thoughts . . .
"I did this album capriciously, following the shapes of things, laying them out on paper only
to suit my mood of leisurely, well-fed living. If you search for me through my paintings, you will
find that I am somewhere outside them.''
In contrast to these "trivial" themes, paintings of plant subjects that carried symbolic allu
sions to Confucian virtues were considered thoroughly respectable, requiring no apology from
the artist. Such were bamboo, orchids, chrysanthemums (associated with T'ao Yiian-ming),
branches of pine and blossoming plum. Shen Chou did these too, on occasion, as did most other
scholar-artists. Other kinds of trees were less common in painting, and Shen Chou's famous
handscroll portraying three old junipers (PI. 42—43), which is among his most powerful works,
is probably without precedent. The three trees were the oldest of the Seven Stars, seven venera
ble junipers planted by a Taoist priest in A.D. 500 in the grounds of a temple at Yii-shan, north
of Soochow. Shen Chou painted them in 1484 when he paid a visit to the place in the company
of Wu K'uan.17
Shen Chou includes only the upper parts of the trees and cuts two of them off at the top as
well; it is the same device that he employs in his landscape handscrolls, setting the upper and
lower boundaries so that the forms are not wholly contained in the picture space, and has the
same effect of drawing the viewer close to the subject, even into it, confronting him (in this
case) with the massive trunks and thrusting branches. The overlappings and interweavings, intri
cate or even tortuous as they are, never depart from organic and spatial logic to the point of be
coming visually unintelligible, as was to happen in paintings of similar subjects by later and lesser
masters.
Shen Chou similarly foregoes the grotesqueries that others achieve by exaggerating sugges
tively animal-like configurations; poets write of the trees as writhing like dragons, reaching out
like the arms of apes, or threatening with sharp claws like giant birds attacking their prey, de
scriptions that must have tempted the painter to depict them that way, and some painters yielded
to the temptation for an easy impressiveness. Metamorphic and metaphorical effects are present
in Shen Chou's painting, but they depend on real aspects of the trees and are not mere products
of the artist's imagination. The grandeur of Shen Chou's presentation admits nothing of the fanci
ful ; with brush drawing of a rugged integrity that is worthy of its subject, he describes movingly
the outcome of a millennium of slow growth, of survival through a thousand winters.
The brushwork is of the constantly modulating kind of his middle period, creating in-and-out
movements within the shallow space, rendering rough bark or suggesting light and shadow. In
its adaptiveness it is comparable to the brushwork of the "Rainy Thoughts" of three years later
(Pi. 34), which similarly conveys a subjective experience through sensitive description of an
objective reality. The broader, flattening line of his late landscape style, and the emphasis it gives
to surface pattern, would in any case have been unsuited to the subject.
CHAPTER THREE
The Later Che School
1. NANKING AS A P A I N T I N G CENTER
The city of Nanking, which had grown to greatness so suddenly at the beginning of the Ming
dynasty, lost about half its population and much of its splendor when the capital was moved to
Peking in 1421, leaving only the hollow shell of a secondary court behind in Nanking. However,
even after the main locus of political and military power had shifted to the northern city, Nanking
retained the great advantage of its location at the center of the richest and most productive area
of China; it was, as the late Ming writer Ku Ch'i-yiian put it, "the hub of all the wealth and re
sources of the southeast." While not a major center of production—its textile industry did not
compare with Soochow's—Nanking was an important center of trade; and this commercial ac
tivity, together with the continued presence of large numbers of administrators and bureaucrats
connected with the smaller, largely ceremonial government maintained in the city, enabled Nan
king in time to regain a status approaching its early Ming eminence. Here, as in Soochow, there
was a lively interaction of officials and merchants, even though they belonged in theory to widely
separated social strata: officials and members of the nobility were forbidden to engage in trade
but did so through family members and servants; tradesmen and small businessmen could make
fortunes and enter some official rank, often through bribery but also because wealth provided
the material basis for a good education, the key to penetrating officialdom.
Money was a source of power and also of personal and family prestige, which could be en
hanced by patronage of writers and artists. By the late fifteenth century, Nanking was rivaling
Soochow in intellectual and literary activity. Leading Nanking writers did not concentrate so
much on the literary forms intended for quiet, contemplative enjoyment or edification, the poem
or the learned essay (although they wrote those too), as on "performance pieces"—dramatic
lyrics (san-ch'u) and operas. Some of the composers of these were also painters, such as Hsu Lin
and Shih Chung, who will appear in this and the following chapter. The directions taken by paint
ing and literature were in some respects parallel. If Soochow painting can be broadly character
ized as scholarly and poetic, Nanking painting can be seen as sharing some of the qualities of the
genres of literature popular there: a fondness for narrative themes, for the portrayal of human
figures and human situations, for effects that can properly be called dramatic. With some of the
artists we will encounter, painting itself seems to have been, in a sense, a performance art—Wu
Wei, like Wu Tao-tzu and other flamboyant painters of the past, produced pictures with dazzling
virtuosity before the eyes of astonished viewers. We may note by contrast that nowhere is there
any record of anyone's having watched Shen Chou paint.
97
98 • THE LATER CHE SCHOOL
For a time in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries Nanking was probably ahead of
Soochow in the number of important artists active there. Some of them were natives of the
city, but most came from outside, attracted by an atmosphere receptive to the arts, by comforts
and pleasures (the Nanking entertainment district was famous), and by the abundance and variety
of patronage, from the small merchant through officials at all levels up to the imperial court.
The diverse nature of the painting produced in Nanking at this time doubtless reflects a diversity
of patrons, but we have little evidence for connecting styles with the tastes of particular kinds of
consumers and can only speculate, with the usual risk of falsification, even unfairness—if, for in
stance, we are tempted to attribute a taste for the showy and vulgar to the merchant class.
In the foregoing volume and chapters we have written sometimes as though certain preferences
and tastes were common to the educated elite, the literati; and so they seem to have been,
within the particular circles of literati we have treated—those of Wu-hsing, Chia-hsing, and Soo
chow in the Yuan, and, in the early Ming, of Soochow once more. But there is no reason to sup
pose that these preferences were uniform throughout China—that scholar-gentry and officials
in Hangchow, or lesser centers such as Fukien and Canton, did not support their local artists and
favor the local styles, including those that the verdict of history, as pronounced by the most
authoritative critics of later times, declared to be low class. Tai Chin enjoyed the patronage and
enthusiastic admiration of some of the leading scholar-officials of his day, as did Wu Wei, the
next major Che-school master, although both painted predominantly in styles that are generally
considered somewhat outside the "literati taste." It is clear that the Che-school styles were
popular in Nanking and Peking during the period we are now considering, not only at the courts
but also outside them in the cities; the innovations in style that Tai, Wu, and others accom
plished were in part responses to an expansion of patronage, the need to satisfy a variety of
demands.
The artists who will be treated in this chapter represent in general a continuation of the "aca
demic" trend that was the subject of our first chapter, although most of them, as we will see,
engaged in attempts to break free of academicism. Some worked in Peking, in the Academy,
others in Nanking, as professional artists outside the court. (The question of whether painters
were active in the Nanking court at this time is unanswerable on the basis of presently known
evidence; presumably they were, probably in some cases moving or being transferred from serv
ice in one capital to the other.) The case of Wu Wei, the central figure in this group, who was
both Peking academician and Nanking professional, demonstrates the fluidity of movement possi
ble to painters at this time, a kind of social mobility in the art world.
2. Wu W E I
LIFE AND CAREER WU Wei was born in 1459 in Wu-ch'ang in present-day Hupei Prov
ince.1 His family had produced distinguished scholar-officials in the past, but his father, who
received a good education and took the chii-jen degree, was reportedly a devotee of alchemy and
given to dissipation, besides collecting calligraphy and painting. He died after bringing the family
to ruin, leaving Wu Wei an orphan with little prospect of continuing toward an official career
himself, although his education had been directed toward that end. Wu Wei had learned to paint,
we are told, without a teacher, probably through association with artists and study of his father's
collection. He was raised by a provincial official and at the age of seventeen came to Nanking to
seek his fortune as a painter.
Among his patrons was a nobleman named Chu, a tutor to the heir-apparent and a descendant
of Chu Neng (1 370-1406), who had held the same position and title, Duke of Ch'eng-kuo. It was
from this man that Wu Wei received the nickname by which he is best known: Hsiao-hsien,
or "Small Immortal." This sobriquet, likening him (however unseriously) to a Taoist Immortal
wu WEI • 99
or Transcendant, indicates how he was already regarded by his contemporaries and suggests the
kind of renown he would achieve as an unworldly and unorthodox personality. He appears to
have been that by nature, but he probably also exploited the popularity of the romantic, "bo
hemian" image of the artist.
His career fits a strikingly consistent pattern for the painter who is a scholar-official manque,
an educated man who somehow fails to pass the examinations and reach office and turns to paint
ing as a means of earning his living. His position in society is anomalous, since his education
has not been put to the normal use: he is learned and talented without possessing either wealth
or rank. Typically, in China, such an artist cultivates in his life and his art an attitude of eccen
tricity, or at least evinces a degree of emancipation from the rules and conventions to which
others, whose roles are better defined, are bound. We will encounter other examples in later
chapters, and still others could be cited for the Ch'ing period, notably the "Strange Masters of
Yangchow" in the eighteenth century.
Wu Wei's success in the south led to an invitation to Peking; he was welcomed there by offi
cials who had heard of his talents and eventually recommended to court, where he became a
painter-in-attendance in the Jen-chih Tien and a low-ranking officer in the Embroidered Uni
form Guard. Emperor Hsien-tsung seems to have found his paintings admirable and the painter
himself entertaining; Wu was allowed entree to the inner chambers of the palace and could take
liberties with the emperor that would have cost others their heads, or at least their jobs. The late-
Ming book Wu-sheng-shih shih tells a famous story: "On one occasion when summoned by the
emperor, Wu was very drunk and came into the imperial presence with disheveled hair and dirty
face, his shoes dragging and torn; he arrived staggering, supported under the arms by two court
servants. The emperor laughed and ordered him to paint on the spot a picture of' Pines in Wind.'
Wu knelt down and spilled the ink [onto a silk or paper screen laid on the floor], then began to
rub and smear it freely, 'trusting his hand,' making wind and clouds arise on the screen so appal
lingly strong that the two servants grew pale. The emperor drew a deep breath and said: 'This is
truly the brush of an Immortal!' "
However, Wu's habits of brooking no criticism, expressing open contempt for high-ranking
statesmen and noblemen, and refusing most requests for paintings aroused so much indignation
that he was expelled from the palace and returned to Nanking. What happened there can again
be read in a vivid account in Wu-sheng-shih shih: "Wei was devoted to the theater and to drink
ing ; he sometimes went ten days without eating. The libertines of Nanking [who were after
his paintings] invited him every day to drinking parties. When they saw that he was also fond of
singing girls [prostitutes] and couldn't really enjoy his drinking without them, they began to
compete with each other in gathering singing girls for him too, as bait.'' Small wonder that high-
minded literati critics of later times, holding that the quality of a work of art was linked to the
artist's motivation for creating it, often had low opinions of Wu's paintings.
Hsien-tsung died in 1488, and early in the reign of his successor, Hsiao-tsung, whose reign
(1488-1506) was titled Hung-chih, Wu Wei was again called to court, advanced in rank to com
pany commander in the Guards, and, most prestigious of all, awarded a seal by the emperor that
read: "Foremost Among Painters." Imperial favors were heaped on him. When he asked leave
to return to his home in Wu-ch'ang to "sweep the ancestral tombs," it was granted; but a few
months later a messenger appeared calling him back to the capital, where the emperor presented
him with a house in a fashionable section of the city. Two years later he escaped again from serv
ice at court, this time pretending illness, and returned to Nanking, where he lived on the bank
of the Ch'in-huai River. He had four wives and at least four children; whether any of them fol
lowed him on these back-and-forth moves we .are not told. In 1506, Emperor Wu-tsung ascend
ed the throne, and in the third year of his Cheng-te reign Wu Wei once more received an im
perial summons. But while he was preparing to accompany the envoy to Peking, he died from
the effects of overdrinking. This was in 1508, when he was onlyfiftyyears old (by Chinese count).
All in all, it is a career that illustrates a new relationship between artist and patron and a new
conception of the artist's position in society. Eccentricity in painters and the tolerance of it
were, of course, in themselves nothing new. The Taoist philosopher Chuang-tzu, writing around
300 B.C., told the story of the painter who, summoned by his lord with a crowd of others to
perform a job, arrived late and was discovered afterwards sitting idly on a mat outside with his
clothes off. This, the lord declared, was a true artist. Ku K'ai-chih, in the fifth century A.D.,
provided a model for the artist as erratic personality; and Wu Tao-tzu in the eighth (to whom
Wu Wei was sometimes likened—the common surname is coincidental but not insignificant
if one believes in mysterious affinities) was the great precedent for the "divinely inspired"
painter who transcended rules and worked with dazzling sureness and ease. The literati painters
from the eleventh century onward supplied countless cases of lofty refusal to produce on de
mand, and the "untrammeled" ink-splashers of the late T'ang and after, of aberrant techniques
for painting. (Besides Wu Wei's "Pines in Wind" performance before Emperor Hsien-tsung,
an anecdote relates an occasion when at a drinking party he seized a lotus seed-case, inked it and
stamped it a number of times on the paper, and then—while the astonished guests were still
wondering what he was up to—turned each of these stamped designs into a crab, creating a
picture of "Catching Crabs.")
What was new was the way Wu managed to reconcile all these nonconformist ways with serv
ice in the imperial court, and with dependence on multilevel patronage outside it. What we
read about him suggests that he was successful not so much in spite of his unservile attitude and
eccentricities as (in part) because of them. The necessity for many educated men in the Yuan
period to earn livings outside the civil service had required the opening of new modes of turning
literary and artistic ability into sources of income without dropping to the status of the artisan
on hire. Patterns of patronage developed that continued into the Ming and spread into areas
of professional painting where they would once have been thought out of place. The support Tai
Chin received from powerful statesmen demonstrates, but also must have enhanced, the prestige
of the kind of painting he practiced. The reasons for its popularity (apart from the sheer quality
of the paintings) are obvious: his works offered to their recipients an attractive combination of
the romantic and bucolic images they enjoyed with a style freed from the stigma of conservatism
or academicism by semi-improvisatory sketchiness. Here, again, was a model; Wu Wei's success
was surely built on Tai's, and the attractions of his paintings were much the same, but he offered
besides a colorful personality and entertaining "artistic" behavior. This, too, must account
for some part of Wu's great renown, which is otherwise not entirely understandable, since
nothing in his preserved works quite comes up to his reputation as "divinely inspired." Even
allowing for the destruction of his larger works, wall paintings and screens, which were said to
be his best, we would expect a masterpiece or two to have survived.
LANDSCAPES WITH FIGURES Some of Wu Wei's paintings are clearly based on Tai Chin's,
and these are the ones that most justify his classification as a Che-school artist. They probably
date mostly from the earlier part of his career, although since none of his surviving works are
dated (with a single exception), we cannot establish this with any certainty.
A good example is "Winter Landscape with Travelers" (Pi. 45). The composition, piled verti
cally at one side and horizontally on the other, belongs to the standardized plan that we have
noted as probably originating with Tai, or at least popularized by him; it was to be employed by
most later painters of the school for countless routine productions. (We should note at once
that our plates were chosen for variety and quality and hence fail to convey the routine and
stereotyped character of the bulk of the Che-school output, especially in its later phases. The
reader who wants to look more closely into Ming painting can discover this fact for himself by
browsing through some of the hundreds of published Che-school paintings.)2 Blocky forms,
WU WEI • 101
some of them tilted for instability, are treated with heavy applications of rough brushwork,
in which harsh light-dark contrasts can stand either for sunlight and shadow or for snow and
exposed earth.
The figures of the plodding traveler and his servant are placed close to the picture plane,
emerging from behind a foreground slope; they are drawn in jagged, nervous lines. The same
nervous energy permeates the trees and rocks. The artist seems everywhere to aim at effects of
animation. Where Chou Wen-ching's landscape of 1463 (Pi. 18) represented a late assertion of
the conservative attitude in court painting and homage to the Sung romantic mode, this picture
by Wu Wei, probably painted only two or three decades later, represents the ascendancy of the
new style introduced by Tai Chin, which was the starting point for Wu's development.
A painting titled "Fishing from a Riverbank" (Pi. 46), one of a pair of hanging scrolls, stands
in a close and Instructive relationship to the "Winter Landscape with Travelers." It would
seem to represent a later period in Wu's career. The composition is basically the same, but the
foreground has been brought closer by enlarging the figure and by cutting off the bank and boul
ders so that they are less completely contained within the frame, seeming rather to extend be
yond it into the viewer's space. The spectator is thus involved in the scene more immediately
and dramatically, instead of being presented with a separate space beyond the picture plane that
is complete in itself. To the same purpose, the overhanging cliff is similarly pulled nearly up to
the foreground and continues out the top of the composition. The space of the picture opens
diagonally forward from behind the cliff in a manner that was later to be exploited also by Wu's
follower Chang Lu.
A more radical change than these, however, is in the brushwork. Rough and scratchy brush-
strokes were used in the winter scene but were held within firm contours and served to render
rugged surfaces of rock. Such brushwork was still a component, that is, of the old outline-and
texturing mode. In "Fishing from a Riverbank," the rough-brush drawing functions more like
the brushwork in some late Yuan landscapes of the literati school, in which it can be said to con
stitute the masses instead of delineating them or defining clearly their shapes and surfaces, and
also becomes in a sense the "subject matter" of the picture, as much as the forms it more or
less represents. Some intrusion of the ideals and methods of the scholar-artists into the Che
school style can certainly be noted here, as it can in other aspects of Wu Wei's painting. At the
same time, the brushwork is far more loose and unrestrained than any that was tolerated in
literati painting, where it would doubtless have been considered insufficiently disciplined. Wu
Wei is pursuing an effect of extreme spontaneity and bravura execution, giving free rein to
rhythms of movement, allowing the kinesthetic impact of brushwork to overrule its form-defin
ing capacity. The scribbly flourishes are turned at constantly varying angles for maximum agita
tion of the picture surface. All this confounds the viewer more than it helps him in understanding
spatial relationships or comprehending the shapes and structures of the objects depicted; an ex
traordinary effort is required, for instance, if the tangle of activated brushstrokes that surmounts
the foreground slope is to be read as trees. Such dissolution of form is itself an assertion of stylis
tic independence: earlier painters of an academic bent had felt obliged to provide their audiences
with far more detailed and well-organized information about their subjects. In demanding of the
viewer this degree of participation Wu Wei implicitly rejects the role of the artist as maker of
neat, impersonal images.
That these radical transformations in the fabric of the picture are accomplished within such a
standard composition gives us further insight into the situation of Wu Wei and the nature of his
achievement. The people for whom he worked, like consumers of art in any time and place, had
been conditioned by their past experiences of painting to respond to conventions of theme, of
form, of execution; they were comfortable with the familiar but eventually bored by it, demand
ing novelty. Wu Wei, like any good artist, faced the tension between an impulse to break the
conventions, motivated both by his own urge toward independence and by the demand for new
ness, and a realization that if departures were carried too far he must fail. Where the great and
original painter could carry out daring leaps into new worlds of form and create new conventions
that worked at least as well as the old, the lesser master had to proceed more cautiously, even
when seeming most incautious, recognizing the limits beyond which he could not venture with
out running the risk of violating expectations to the point of failing to communicate (or ' 'not
being understood"). Wu Wei is not a notable inventor of new forms or images; he is usually
satisfied to present the old ones in dashing new ways, preserving always enough of the familiar to
ensure intelligibility.
Wu Wei's debt to Tai Chin is demonstrated not only in such river compositions as the fore
going but also in "Pleasures of Fishermen" (Color Pi. 6), a handscroll similar in subject and style
to Tai's "Fishermen on the River" (Color Pi. 3). Comparison of the two reveals that Tai Chin,
whose drawing seemed so unconventional in a mid-fifteenth-century context, seems rather, when
viewed retrospectively from the early sixteenth century, to have merely exchanged old brush
disciplines for new ones. Wu Wei paints in a looser way, violating old taboos in order to adapt
his brush techniques to the descriptive or suggestive needs of the moment. Here he turns away
both from the rough vigor of Tai Chin's drawing and from the sharp, slashing strokes of his
own "Fishing from a Riverbank," working instead in a broader and wetter manner for most
of the landscape passages. He mixes cool and warm pigments with his ink washes to achieve richly
coloristic effects and blends them or allows them to run together freely in mottled, evocative
areas that will recall, to Western viewers, passages in Impressionist landscapes. The figures,
buildings, and boats appear to have been delineated with a stubby brush of which the tip was
worn or trimmed so as to produce a correspondingly stubby and inelegant line; more refined
drawing would have been ill suited, in the Chinese hierarchy of styles, to the low-life subject.
The range of acceptable subjects in the Academy and Che-school repertory seems to narrow
after the time of Tai Chin. Ku-shih, the historical or legendary anecdotes so often depicted by the
earlier Academy masters, are less often seen. Most of the pictures are devoted to time-honored
symbolic themes, and little of the artist's creative effort, one feels, was expended on inventing
new ones, or even on giving fresh interpretations to the old. It is possible to see this phenomenon
—the loss of interest in historical and other particularized subjects—as paralleling a related
development in early Sung painting, where it reflected the artist's wish to deal with more univer
sal themes, especially those of nature. It can also be seen as paralleling the de-emphasis of subject
matter in Yuan and later literati painting (or in some European painting of the nineteenth
century) where a growing concern with purely formal problems leads to a lessening concern
with specific subject.
Neither of these, however, quite accounts for the nature and function of subject matter in
Che-school works. It can properly be described, for most of the paintings, as conventionalized
and derivative; the same motifs are tirelessly repeated, and a great many of them are taken from
Southern Sung painting, or at least belong to a type popular in Southern Sung. This is the type
that presents images not only of nature but also of particular experiences in nature, or responses
to nature, through the relationship of figures to their surroundings. Examples include the theme
of harsh struggle with an inhospitable world, in pictures of travelers wending their tortuous ways
through rocky ravines; the theme of purifying the mind and emotions through deliberately
sought-out contacts with nature, in pictures of gentlemen gazing at waterfalls or listening to the
wind in the pines; the theme of enjoying both seclusion from the contamination of human
society and the pleasure of congenial company, in pictures representing a scholar-recluse's house
in the mountains, with a friend arriving for a visit; the theme of the simple life spent in un
conscious immersion in nature, in pictures of wood-gatherers and fishermen. All these except
the first are idealized themes, and the ideals they embodied were (as in Southern Sung painting)
WU WEI • 103
the ideals of noblemen and functionaries at court, and officials, tradesmen, men of practical
affairs in the cities, who could seldom expect to realize them in actuality, being too closely
bound, by circumstances but also by choice, to the "dusty world" that they professed to scorn,
he paintings offer imaginative escapes to bucolic ways of life and other modes of disengage
ment from the trammels of society. The emotions and experiences they communicate are not
those felt deeply either by the painter (as, for instance, in Shen Chou's "Night Vigil") or by his
patrons, nor do their subjects have any special emotional associations (as did Yuan and later
depictions of villas and retreats, painted for their owners), nor do they express (as do Shen
Chou's "Tiger Hill" pictures) a satisfaction with the immediate surroundings, the here-and
now, of either artist or audience. We learn virtually nothing, except by implication, about life
in Nanking or Peking in the middle Ming period from the paintings done in those cities at that
time. We are dealing, that is, with an essentially escapist art.
Wu Wei's portrayal of fishermen and their lives, like Tai Chin's, belongs to the category of
idealization, not that of personal involvement. The latter approach is best exemplified by a
famous tenth-century work, Chao Kan's "Early Snow on the River,"3 which is based on detailed
observation and sympathetic understanding of the lives of fishermen, depicting movingly the
arduousness of their labors and their struggle for survival. The fishermen in the Tai and Wu
scrolls, and in other Che-school depictions of the theme, inhabit instead a world which, like that
of shepherds and shepherdesses in the pastoral myths of Europe, exists only in the collective
imagination of sophisticated, urban people who cherish romantic longings for a naive state of
being and who are unconcerned with the realities of sheep-herding orfishing.Wu Wei gives an
entertaining picture of the bustling life of the village, where the fishermen and their families
engage in the tasks and pleasures of the moment, poling their boats, throwing out and drawing
in nets, drinking wine, talking, untroubled by any of the sober concerns of the great world
beyond their river.
A colophon on the scroll by a writer named Ch'en Pang-yen, dated 1721, goes so far as to sug
gest that the painter has a deeper and truer understanding of the "mists and waves" of the
fishermen's environment than do the fishermen themselves. His poem, which is otherwise a nice
literary equivalent of Wu's painting in its descriptive, lightly philosophical tone, ends with these
lines:
The fishing boat is a single leaf, poised between heaven and earth.
But one comes to realize that this boat is vast and the floating [ephemeral] world narrow.
Transmitting the spirit of fishermen needs a great artist's hand;
He fills our eyes with rivers and lakes, all on a foot of paper.
The true essence of mists and waves is unknown to fishermen—
If made to look at this painting, they would come to love them more.
FIGURE P A I N T I N G WU Wei's prowess as a figure painter can be admired in a number of

signed pictures. They range through such a diversity of manners, however, that it is difficult to
recognize in them a distinctive style or to decide with any confidence which are really from his
hand. They can be divided, to begin with, into "rough" and "fine" works. The decision
whether to employ the rough, impulsive kind of brushwork or the delicate and disciplined
depended on a number of factors, among which were considerations of subject, purpose, and
doubtless the wishes of patrons. Pictures of Taoist or Ch'an Buddhist adepts, or low-life char
acters such as fishermen, farmers, and woodcutters, were typically done in the rough manner,
which was also favored generally for hanging scrolls meant to be displayed in places where
strongly decorative paintings were needed. The finer style was typically used for paintings of Con
fucian scholars and beautiful women and was best suited to the forms of painting meant to be
seen close up, the handscroll and the album. But it was used sometimes also in hanging scrolls,
as was the rough manner in handscrolls. The rough, bolder manner was loosely associated with
the tradition of Wu Tao-tzu and the fine-line one with that of Ku K'ai-chih.4 Wu Wei, al
together one of the most versatile of Ming masters, was highly skilled in both but best known
for his rough works. This is doubtless why Wang Shih-chen remarks that his style "is suited to
painting on the walls of an ancestral temple or on large standing screens, but as for portable
scrolls or single leaves, I fear it is inappropriate."5
"Two Taoist Immortals" (Pi. 44) is an excellent example of his rough manner. The personages
portrayed are probably two of the Eight Immortals of popular Taoist legend; they are about to
cross the billowing sea, as all eight are sometimes shown doing in paintings. The nearer figure
appears to be Li T'ieh-kuai, who inhabited the body of a lame beggar after his proper body was
burned while he was absent from it on a spirit-journey; he will ride the waves on his iron
crutch, which is miraculously made buoyant. Li T'ieh-kuai had been portrayed by an early
Yiian-period specialist in Taoist and Buddhist figures, Yen Hui (Hills, Pi. 66), in a style that was
widely imitated by Che-school and Academy masters of the Ming. A Yen Hui follower named
Liu Chiin, for instance, served with Wu Wei in the Hung-chih Academy, and some of Wu's
works, including the "Two Immortals," follow this style in important features. The nervous,
heavy-drapery drawing, the active poses, and the portrayal of muscular tension, especially in the
faces, with lips drawn back tightly and large, expressive eyes, relate these figures to Yen Hui's.
The style was well suited to the artistic temper of the time and place in which the later Che
school masters worked, which called for animation and intensity and valued strong effects over
subtle ones.
Wu Wei here, as in his rough-manner landscapes, uses a swift-moving brushline that swells
and thins suddenly or changes direction abruptly. In places it exemplifies a quality we can call
"scribbly," with rapid back-and-forth movements serving chiefly to convey kinesthetically the
energy of the artist's hand, at some sacrifice of descriptiveness. This manner of drawing was
developed and popularized by Wu Wei; we will see it used also by his followers such as Chang
Lu as well as by other Ming masters of Nanking and Soochow. One important model for it was
the figure style of the thirteenth-century master Liang K'ai, as seen in his "Hui-neng Chopping
Bamboo."6
The framing of the figures by a sketchily rendered pine tree also recalls Liang K'ai's com
positions. Liang, a person of eccentric habits who called himself "Liang the Wastrel," was
fond of drinking, and left the imperial painting academy by choice to live in a Ch'an monastery,
was a model or at least a predecessor for Wu Wei also in his personal and artistic behavior, and
this correlation between the styles of the two painters and their personalities and life patterns
is no accident—as we will see in further examples, correlations of this kind are present through
out much of Ming painting. This phenomenon will be discussed in the next chapter.
At the other end of the rough-to-fine range of brushwork types was the fine-line mode of
drawing without washes, or with only limited washes. Pai-miao, almost from its inception in the
late Northern Sung period in the hands of Li Kung-lin, had been used by both professional
and amateur artists; paintings by Chang Wu and Ch'en Ju-yen were used to illustrate the "social
mobility" of this mode of drawing in our discussion of its use in the Yuan period (Hills, PI. 70—
71). By the Ming, it was practiced almost exclusively by the professionals, perhaps because it
was by then apparent to everyone that they could do it better than the amateurs. Wu Wei uses
it with great finesse, when the subject or the occasion calls for it. The handscroll titled "The
Iron Flute" (Pi. 48) is his finest performance in this manner and also seems to be his only extant
dated work. The inscription (not included in our plate) reads: "Chia-ch'en year of the Ch'eng
hua era [1484], twenty-eighth day of the fourth [lunar] month, painted by the 'Small Immortal'
WU WEI • 105
from Hunan Wu Wei." (His birthplace Wu-ch'ang is actually in present-day Hupei Province,
as stated earlier.)
A scholar is seated in a garden, books and brushes on a stone table at his side. A girl servant
holds the iron flute; he is presumably about to perform on it for two charming ladies who sit
before him on low stools, one hiding her face behind a translucent fan, the other putting
chrysanthemum blossoms in her hair. The man is probably the Yuan-period litterateur Yang Wei
chen (1296-1370), whom we encountered before as writer, calligrapher, and painter (Hills,
PI. 36, 85; pp. 82, 165, 175). He called himself the Iron-Flute Taoist after an instrument he
owned and played, and his dalliances with courtesans were well known; the scroll may well
illustrate some colorful story in which he figures.
The line drawing used for the figures preserves some of the smoothly curvilinear quality
associated with the pai-miao tradition from the time of Li Kung-lin onward, the quality some
times described as being like "drifting clouds andflowingwater.'' At the same time, as executed
by a master of sound technical training, it serves better to render the mass and articulation of
the figures than it typically had in the hands of amateur painters, who were more concerned with
evoking the antique than with descriptive naturalism. Wu Wei's figures sit firmly on their seats
and turn convincingly in space, caught in moments of arrested movement. The brush drawing
of the trees and rocks is similarly descriptive, varying for textural contrasts instead of being
bound to any established manner to which the artist must conform in the interest of stylistic
purity.
The style of Wu Wei's "Lady Carrying a P'i-p'a" (PI. 47) is not true pai-miao, since there are
limited washes and slight fluctuations in breadth of line, but it carries the same sense of refine
ment and restraint. The lady is seen in profile, walking forward with a melancholy air, her head
drooping, carrying her p'i-p'a, or lute, in a brocade bag over her shoulder. The painter writes
only his signature, and none of the three poems inscribed on the picture by his contemporaries
provide any clue to the identity of the subject; a later writer adds to his poems a prose note
saying that he has "no idea what the meaning of the picture can have been in its time." Perhaps
this is a courtesan whom Wu Wei knew in Nanking; perhaps he is thinking of Chao Wu-niang,
the heroine of the mid-fourteenth-century play The Lute Song (P'i-p'a chi), who traveled to
the capital to seek her lover, carrying her lute. Whoever she may be, Wu Wei portrays her with
a poignancy that excites our curiosity about her story. The absence of any setting, the isolation
of the figure in the center of a blank expanse of paper, adds to the feeling of loneliness.
This is another of the excellent figure paintings that are among Wu Wei's finest surviving
works; they allow us to understand why he was especially admired and was so influential as a
painter of figures. In "Lady Carrying a P'i-p'a" we encounter also another example of the
manner of drawing that was probably original with Wu Wei and was to be developed during the
next half-century by artists in both Nanking and Soochow. At its best the style balances the
descriptive or characterizing function of linear drawing with the calligraphic. The line is distin
guished by a high degree of fluency and tends to continue unbroken for long stretches, often
moving smoothly and supplely, sometimes changing direction sharply or doubling back on itself
without the brush being lifted, as in the cursive forms of calligraphy. The character of the line
drawing contributes to the characterization of the figure, with smooth or jerky patterns of
movement creating a quiet or an excited mood. Wu Wei is a master of both;" here it is the
quieter mode that suits his expressive needs, and he works with the nuances oPtouch that best
convey the fragile sentiments he is evoking. The more vigorous, "scribbly" drawing is only
hinted at in a few passages. His line thins at times to hairlike fineness, or becomes so dry as to
all but disappear, or dims to the palest of tones without ever relaxing its taut sureness or slipping
into aimlessness. The nature of the drawing suggests that the painting was probably done swiftly
and with the ease that superb technical discipline permits; most later imitators would make it
look harder but do it far less well.
3. Hsii L I N
Nearly the equal of Wu Wei as a colorful personality and example of the new urban-eccentric
type of artist was Hsii Lin (1462-1538). Unfortunately, his surviving works do not show him as
nearly Wu's equal as a painter and leave us wondering about the basis of his immense success
during his lifetime. His biography has recently been skillfully put together and entertainingly
presented by Chaoying Fang.7 We will give only a summary here of his extraordinary career. It
parallels Wu Wei's in many respects and must, along with Wu's, have been seen as an attractive
and encouraging model by other educated men faced with the necessity of applying their artistic
talents to earning their livelihoods without slipping into the low position of the painter-for-hire.
Born in Nanking, Hsii Lin was a precocious child, composing poetry at six and writing callig
raphy at eight. At the age of thirteen he passed the examination for admission to the district
school and began the studies that should have led to success in the higher examinations and an
official post. But instead of concentrating on those studies he yielded to the distractions of poetry
and painting, the enjoyments of music, women, and the winehouses, and came to be regarded
more as a playboy than as a serious scholar. He failed the provincial examination several times
and eventually, in the 1490s, was expelled from the school.
Seemingly undaunted by this failure, which dashed all hope of an official career, Hsii an
nounced that one need not wear an official's robe to be a respected scholar, and he applied
himself even more to calligraphy, poetry, and painting. He had, understandably, acquired a
reputation for unconventional behavior, which in Nanking at this time seems to have been as
much an asset for an artist as it was an obstacle for an office-seeker. Shortly before his expulsion,
in 1490, he had met Shen Chou in the company of seven other young scholars. He probably also
knew Wu Wei, who was just three years older and of a like artistic disposition. Just as Wu was
popularly known as Hsiao-hsien (Small Immortal), Hsii took the name Jan-hsien (Bearded Im
mortal). He was an imposing, full-faced man who apparently impressed people as much by his
person as by his painting. He opened a studio and attracted patrons from among the rich officials
and landed gentry who were residents of the city or visitors to it, making enough money to buy
a house with several acres of land in the entertainment district.
Guests of high station came to the parties on his estate, which he called the K'uai-yuan, or
Satisfaction Garden. There famous actors and actresses performed popular song-dramas, for some
of which Hsii himself composed the lyrics. But all his earlier triumphs as a host were outdone in
1520 when he was twice visited in his garden by the Cheng-te emperor, who was staying for
some months in Nanking. The emperor was delighted by Hsu's songs and by a New Year's poem
he had composed, and he took the painter with him when he returned to Peking. The emperor
died soon after their arrival, however, and Hsii was forced to return to Nanking without re
ceiving the expected favors. We can imagine that he was, like Wu Wei, reluctant in any case
to remain long away from Nanking and its pleasures. At his seventieth-birthday party over a
hundred famous singsong girls came to congratulate him.
All this would lead us to expect paintings of great virtuosity and originality, but they are not
to be seen. All we have from him, besides one blossoming plum and one hares-and-chrysanthe
mums picture, neither of great interest, is a set of four landscapes of the seasons, undated.8
The painter's intention in these is clearly to offer the same combination of familiar, conservative
styles and brilliantly vivacious brushwork that Wu Wei excels in, and the paintings do indeed
fall within the stylistic range associated with painters of this type, tempering the hard academi
cism of much late Che-school landscape with some degree of loosening in brushwork. But this
PAINTERS OF THE HUNG-CHIH AND CHENG-TE ACADEMIES • 107
formula in Hsu Lin's hands fails to produce the same happy blend. The spring, summer, and
autumn scenes are surprisingly conventional Che-school performances in the Tai Chin mode.
The winter scene (PI. 49) is an equally old-fashioned composition executed in a hard variety
of the energetic, linear brushwork developed by Tai Chin and Wu Wei (cf. Pi. 17, 46) A traveler
and his servants have arrived in the snow at the gate of a house, within which a man is seen
awakening from sleep. The picture is believed to represent an incident from the Romance of the
Three Kingdoms in which the pretender Liu Pei sends an emissary to invite the warrior-diplomat
Chu-ko Liang to be his chief counselor. The tight, jerky drawing succeeds in enlivening the
scene but falls far short of the sensitivity and calligraphic fluidity of Wu Wei and some of his
followers at their best. To say that the painter is conveying the harshness of winter does not
make the picture more pleasing, or less retardataire.
Perhaps other, unpublished works of the artist in Chinese collections, when they become
known, will allow a fairer and more favorable assessment. But for now, Hsu Lin must be seen as
representing the Che school in its decadent phase, when its practitioners lapse too frequently
into heavy-handedness and fussiness.
4. PAINTERS OF THE H U N G - C H I H AND CHENG-TE ACADEMIES
The painters to be treated in the remainder of this chapter fall into two groups: Wu Wei's
contemporaries in the Imperial Academy at Peking and his followers in Nanking. The former are
generally the more conservative painters, continuing with some variations the tradition of the
early Ming Academy; the latter are inclined to adopt and exaggerate the less subtle aspects of
Wu Wei's style and end by being condemned as a group for wildness and heterodoxy.
Lft CH I The leading master of bird-and-flower subjects in the Academy in the Hung-chih era
(1488—1506), and the best-known Ming painter of those subjects, was Lii Chi. He was born in
Ning-p'o, a coastal port-city east of Hangchow that seems to have been the major port on
Hangchow Bay, servicing the whole region. It had a centuries-old history as another center for
the commercial production of paintings, and the works of artists in nearby centers such as P'i
ling and Hangchow were sold through Ning-p'o. Hundreds of Buddhist pictures had been ex
ported from Ning-p'o in the Sung and Yuan periods to Japan, where they are still preserved in
temples; they are by minor masters or anonymous and adhere closely to the styles current in
Hangchow in the same periods. The same was probably true of the output of Ning-p'o specialists
in other subjects, whose works have not survived in such numbers. Lii Chi, we may suppose,
began by following such a conservative local tradition. Later accounts of his career say that he
studied the works of T'anp and Sung bird-and-flower masters and resolved to combine the
o o
merits of all of them; they say also that he imitated Pien Wen-chin. Both would be normal for
an academic, somewhat eclectic bird-and-flower painter of this period.
Lii Chi was recommended to court and entered the Academy early in the Hung-chih era,
probably around 1490. He served in the Jen-chih Tien, and became a Commander in the Em
broidered Uniform Guard. He was reportedly stiff and ceremonious in manner; the impression
of earnestness that his paintings convey (they are characterized by one Ming critic as "methodi
cal") was evidently a quality of the man himself. When called on to paint in the imperial
presence, we are told, he proceeded with such clear purpose, "offering rules to the emperor"
(presumably on the creation and evaluation of paintings), that the emperor exclaimed: "Lii
Chi really has an aptitude for using artistic ability as an admonishment!''
It is possible that Lin Liang, who must have been older by several decades, was still alive
and at court when Lii Chi arrived there (although the two cannot have been, as standard late
Ming accounts have it, summoned there at the same time). In any case, some of Lii's works are
close imitations of the Cantonese master's style. Most of them, however, are in a much more
careful and traditional manner, executed with colors and in firmly controlled brushwork.
The new fluidity of brushstroke popularized by Tai Chin and others earlier in the century was
developed by later academic painters in two distinguishable directions. One exploited it for
effects of impetuosity or roughness, even wildness; of this, Wu Wei is the prime exemplar.
The other aimed at an elegant sleekness of form, accomplished with flowing line and smooth
washes; and it is Lii Chi who most successfully turned this latter manner to bird-and-flower
painting, to which it is particularly well suited, with results that immediately established him
as the outstanding master of that genre in his period. His fame declined only when, perhaps
already in his lifetime, other painters began to imitate him so closely as to dilute the attraction
that his works had for their viewers.
Among the hundreds of extant paintings that bear his signature, most of them by followers
and imitators, a set of four large hanging scrolls now in the Tokyo National Museum, represent
ing birds and flowers of the four seasons, has come to be accepted as the standard by which
others are judged.9 A more recent discovery that stands up well on comparison with those
masterworks is "Cranes by a Rushing Stream" (PI. 50). In addition to a convincing signature, it
bears a seal reading Jih-chin ch'ing-kuang, or "Daily Approaching the Pure and Radiant." Seals
with the same legend are found on works of a few other artists who were active as court painters
in the Hung-chih era; as interpreted by Wai-kam Ho, they indicate that the painters had the
privilege of working in the imperial presence.
The painting is unusually spacious and elaborate in plan; most of Lii's pictures are simpler and
confined to the foreground. That it is a scene of early spring is indicated both by a plum tree just
beginning to bloom and by the torrent of water, which emanates from melting snow higher in
the mountains. The succession of arching shapes created by the stream as it gushes down from
the recesses of the ravine is nicely answered by a flock of small birds above, each an arc in
flight, winging into the foreground from a farther distance, to roost in the plum tree. Similarly,
the double curves of the cranes' necks and bodies set up a series of echoes in their vicinity, in the
rounded hollows eroded by the water in the underside of the cliff and in the billows. The
exquisite balance of movement and rest, of curving and angular forms (the rock and tree pro
viding the latter), of filled and empty areas (separated, as in Southern Sung compositions, by a
diagonal division across the picture surface, with the tree laid counterdiagonally across them),
seems very calculated. But it is in just such overt artifice, and not in spontaneity, that the excel
lences of Lii Chi lie.
Lti WEN-YING Another painter with the surname Lii served at the same time in the Academy,
and their contemporaries, with that special Chinese penchant for symmetry that seems at times
to prefer it to objective truth, dubbed them Big Lii and Little Lii. Big Lii was Lii Chi; Little Lii
was a lesser master, also from Chekiang, named Lii Wen-ying. Biographical sources tell us
virtually nothing about him beyond the inconsequential fact that he was only a Vice-Commander
of the Guard. By 1507 he had given up his career as a painter, as a palace record of that year
reveals, to devote himself to serving as an official at court.10 Until a few years ago he was known
only for two painstaking, unoriginal pictures of toy sellers in Japanese collections. His "River
Village in a Rainstorm" (PI. 51), a recent acquisition of the Cleveland Museum of Art, wins him
a place of respect in the history of Ming painting. Under his signature is impressed a Jih-chin
ch'ing-kuang seal, revealing that he too enjoyed the honor of receiving the emperor's personal
supervision.
The painting is grander in scale and sweep than Lii Chi's but similar in its Sung-like technical
44. Wu Wei: "Two Taoist Immortals." Hanging scroll. Shanghai Museum.
List of Plates p.x
45. Wu Wei: "Winter Landscape with Travelers." Hanging scroll,
Go to page: 100, 190
ink on silk, 242.6 X 156.4 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
List of Plates p.x 46. Wu Wei: "Fishing from a Riverbank." Hanging scroll. Collection unknov
Go to page: 101, 107, 130
4 7 . W u W e i : " L a d y C a r r y i n g a P ' i - p ' a . " Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 125.1
X 61.3 cm. Indianapolis Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eli Lilly.
'
48. Wu Wei: "The Iron Flute." Dated 1484. Handscroll, ink on paper. Shanghai Museum.
List of Plates p.x
Go to page: 107 49. Hsii Lin: "Winter Landscape with a Man Arriving at a House."
Hanging scroll, ink on silk. Formerly Hozo Hara collection.
List of Plates p.x SO. Lu Chi: "Cranes by a Rushing Stream." Hanging scroll, ink
Go to page: 108 and colors on silk, 148 X 84 cm. Ching Yuan Chai collection.
List of Plates p.x
51. Lu Wen-ying: "River Village in a Rainstorm." Hanging scroll, ink and light
Go to page: 89, 108 colors on silk, 168 X 102.2 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund.
List of Plates p.x
52. Wang E: "Snowy Peaks in a High Wind." Hanging scroll. Collection unknown.
Go to page: 125
List of Plates p.x 53. Chung Li: "Scholar Contemplating a Waterfall." Hanging scroll,
Go to page: 126 ink and light colors on silk, 178 X 104 cm. Private collection.
List of Plates p.x
54. Chu Tuan: "River Landscape with Fishermen." Hanging scroll,
Go to page: 127, 133 ink and colors on silk, 167 X 107 cm. National Museum, Stockholm.
List of Plates p.x
55. Chang Lu: "Fisherman Under a Cliff. Hanging scroll,
Go to page: 130, 200 ink and light colors on silk, 138 X 69.2 cm. Gokoku-ji, Tokyo.
List of Plates p.x
5 6 . C h a n g Lu : " S h i h - t e L a u g h i n g a t t h e M o o n . " Hanging scroll, ink on silk, 158-6
Go to page: 130 X 89.3 cm. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
57. Chiang Sung: "Spring Landscape," from "Landscapes of the Four Seasons." Section of a hand-
scroll, ink and light colors on paper, 23 X 11 8 cm. Museum fur Ostasiatische Kunst, Berlin-West.
58. Chiang Sung: "Winter Landscape," from "Landscapes of the Four Seasons." Section of a hand-
scroll, ink and light colors on paper, 23 X 118 cm. Museum fur Ostasiatische Kunst, Berlin-West.
List of Plates p.xi Go to page: 132

61. Chang Lu: "Playing the Ch'in for a Friend." Hanging scroll, ink
and light colors on silk, 31.4 X 61 cm. Ching Yuan Chai collection.
List of Plates p.xi Go to page: 131, 132
62. Cheng Wen-lin: "The World of the Magic Pot." Section of

a handscroll, ink on paper, 29.7 X 298 cm. Princeton Art Museum.
63. Anonymous, Ming dynasty: "Arriving Home by Moonlight." Hanging scroll, ink and light colors
on silk, 155.1 X 107 cm. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of An, Washington, D.C.

finish and sleek elegance. The Sung artist to whom Lii is principally indebted is Hsia Kuei: the
rotundity of the slopes is rendered with smoothly graded ink wash, the tree foliage in massed
strokes of ink; the composition, which compacts the solid elements into a fairly small lower area
of the picture (a notable departure from ordinary Ming practice) and sets in the upper part only
the crest of a bluff with wind-tossed trees, can be paralleled in paintings by or after Hsia. Even
though Lii Wen-ying inserts slightly more anecdotal detail than the Sung master is likely to
have used (the owner of the riverside villa is seen arriving home with his luggage-bearer in the
lower corner, a boy servant watches their approach from a window, three boats moored at left
suggest other outings by water), it is kept inconspicuous and does not, as in many other works
of the school, clutter the scene. Landscapes with rainstorms were favorites among the Che
school artists, and in this too they follow the Southern Sung Academy masters, who have given
us the finest storms we have in Chinese painting. (Notable examples include a landscape ascribed
to Ma Yuan in the Seikado, Tokyo, a fan painting by Hsia Kuei in the Boston Museum of Fine
Arts, and an anonymous "Summer Rainstorm" in the Kuon-ji, Japan.) They seem restrained and
suggestive, however, beside the Ming examples, which are usually more dramatic, as this one is.
WANG E Wang E, another landscapist active in the Hung-chih Academy, was, like Lii Chi, a
native of Ning-p'o in Chekiang Province and learned painting first from a minor master there. At
court he served in the Jen-chih Tien and was much favored by the Hung-chih emperor, who
was especially fond of the works of Ma Yuan and hailed Wang E as "the Ma Yuan of our time."
The Cheng-te emperor, who ascended the throne in 1506, honored him even more highly,
raising him to the rank of battalion commander in the Guard and presenting him in 1510 with
a seal, which Wang impressed on his paintings after that date.11 Lang Ying (b. 1487), whose
writings on Tai Chin we quoted earlier, tells us that Wang was very famous in the southeast, his
homeland. He praises Wang for giving "a misty appearance" to his rocks and trees, "as in the
p'o-mo [splashed ink] technique," but adds that they lacked three-dimensionality (literally "four
sidedness") and that the trees were "deficient in the sense of profuse growth, denseness, and
sparseness." This is a perceptive comment; Wang is indeed, as his surviving works reveal, in
terested in large effects of shadowiness and mistiness but even more in bold, distinctive brush
work, and his forms are indeed flat. However, these qualities are not particular to Wang but are
characteristic of most painting of the time, from which Lii Chi and Lii Wen-ying are rather the
exceptions in their preservation of essential features of Sung style.
A winter landscape in a Japanese collection titled (by the artist himself) "Snowy Peaks in a
High Wind" (Pi. 52) bears the seal that Wang E received from the emperor in 1510; so it must
have been painted after that date and is thus a late work. The same late date could be inferred
from the style, in which the distinguishing traits of Wang's hand are conspicuous. Other,
presumably earlier pictures represent him better as "the Ma Yuan of his time" ; this one shows
him as unabashedly a Ming painter. The scene is typically busy. A procession of travelers climbs
the steep road (the motif of ascending a mountain belongs to the larger theme of harsh struggle
with the elements; no one ever comes down the road in such pictures). At their head is a gentle
man mounted on a stocky horse, accompanied by a servant, and behind them, spaced along the
road, are a porter, a weary wanderer, a peasant with a donkey, and two wood-gatherers. A
Buddhist temple can be seen above them, but is shown as inaccessible; they are not seeking
spiritual grace, but only warmth and comfort. In a thematically irrelevant passage in the lower
left corner, a visitor arrives at a villa and is met by a boy at the gate.
. The Sung master whose manner is here invoked is neither Ma Yuan nor Hsia Kuei, but Li
T'ang, who similarly constructed mountains by using huge masses of rock as building blocks.
His, however, interpenetrate as organic components of a geological whole, weathered into
strange but never unnatural shapes. Wang invents his own geology (as do most Ming land
scapists), jumbling his slanting masses together freely, joining them in the upper center in such
a way as to force the conclusion that the waterfall flows out of, and the travelers disappear into,
a cavern. But the picture is not to be read that way; its spatial implausibilities are beside the
point. Like Tai Chin, Wang creates an effect of monumentality without being quite capable of
creating truly monumental forms or structures; a kind of massiveness and ponderousness accrue
to his forms from the harsh force of their outline drawing and the heavy contrasts of their light
ing. In keeping with an allover rejection of naturalism and nuance, the axe-cut texture strokes
of Li T'ang's manner are turned into rows of stiff, nail-like strokes, made with a slanted brush
pressed to the silk and then drawn downward or sideward as it is raised; these mark the lines
of intersection between areas of highlight (or snow) and shadow.
Looking back at Sun Chun-tse's landscape (Hills, Color Pi. 4) in which the texture strokes
already began to take on a schematic character but still described rocky surfaces, we can see
Wang's work as a direct, although extreme, outgrowth of the Li T'ang and Ma-Hsia tradition;
and, as the painting itself might cause one to suspect, it marks the virtual end of that tradition.
Soochow followers of Li T'ang who will be considered in our fifth chapter take an entirely
different stylistic direction, in which the Ma-Hsia stage is largely bypassed and such dramatic,
striking effects as Wang E creates play little part.
C H U N G LI Perhaps the last more or less serious and respectable artist in the Ma Yuan tradition
was a contemporary of Wang E in the Academy named Chung Li, who occupies this position
at the end of the line partly because he himself helped to bring the line to an end. As we will see
below, he is assigned by Ming writers to the "Heterodox school," and so is included in the
charges of stylistic perversity and wildness that they level against artists of that group.
Born near Shao-hsing in Chekiang Province, he was orphaned early in life but somehow ac
quired a good enough education to become a skilled calligrapher and poet. He made his way
in the world, however, as a painter of landscapes, imitating Tai Chin. In 1490 he was inducted
into military service as punishment for some offense but was released on imperial invitation to
enter the Hung-chih Academy as a court painter. His service at court probably continued until
around IS 10 or somewhat later, when he was permitted to return to his home.12 His specialties
were large-scale compositions of scholars on mountain ledges, gazing at the moon or at water
falls, and misty landscapes in the Kao K'o-kung manner. No paintings of the latter category are
known today, but four or five of the former survive and are so similar as to suggest a narrowness
of theme and style. As a group, they can be faulted more for hardness and grandiosity than for
anything that could be called wildness; only one, a signed work in a Japanese temple collection,
has a slapdash quality that suggests the reason for his inclusion among the "Heterodox'' painters.13
Others make him appear the most orthodox of Ma Yuan imitators in the Ming.
His "Scholar Contemplating a Waterfall" (PI. 53) is the best of his surviving works. While
not entirely free of the heaviness and rigidity that are his vices (and those of much other Hung
chih Academy output) it turns these to use in a powerful composition which does not, like his
others, follow unimaginatively the Ma-Yuan-school stereotype for treatments of this popular
theme but works an interesting variation on it. The concentration of detail at the lower right is
balanced at the upper left by an overhanging cliff and dependent trees, with a huge diagonally
set rock mass bridging the space between the two corners. The areas of misty space are similarly
placed in diagonally opposite segments: one at the upper right merges upward into the sky, which
is ink-washed for dusk, with a full moon suspended in it; the other, at the lower left, is the
cavernous depth into which the waterfall drops, with treetops along the lower edge implying
farther extension downward. Set in this symmetrical scheme, the scholar looks across the ravine
at the waterfall. He may represent, or may simply recall, the T'ang poet Li Po, who was often
depicted gazing at waterfalls to cleanse his mind. This time-honored theme, embodied in a
large painting that features the heavy and angular forms, strong light-dark contrasts, and striking
design qualities of good Che-school painting, suited it for its purpose of hanging, perhaps, in the
large reception hall of an official's residence.
There is not enough datable material to serve as basis for tracing a clear chronological de
velopment within the Academy, and, since artists from different locales with different stylistic
background came and went, perhaps we should not expect to find any. Nevertheless, a survey
of the styles practiced by artists active in successive periods makes it plain that by the early
sixteenth century a different taste from the one reflected in most fifteenth-century painting had
come to prevail. Suppleness and sensitivity gave way either to hardness or to calligraphic
nervousness, romantic warmth to a calculated striving for stronger and more impressive technical
effects. Restraints were relaxed, and the artists tended to move into positions of stylistic extrem
ism. A decadence had indeed set in, and no artists of note were to serve as court painters be
tween the eras of Cheng-te (1506-21) and Wan-li (1573-1620).
C H U TUAN The best of the landscapists who were still active in the Cheng-te Academy was
Chu Tuan, another native of Chekiang. He came from a poor family and in his youth worked as
a woodcutter and afisherman.How he learned painting is not recorded, but his reputation grew
until it reached the capital, and he was called to court in 1501.14 He became a commander in
the Guard, and the Cheng-te emperor awarded him a seal reading "Imperially Presented to the
Single [or Solitary] Woodcutter,'' signifying presumably that he stood alone among painters but
also alluding, perhaps, to his earlier occupation.
The Ming-hua lu says that he painted landscapes in the manner of Sheng Mou, an observation
that is borne out by at least one of them, a picture dated 1518 in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Another, a winter landscape in the Palace Museum, Taipei, is in the same hard-edged, blocky
manner as the work by Wang E that we have just considered. Chu Tuan's most distinctive and
attractive style, however, is neither of these but a pleasantly playful rococo recension of the
Kuo Hsi manner. The anonymous "Spring Mountains" of the late Yuan period, inscribed and
perhaps painted by Yang Wei-chen (Hills, PI. 36), revealed how this manner, originally ded
icated to the objedifications of comprehensive systems for understanding the natural world,
could be reduced to a fanciful play lacking serious implications outside the borders of the
picture. Chu Tuan's landscapes after Kuo Hsi are of this same kind; they are even more linear
in execution, and the line is even more subject to abstract rhythms of movement.
"River Landscape with Fishermen" (PI. 54) is an excellent representative of Chu Tuan's
works of this type. It is signed and bears three of his seals, including the one presented to him
by the Cheng-te emperor. The composition is grandly spacious in spite of the linear rendering
of the forms, pulling the viewer's eye across the water to the horizon and marking stages on the
way withfishingboats that diminish markedly in size. The broad expanses of empty space serve
to absorb the nervous activity of the earth forms and trees, which are drawn with obsessively
repeated series of tight curling strokes, occasioned in the trees by the "crab-claw" convention
of the twigs, and in-the earth contours by the image of "rocks like clouds" distantly inherited
from Kuo Hsi's heavily eroded masses. Chu Tuan's geology is no more plausible than Wang E's,
and the effect of forced activation of a fundamentally stable structure is no less present; it is
the main affliction of much of the late Academy output, suggesting always that the artist is
attempting purposefully to escape, through such means, from some irreversible onset of rigidity.
Chu Tuan's touch, however, has none of the heaviness of Wang's; his line resists one's at
tempts to focus and rest on it, taking the eye instead on excited dances across the surface. In
Sung works of this school, the artist's intent seemed to be to efface himself in a universal vision;
now the emphasis has shifted to the other pole, and manifestations of the artist's nervous energy
dominate the expression of the painting. The Kuo Hsi manner might seem to have reached here
a point of total exhaustion, but it was still to have a brief revival in the works of Yuan Chiang and
a few other painters of the early Ch'ing period.
5. THE "HETERODOX" MASTERS
We turn finally to the artists termed by later critics the hsieh-hsueh p'ai, or "Heterodox school."
The word rendered as "heterodox" also has implications of "depraved" or "vicious" and is
used in philosophical writings for wrong teachings that upset the moral order. The application
of it to artists carries the same moral disapproval: they destroyed a tradition, the word implies,
by willfully perverting it.
The late-sixteenth-century writer Kao Lien, himself a native of Chekiang who was generally
sympathetic to the Che school in its earlier phases (and a defender of Sung against the advocates
of Yuan in that controversy), assigns Chiang Sung, Chang Lu, Cheng Wen-lin, Chung Li, Wang
Chao (another follower of Tai Chin and Wu Wei), and a painter named Chang Fu-yang to this
"Heterodox school." The same judgment is pronounced on the same artists by the greatest
collector of that age, Hsiang Yiian-pien (1525-96); it must have been widely accepted in
critical circles by that time.15 Ho Liang-chiin (1506-73) remarks scornfully that the paintings
of Chang Lu and Chiang Sung are good only to mop the floor with. Tung Ch'i-ch'ang (1555—
1636) evidently believed—and it is a theory, like most of Tung's, that deserves to be taken
seriously—that the decline of the school was due to its geographical dispersal, as painting in this
style became popular all over China and artists practicing it arose in various provinces; cut off
from its nourishing roots in the Chekiang local tradition, it withered. "The cause of the Che
school's gradual decline," he writes, "does not lie so much in 'sweetness, heterodoxy,
vulgarity, and dependence' [Huang Kung-wang's 'four faults,' cf. Hills, p. 88] as in its having
become associated with other centers [than its native province]." If we were to look for a
rationale for Tung's thesis, free of mystique, we might find it by observing that the separation
of these later Che-school artists from the original locus of the tradition probably robbed
them of the rigorous technical training that the young artist could still receive within a strong
local tradition, even after the tradition had lost much of its creative impetus. Instead of starting
from such a solid base, they departed from others' departures, and their flights, accordingly,
were often erratic and inconsequential.
After we have read these judgments, the paintings (or at least the ones we have chosen for
reproduction) may come as a pleasant surprise, since they display little of obvious depravity and
are, in fact, attractive, interesting pictures. The judgments are historical, that is, affected some
what by the historical circumstance that these painters stand at the end of a tradition. Chinese ap
praisals of the last rulers of dynasties tend similarly to be strongly negative, reflecting a con
viction that someone must be held responsible for the downfall. The judgments are also colored
by regional and social prejudices. When we have granted all this, however, we are forced to
admit that the judgments are in large part valid: these painters do indeed represent a phase of
decadence. They fail to produce more than a few works that can by any criteria be considered
really first class, and produce a great many that are routine and shallow. It would be difficult,
with many of the paintings, to imagine that they came into being as the outcome of any authentic
creative impulses. The artists repeat standard compositions in set styles without much of inter
esting variation, in such a way as to suggest that they are supplying demands for pictorial types
that had proved popular and saleable. (We do not by any means intend to belittle the professionals
THE " H E T E R O D O X " MASTERS • 129
as a whole; the best of them were always able to approach each picture as a fresh creative chal
lenge, as these painters did not.)
Chung Li, judging from the few of his works that are preserved, repeated over and over a
simple compositional type derived from the tradition of Ma Yuan, with scholars on mountain
terraces gazing at waterfalls or into space; Chiang Sung and Chang Lu similarly replicated com
positions by assembling more or less ready-made type forms. An indication of what motivated
much of this routine output is provided by a note in the Chin-ling so-shih concerning another
follower of Wu Wei named Li Chu (whose major surviving work is a handscroll very similar
in style to Wu's "Pleasures of Fishermen" (Color Pi. 6): 16 "Li Chu . . . as a boy studied
painting under Shen Chou. When his studies were completed, he returned to his home [in Nan
king] and there imitated only the style of Wu Wei, in order to sell his works. The reason was that
at that time Wu's paintings were very highly valued in the capital."
CHANG LU The most famous and successful of Wu Wei's followers in the early sixteenth
century was Chang Lu. His birth and death dates are unknown. 17 Unlike the other artists treated
in this chapter, he was a northerner, coming from K'ai-feng in Honan Province. He showed
great intelligence as a child, studied for an official career, and went to the National University
(T'ai-hsiieh) in Nanking as a first-degree graduate but somehow failed and was forced to turn to
another means of supporting himself. He had reportedly begun painting already while he was in
K'ai-feng, inspired first by a viewing of a figure painting by Wu Tao-tzu and later studying the
landscapes and figures of Tai Chin by making copies of them. In Nanking he began to imitate Wu
Wei, whom he may have known, and became a popular artist: "all the officials and gentlemen
enjoyed going around with him."
As an educated man who was also a capable painter, sometimes facile but also sometimes
brilliant, he exemplifies (like Wu Wei and Hsu Lin) the type of artist who seems to have been
particularly successful in Nanking and later in Soochow, where scholar-officials and merchants
could enjoy, through their patronage, both the association with colorful and congenial personali
ties and the possession of works of art in the currently popular styles. This ambiguous status
gave the artist a certain fluid position in society which the intelligent and versatile man could
exploit to his advantage, both artistic (in asserting a degree of independence) and economic. At
the same time, as noted in the previous chapter in relation to Shen Chou, holding no official
rank left him in the status of commoner, however talented and educated he might be, and meant
that he could be victimized by any official who chose to do so.
While Chang Lu was still in the north, Wang Shih-chen relates, an official named Sun, who
was angry that Chang had not come to pay his respects, enticed the painter to his house and had
his left hand put in a clamp, tightening it to torture him. With his right hand, meanwhile, Chang
was forced to paint a picture of Chung K'uei the Demon Queller. (The subject itself suggests
that Sun thought of the painting more as a functional than an aesthetic object, since pictures of
Chung K'uei were hung in houses to rid them of demons.) Chang was only freed when a higher
official, a minister from court, happened by and begged Sun to release the artist. Chang Lu was
then obliged by gratitude and indebtedness to paint for his rescuer a set of four pictures, on
which he "expended the greatest effort of his whole life." 18
The response to Chang Lu's works during his lifetime seems to have been favorable; people
who got one of his paintings treated it "as though they had acquired a precious disc of jade."
The adverse criticism, as with others of this school, came later, when the style had dropped out
of fashion and the artist was no longer around to lend interest to his works by association. Wang
Shih-chen wrote of him: "Among those who carried on Wu Wei's manner, Chang Lu is best
known. However, he missed the refinement and freedom of Wu's style, catching only its firm
ness and muscular strength. Northerners value his works as great treasures." To which the Wu
sheng-shih shih, some decades later at the end of Ming, adds: "But connoisseurs feel that [his
paintings] aren't really in the best of taste, with the result that both his reputation and his prices
have declined gradually in recent times."
Chang Lu was a prolific painter, and his works survive in considerable numbers. Many of them,
particularly the stereotypedfigures-in-landscapescenes that he did as a specialty, make the harsh
judgments of the later critics seem merited. We reproduce instead, to show him at his best,
four pictures that display the more admirable side of his art.
His finest surviving work is probably "Fisherman Under a Cliff" (Pi. 55), in a Buddhist
temple in Tokyo. The painting is signed, like most of his works, with his hao, or sobriquet, P'ing
shan. The composition is based on the river-landscape type of which we have seen examples by
Tai Chin and Wu Wei (cf. PI. 16, 46), with an overhanging cliff on one side and figures and a
boat or boats below or beyond it. Chang Lu simplifies the scene and brings it closer; the cliff,
painted in broad strokes of ink with patches left in reserve for highlights, seems to loom out at
the top into the spectator's space. The bushes that grow from the cliff and also fill out the base
of the picture are drawn as silhouettes, dimmed effectively for an impression of mistiness. The
broad treatment of these surrounding elements, contrasted with the linear drawing and darker
ink tone concentrated in the figure, provides a pictorial approximation of the optical phe
nomenon of focus; it also conveys a feeling of dim light and damp atmosphere.
Such a visual approach to landscape, evoking an immediate sense of time and place, had seldom
been seen since the Southern Sung period. Thefiguresare portrayed with the same immediacy:
the boy poles the boat from behind the cliff into the open space; the fisherman, turned partly
away from the viewer, crouches to throw his net, the tension of incipient action caught in his
stance but even more in the tightly compressed cluster of lines that radiate from his waist to
charge the figure with force. Chang Lu's typical line drawing features sudden thickenings and
thinnings, sharp changes of direction, and a springy tensile strength. In an age of elegant but
generally flaccid figures, one such as this represents a particular achievement.
"Shih-te Laughing at the Moon" (Pi. 56) carries an old attribution to a Sung master but can
be confidently credited to Chang Lu on the basis of style—the sheer wall of rock and the dimly
silhouetted foliage are clearly by the same hand that painted "Fisherman Under a Cliff," and the
composition is similarly made up of large geometric units, with the space opening forward from
behind the cliff. (Precedents for this type are to be found in thirteenth-century paintings,
notably Liang K'ai's "Sakyamuni Descending from the Mountains.")19 The plan of the picture is
even simpler: a vertical surface (the cliff), a horizontal one, and empty space beyond, the three
areas distinguished by clear contrasts in ink-wash values. Thefigureis set in the center and drawn
large.
This was probably one of a pair of hanging scrolls representing Han-shan and Shih-te, perhaps
painted for some Ch'an Buddhist temple. Shih-te, who (the legend has it) was a scullion in a
T'ang-dynasty temple kitchen, is identified by his broom, which lies on the ground behind him;
his gourd-bottle of wine hangs from his girdle; he clasps his hands behind his back and tilts his
face upward toward the moon. The figure is intensely expressive but not especially of the ideal
that Shih-te represented, which was a carefree unworldliness that found nothing more worth
doing in life than watching leaves fall or laughing crazily at the full moon. That ideal is better
expressed in the relaxed, capricious, "untrammeled" brushwork of ink-monochrome paintings
done in amateurish styles by Ch'an Buddhist monks of the late Sung and Yuan. Chang Lu's figure
belongs firmly in another, somewhat opposed tradition, the professional one of Yen Hui (cf.
Hills, Pi. 66), whose manner of portraying popular Buddhist and Taoist figures was carried on by
Che-school artists in the Ming—notably, as we have seen, by Wu Wei. The nervous, heavy dra
THE "HETERODOX" MASTERS* 131
pery drawing and the portrayal of muscular tension, especially in the face, with lips drawn back
tightly and eyes narrowed, relate this figure to Yen Hui's and to Wu's.
Chang Lu's figure style is displayed at its best in some smaller works, such as a handscroll in
the Tientsin Museum or "Playing the Ch'in for a Friend" (Pi. 61), a large double album leaf
(i.e., a composition that originally occupied two facing pages in an album) now mounted as a
hanging scroll. Since paintings in these smaller forms were made to be seen at arm's length and
had no decorative function, the artist's touch could be softer and his designs less bold. Chang
uses this intimate form to demonstrate the extraordinary range of tone, breadth, wetness, and
momentum through which his brush can modulate in a small space. The line moves in swift
rushes, doubling back and redoubling in tightflourishesfor the folds of a bent sleeve or a rumpled
hem. Sometimes it is so light and dry that it might have been drawn with a fine charcoal stick or
soft pencil; suddenly it will thicken to a heavy black band.
The picture is more, however, than a display of calligraphic versatility. The scribbly back-and
forth strokes describe the bunched cloth, while the swift-running, wavering line used for outer
contours conveys the heaviness of the robes. The theme is an old, symbolic one: playing the ch'in
(a plucked string instrument usually rendered as "lute," although it is more like a zither) for a
friend whose sensibility is tuned to one's own represents perfect communication, an ideal com
munion of minds. When the Chou-dynasty musician Po Ya played for Chung Tzu-ch'i, Chung
understood Po's subtlest thoughts through the music; when Chung died, Po broke his ch'in,
feeling that there was no one left in the world with whom he could reach that kind of under
standing. Chang Lu creates a simple but effective pictorial symbol for this rapport by unifying
his two figures into a single oval shape.
The distinctive manner of figure drawing seen here and in others of Chang's signed works
allows us to ascribe to him an unsigned handscroll depicting "Su Tung-p'o Returning to the
Han-lin Academy" (Color PI. 7). The eminent Sung-period poet-statesman Su Shih, or Su Tung-
p'o (1036-1101), was banished for a time from the capital for opposing the radical reforms of the
prime minister Wang An-shih but was later reinstated in imperial favor and appointed to the
Han-lin Academy. The old empress dowager summoned him to an audience one night and told
him that her son the late emperor had in fact greatly admired him and had banished him only
under pressure from Wang An-shih's supporters. Su Shih wept with emotion, and the empress
dowager wept with him. She sent her attendants to escort him back to the Academy, lighting
his way with two lanterns, in the form of golden lotuses, that hung before her throne. This is the
moment represented by Chang Lu, who draws Su Shih large (as indeed he was), walking with
stately tread, the attendants around him carrying hanging lanterns and playing music on a p'i-p'a
and a flute.
This processional grouping of figures in a semicircle around the principal personage, with
shorter figures in front facing inward, follows a spatial plan that can be seen as early as the
Northern Wei reliefs representing the processions of the emperor and empress on the walls of
the Pin-yang Cave at Lung-men, carved in the first quarter of the sixth century.20 The drawing
agrees closely in many features with figures in Chang Lu's other works; we will leave it for the
reader to discern them.
The touch here is much lighter, however, resembling in this regard the drawing in Wu Wei's
"Lady Carrying a P'i-p'a" (Pi. 47). Such a brilliant reconciliation of sureness and spontaneity,
modulating smoothly from the sketchy or "scribbly" manner (in rumpled sleeves, the lanterns,
the balustrade of the bridge) into disciplined drawing that conveys vividly the volume and
postures of the figures, can be matched only in other works by certain Nanking and Soochow
masters of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and was never to be equaled in later
times. This and a few other works by Chang Lu should lead us to reappraise the low position to
which critical opinion has assigned him on the basis of the many coarse and routine pictures
that bear his signature.
CHIANG SUNG Chiang Sung is the next most important of the Nanking professionals of this
period who were disciples of Wu Wei, and another whose output is made up largely of stereo
typed compositions, which in his case fall into two types: river scenes withfishingboats (distant
ly based on Wu Chen's) and landscapes with scholars strolling or sitting under leafy trees. He was
a native of Nanking and must have learned painting from some local master, perhaps from Wu
Wei himself. Critical judgments of his paintings range from outright condemnation to praise.
His adverse critics relegate him to the "Heterodox" and decadent group along with Chang Lu
and Cheng Wen-lin, and the Ming-hua lu speaks of the "empty presumption and undisciplined
attitude" of his works. The Wu-sheng-shih shih, on the other hand, writes of his deeply sympa
thetic portrayals of the scenery around Nanking, the "rivers and mountains encircling and folding,
among which Chiang Sung lived, cherishing their beauty, imbibing the splendor of hills and
valleys; but when he began a painting he transformed them, so that it wasn't Chiang Sung who
[in his paintings] resembled the landscape, but the landscape that resembled Chiang Sung."
Like Chang Lu, Chiang is best known for large hanging scrolls, painted in ink on silk in a
broad, often slapdash manner, but he really excels in small forms, such as fan paintings and
handscrolls, mostly done on paper. The form and the medium allow more sensitivity of touch
and more compositional variety. A set of four handscrolls called "Landscapes of the Four Sea
sons" is one of the finest productions of his vivacious brush. From the Spring and Winter scrolls
we reproduce sections (Pi. 57—60) that are focal areas of longer compositions. Compositional
sparseness is a characteristic of handscrolls by artists of this school—Wu Wei, Chang Lu, Li
Chu, Chiang Sung; the painter spreads his more scanty materials over long stretches of paper or
silk, offering to his viewers fewer tactile and imaginative adventures per running foot than
masters of other times and schools normally did. The positive aspect of this practice is an ami
able ease of manner; the artist does not appear to be working hard at his task, and yet, when he
succeeds, "everything is complete" (as Chinese writers put it); within the limits of the style,
one wants no more.
This quality is of course another manifestation of the attitude suggested in our discussion of Wu
Wei: the painter provides his audience with less information, less definition of palpable form,
aiming rather at suggestion. This aim is similar to that of some Southern Sung artists, but the re
sults, one must immediately add, are far less evocative of hidden depths and spatial complexities.
Chiang Sung sets masses against space in a broad, easy way, relying on the suggestiveness of con
trasting ink values and rough brushstrokes for effects of light and shade, convexity and concavity.
The dark, scratchy strokes, seen especially in the winter scene, probably exemplify the applica
tion of chiao-mo, "roasted ink," with a worn-out brush which, as the Ming-hua lu tells us, par
ticularly pleased the eyes of his contemporaries.
CHENG W E N - L I N Very little that we have considered so far in the paintings of this school
could be called "wild," much less "depraved"; an example that merits those adjectives had
best be introduced, from among numerous possible choices, before we leave the late-Che-school
masters, so that we can understand more clearly the nature of the decline. A painting that is
probably by another of these "Heterodox" artists, the Fukienese master Cheng Wen-lin (also
known as Cheng Tien-hsien, "Mad Immortal"), will serve the purpose (PI. 62). It is a long, epi
sodic handscroll known as "The World of the Magic Pot," representing Taoist Transcendants
engaged in a variety of hyperactive pursuits in an equally activated landscape. The painting is now
divided between the Princeton Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the pas
THE "HETERODOX" MASTERS • 133
sage we reproduce is from the Princeton scroll. The signature has been cut off so that the scroll
could be falsely attributed to Kung K'ai of the Yuan period, whose works exceed Cheng's many
times in value. But its close stylistic similarity to the few known works by Cheng with signature
or seals supports a reattribution to him.21
The figures in the section we reproduce are gathering fungi and peaches, both believed to be
foods for Immortals in the popular Taoist cult of longevity. Cheng Wen-lin paints the river bank
in splashes of ink wash, working so fast that wet patches can run together for interesting ran
dom formations. This method of applying ink, similar to a technique called tarashikomi that was
superbly exploited by Japanese painters of the Rimpa school, was consistently disapproved of and
generally avoided in Chinese painting, since it was considered too facile and incompatible with
canons of good brushwork. Little sense of either rotundity or play of light results from Cheng's
use of the technique.
He seems to improvise his composition as he moves across the scroll, giving at least the impres
sion, whatever the truth may have been, of following the centuries-old Taoist tradition of
painting while drunk. (The practice was not, of course, confined to Taoists.) The postures of
the figures are twisted and contorted, their faces drawn into grins or grimaces, their eyes
turned sideward or crossed. The forced, feverish animation of the scene arises most of all from
the brushwork, in which the painter permits his own muscular impulses to dictate the character
of his forms. The curling and undulating movements are so obsessive as to make an unrolling of
o o o
the scroll a dizzying experience. Kinesthetic excitement and simple entertainment are what it
offers, and these were not enough for the Chinese, who have given Cheng a lowly place in the
history of their painting.
This is a good example of what we wrote of earlier as "stylistic extremism," the artist exag
gerating some aspect of style beyond the point where it can still be reconciled with pictorial read
ability. For painters in the late phase of the Che school, the motivation for such ill-advised ex
cursions was surely the desire to escape from the kind of hard academicism represented by Wang
E and Chung Li and to assert some artistic individuality and temperament. One popular course
for artists so motivated was the use of highly activated brushline, which served to dematerialize
the forms by turning them into movement. Chu Tuan (Pi. 54) is another who chose this way out
of academicism in the middle Ming, and artists such as Yuan Chiang can still be found attempting
it in the early Ch'ing period.22 The attempts are always short-lived, leading to nothing but dead
ends.
" A R R I V I N G HOME BY M O O N L I G H T " AND C H U PANG A great many of the best surviv
ing paintings by Che-school masters are anonymous, the original signatures and seals having been
removed by dealers who wanted to hoodwink their customers into buying them as works of
earlier and more prestigious artists, at prices higher than Che-school productions could com
mand. Some of them, such as the Cheng Wen-lin scroll, can now be ascribed to particular
hands; others remain mysterious in authorship, and these include many of the finest.
In this latter category is "Arriving Home by Moonlight," in the Freer Gallery (Pi. 63), at
tributed (absurdly) to Lu Hung of the T'ang dynasty but obviously by some Che-school artist
working around 1500. Another work by the same artist, whoever he may be, is in the Osaka
Municipal Museum, similarly unsigned. Perhaps the best clue to the authorship of the Freer
painting is the resemblance of a number of motifs—rocks, river banks, reeds, and others—to the
rendering of those motifs in a large signed work by a little-known master named Chu Pang.23
An even more significant affinity between the two pictures is the distinctive use of graded ink
washes in both and a trick of arbitrarily dimming some passages—one side of a rock, one end of
a boat—through abrupt shifts into pale ink. The signed work of Chu P.mg is far lower in quality,
less well organized, and made up of harder and more angular forms. But, as Chang Lu and others
demonstrate, Che-school artists were capable of transcending sometimes the hack-work level
of their everyday productions to create paintings of great beauty and originality.
Chu Pang was from She-hsien in Anhui Province (which was not to become an important
center of painting until the seventeenth century). The Ming-hua lu gives him a brief note, saying
that he painted figures in a very sketchy manner, splashing the ink freely, and that they resembled
the works of Cheng Wen-lin and Chang Lu. It adds he also did landscapes in the same style.
The Freer painting depicts a thatched house in a valley by a stream, the owner of which is
returning from a day's outing (the luggage consists only of a picnic box and a wine pot). The
stream and its banks are partly hidden in mist, which is beautifully evoked by the use of dilute
ink. Delicate gradations of wash suggest the pale light of the moon which picks out the edges of
boulders and the crests of ridges. The effect of shifting light and atmosphere has seldom been so
well conveyed in Ming painting. The stiffness of Wang E and others is avoided through the sup
plest of brushwork and an extraordinary spatial fluidity: the winding movement into distance
which begins with the foreground path continues with the stream, carrying the eye on an S-
curved course into the farthest depth, and is echoed in the mountain ridge above. This is a care
fully planned composition, executed with versatility and perfect control but with no sense of
academic tightness or overreliance on convention.
If the Che-school artists had been able to maintain this level of excellence more consistently,
we would not have to talk of decadence. But they did not, and the decline was rapid. Later works
in the style were mostly negligible, deficient in both quality and originality. Once Soochow had
supplanted Nanking as the leading center of painting, the styles of the Soochow professionals such
as Chou Ch'en, T'ang Yin, and Ch'iu Ying became more attractive models than the Che-school
styles for later Ming professional masters. Some traces of the Che-school manner persist in
works by artists from Chekiang Province, such as Hsu Wei in the later sixteenth century and Lan
Ying in the seventeenth. But they are too scattered and weak to constitute a continuation of the
school, and it can be considered to have been all but defunct by the middle of the sixteenth cen
tury.
CHAPTER FOUR
Some Nonconformist Painters of

Nanking and Elsewhere
1. BEYOND THE CHE AND W U SCHOOLS
Most of the important Chinese painters of the first half of the Ming belonged to one or the other
of the two principal currents or schools—the Che and the Wu—that have occupied us in the
preceding three chapters. As we have seen, these two schools differ markedly in fundamental
stylistic directions, in their choices of old models to imitate, and in the subjects they paint; the
artists tended to differ as well in social status and economic basis of activity. This Che-Wu divi
sion, in various guises, came to serve as a basic issue in art-historical and theoretical discussions
and arguments later in the Ming and was eventually reflected in a grand formulation of the his
tory of painting, the theory of the Northern and Southern schools. It is not entirely without
validity, since the correlations between regional and stylistic criteria, or between style and the
artist's social and economic position, are observable and real, even after all exceptions and devia
tions have been noted.
But the Che and Wu schools do not by any means account for all the significant painting
being created in China during this lively and productive period. Orthodox Chinese histories
pay small attention to the later Che-school artists treated in the preceding chapter, and even
less to the masters who will occupy us in this one, excepting the last of them, Hsu Wei; their
prejudice is consistently in favor of the Wu-school artists of Soochow. Modern Western studies
have similarly slighted developments outside Soochow, and one recent book goes so far as to state
that "there was in any event no art of historical consequence being created outside Soochow's
sphere of influence in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries."1 On the contrary, Nanking as
a painting center in the late fifteenth century was far ahead of Soochow, which had little to boast
of besides Shen Chou, and was still a strong rival in the early decades of the sixteenth century.
We must, in other words, expand our angle of view and our framework of classification if we
are to take in all or even most of the interesting masters of this period.
The first part of this chapter will be devoted to a group of painters who were active in the dec
ades before and after 1S00 and who held no clear allegiance to either of the two main currents of
the time, although they are most closely related to the Che school. They do not properly form a
school themselves, and there is no firm evidence that they even knew one another. But this
group, like the others, is definable by regional and stylistic criteria and by similarities in the
artists' life situations and artistic attitudes. The painters we are grouping here were all born and
were active in or near Nanking, rather than in any of the older centers of painting; most of them
(in fact, all of those for whom we have enough information to allow a judgment on the matter)
135
136 • SOME NONCONFORMIST PAINTERS
were educated men, of some literary attainment; all appear to have cultivated around themselves
an aura of eccentricity, which they expressed not only in their paintings but also in their inscrip
tions and in the nicknames they chose or acquired—"Old Fool" or "Pure and Crazy."
These same criteria apply neatly, of course, to Wu Wei, who no doubt was a model for these
painters, as he was for his own proper followers. The artists of our present group might, instead
of being treated separately, have been put together with the "Heterodox" painters Chang Lu,
Chiang Sung, and Cheng Wen-lin, with whom they share some features of style. They similarly
tend to adopt traditional themes and compositions associated with Sung painting as points of de
parture, confining their unorthodoxy mainly to the manner in which the pictures are executed.
(Eccentricity expressed through grotesque or fantastic images belongs generally to a later phase
of Chinese painting.) They perform these standard themes in unusual brush manners, applying
ink and colors to paper and silk in ways that seemed, within the Chinese context, undisciplined
or even wild. Their varieties of wildness, however, differ somewhat from those of the late Che
school masters who tried for effects of spontaneity and unconventionality. Those masters, as
we saw in the preceding chapter, tended toward an exaggerated boldness or nervousness of brush
work, which often degenerated into the heavy-handed insensitivity of style that afflicted the late
phase of the school. The artists we are about to treat worked generally either in less forceful
brushstrokes that carry little feeling of tension, or in fast-running line drawing, or sometimes in
a combination of the two manners.
2. THE NANKING GROUP
SUN LUNG, " B O N E L E S S " PAINTING, AND DETROIT'S " E A R L Y A U T U M N " One of the
earliest departures from the orthodox outline-and-color technique of painting was the mo-ku
(literally, "boneless") manner, so called because the painting was done in brushstrokes and
washes of pure color, without the structural "bones" of ink-outline drawing. The beginnings of
mo-ku painting were in the T'ang dynasty or earlier; in the tenth century, the flower painter Hsu
Hsi worked in broad strokes of ink, without outlines, and added light washes of color; his son (or
grandson) Hsu Ch'ung-ssu used the "boneless" technique for flower painting in the early Sung
period, as did also, apparently, the greatest flower painter of the time, Chao Ch'ang.
Like other unorthodox techniques, it was considered somewhat erratic and exposed the user
to the danger of condemnation by scholarly critics. Chao Ch'ang's paintings, for instance, were
judged by Mi Fu (1051—1107) to be "worth keeping if you want something to decorate your
reception hall with when you marry off a daughter." Part of the reason for Mi Fu's disdainful
opinion was his general contempt for decorative, "pretty" flower pictures, but disapproval of
the brush technique was doubtless involved in it also. Pejoratively viewed, "boneless" meant
deficient in the structure given by disciplined brush movements; when paintings were assessed
on criteria equally applicable to (and partly derived from) calligraphy, any variety of painting that
had virtually nothing in common with calligraphy lay outside the range of consideration. Never
theless, some painters, and especially those who favored bird-and-flower subjects, continued to
do paintings in color only or in ink washes overlaid with color, or subdued their outline drawing
to a point of near invisibility. During several centuries, from the late Sung into the early Ming, a
minor local school of painters in P'i-ling, located about fifty miles southeast of Nanking, spe
cialized in producing decorative pictures offlowersand insects in a heavily colored style, some
times with outlines but often in the "boneless" manner. Many of their works are in Japanese
collections.2
The painter Sun Lung, a specialist in just such subjects, came from P'i-ling and used the mo
ku technique. He must have been heir to this local tradition, although nothing is recorded about
THE NANKING GROUP • 137
his stylistic ancestry, and his works differ from those of his P'i-ling predecessors in being execut
ed in transparent washes of ink and color instead of heavy, opaque pigments.
His dates of birth and death are unknown, but he is spoken of as being contemporary with Lin
Liang, and one of his albums is accompanied by inscriptions written by Yao Shou, circumstances
that point to a period of activity in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Accounts describe
him as quick-witted and unconventional in his behavior as a child, "like a Taoist Immortal." He
was the grandson of a famous early Ming loyalist, Sun Hsing-tsu, who had taken part in the siege
of Peking by the forces of Chu Yuan-chang and was later killed in action; Sun Lung, as his
descendant, had claims to special favor from the court. According to the Hua-shih hui-yao, he
sometimes signed his works as "Painter in the Imperial Presence," which would mean that he
served at some time as a court painter. Seals on his two surviving albums suggest that they were
used as presents from the emperor to some nobleman or high official. One of the nicknames Sun
adopted was Tu-ch'ih ("Perfect, or Complete, Fool").
In addition to his pictures of flowers and insects, frogs and shrimp, which were praised as
"possessing a vivid air of life," he sometimes painted landscapes that are described as being in
the manner of Mi Fu and Mi Yu-jen. The single surviving example of landscape from his hand,
a leaf in one of the two albums which, along with one hanging scroll, appear to make up his en
tire extant oeuvre, is a picture of hills and trees done entirely in mottled washes of ink and
color, with no individual brushstrokes visible. The critical reaction to such a practice might
have been foreseen: the sixteenth-century scholar Wang Shih-chen, after dismissing Lin Liang's
paintings as "devoid of spiritual depth," adds: "This is all the more true of his contemporary
Sun Lung." Sun is scarcely mentioned, otherwise, in the later literature of painting.
A particularly striking leaf in the album now in the Shanghai Museum portrays a cicada cling
ing to the stalk of a waterweed in a pond (Pi. 64). Other weedy shapes mark the surface of the
pond. The dampness and softening effect of a steamy atmosphere are rendered by dimming the
ink tone and blurring the brushstrokes, which in some places have been applied to dampened
areas of silk so as to suffuse freely. Elsewhere, the brushwork is ragged, the ink or color having
been brushed loosely onto the silk in broken strokes that are the Chinese equivalent of scum
bling. The effect is to merge forms with surrounding space, and to create a pictorial approxima
tion of visual perception in a way that had seldom been attempted since the thirteenth century.
It was an effect contrary to the whole direction of Ming painting.
Other leaves in the two Sun Lung albums, rendered in strokes and patches of transparent color
or lightly tinted ink wash, offer the best clue we have to the correct attribution, in time and
place, of one of the loveliest of Chinese paintings. This is the famous handscroll in the Detroit
Institute of Fine Arts known as "Early Autumn" (Color PI. 8), which bears a misleading, inter
polated signature and seals of the early Yuan master Ch'ien Hsiian. Whoever the artist may have
been, he was apparently a better painter than Sun Lung, although the possibility should be al
lowed that Sun himself, working in a more careful and conservative manner and perhaps ear
lier in his career, painted this delightful work. The scene is microcosmic in conception: where
a landscape handscroll transports the viewer through miles of countryside, offering him a suc
cession of expansive vistas, this one draws him down to the surface of a pond in autumn, into a
busy scene inhabited by a teeming population of frogs and insects, and allows him to observe at
close range and in sharp detail the creatures themselves, their habitat, and their ephemeral
lives. In the latter portion of the composition (not shown here), a diversity of beetles, grass
hoppers, and other insects are arrayed, evenly spaced, against a decoratively flat ground, much as
were the birds in, for instance, Pien Wen-chin's "Three Friends and Hundred Birds" composi
tion,3 with which it might well be roughly contemporary.
The opening section, from which our plate is taken, is more actively composed : three dragon
flies are catching midges in the air, and three frogs on a decaying lotus leaf watch and wait their
chance. The theme is motion and change—fast movement and slow—and the still slower proc
esses of growth and decomposition. For this theme, symbolized in Taoist thought by the image
and properties of water, an aquatic world is the proper setting; the style, in both its luminous
color and its disinterest in establishing any firm structure of brushstrokes, carries the same im
plications of impermanence and immediacy. Once more we may pause for a moment to lament
the inhibiting effect of a narrowing of critical taste on both the production and the preservation
of such pictures as this; the Detroit scroll stands as sole survivor, at least on its qualitative level,
of what was probably aflourishingproduction of paintings of this genre.
LIN KUANG AND YANG HSUN The paintings of Sun Lung and the Detroit master, whatever
critics may have thought of them later, display no willful unorthodoxy but only techniques that
did notfitinto the generally acceptable range of ways in which ink and color could be applied to
silk and paper. Before continuing with some artists who, by contrast, were rule breakers by
intent, we will look briefly at two fine and little-known works by minor masters that exemplify
more moderate and cautious excursions outside the standard styles of the period.
One is by Lin Kuang, who came from Yangchow, less thanfiftymiles northeast of Nanking, and
who is said to have followed Li Tsai as a landscapist. The short entries accorded him in the
seventeenth-century dictionaries of painters say that he worked "with a light and unconventional
touch but a great deal of vitality."
Lin's sole surviving work, titled "Spring Mountains" (PI. 65), fits this characterization well.
The artist's signature and the date are accompanied by a curious poetic couplet which reads:
Orioles sing in the skies of March, of February;
Flowers spring up on a myriad mountains, a thousand mountains.
The loose, broad brushline may imitate Li Tsai but seems closer to the drawing of Shen Chou
in its paleness, evenness of breadth, and flattening effect; by 1500, Shen's works could easily
have been known to an artist working in Yangchow. Lin, like Shen Chou, depends on linear
patterning and plump tien to enrich and substantiate his forms, using little wash and nearly
eliminating textures. The composition, however, is more agitated than Shen Chou's and more
reminiscent of Sung traditions; it may seem solidly put together until one begins to examine it
in detail, whereupon it proves to be full of inconsistencies, as if Lin had improvised it lightly,
allowing solids to turn into spaces and trees to grow into the masses instead of out from them.
Such passages do not harm the effect of the whole, which is in any case more suggestive than
descriptive, its grassy sketchiness conveying the feeling of a windy day in spring. The exuberance
of the style matches that of the scene, with its gushing waterfall and profusion of flowering trees,
which are drawn pale so as to appear bathed in air and sunshine. Through such formal means the
painter transmits his own experience and that of the figure seen in the pavilion over the water in
the foreground. Such a telling use of calligraphic and abstract qualities for expressive purpose
anticipates seventeenth-century painting, and one might be tempted to date the picture as late
as that if it were unsigned. As the work of a little-known painter of 1500, it is surprisingly fresh
and original and makes us wish that more of the artist's production had survived.
The same can be said of the landscape by Yang Hsiin (Pi. 66), who is even less known as a
painter, our only information on him coming from an inscription written by a Japanese scholar
in 1874 on the box for one of his paintings. The data is unconfirmed and hence not entirely trust
worthy.4 According to it, Yang Hsiin was from Hsien-ning in Hupei Province, about fifty miles
south of Wu Wei's birthplace. He took his chin-shih degree in 1454; was a scholar in the National
University, probably at Nanking, in 1489 and was given an honorary rank by the emperor Hsiao
tsung that same year; and died in 1508. If this is indeed the correct identification of the artist,
the cyclical date on the painting would correspond to 1483, and the painting would take its
place as a very interesting work by a scholar-artist working in a style not ordinarily associated
with the literati school.
Yang Hsiin is represented today by only three landscapes, one of them small and on paper, the
other two large and on silk. Both of the large works bear the same cyclical date: the one repro
duced here is signed "The Drunken Profligate of West Lake, Yang Hsiin," suggesting that Yang
must have spent some time in Hangchow, which would help to account for the Che-school
flavor of the work. If we wonder, in fact, what kind of picture a scholar-amateur working
within the Che-school styles might do in the late fifteenth century, Yang Hsiin's landscape may
furnish one of the very few pieces of evidence toward answering the question. The tradition on
which he draws is not that of Ma Yuan, but of Li T'ang, whose craggy mountain peaks lie far
behind those in Yang's picture. The separation of sunlight and shadow which, in Li T'ang's style,
was systematically employed to distinguish the faces of a rock and thus to reveal its form, had
already by the Yuan dynasty (cf. Hills, Pi. 29) been simplified into a free, wet application of
patches of ink wash that suggested highlights and shadows without assigning them to clearly demar
cated surfaces. Yang Hsiin's is a further extension of the same technique; it is more schematic,
less descriptive of visual phenomena of light, but can still create an impression of strong sun and
shade, enhancing the powerful presence of his rocky masses. In a few passages it does more, pro
viding a positively illusionistic rendering of three-dimensional forms by portraying the play of
light and dark on their surfaces.
The plan of the picture is similarly old-fashioned but effective in giving spaciousness and
monumentality to the scene; the composition is in fact so imposing as to seem more like a pro
fessional performance than a scholar-amateur's. Beyond a rocky foreground shore topped with
leafy trees, the river carries the eye back to the middle ground, where a traveler crosses a
bridge on a donkey; behind is a misty ravine, out of which rise tall spires of rock. The parts of
the composition are arranged in three planes of depth, offset on a receding diagonal, with the
rocky masses increasing in size from the foreground boulders to the peaks that tower over the
scene and block any further penetration.
SHIH C H U N G , " T H E F O O L FROM N A N K I N G " Neither Lin Kuang nor Yang Hsiin is likely
to have adopted any outward, public stance of eccentricity; the one was a professional painter
and follower of an Academy master, the other probably a respected scholar-official. Originality
in their paintings is manifested in relatively restrained, unobtrusive ways. The situation that
seems typically to have led to overt unorthodoxy in painting is the one exemplified by Wu Wei:
an educated man of low economic status decides for some reason not to pursue a career as a
government official, or attempts one and fails, and so is forced (presumably—we are seldom told
as much in biographical accounts) to practice for his livelihood what he may have begun as an
avocation. This option became more attractive to men in this special position as the rewards,
both in patronage and in respect, became greater, and the role of the artist as a talented and culti
vated man with some measure of artistic independence came to be recognized and socially accept
ed. Again, the successful careers of Tai Chin and Wu Wei may have been crucial in opening the
way to such recognition; and innovative, even heterodox styles were, among other things,
assertions of the artists' newly won independence.
Heterodox modes of brushwork in Chinese painting usually took one or the other of two
directions, which we can term scribbliness and splashiness. Good examples of the former we
have seen in works by Wu Wei and Chang Lu: it is the manner of drawing in which the brush
is not lifted between strokes, so that the line runs on as it deviates or reverses direction abruptly.
Splashiness, by contrast, records little if any trace of brush movement, the ink being applied so
broadly and wetly that its suffusion absorbs and obscures the brushstroke. An extreme form of
this latter was practiced already in the eighth and ninth centuries by eccentric "ink splashers"
who, in some combination of creative frenzy and alcoholic intoxication, spattered ink and some
times colors onto a painting surface and then, usually after regaining their sobriety, turned the
largely random outcome of this activity into a representation of landscape or some other subject
through the addition of proper brushwork.5 By the fifteenth century, only literary accounts of
these painters remained, their works having long since disappeared; but they could still serve,
along with latter-day Heterodox painters such as Fang Ts'ung-i, as models for any painter who
wanted to venture into aberrant techniques.
The anecdotal biographies of brilliant, erratic painters tend to have another feature in com
mon : the painters begin their lives as unusual children. Shih Chung, who was born in Nanking in
1438, follows that pattern, but not in the standard precocious way; on the contrary, he report
edly could not even speak until he was seventeen. Outwardly a simpleton during these youth
ful years, he was inwardly very intelligent—or so people decided later, after he had learned in
a short space of time not only to speak but also to read, write, and compose poetry and prose, and
to paint. His talents also included the composition of popular songs, which he would sing when
drunk, beating time; he taught them to his concubine Ho Yu-hsien (' 'Jade Immortal''), whom he
had taught to play the p'i-p'a. He avoided the ordinary even in his name: his original name was
Hsu Tuan-pen; why he changed to Shih Chung and why he continued to use the earlier name
along with the later in his seals are questions still unsolved. The name Ch'ih ("Fool" or
"Idiot"), which he had presumably acquired during his dullard days, pursued him into his later
years, when he was a fool only insofar as he chose to be. He used the name proudly, calling his
house Wo-ch'ih ("Fool's Rest"), taking in his old age the name Ch'ih-weng ("Old Fool" or
"Foolish Graybeard"), and so forth.
One anecdote relates the circumstances of his first meeting with Shen Chou. Coming to visit
Shen but finding him absent, Shih walked into Shen's studio and painted a landscape on a piece
of unused silk that was stretched on the wall. Then he departed without leaving his name. When
Shen returned and saw the painting, he knew immediately that it must be by "the Fool from
Nanking'' since no one in Soochow used the brush in such a way. He sent his servants to find Shih
and bring him back, and the two became fast friends, sometimes staying at each other's houses.
Shen Chou once inscribed a portrait of Shih Chung that had been painted by Wu Wei, a re
markable conjunction of three leading artistic personalities of the age; the painting has not
survived. Shih lived to be about eighty and so must have died around 1517. Like Wu Chen and
others, he is said to have foreseen, or even determined, the time of his death, and then died with
out any sign of illness at the self-appointed time, after participating in his own funeral procession.
Shih Chung's training as a painter is nowhere described, but his stylistic affiliations seem to be
principally with the late, "wild" academic masters, especially Chiang Sung (who was also a
native of Nanking), and we may suppose that he started from a similar academic base. No early
work remains to answer the question of what his early style may have been; all that we have
appears to be late and agrees with his descriptions of his work as "unrestrained by adherence to
any school manner" and "like clouds scudding and water churning." Occasionally encountered
in his work are passages that recall Shen Chou, but he lacks the control and formal power of the
far greater Soochow master.
His style is especially suited to snowscapes, and two of his best known works are of that genre:
a handscroll dated 1504 (Pi. 68) and a hanging scroll dated 1506 in the Museum of Far Eastern
Art, Cologne.6 One might at first take the hanging scroll that he painted in the spring of 1504
(PI. 67) to be a snowscape also, but it probably was not intended as one. The patches of untouched
paper left in reserve between the amorphous strokes of wet ink laid on so freely by the artist
might be read either as pockets of snow or as highlights standing out from shadows; the latter
reading seems more likely, since the leafy trees and open-fronted house, within which two men
64. Sun l.ung: " C i c a d a and W a t e r w e e d s . " Album leaf, ink and colon on ulk, 21.8 X 22.9 cm. Shanghai Museum.
65. Lin Kuang: "Spring Mountains." Dated 1500. Hanging scroll, ink and
light colors on silk, 182.8 X 103.8 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
66. YangHsiin: "Landscape with Travelers." Dated 67. Shih Chung: "Landscape." Dated 1504.
1483. Hanging scroll, ink on silk, 183.6 X 77 cm. Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 142.7 X 46.1
Collection of George J. Schhnker, Piedmont, California. cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
68. Shih Chung: "Clearing After Snowfall." Dated 1504. Section of a hand-
scroll, ink on paper, 25 X 319 cm. Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
List of plates p.xi Go to page: 140, 153
6 9 . Shih C h u n g : " A Solitary F i s h e r m a n . " Album leaf, ink on paper. Shanghai Museum.
List of plates p.xi Go to page: iv, 153
70. Kuo Hsii: "Landscape." Album leaf, ink on paper. Shanghai Museum.
r
J
71. Kuo Hsii: "Woman and Child in a Garden." Album leaf, ink on paper, Shanghai Museum.
List of Plates p.xi
Go to page: 155
72. Tu Chin: "T'ao Yiian-ming Viewing a Painting of the Peach Blossom Spring."
7 3 . T u C h i n : "Enjoying A n t i q u e s . " Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 126.1 X 187 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei-
•
Section of a handscroll, ink on paper, 28 X 108.2 cm. Palace Museum, Peking.

List of Plates p.xi
Go to page: 157 74. Wang Wen: "Landscape with Pavilion." Album leaf, ink on silk. Collection unknown.
*. .
75. Hsieh Shih-ch'en: "Landscape After Rain." Dated 1559. Album leaf mounted
as a hanging scroll, ink on silk, 26.6 X 22 cm. Ching Yuan Qhai collection,
1
"1
16-11. Hsieh Shih-ch'en: from "Landscapes of the Four Seasons." /.c/r, "Misty Trees by a Level Lake" ;
right, "Clearing Alter Snow in a Mountain Pass." Hanging scrolls. Collection of']. T. Tai, Sew York.
78-80. Hsu Wei: "Flowers and Other Plants." Sections of
• '
i /
• _ . ^
B£7^ •
1
a handscroll, ink on paper, 30 X ] 053 -5 cm. Nanking Museum.
81-82. Hsii Wei: "Landscape with Figures." Sections oj a hand-
scroll, ink on paper, 30.2 X 134.6 cm. Private collection, Tokyo.

sit conversing, indicate a warmer day. But the ambiguity is itself revealing. Shih Chung's style
does not so much describe the landscape as convey quick, imprecise impressions of it. The mode
of achieving a strong rendering of light and shadow (supposing it is that) by applying broad strokes
of ink wash and leaving areas of light between them is one of a number of features the painting
has in common with Yang Hsiin's; but where Yang separates one form from another with utmost
clarity, Shih blurs boundaries and distinctions by using the same uncouth brush movements
whether he is drawing rocks, snow, or trees and avoids firm and continuous outlines through
out.
The painting appears in catalogues as "Landscape in the Manner of Huang Kung-wang" but
bears no easily recognizable resemblance to that Yuan master's work except perhaps in the way
the mountainside is built up. Shih Chung's inscription reads: "Yang T'ien-ts'e from Chin-t'ai
came by my Fool's Tower, and we got to talking about natural virtue. He knows what kind of
person the Fool is [i.e., I am] and can appreciate the Fool's awkwardness. Truly, he is another
Mi Fu in his capacity for aesthetic discrimination. Accordingly, I have done this as a gift for him.
Drawn by the Fool Shih of Chiang-tung, in [1S04]."
The "Clearing After Snowfall" handscroll (Pi. 68) was painted in the same spring of 1504
but probably earlier in the year, "when the snow was deep," according to Shih's inscription.
The handscroll is about ten feet long and is a brilliant performance, executed with an air of com
plete spontaneity, as though the artist had set down rapidly a succession of visual impressions
absorbed on a walk through snowy hills by a river, at the same time composing his picture
skillfully and satisfyingly. The brushwork is allowed to turn dry and scratchy in a few places,
producing occasional outbreaks of rougher texture, and the drawing tightens just enough to ful
fill its descriptive function in figures, houses, trees; otherwise, the whole painting is done in
seemingly lax contour strokes and uneven patches of wash, the one merging unclearly into the
other. The style seems here so ideally adapted to the theme as to make the issue of unorthodoxy
beside the point.
Shih Chung's more striking ventures into the borderlands of eccentricity are to be seen in his
album paintings. The new popularity of the album in the late fifteenth century, already noted in
connection with Shen Chou, had a liberating effect on style; faced with the necessity of creating
variety throughout the whole album, an artist might risk in a single leaf some uncautious experi
ment that he would hesitate to attempt in an integral work on a larger scale. In a twelve-leaf al
bum in the Shanghai Museum, undated but doubtless from his late period, Shih Chung displays
his undisciplined brushwork in pictures more "splashy" or "scribbly" than either of the 1504
works. The subjects and compositions, however, continue to be familiar and old-fashioned:
scholars walking in the mountains with their servants, or sitting in a boat admiring the scenery,
or standing on a ledge gazing over a river, or playing at being hermit-fishermen as in "A Solitary
Fisherman" (Pi. 69). The romantic appeal of these images was largely in the way they flattered
the viewer by suggesting that his true longings were for the untrammeled life. Executed in brush
work that had the right nonconformist associations, such pictures were obviously aimed at people
of conventional tastes but with aspirations toward the unconventional—those people to whom
some artists in all ages have catered in the pursuit of benefits usually more material than artistic.
The real level of Shih Chung's eccentricity is hinted at by his having made several of the figures
in the album (including thefishermanof our plate) cross-eyed.
Kuo Hsu Our suggestion that stylistic eccentricity in this period is a self-conscious offshoot
of academicism—which is, of course, consistent with the account we have given of the decline
of the Che school—is strengthened by a sameness in the manifestations of this eccentricity from
artist to artist; if it were really a natural effusion of idiosyncrasy from truly deviant people,
"fools" or "crazy" in more than their chosen names, the stylistic affinities between artists
should not be so close—the idea of a school of eccentrics carries an inherent contradiction. That
contradiction is well embodied in the works of Kuo Hsu (14S6 to after 1526).
He was born in T'ai-ho in Kiangsi Province and was well educated; he prepared for an official
career, which was for some reason abortive. When in the 1490s he was invited to the capital and
offered an official post by a powerful eunuch at court named Hsiao Ching, he rejected the offer
firmly, and for this act was praised as equal in high principle to the loyalists (i-miri) of earlier
ages. He is said to have been recommended at court as a painter by the great philosopher-states
man Wang Shou-Jen (or Wang Yang-ming, 1472-1528), who inscribed one of his paintings and
presented it to the emperor. Kuo may have served in some official capacity for a short time but
then gave up his post or lost it. After this, we are told, he traveled to view the famous mountains
in China and declared that they, and not other people's paintings, would serve as his copybooks.
The same story is told of many other painters, but there are few whose works make it sound so
unconvincing. Equally unlikely, in the light of his extant oeuvre, is the story that he was con
sidered in his time the superior of Wu Wei, Tu Chin, and Shen Chou.
The comment that he was able to handle any landscape style skillfully fits better with what we
know of him but could also be stated negatively: he seems to have no clearly recognizable style
of his own. Two extant landscapes dated in the first decade of the sixteenth century are orthodox
performances in the manner of Kao K'o-kung, which was, as we have noted, a manner used chief
ly in this period by academic artists. Two figure paintings, one in the Palace Museum, Taipei,
dated 1526, are reminiscent of the work of Wu Wei and Chang Lu. An undated album of eight
leaves in the Shanghai Museum contains one picture of a frog and lotus in the Sun Lung manner,
several landscapes similar to those of Shih Chung (Pi. 70), and a figure painting close in style to
works of Wu Wei and Tu Chin (Pi. 71). This last portrays a lady seated in a garden, while a boy
at her side tries to catch a butterfly. The faces of both have the winsomely cross-eyed look of
Shih's fisherman. Kuo signs this and his other pictures with his favorite sobriquet, Ch'ing-k'uang
("Pure and Crazy").
Tu C H I N A much more serious, original, and influential artist of this group was Tu Chin,
whose birth and death dates are unknown but who was active in the later fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries. A native of Chen-chiang, located to the east of Nanking on the south bank
of the Yangtze River in Kiangsu Province, he was the son of an official and studied the classics in
his youth, reading widely in literature of all kinds, including novels. He himself wrote poetry
that was "strange and old-fashioned." His ability as a poet and as an accomplished if somewhat
idiosyncratic calligrapher can be seen in an inscription he wrote to accompany a bamboo paint
ing by Ni Tsan.7 Some time in the Ch'eng-hua era (1465-88) he passed the examination for the
chin-shih degree, but because he did not place high enough to be offered an attractive post, he
gave up all ambition toward a bureaucratic career and turned, like the others, to painting. His
earliest dated work is from 1465. There is no record of who his teacher was, but he was surely
influenced by Wu Wei, who was probably some years older.
Tu settled permanently in Nanking, no doubt because this was the best place for an artist of
his stylistic persuasion to make his living. He called himself Ku-k'uang ("Antiquated and
Crazy"). His most admired works, however, were those in such highly disciplined techniques
as pai-miao, the fine-line manner of drawing used for figures, and chieh-hua ("boundary paint
ing"), used for architecture; these works of his were praised as "strict and restrained." Critics
note that he painted rocks, trees, and other landscape elements in the broad, broken brushwork
called^/ei-pai ("flying white"), but his works in this manner, according to Wang Shih-chen, were
not so highly regarded. It would appear, then, that in spite of his self-designation as "crazy," he
was more appreciated for his fine technique than for the mild touches of unorthodoxy in his
works. The Hua-shih hui-yao notes that he was widely copied and imitated by later artists, a state
ment that is confirmed by what we can observe of his influence, especially on the professional
masters of Soochow. When T'ang Yin visited him in the first month of 1499, he was old and
poor, as we know from a poem that T'ang wrote to him. He probably died shortly after 1509,
the year of his last dated work.
The subjects of Tu Chin's pictures are mostly popular and anecdotal; he painted few pure
landscapes, specializing rather in scenes of figures in landscape or garden settings. Pictures of
poets gazing at the moon or walking by moonlight (a fine example portraying the Sung poet Lin
Pu is in the Cleveland Museum of Art) evoke a Southern Sung mood of lyricism, echoing in their
style the Academy painting of that earlier age, especially the work of Ma Yuan. A handscroll in
the Peking Palace Museum contains nine illustrations that Tu painted to accompany old poems
inscribed by a contemporary named Chin Tsung (1448-1501), whose note at the end of the
scroll identifies Tu as the artist and is dated 1500. The pictures portray scenes from the lives of
poets and literary men of the past.
In one of them (Pi. 72), the poet T'ao Ch'ien, or T'ao Yiian-ming (365-427), stands with the
ubiquitous boy servant in a garden before a screen on which hangs a painting depicting the
subject of one of T'ao's own most famous literary compositions, the story of the Peach Blossom
Spring. This is a tale of a fisherman who finds his way through a narrow opening at the remote
source of a stream in the mountains and comes out beyond into an Elysium where people live
in perfect happiness and peace, isolated from the rest of the world. Thefishermanin the picture
is seen walking, his oar over his shoulder, toward the entrance to the hidden valley, here rep
resented as a cave.
This painting-within-a-painting is rendered in the bold, spontaneous manner of Shih Chung
and Kuo Hsu; it is matched, in the larger picture that contains it, only by the garden rocks at the
left; otherwise the execution is linear and controlled. The rocks are shorthand performances of
the angular and faceted type created by Li T'ang and imitated by countless artists afterwards.
From the original model remain the "axe-cut" texture strokes, now nervously applied, and
the dependence on suggestions of strong highlights and deep shadows to assert solidity. The figure
of T'ao Yiian-ming belongs also to an old type but is here portrayed with a tense sharpness—the
eyes narrowed and alert, the torso bent back—that is new. The composition resembles some late
pictures by Shen Chou in dividing the space geometrically with strong diagonals and verticals
and in cutting off the screen at midsection.
The fact that no signature or seal of Tu Chin appears on any of the paintings is indicative of
their "social status" ; they were done on commission, as adjuncts to the calligraphy. Chin Tsung
relates in his inscription that a certain man (whose name has been expunged, as was frequently
done when scrolls dedicated to a particular patron or friend were later sold, to avoid embarrass
ment to the man or his family) "asked me to write twelve old poems; then he went to get Tu
Sheng-chii [Tu Chin] to do pictures illustrating them." The paintings were thus intended to be
functional, not to be appreciated primarily as creations of an individual artist, and his identity
was accordingly of less interest to the viewer or owner of the scroll. It was common for paint
ings done as illustrations to go unsigned, even when they were by respected artists; another
example is the scroll illustrating the "Nine Songs" of Ch'ii Yuan, by Chang Wu of the Yuan
period (Hills, PI. 70), in which the artist is similarly identified only in a note by the calligrapher
who wrote the text.
A functional picture of another kind is "Enjoying Antiques," in the Palace Museum, Taipei
(Pi. 73). It is mounted now as a hanging scroll, but its unusual shape and size (it is over six feet
long) indicate that it was probably painted to be mounted on a flat screen like the one seen in
the upper right of the picture itself. Such screens have not survived in their original form, and
since the paintings on them were of an awkward size for remounting as scrolls, they have with
very few exceptions been lost, or at best cut up so that they survive only in fragments.8
Another version of the left-hand third of the present composition was in fact recently dis
covered in a Japanese temple, the Kongobu-ji on Mount Koya; the other two parts (center and
right) may also be in the collection of the same temple, the original painting having been cut to
make scrolls suitable for hanging in the Japanese tokonoma alcove. The Kongobu-ji version agrees
better in the calligraphy of its inscription and in its drawing with the other extant paintings by
Tu than does the Palace Museum version, which may in fact be a copy by some Soochow artist
close to Ch'iu Ying, or perhaps by Ch'iu himself.
Leaving aside this question of authenticity for future investigation and treating the Palace
Museum painting as a Tu Chin composition (which it is in any case), we may note that the
assumption that it was a screen composition might explain some of its characteristics: it is stable
and expressively unassertive (as is also the case, for instance, with Kano-school figure-in-landscape
screen compositions in Japan—which are, to be sure, different in many other respects); it is full
of anecdotal detail, and so would continue to entertain through repeated viewings; it is executed
with a superlative technical finish, in a conservative style, and so could be admired and enjoyed
by anyone who might encounter it. The form has affected the style, as in the case of album paint
ings, but in just the opposite direction: this was not an intimate kind of painting, meant to
occasion a momentary and intense experience, nor did it encourage experimentation of any
kind.
The subject is itself generalized and conventionalized (again, like the "Four Accomplish
ments" theme so common in Japanese screens). On a garden terrace, a rich collector of
antiques is showing off his acquisitions to a friend, who examines archaic bronzes set out on a
table. A boy enters the scene at the left, carrying a scroll painting; two maids at the upper right
arrange other treasures—a ch'in, handscrolls, a vase, incense burner and tortoise-shell box,
albums—on another table. A child at the lower right, pursuing two butterflies with a fan, seems
irrelevant and has a purely compositional role: he fills a space and adds another passage of
frozen activity to the tableau.
A little-known painting titled "The Scholar Fu Sheng in a Garden" (Color Pi. 10—11) can be
added to the oeuvre of Tu Chin on the basis of its close similarity, in many features, to "En
joying Antiques." A painting of this same subject is recorded in a Chinese catalogue;9 the
picture we reproduce may be the same, with the artist's inscription removed, or perhaps it is
another version by Tu Chin.
Our plate is a detail of the main figure group. The old man in the center is Fu Sheng, a
Confucian scholar who, after the fall of the Ch'in dynasty in the third century B.C. and the
founding of the Han, brought forth a copy of the Shu-ching (Book of Documents) that he had
hidden in the wall of his house to rescue it from Ch'in Shih-huang-ti's attempted destruction of
all Confucian books; Fu Sheng devoted his remaining days and energies to giving lectures on the
text to a scholar especially sent by the Han emperor to receive and preserve the old man's
wisdom. His pupil appears to the right (outside the area of our plates) seated before a desk,
assiduously recording Fu Sheng's words. He and the servants flanking Fu Sheng belong to con
ventional figure types, by Fu Sheng does not; his grizzled face is individualized, and the withered
and sagging flesh of his shoulders and arms is depicted with a sympathetic understanding that
must be the outcome of careful study of the anatomy of the aged. A famous early portrait of Fu
Sheng, ascribed (probably arbitrarily) to the T'ang-dynasty master Wang Wei,10 is even finer in
this respect, but Tu's is an uncommon achievement for its late period, rivaling Chou Ch'en's
"Beggars" (Pi. 88-89) in its touching portrayal of infirmity and emaciation. The line drawing,
especially in the figure of the old man, is masterly, modulating with great versatility from the
most subtly responsive delineation of the body to a springy calligraphy for the robe.
TWO PAINTERS OF SOOCHOW AND ONE OTHER • 157
3. Two PAINTERS OF S O O C H O W AND ONE OTHER
For reasons that have not yet been determined but will probably prove to be in part economic,
the commercial production of paintings declined in Nanking after the early sixteenth century
and shifted to Soochow, which continued to be the principal locus of the amateur current at
the same time as it now became a professional painting center as well. Nanking was not to
regain its importance as an artistic city until the late Ming period. The important following of
the new style of Tu Chin and the others was not to be in Nanking but among the professional
artists of Soochow. Before turning to them, however, we shall devote the remainder of this
somewhat catch-all chapter to three painters of the sixteenth century who are not easily defin
able by school affiliations and thus have a place here if for no other reason. In fact, however, they
have some real affinities with the foregoing group of painters both in their lives and in
their styles.
WANG WEN The first, and least distinguished, of the three is Wang Wen (1497-1576), a
native of Wu-hsi, a city located a short distance to the northwest of Soochow in Kiangsu Prov
ince. He took the chin-shih degree in 1538 and served in a number of capacities in the govern
ment, including a position as secretary in the Ministry of War in Nanking from 1544. This post
he requested so that he could be near his father in Wu-hsi. Later, appointed to a job in Canton,
he resigned rather than leave his aged parent unattended. After the death of his father he re
tired to the shore of T'ai-hu, or Great Lake, built a villa and garden, and lived out the remainder
of his life there, devoting himself to poetry, calligraphy, and painting and associating with
local scholars and Taoist priests.11
The crucial stage in the formation of his artistic style must have taken place, judging from
his surviving works, during his service in Nanking. A single painting dated 1539, before he went
there, is in a soft, undistinguished style that belongs loosely in the Soochow stylistic sphere,
whereas all the others, dated 1552 and after, betray strongly the influence of Wu Wei and his
followers, whose works Wang must have seen at the southern capital. Some are done in deep,
wet ink and impetuous brushwork that anticipates strikingly the painting of Hsu Wei, to whose
far greater achievements Wang Wen's modest ones can be seen as an important link. Wang also
works, as Wu Wei and Tu Chin did, in a manner that is at the opposite extreme from this, the
fine-line, highly disciplined pai-miao. Between these, within his oeuvre, lies a pleasant manner
that represents Wang's attempt to combine, as so many others had tried to do, the still-popular
themes and compositions of the Che school and its derivatives with the softer, broader kinds of
brushwork popularized by Shen Chou and his imitators. One who had made the attempt, for
instance, was a minor artist named Li Chu, mentioned in the previous chapter as having begun
as a follower of Shen Chou and having later switched to the style of Wu Wei after moving to
Nanking and finding that pictures in that style were most in demand.
A leaf from an album offivelandscapes and figure paintings by Wang Wen (Pi. 74) exemplifies
the same stylistic direction in its drawing of angular forms in blunt strokes and its decorative
(rather than atmospherically descriptive) use of ink values, with the deepest clustered at the
center right to give the composition a loose sense of focus. The strongly vertical-horizontal
emphasis of Che-school landscape persists, as does the Che-school satisfaction with massive,
simple forms and avoidance of complexities of all kinds, formal and expressive. An inscription
on another leaf of the album was written by Wang Wen in Nanking in 1554, during the several
months he stayed there with his father after the two escaped from Wu-hsi when that city was
menaced by Japanese pirates. A collector named Erh-ku brought him the album, which Wang
had painted some years before (probably during his earlier stay in Nanking), to ask for inscrip
tions, and Wang obliged him.
HSIEH S H I H - C H ' E N Hsieh Shih-ch'en (1487 to after 1567) is another sixteenth-century
master who turned Shen Chou's brush manner to artistic purposes that are usually quite different
from Shen's own. He came from a well-to-do family in Soochow and spent his whole life in that
region, except for short trips to other places, living most of the time in a villa on a mountainside
overlooking Great Lake. It is generally assumed from the nature of his output that he was a
professional artist, although there is no clear documentary evidence of this. The Ming-hua lu
accords him heavily qualified praise as a painter who was "very competent in executing screens
and large hanging scrolls which were bold and energetic in manner but didn't escape the affliction
of fussiness." Accounts of his stylistic development state that he first mastered Shen Chou's style
and then altered it by adding features from the tradition of Tai Chin and Wu Wei. The charge
of being "deficient in harmony and sensitivity" commonly brought against his painting, for
example by the author of the Wu-sheng-shih shih, seems justified on the whole with respect to his
large-scale works, which too often are banal in their themes and heavy-handed in their execution,
featuring lumpy land and mountain configurations drawn with nervously shaky outlines. Many
of them have narrative subjects taken from old stories. His smaller hanging scrolls, on the other
hand, and his paintings in handscroll and album form, are quieter and generally more attractive;
hills and cliffs in them are as engagingly earthy as those in late works of Shen Chou,figuresand
buildings have the same thick-line robustness. In the context of mid-sixteenth-century Wu-
school painting, in which (as we will see in a later chapter) sharper modes of brushwork and
deliberately induced formal tensions were prevalent, Hsieh's more relaxed pictures must have
appealed to many people for the same qualities that made them seem unexciting and old-
fashioned to others.
A good example is a small painting dated 1559, "Landscape After Rain" (Pi. 75), which
shows Hsieh in his most amiable mood. Behind the stable, compact composition, the fat tien,
the broad, pale texturing, the simple trees, stands Shen Chou, and behind him Wu Chen
(compare, for the truncated-cone shape of the hill at the left, Wu's "Central Mountain"—
Hills, Pi. 27); but Hsieh's painting is not a simple imitation of either. The composition is
pleasingly symmetrical: a steep riverbank in the foreground is composed of two rotund masses,
with houses seen through the gap between them; a band of fog separates this from the middle
ground, which is similarly bifurcated; two winding rivers provide the simplest indication of
recession into the background, which is marked with high mountains. A fisherman in his boat
and a bridge at the lower left relieve slightly the simplicity of this scheme.
A set of four huge hanging scrolls on paper representing the four seasons, of which we
reproduce the spring and winter scenes (PI. 76—77), are among Hsieh's most impressive
pictures. They must have been intended for the high-ceilinged reception hall of some grand
official or rich merchant, to be hung in rotation according to the season. Like most other large
paintings that were exposed in this way for prolonged periods, they have suffered considerable
damage and undergone some retouching. (For the same reason, Che-school and academic
paintings of the Ming as we see them today are usually darker in tone and in poorer condition
than other paintings of the same age that were hung less frequently and for shorter periods.)
The size and function required significant adjustments in the style; Hsieh's softer manner of
brushwork as used in his small works could not sustain compositions on this scale. The forms
necessarily became bolder and heavier, tonal contrasts more dramatic, and the compositions
took on, more or less unavoidably, a loose-hung and episodic character. Only a few masters
in the later history of Chinese painting could organize effectively and unify such large expanses
of painting surface, and Hsieh Shih-ch'en was not one of them. The viewer's attention moves
from bottom to top as he absorbs the incidents of each picture sequentially, helped by bridge
passages that are not, and do not pretend to be, true formal transitions.
In the spring picture, which is titled "Misty Trees by a Level Lake", one encounters, suc
cessively, travelers on horseback with their servants, a man being sculled across the lake in a
ferry, another reading in a waterside pavilion, some houses, and, at the top, another mounted
traveler crossing a bridge. The pair of horsemen in the foreground has been taken fairly literally
from a winter landscape by the late Sung master Liang K'ai, or else from one by Tai Chin in
which the motif also occurs, or from some other secondary source.
The title of the winter scene is partly illegible because of damage but appears to be the
same as that of a painting done earlier in the century by T'ang Yin, "Clearing After Snow in a
Mountain Pass" (Pi. 93). The composition is also based loosely on T'ang's, or on some deriva
tive of it, presenting ox carts trundling up a valley between steep mountains, a village with a
hostel farther up in the pass, and a Buddhist temple located still higher. T'ang Yin's sensitive
evocation of cold, clear wintry air and stillness is quite lost in this greatly enlarged rendering,
and the forms adhere too strongly to the surface to allow the viewer to be drawn into this
picture as he is into T'ang's. The patterns of vigorously depicted bare trees and the heavy
dotting applied throughout serve to enliven and enhance the decorative effect of the picture.
As with Kano-school painting in Japan, one must take into account the purpose for which the
paintings were intended in order to appreciate their success in fulfilling that purpose.
Hsu W E I One of Hsieh Shih-ch'en's admirers was Hsu Wei (1521—93), a painter who was
also given to heavy applications of ink for striking effects; he wrote of Hsieh:
"In contrast to the other painters of Soochow, who were mostly quite sparing of ink, old
Hsieh used ink copiously, to the great astonishment of his fellow citizens. But those who are
like dwarfs at the theater [i.e., too short to see for themselves] simply follow the crowd [ap
plauding when the others do]. Such people do not know that when a picture is defective, it
isn't the result of heavy or light ink but depends on whether there is sufficient life-movement.
"Chao Fei-yen [a courtesan of the Han period] was slender, and Yang Kuei-fei was stout; the
two ladies were thus quite different, and if their masters had changed places, they would not
have pleased the men. But if a great connoisseur had looked at them from without [objectively],
he would have had no difficulty infindingthem both very lovely. That is the way the ancients
judged calligraphy and, still more, painting.
"Once old Hsieh came to Yueh [Chekiang] and finally reached Hangchow. He gave me four
or five paintings, all very vigorous. Then he went back home, and his work was ended. When I
now look again at this picture, I cannot help feeling sad."12
By the time of Hsu Wei's activity as a painter—his dated works are from 1570 and after,
and most of the others probably also date from the last decades of his life—neither the heavy
landscape style of Hsieh Shih-ch'en nor the conscious craziness of Shih Chung and the other
Nanking artists of that group was still in fashion. Nevertheless, Hsu Wei, who (as can be seen
already in the above quotation) cared little for fashion, worked in the "Nanking unorthodox"
mode on occasion, doing splashy renditions of the once romantic, now conventionalized,
themes. As a genuinely deranged painter who was a native of Chekiang Province, he had a
legitimate claim to this aberrant offshoot of the Che-school style on at least two scores. We will
illustrate his continuation of it, before treating his life and his complex and tragic personality,
with two pictures from an undated handscroll (Pi. 81-82) that are among the few surviving
landscape-and-figure compositions from his hand.
Hsu Wei is not an artist who is customarily discussed in terms of traditions at all, since his
paintings seem, as spontaneous and inspired creations, to claim complete independence from
models and conventions. But neither the image of a man seated pensively on a hillock by a broken
willow tree nor the scene of a traveler on a donkey and a luggage-bearing servant on foot is in
itself especially unconventional in either subject or composition; they gain their effect of
idiosyncratic abandon through the manner in which they are painted. One can imagine Hsu in
ebriated (as he apparently was much of the time, in his late years) producing these pictures
at some drinking party, in the manner of the i-p'in, or "untrammeled class," artists of the ninth
and tenth centuries whose distant descendant he is, seeming to splash and spatter the ink freely,
flourishing the brush as if at random, and astonishing his audience by creating in this improvi
satory way rough approximations of more standard representations.
It is in fact the viewer's familiarity with more careful and conventional rendering of similar
subjects that makes Hsu's pictures readable at all. The overhanging cliff that the travelers ap
proach and the leafy tree bending down over them are in themselves amorphous, but are
registered as familiar images because they had performed the same compositional role, more
descriptively portrayed, in innumerable pictures by Chang Lu and others. Similarly, the cluster
of dabs and scratchy strokes of ink at the left of the seated man is legible as a clump of bushes
only as a result of the artist's having calculated closely the viewer's expectations and given him
the right clues. If one sees this as the work of a madman (as Hsu's works are often seen), one
must add that there is a distinct and analyzable method in his madness and that it has obvious
precedents in the work of such painters as Shih Chung. Hsu Wei's aberrations must thus be
distinguished from, for instance, those of Chu Ta of the early Ch'ing period, another "mad"
painter, whose images are in themselves disturbing and intensely private.
The life of Hsu Wei is unusually well documented and has been the subject of several de
tailed studies.13 We can give only the barest outline of it here. He was born at Shao-hsing in
Chekiang Province, the third son of a retired official who died the year he was born. His mother
was a concubine and was dismissed from the family when the boy was only nine. He was given a
pampered upbringing by his stepmother, Madame Miao, an educated woman whose excessively
affectionate treatment of him expressed her own loneliness and frustration. She died when he
was fourteen, leaving him in the care of his eldest brother. The effect of such a childhood on a
highly sensitive and precocious boy was to implant the emotional disorders that would make a
normal life impossible for him. He mastered quickly whatever he turned to: poetry and essays,
which he was writing by the age of seven; the ch'in, for which he was soon composing works of
his own; operatic singing, swordsmanship, calligraphy, and painting—the last two studied
seriously from the decade of the 1540s. He passed his first-degree examination in 1540 but failed
the provincial examination seven times after that and lived in semipoverty, occasionally making
money as a tutor or a professional writer. During this middle period he composed four strange
and highly original tsa-chii, plays with songs, to which he gave the name Four Cries of the Gibbon,
and also wrote two important studies of the Southern-style drama.14
In 1557 he became secretary to the provincial governor, Hu Tsung-hsien, who was con
ducting a campaign against Japanese pirates. Hsu, versatile as always, not only composed official
documents and memorials to the emperor for the governor to sign but also gave him valuable
advice on strategy. Hu Tsung-hsien was imprisoned in 1562, on suspicion of involvement with
the powerful and unscrupulous prime minister Yen Sung, who was finally overthrown in that
year. Hsu Wei was afraid that he himself would be implicated, and he pretended madness.
How much was pretense and how much a real, unfeigned psychosis is impossible now to say.
In any case, three years later his mental disorders, aggravated by these strains and setbacks,
were severe enough to drive him to attempt suicide by terrible self-mutilation: he drove a nail
into his ear, cracked his head with an axe, and smashed his testicles. Shortly before that he had
composed his own obituary, expecting to die in that year; it ends with this poem, intended
to be engraved on his tombstone:
He survived child disease brightly, and does not deserve to die;—death hurts faith.
Tied in dread, persistently locked in, no need for him to live;—lived for nothing.
Afraid of drowning he jumped in first.
Laugh at Wei, who had a bald head, it is too late to turn him into a monk.
Have pity on his misfortune, once he was an intelligent lad.
He wore the ancient sage's outfit and simulated madness.
Fought time and again to be a normal being.
He was guilty of that,
Now, all is intelligible.15
Friends nursed him back to health, but the following year his attacks returned, and in a
moment of derangement he stabbed to death his third wife. For this he was sentenced to be
executed, but he was spared on the intercession of friends and finally released from prison after
seven years of confinement. During the last two decades of his life he was ill and mentally dis
turbed, and drunk much of the time; although admiration for his writing, calligraphy, and
painting was growing among some of his more perceptive contemporaries, Hsu was seldom able
to turn this admiration to material advantage and continued to lead an impoverished, hand-to
mouth existence. He often repaid gifts of food or clothing with a painting or a piece of cal
ligraphy, but he alienated well-meaning friends by turning on those who tried to help him.
To the man who had procured his release from prison he said: "I was fine in the cage. Now I
am all scattered. You misunderstand me!" He lived during his last years with his two sons,
until the older could stand him no longer and moved out; he died at seventy-three, penniless,
in the household of his younger son's wife.
Tracing the development of Hsu Wei's painting style is hampered by the absence of one crucial
link: a painter named Ch'en Hao, one of a group of Shao-hsing literati with whom he associated
in the 1540s, may have been the most important single influence on him during his formative
period, but no works by Ch'en are known today. Some features of Ch'en's life and artistic
activity parallel Hsu Wei's strikingly. He was another child prodigy and an eccentric who
renounced a hereditary sinecure to lead an independent life; he composed dramatic lyrics and
was probably Hsu's teacher in this form also. He painted, often while drunk, very sketchy
landscapes and flowers in ink, in which he "somehow managed to preserve the disciplines in the
midst of [apparent] sloppiness and abandon." When we add the earlier example of Shih Chung,
we can begin to note a pattern: this manner of painting and the composition of popular songs
and drama were both, in the sixteenth century, manifestations of a chosen life style that was
outside the Chinese norm for educated men.
Another important influence on Hsu Wei's painting was Ch'en Shun (1483-1544), a Soochow
artist who will be treated in a later chapter. Painters whom Hsu mentions with approval in his
writing, besides Hsieh Shih-ch'en in the comment quoted above, include Shen Chou and Tu
Chin.
Among Hsu Wei's surviving works, the unrivaled masterpiece is a long handscroll in the
Nanking Museum; it is signed but bears no date. The painting (Pi. 78-80) is dazzling even in
reproduction and overpowering in the original. It presents, in ink monochrome, renderings of a
succession of flowers and fruits, banana palms, and trees, some of them drawn close-up and filling
the whole scroll. The picture of the peony with which the scroll opens (PL 79) is in a style
obviously derived from the more reserved manner seen in Ch'en Shun's rendering of the same
subject (Pi. 127). It is not, however, made up of brushstrokes of predetermined shape, as
Ch'en's can still be said to be, but of irregular patches of ink wash, laid on as if without con
scious planning. Where Ch'en Shun's flower, for instance, is a concentric formation of shaded
strokes that are allowed to run together slightly but are still distinguishable, Hsu Wei's is a single
ragged-edged puddle of ink, through which darker ink suffuses to suggest the same manifold petal
structure that Ch'en Shun portrays more fully.
The peony is followed by some others of Hsu Wei's favorite subjects—a pomegranate, lotus,
a broad-leafed tree, chrysanthemums, and a melon with its vine and leaves (Pi. 78). In this last,
the brush has quickened and does not pause to describe the joinings of parts of the plant; it is the
continuity of movement itself that binds the image together. Nevertheless, within this method,
Hsu Wei manages to convey some sense of the weight of the melon and the springiness of the
vine. Moreover, his brilliant scaling of ink values is as effective in giving a spatial existence to the
cluster of vines and leaves as some illusionistic technique from the West might be, and preserves
more of the appearance of growing life.
This scroll is one of the small group of Chinese paintings that seem, through some effortless
and near-miraculous transmutation of visual form into brushstrokes, to reconcile ideally the
excitement of ink-and-paper calligraphy with a deep commitment to the object, its underlying
nature and its visual properties. T'ang Yin's painting of a bird on a branch (Pi. 99), in which the
depiction of the branch anticipates Hsu Wei's style, is another. Such paintings seem to have
escaped the process of conventionalization that normally intervenes between a natural image
and its re-creation on paper. Hsu Wei does not by any means abandon the conventions alto
gether, as we could easily demonstrate with other comparisons like the one with Ch'en Shun's
peony, but he violates and expands them selectively, and those he retains are skillfully altered
so that they do not read as conventions but as fresh means of description. He runs together lines
and shapes, avoids the well-established brushwork types, and exploits techniques which, if not
wholly new, were at least uncommon, such as the shaded stroke produced by uneven inking of
the brush, the mottling of a wash area by touching darker ink into it while it is wet, or the
drawing of split-brush lines vigorously over the inked leaves, to trace veining but even more to
charge them with an electric force.
The climax of the scroll is reached in a long passage portraying grapevines (Pi. 80)—or,
another opinion has it, wisteria; the forms are ambiguous enough to allow such an alternate
reading. Two vines, drawn as long, ragged strokes with a semidry brush in thefei-pai ("flying
white") technique of calligraphy, snake across the surface between heavy groups of leaves,
which are painted in powerful overlays of massed ink. The pendant bunches of grapes (or flowers)
are seen between the leaves and vines, depicted with loosely clustered dabs of dilute ink. Over
all this is drawn a network of twisting tendrils.
But to describe the painting in such a way is to suggest a stricter assignment of representational
functions to the brushstrokes than the artist gave them; in fact, the furious momentum of Hsu
Wei's brush and the free splashing of ink go far toward erasing distinctions, and some passages,
such as our Pi. 80, could hardly be recognized in isolation as representing anything at all. As in
Hsu Wei's landscapes and figures (Pi. 81-82), the brushstrokes and splashes of ink work sug
gestively in the context of the whole image, and their suggestiveness depends in part on the
viewer's unconscious memory of similar but more conventionally rendered pictures. The re
lationship of Hsu Wei's grapes to a traditional painting of the same subject is like that of a
highly cursive ts'ao-shu, or draft script, writing of a poem to a transcription of the same text in
the standard script: the viewer remembers the poem and reads the cursive characters, which
are often in themselves nearly or entirely illegible, by referring their kinetic structures to the
more controlled movements that would produce the standard characters. In both painting and
calligraphy, it is the tension between the understood norm and the work as executed that
creates the effect of unconventionality or, in extreme cases as here, of wildness.
Such semicontrolled applications of ink had a long tradition in China, beginning with the
i-p'in ink-splashers of the T'ang dynasty and continuing through the Ch'an Buddhist artists and
others of the late Sung. A painting of grapevines dated 1291 by the eccentric Ch'an monk-artist
Jih-kuan, for instance, could be seen as a precedent for Hsu Wei's grapes;16 in the thirteenth-
century context it seems itself splashy and unconstrained but conveys nothing like the fervor of
Hsu Wei's performance. The conventions from which it departed were tighter, and even a
LIFE PATTERNS AND STYLISTIC DIRECTIONS • 163
radical departure from them carried the style to a point of dissolution that was still far short of
what was possible in the late sixteenth century. Hsu Wei's style probably represents the extreme
point reached in that direction by Chinese painting, at least up to the present century. As such,
it continued to inspire later artists who were inclined by taste or temperament to bold and
extravagant manners of painting. That it can be seen today as a striking precursor of Abstract
Expressionism is therefore no accident, since this modern movement was inspired in turn by
the practice of Far Eastern calligraphers and painters.
It is natural, then, even inevitable, to see Hsu Wei's painting style as an unmediated out
pouring of the painter's deranged mind. In passages such as the grapevines of the Nanking
scroll, the fury of his attack of brush on paper, and what appears to be a kind of automatism in
his barely controlled movements, seem to betray a psychic state bordering on delirium. But an
important qualification must be made when we see Hsu Wei's paintings in the light of twentieth-
century Expressionism: nothing in them quite corresponds, in expressive intent or effect, to the
dissonant colors, cruel distortions, or nightmare-like images by which European Expressionists
sought to exteriorize their internal anguish. The tortured inner life of Hsii Wei, which is the
very content of much of his writing, has not been projected with anything like the same self-
revelatory pathos into his paintings. We may account for this to some degree as a difference in
media, or in the expressive potential to which those media had been developed; the truth
remains that while Hsu's paintings convey a high intensity of feeling, impetuosity, sometimes
violence, nothing in them would in itself necessarily suggest the tragic character of the man to a
viewer who encountered them in ignorance of Hsu's life. Such a viewer could easily, in fact, if he
chose to adopt a psychological approach at all, see the paintings as revelations of a brilliant,
high-strung, but essentially well-adjusted personality. They express a sense of release rather than
of repression, and this may be a key to their effect: as a channel for drawing off some of the
psychic energy that fed his turbulence, painting was probably for Hsii Wei more therapeutic than
symptomatic. One's emotional response on retracing empathically the movements recorded by
one of his paintings is thus a feeling more of liberation than of discomfort.
The quality of the visually and emotionally uncomfortable in Chinese painting is to be ex
perienced more frequently in the works of artists who had, so far as we know, reasonably stable
personalities: Wang Meng, Wen Cheng-ming, Wu Pin, Tung Ch'i-ch'ang—painters who
worked more calculatedly than did Hsii Wei and who chose to include deliberate dissonances
and tensions as part of their calculations.
4. LIFE PATTERNS AND STYLISTIC DIRECTIONS
We have touched a number of times in this chapter and the preceding ones on the correlations
that can be observed between the artist's position in society and the styles in which he works.
Correlations of this kind have always been assumed by Chinese theorists and historians of
paintings, and the assumption underlies much of what they write about particular artists and
schools. Some Occidental writers in recent years, by contrast, have been inclined to deny that
social and economic factors affected art as decisively as the Chinese have maintained. They
have questioned, that is, whether the artist's amateur or professional status is really a significant
determinant of style, or whether the distinction between the Che and Wu schools is a clear
and useful one. We have here another instance of the classical confrontation of the "splitters"
and the "lumpers," as some perceptive person has termed them. Splitters move toward under
standing by recognizing distinctions, by classifying and categorizing; lumpers tend to blur over
the distinctions and to doubt their validity. The reader who has come this far will not need to be
told that the present writer is a confirmed splitter, and so will not be surprised at the discussion
that follows, which will argue that the distinctions are clear and useful—that the correlations
between life patterns and stylistic directions, that is, are real and demonstrable—and will
suggest why this is so.
The lumpers' arguments have often been advanced in defense of Che-school and other pro
fessional artists as attempts to rescue these artists from what the writers believe to be prejudice
and social snobbery on the part of Chinese critics. Those arguments, as far as they go, have much
merit; Chinese critics have indeed often been prejudiced and snobbish, and their bias has
colored their judgments of artists and paintings. The remedy, however, is to try to eradicate the
bias, not to argue that the distinctions are invalid. Otherwise, one makes the mistake of Wang
Shih-chen, quoted in our first chapter, who thought he was praising Tai Chin by saying that a
certain series of paintings by him could hardly be distinguished from the works of Shen Chou.
That kind of praise Tai does not need, and would doubtless disavow.
The distinctions commonly held to affect style in Chinese painting are the ones usually
adduced in other areas of art: distinctions of period, of locale, of the artist's social and economic
status, of his individual character and personality. The first two and the fourth give little trouble;
they are accepted by most people as playing significant parts in setting the coordinates by
which styles are defined. The third is the difficult one. People who would admit the others as
determinants stick at this; they seem to be disturbed, for good, liberal, somewhat confused
reasons, by the idea that style has any clear correlation with the social position of the artist or
the economic basis of his activity, and resist assigning any significance to such distinctions as
professional vs. amateur, or gentry vs. plebeian. This is apparently because such distinctions, as
the Chinese have made them, carry unpleasant associations of class prejudice. Those who object
point out that artists of different classes and types associated with each other, or made oc
casional intrusions into each other's stylistic territory. But after granting these quite unob
jectionable points, one has only to return to the paintings and the accounts of the artists' lives to
find correlations between them that are clear and demonstrable. The question is not whether
these are genuine correlations—of course they are—but rather, how they are to be explained or
accounted for.
In asking this question we come to the crux of the problem. Objections to associating style
with social status, or with amateurism or professionalism, are really directed at the idea that
such a status is like a quality inhering in the artist which has its natural expression in a certain
kind of style. Taking that view seems to argue for the artist's style being predetermined by the
circumstances of his birth and upbringing, and to allow little freedom of choice. But the effect
of these factors on style need not be understood in that way at all. Another kind of explanation
could be offered, one that has considerable currency today in analogous situations, such as, for
instance, the differences in speech, behavior, and other forms of expression between the sexes.
If we were to assemble an exhibition of paintings by Chinese women artists, we could no doubt
find common characteristics in most of the works which are not common to Chinese painting as
a whole, and which we might then proceed to designate as features of "feminine" styles. But if
we were to explain this by saying or implying that the artists painted that way because they were
women—as though, that is, these styles were the natural and more or less inevitable expressions
of the "feminine temperament"—strong objections would be voiced, and properly, since the
idea is indeed objectionable. Instead, one deals with such a phenomenon now, typically, by
pointing out that a person grows up and develops in an atmosphere in which certain expectations
are always present; girls are expected to act like girls and boys like boys, from the earliest age.
The same situation continues into their creative periods as artists, and they tend to conform,
without necessarily thinking about the matter or even being aware of it. Women artists in
China seem to have done this, painting generally in restrained, sensitive manners rather than the
bold and "virile" ones, specializing in orchids or flowers-and-birds or other "suitable" subjects.
In an analogous way, artists occupying certain positions in Chinese society, and functioning on
LIFE PATTERNS AND STYLISTIC DIRECTIONS • 1 6 5
certain economic bases, were subject to corresponding expectations from all around them, and
from inside themselves as well; their choices of styles were affected, within broad limits even
determined, by the sets of expectations that applied to their particular situations. Shen Chou
and Wu Wei, that is to say, could not have changed places, each painting the other's pictures.
Shen worked within a spectrum of styles allowable for someone in his social position, and Wu
Wei within another spectrum allowable for his. Within each there was room for great diversity
and manifestations of individual genius, but each had boundaries outside which the artist seldom
if ever ventured.
The amateur-professional classification and the styles associated with each category are in
considerable part to be accounted for in the same way. The amateur, however proficient he might
be in reality, could not venture too far into the realm of the accomplished technicians and their
Sung-derived styles without risking adverse criticism. Nor could the professional, even when
he was affecting a degree of "amateurish" ineptitude, fail to display behind this his real technical
virtuosity—true amateurishness was for him unacceptable.
It is more interesting, however, to go beyond that broad division, as well as the standard Che-
Wu distinction, to recognize recurrent types among Ming artists—to observe, that is, the degree
of stylistic conformity that exists in the works of artists whose lives follow a common pattern,
such as the one (the "cultured professional" type) of which we have seen a number of examples
in the last two chapters. We will consider that type again as a general phenomenon before going
on to its great Soochow exemplar, T'ang Yin, and two other painters associated with him.
In speaking of established expectations we raise the question of how they are established, how
the pattern is set. For the Ming dynasty and for the type we are considering, it was Wu Wei who
provided the paradigm. Tai Chin was, of course, Wu's predecessor in important features of style
and in some features of his career as well, but Tai seems not to have been properly an artist of
this type. In a search for more distant forerunners we could go all the way back to the eighth-
century Wu Tao-tzu, to whom Wu Wei was likened, and who established basic characteristics
for the type: childhood evidence of a "divine" talent; nonconformity in personal behavior, in
cluding a fondness for drinking; service as a court painter greatly admired by the emperor (i.e.,
dependence on high-level patronage—all painters of the type were of course not court painters);
and a virtuoso manner of working which dazzled his viewers (although we have no direct evi
dence for Wu's style in the form of extant works or even reliable copies, he is reported to have
worked swiftly and is assumed to have adapted into his painting style something of what he
learned from the "wild" calligraphy of his teacher Chang Hsu). This suggests a mode of drawing
somehow akin to the cursive mode of calligraphy, within the stylistic context of his time, some
variety of the "running" manner.
In the Sung period, Liang K'ai might be cited as another model. Heavy drinking and eccentric
behavior are reported of him as well; he served as a court painter but left the Academy volun
tarily; and he moved, in style, between a relatively conservative, even academic manner and one
brilliantly cursive and abbreviated.
The characteristics of this type of artist in the Ming include the following (not all applicable,
of course, to all): lower- or middle-class origins, or family impoverishment; early signs of intel
lectual brilliance; education directed toward civil-service careers, which are somehow aborted;
eccentricity, sometimes to the point of feigned or even real madness; the adoption of nicknames
or studio names containing such words as hsien ("transcendant"), k'uang ("crazy"), or ch'ih
("fool"); participation in popular culture, the drama, songs, etc.; a penchant for elegant
urban dissipation in wineshops and brothels; a willingness to fraternize with, but not to be
subservient to, the rich and powerful. Artists of this type are active in the great cities, Nanking
and Soochow, although they may come from the provinces. In their socio-artistic positions they
might be termed "cultured professionals," since they belong neither with the scholar-amateurs
nor with the more or less uneducated "artisan painters." In style, they tend to move smoothly
from conservative Sung-based styles into virtuoso, cursive renderings of the same, in brush draw
ing of the kinds we have termed scribbly and splashy. Or they may, judged at least by extant
works, practice only the latter varieties of style. They paint figure orfigure-in-landscapecom
positions, often with historical or literary ku-shih themes, as well as bird-and-flower pictures.
Pure landscapes are less common, and they are not ordinarily invited to portray scholar-officials'
retirement villas or farewell gatherings, as the amateur artists are. (This restriction relaxes, as
we shall see, with T'ang Yin.)
Painters who belong to this type and exhibit most if not all of these characteristics include Wu
Wei himself, Hsu Lin, Chang Lu, Sun Lung, Shih Chung, Kuo Hsu, Tu Chin, and Hsii Wei;
others whom we have not treated could be added.17 The works of any one of these might, if
considered in isolation, be taken as direct revelations of the artist's individual personality and
situation in life; it is only when the painters and their paintings are observed as a group that the
recurrences become apparent, bringing us to the inescapable conclusion that even these uncon
ventional masters, whether they were aware of it or not, followed models for their unconven
tionality.
When we read the life of T'ang Yin, in the next chapter, we shall find that it fits neatly the
pattern for this type and shall expect to find corresponding affinities in style. We shall not be
disappointed; T'ang is a more complex figure than the others, both in his person and in his styles,
and only part of his output relates closely to Wu Wei, Tu Chin, and others, but it is a large and
important part. Nor will we be surprised to learn that he visited Nanking shortly before turning
to painting as a career. Conversely, when we read in the last chapter about T'ang's exact contem
porary and friend Wen Cheng-ming, whose life differs from this pattern at virtually every point,
we will expect his paintings to differ accordingly, as indeed they do. We have, in other words,
seen and learned enough of Ming painting already to recognize the types and have our own expec
tations.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Soochow Professional Masters
In considering the Academy and Che-school masters, we noted in passing the existence of local
schools in the early Ming period—those in Hangchow and Ning-p'o in Chekiang Province, as
well as others in Fukien and Kuangtung provinces—within which artists continued to base their
styles on Sung traditions. These schools and artists are largely unnoticed today, although they
may well be responsible for the bulk of the early Ming painting that survives (most of it now
ascribed to earlier and more illustrious masters) and may also have produced, in sheer quantity,
most of the painting of their period, although not the most original or interesting. The Sung, as
the culmination of the early development of Chinese painting and the apogee of the main con
servative tradition, remained through all the later centuries the principal inspiration and stylis
tic source for artists of a conservative bent, still devoted to technically finished and representa
tionally directed styles, or professional artists induced by the demands of their public to adhere
to these still-popular styles, whatever their private inclinations may have been. Such painters,
working in many places and using many derivatives of the Sung models, made up a common,
broad base out of which arose the new movements and individual or local innovations. They were
often regarded with disdain by the literati artists and critics, and often deserved to be. The most
efficacious remedy for the stagnation from which they suffered seems to have been the kind of
lively interaction of artists of different backgrounds that a city like Nanking could offer, and the
chance to see old paintings in a diversity of styles in private collections or in the imperial collec
tion.
From the beginning of the sixteenth century, Nanking was gradually replaced by Soochow as
the city in which the most fruitful intercourse of artists, patrons, and collectors took place. The
greatest collections were by this time located in the Soochow region. Moreover, Soochow's
long-established tradition of literati painting interacted with the professional tradition in
mutually beneficial ways, as had never happened at Nanking, where no comparable school of
scholar-amateur artists had grown up. Throughout the sixteenth century, it is the Soochow mas
ters, both professional and amateur, who accomplish the most bounteous production of excel
lent painting. This chapter will be devoted to the greatest of the Soochow professionals, three
artists active in the early decades of the century.
There is little information available on the earlier phases of the Soochow professional tradi
tion, and very few works to represent it. Nevertheless, we can suppose that a local school of con
servative masters working in Sung styles preceded the painters we are about to consider. A fol
lower of Sheng Mou named Ch'en Kung-fu worked in Soochow in the early part of the century;
167
168 • THE SOOCHOW PROFESSIONAL MASTERS
he was the teacher of Ch'en Hsien (1405-96), who "could do imitations of old paintings so good
they could almost be confused with the originals." Ch'en Hsien was a close friend of Tu Ch'iung,
and in 1488 he was invited to the court in Nanking and "presented with a cap and girdle,"
symbolic apparel that was usually the insignia of the literati. Ch'en is today represented only
by three unpublished paintings preserved in the Tofuku-ji, a Buddhist temple in Kyoto.1 They
are landscapes with buildings and figures—travelers, scholars, courtiers, fishermen—and are
are clumsily organized hack performances that surely cannot show at his best an artist with whom
Tu Ch'iung associated by choice, or whom the emperor chose to honor. Quality aside, however,
they reveal Ch'en to have been a very conservative practitioner of a fine-line manner of painting
who fills his pictures with anecdotal detail. For his rocks he uses a heavy-handed version of the
"axe-cut" manner of Li T'ang, with deep shadows. If these pictures represent fairly the Soochow
professional tradition in the fifteenth century, it would appear to have been largely independent
of contemporary developments in the Che school and to have offered less of creative reworking
of the Sung materials.
1. CHOU CH'EN
Ch'en Hsien's pupil was Chou Ch'en, who was born around the middle of the century and must
have died shortly after 1535, the year of his last dated work. It was Chou Ch'en who raised the
professional side of Soochow painting to a level commensurate with that of the scholar-amateur
side and who was the teacher of its two most renowned figures, T'aiig Yin and Ch'iu Ying. Chou
Ch'en himself has generally been underrated, cast in the shadow of his more illustrious pupils;
but in the light of his works, when these are assembled and surveyed, he stands forth as a painter
of more breadth and power than he has been credited with by either Chinese or Western critics.
Wang Chih-teng, writing his brief account of Soochow painters only about thirty years after
Chou's death, comments slightingly on him: "He was praised by everybody in his time as an
artisan-painter [i.e., for his technique]; the feelings of loneliness arid solitude, the flavor of re
moteness and reserve, were not within his reach." Late Ming sources say that he was "outstand
ing among the academic painters," that his brushwork was "full-bodied and mature," and that
he "excelled especially in the so-called 'running' manner"—this is the manner that we have in
the preceding chapters termed "scribbly."
Chou Ch'en seldom writes more than a simple signature on his paintings; although the Hua
shih hui-yao reports that he could compose poetry, no surviving work bears a poetic inscription
by him. With a single exception ("Beggars" of 1516) he tells us nothing of his thoughts or cir
cumstances at the time he did the pictures, nor, except in a few cases, does he even date them.
All this is quite in keeping with professionalism, but it means that, as with most Chinese pro
fessional painters, we have no solid basis on which to trace the development of his style. If we
suppose (insecurely) that his early works should be in his most traditional and meticulous
manner, the "North Sea" handscroll (Pi. 84) is an ideal one with which to begin.
This painting is composed and executed as faultlessly as any that Ming painting can offer; there
is nothing in it that seems arbitrary, or calligraphically assertive, or the outcome of momentary
whim. Spontaneity is irrelevant to its character, as is, almost, to all but art historians, the fact
that it is a work of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century rather than of the twelfth. It is a
near-perfect replication of the Li T'ang mode as practiced in the Southern Sung period by Acade
my artists, in whose works parallels can be found for the rising diagonal movement of its
composition, its old-fashioned but effective portrayal of raging waters and wind-whipped trees,
its program of building to a climax that centers on the figure of a man sitting at the open window
of his house, looking out into the storm. The ending is made up of massive cliffs and boulders,
List of Plates p.xi 83. Chou Ch'en: "Bidding Farewell at a Brushwood hence." Hanging
scroll, ink and colors on paper, ]20-5 X 5 6 . 8 cm. Nanking Museum.
Go to page: 190
85. Chou Ch'en: "Playing Wei-ch'i Beneath Pines." Dated 1526. Hanging scroll,
ink and light colors on silk, 84.2 X 1 32.2 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
8 4 . Chou C h ' e n : " N o r t h S e a . " Section oj a handscroll, ink and light
colors on silk, 28.6 X 135.3 cm. Nelson-Atkins Gallery, Kansas City.
86. Chou Ch'en: "Enjoying the Dusk." Section of a handscroll,

ink on silk, 28.2 X 105 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.

List of Plates p.xi
87. C'hou C h ' c n : " l ' o e t i c lcclin^s Beneath Pines by a Stream." Dated 1 534. Hanging
scroll, ink and light colors on paper, ] 14.6 X S J . / cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
8 8 - 8 9 . Chou C h ' e n : from "Beggars and Street C h a r a c t e r s . " Dated 1516. Album leaves mounted in a hand-
scroll, ink and colors on paper, 32.9 X 843.9 cm. Honolulu Academy of Art, gift of Mrs. Carter Gait, 1956-
List of Plates p.xi Go to page: 156, 191, 193
A 90. T'ang Yin: "Secluded Fishermen on an Autumn River." Section of a hand-
scroll, ink and colors on silk, 29.4 X 351 cm. National Palace .Museum, Taipei.
T 9 1 . T'ang Yin: "Parting at Chin-ch'ang." Section of a handscroll,
ink on silk, 28.5 X 126.1 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
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92. T'ang Yin: "Poetic Thoughts: Traveling by Donkey." Hanging

scroll, ink on paper. Former Wu Hu-Jan collection, Shanghai.
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93. T'ang Yin: "Clearing After Snow in a Mountain Pass." Hanging scroll,
List of Plates p.xi
ink and light colors on silk, 69-6 X 37.3 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
94. T'ang Yin: "The Noble Scholars" (Kao-shih t'u). Handscroll,
ink on paper, 23.7 X 195.8 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
95. Ch'iu Ying: "Master Tung-lin's Villa" (Tung-lin t'u). Section of a hand-
scroll, ink and colors on silk, 29.5 X 1 36.4 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
96. T'ang Yin: " T ' a o Ku Presenting a Poem." Hanging scroll, ink and
colors on silk, 1 6 8 - 8 X 102-1 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
97. Ch'iu Ying: "Waiting for the Ferry in Autumn." Hanging scroll, ink
and colors on silk, 155-4 X 133-4 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
98. T'ang Yin: "Trees, Bamboo, and Rocks by a River." Pair of hanging scrolls,
ink on silk, 107.5 X 30-5 cm. Courtesy oj Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
100. Detail from Plate 99.
List of Plates p.xi Go to page: 162, 200, 246
99. T'ang Yin: "Singing Bird

on a B r a n c h . " Hanging scroll,
ink on paper, 121 X 26.7 cm.
Shanghai Museum.
List of Plates p.xi
Go to page: 203
101. ( h'iu Ying: "Tin- Golden Valley Garden" (Chin-ku viian). Hang-
ing scroll, ink and colors on silk, 224 X I 30 cm. Lhion-in, Kyoto.
102. Ch'iu Ying: "The Garden of Peach and Pear Trees" (T'ao-li yuan). Detail
from a hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 224 X 1 30 cm. Chion-in, Kyoto.

103. Ch'iu Ying: "Lady in a Pavilion Overlooking a 104. Ch'iu Ying: "Conversation in the Shade of Wu-
L a k e . " Hanging scroll, ink and light colors on paper, t'ung Trees." Hanging scroll, ink and light colors on
89.5 X 37-3 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. paper, 279-5 X 100 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
List of Plates p.xii Go to page: 207, 208

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List of Plates p.xii

105. Ch'iu Ying: "Fishing Boat by a Willow Bank." Hanging scroll,
Go to page: 207 ink on paper, 102.9 X 41.2 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
106. Detail from Plate 104-
List of Plates p.xii Go to page: 207, 208 107. Detail from Plate 105.
•-v .
CHOU CH'EN • 189
through which a stream rushes. A visitor, followed by his servant carrying a ch'in, crosses a rustic
bridge to approach the house. The rocky surfaces are rendered with axe-cut texture strokes,
and shadowed vertical or slanting fissures set up a forceful cadence within the dynamic struc
ture.
The issue of originality seems also beside the point here; in an age of mild scenery and self-
conscious evocations of the past, this must have stood out by its very fidelity to a mode of
painting that concerned itself with sensory experience in a palpable world. Since the use of the
Li T'ang style is not of a consciously archaistic kind and does not intrude on the pictorial aspect
of the painting—which does not depend for its expression, that is, on the antiquity of its style,
but is (like works of Ch'iu Ying to be considered later) art-historically unconscious and independ
ent—no screen of style-consciousness intervenes between the viewer and the scene presented
by Chou Ch'en, and his wind and rain, his waves and rocks and pines and figures, evoke a more
immediate emotional response and appeal more directly to the senses than do the materials of
most Ming paintings. Chou is not using the scenery as a vehicle for the presentation of an old
style, but using an old style that suits his descriptive intent to present vividly a moving scene.
Whatever the date of this work, it exemplifies Chou Ch'en's fundamental commitment to the
landscape manner of Li T'ang, which is evident also in most of his other conservative works. A
professional painter in China typically began in this way by mastering some traditional style, from
which his individual style departed in some definite direction. If we suppose Chou Ch'en to have
followed that pattern, the problem of understanding his stylistic development becomes one of
defining the particular direction he took.
His "Playing Wei-ch'i Beneath Pines" (PI. 85), although it is dated 1526 and thus cannot
properly be used to represent any formative stage in his career, suggests, when juxtaposed with
the "North Sea" scroll, a move into a swifter, more linear, "scribbly" manner. The artist
foregoes the painstaking rendition of textures and detail, nuances of tones and transitions, in
pursuit of the greater fluency and visual excitement of the running-line drawing, which carries
the eye restlessly over flowing surfaces and along continuous contours. The "axe-cut ts'un" of
the more traditional manner, applied as separate strokes that stabilize the forms, are replaced by
veiny networks (reminiscent of Sheng Mou's) that seem to continue the fish-net pattern of the
water onto the land. Pine trees, already attenuated in the "North Sea" scroll, are drawn out to
even greater height, as if by the sheer momentum of their contour drawing. In place of the
angular structure of rocky cliffs, the composition is based on curving and arching movements,
with a few vertical and horizontal elements (houses and farther trees) as points of rest.
The outcome of the running-line manner is the transformation of mass into movement. The
gains, consequently, are in a lighter fabric and a livelier picture surface; the losses are in sub
stantiality of form. Loss of substance was always the danger that accompanied the "scribbly"
manner: used in excess, it made the picture seem facile, too fluid to engage the viewer's tactile
imagination. The undated handscroll titled "Enjoying the Dusk" (PI. 86) is for this reason a
much slighter work than "North Sea"; it is nevertheless an interesting and entertaining per
formance, in which the same landscape materials are reduced almost to pure linearity. Since the
nature of the drawing works against the convincing rendition of space as well as mass, Chou
Ch'en introduces an archaically hard-edged passage of fog between near and far grounds to
compensate for the lack of depth. In the strong, flat design produced by the heavy delineation and
simplification of forms, the painting resembles late works of Shen Chou, and probably reflects
his influence; Shen, whether or not he was still alive when this was painted, was no doubt still
the most prestigious figure in Soochow painting circles, along with his student Wen Cheng-ming.
There is no evidence that Chou Ch'en had any close associations with members of the Soochow
gentry-scholars, as T'ang Yin and Ch'iu Ying did, but he must surely have been acquainted with
them and their painting, especially since his pupil T'ang Yin was a friend of Wen Cheng-ming
from childhood.
Experiments with a calligraphic manner, however, did not represent any true incursion
into the territory of the literati painters, except insofar as an emphasis on brushwork had that im
plication ; this is still essentially a shorthand rendering of an academic style, more akin to the
sketchier works of late Che-school and Nanking painters than to the styles of Chou Ch'en's
scholar-artist contemporaries in Soochow. The undulating lines that serve as contours of hills,
trunks of pines, the curling top of the fog bank, even the thatched roof, all belong to the same
"script style.'' The work lacks the variety in textures and touch that the literati painters pursued
and does not hold one's interest for long.
Some of Chou Ch'en's works seem clearly to be imitations of Wu Wei, who, although
probably not much older, was by far the more famous and influential master in the late fifteenth
century; new directions in painting in Soochow as well as Nanking owe a great deal to him.
Chou Ch'en's "Bidding Farewell at a Brushwood Fence" (PI. 83) shares all the main features
of Wu's style (cf. Pi. 45) to the point where it could almost, if unsigned, be ascribed to him: the
composition divided into large geometric units; the telescoping of space, with layers of depth
compressed against the picture plane, like a scene photographed from far away through a tele
scopic lens; the rough drawing with a broad brush, its tip sometimes divided for the nervous
"split brush" manner of drawing; the activated figures, bending and twisting. The whole effect
of unremitting agitation and harsh power places the painting in the sphere of the late Che-school
styles. It was an effect that the Soochow painters occasionally sought but in the end rejected, pre
ferring generally a greater fluency andfinesseof execution.
The difference in style and taste that separates the Che school from the Soochow masters,
whether amateurs or professionals, is well illustrated by a painting that Chou did in 1534, "Po
etic Feelings Beneath Pines by a Stream" (PI. 87); in his brief inscription on it Chou writes
that it was done in imitation of Tai Chin. This must be the kind of painting to which the Wu
sheng-shih shih refers when, after naming Li T'ang as Chou's principal model in landscape, it
adds: "But he also painted in the styles of Ma [Yuan] and Hsia [Kuei], and in such pictures he was
the equal of Tai Chin." The scale offiguresto setting, and the spaciousness of the whole, with
such motifs as the distinctively posturing pine trees (very different from those of Chou's usual
style) and the dark boulder in the foreground, are features of the Ma Yuan mode which Chou
Ch'en transmits fairly faithfully. By not crowding his picture and by focusing it so effectively on
his two seated figures, in fact, Chou makes it more Southern-Sung-like than most of Tai Chin's;
he knows when to stay his hand, as Tai and his following in the Che school generally did not; and
he escapes banality with a composition that follows the principles of Southern Sung design with
out adhering to any established type—one that achieves originality, that is, at a time when an
original composition in the Ma Yuan manner was all but a contradiction in terms. The central
location of hisfiguresand tallest mountain suggests a typical sixteenth-century axial plan (cf. Wen
Cheng-ming's painting of the following year, Pi. 115); the tall pine trees at the left, with the
hilltop above and stream below, offset this with asymmetry of the Che-school kind, in which the
weightiest elements are aligned vertically on one side; but the diagonals set up by the pine trunks
and branches and the foreground rocks and cliffs, along with the empty area in upper right,
partake enough of the diagonally divided asymmetry of Southern Sung landscapes to produce
quiet reverberations of that style. The empty area, however, which in a Southern Sung picture
would read as deep space, is here irredeemably blank paper; the clues with which the painter
surrounds it are not the right ones to project us imaginatively into depth; this is, in the end,
essentially a Ming painting. The drawing is broad, relaxed, free of the tensions of the Che-school
CHOU CH'EN • 191
brush-work. Here again we can hypothesize that Chou has been drawn enough into the Soochow
scholar-painters' milieu to be affected by their tastes.
The tastes of the literati, however, were by no means always aesthetically salutary; as often as
not they were inhibiting, and the artist who wished to keep his freedom of choice might have
been well advised to stay clear of them. We have already spoken of artists disparaged by the
literati critics for using "coarse" brushwork, i.e., varieties that did not fall within their fairly
narrow criteria of "good" brushwork, or for representing "vulgar" subjects—by which was
meant, much of the time, unidealized portrayals of subjects on a lower social stratum than their
own, which could suggest uncomfortably that the poor were not really so contented and pic
turesque as they preferred to believe. Patrons of art in China, like those in most other times and
places, saw no reason to pay for what offended their eyes. Later collectors responded in the same
way, and pictures thus stigmatized as "vulgar" or "low-class" ran poor chances of survival, not
being considered suitable for inclusion in respectable collections. This kind of posterior censor
ship, we may assume, is partly responsible for the relative poverty of subject matter in later Chi
nese painting as it survives—what has been transmitted, that is, consists largely of what has been
judged worthy of transmission. Other kinds of pictures were painted, but few of them are now
to be seen.
The uniqueness of Chou Ch'en's now famous "Beggars and Street Characters" (Pi. 88—89;
Color PI. 12) is probably to be so explained. No collector lists it in his catalogue; it bears several
laudatory colophons but has come down to us completely unrecorded. Originally painted as an
album of twenty-four leaves, arranged in facing pairs with each leaf containing one figure, the
work is now mounted in two handscrolls and divided evenly between the Honolulu Academy of
Arts and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Chou Ch'en's inscription accompanying the album reads (translation by Wai-kam Ho): "In
the autumn of the ping-tzu year of Cheng-te [1516], in the seventh month, I was idling under the
window, and suddenly there came to my mind all the appearances and manners of the beggars
and other street characters whom I often saw in the streets and markets. With brush and ink
ready at hand, I put them into pictures in an impromptu way. It may not be worthy of serious en
joyment, but it certainly can be considered as a warning and admonition to the world."
Although Chou Ch'en writes of his paintings as pictorial records of what he "often saw in the
streets and markets"—not, that is, what he saw from his window as he painted—the pictures
have the appearance of sketches from life, with an immediacy and particularity that are rare in
Chinese painting, as are the subjects themselves. Beggars had appeared before in Buddhist paint
ings (such as the well known twelfth-century "Arhats Bestowing Alms" by Chou Chi-ch'ang in
the Boston Museum of Fine Arts)2 and occasionally in narrative scenes, but no earlier paintings
are known that treat them as an independent theme. (Street vendors, who also appear in Chou's
series, are of course to be seen in earlier painting, e.g., the toy-sellers of Li Sung and others.)
Chou's final statement that his pictures "can be considered as a warning and admonition to the
world" can be interpreted in several ways. One might relate it to Japanese emaki (picture scrolls)
of the Kamakura period such as the "Diseases" and "Hungry Ghosts" scrolls, which are believed
to be based on the Buddhist doctrines of karma and reincarnation, according to which those born
into a miserable state in their present life are paying for misdeeds in a previous one. By this inter
pretation, Chou would be "warning" his viewers against committing the sins that might bring
them to such an unhappy rebirth. One of the three colophons by later sixteenth-century writers,
however, suggests instead that Chou is making a pictorial protest against the misrule by eunuchs
in his time, by showing its effect on the lives of common people. After the Cheng-te emperor,
Wu-tsung, ascended the throne in 1S05 as a youth of fifteen, his power was usurped by a clique
of eunuchs led by Liu Chin, who drained the country through excessive taxation and corruption
—when Liu wasfinallyoverthrown in 1510, the treasure he had amassed was found to be more
than the total annual budget of the state. The three colophons have not been translated or pub
lished previously, and are of enough interest in conjunction with the painting to warrant quoting
at length here.
The first, dated 1564, is by Huang Chi-shui, who, after noting that Chou Ch'en was especially
famous for figure painting, continues:
"This album depicts the appearances of all the different kinds of beggars whom Chou Ch'en
observed in the streets of the city, capturing perfectly the special aspect of each. Looking at the
pictures, one can't help sighing deeply. Nowadays people come around on dark nights [covertly],
begging and wailing in their desire for riches and high position—if only we could bring back Mr.
Chou to portray them!
"The summoned scholar Wo-yiin brought out this album to show me, and I wrote this im
promptu inscription at the end."
Huang's point is that there are beggars in high places as well as low, in the yamens as well as
in the streets. "Summoned scholar" was a term of respect for one who had been given a post at
court; Wo-yiin (literally "Lying in the Clouds") is a studio name, probably that of an official
named Cheng Kuo-pin.
The next colophon is by the more famous Chang Feng-i, who took his chii-jen degree in 1564.
He writes: "This album presents us with the many aspects of misery—hunger and cold, home
less destitution, infirmity and emaciations, deformity and sickness. Anyone who can look at this
and not be wounded to the heart by compassion is not a humane person. The ping-tzu year of the
Cheng-te era [1516, when the album was painted] was only a few years after the seditious [Liu]
Chin spread his poison; this was the height of [Chiang] Pin's and [Wang] Ning's exercising of
their brutality. I imagine also that the officials and nobles were seldom able to nurture and
succor the common people. Thus this work by Chou Ch'en has the same intent as Cheng Hsia's
'Destitute People': it was meant as an aid to government and is not a shallow thing—one can't
dismiss it as a 'play with ink.' "
Cheng Hsia was an eleventh-century scholar-official-artist who, as is told in a lengthy account
in the official Sung history, depicted in a painting scenes of starvation that he saw in the city
streets during a famine of 1073-74 and showed the painting to the emperor in order to shock
him into taking action to relieve the people's suffering. This is a nearly unique case of a politically
motivated Chinese painting: Cheng Hsia's real target was the prime minister Wang An-shih
(1019-86), whose radical reforms he blamed for the famine. Chou Ch'en, of course, had no offi
cial status or access to the emperor; Chang Feng-i does not speculate about who was supposed to
see, and be moved to effective action by, Chou's picture.
Finally, Wen Chia, the son of Wen Cheng-ming, contributes a colophon dated 1577:
"This painting by Chou Ch'en depicts the appearances of hungry and chilly beggars, in order to
'warn the world.' Huang Chi-shui takes it to represent those who 'come around on a dark night
seeking alms,' while Chang Feng-i compares it to [Cheng Hsia's] picture of the An-shang Gate.
These views of the two gentlemen both have their points.
"In the old days T'ang Yin, whenever he saw a painting by Chou, would kowtow deeply be
fore it and cry 'Master Chou!'— so much was he aware of not being able to equal Chou's divine
wonders. This album could not, I believe, have been done by anyone else; I am in complete
agreement with T'ang Yin's heartfelt obeisance. Such a piece is not to be acquired easily. The
qualities that Huang and Chang point to must be considered beyond the [forms of the] painting—
they are not to be found in formal likeness, or in brush and ink."
Whatever message the paintings were intended to convey, they seem clearly to reflect a sympa
thetic involvement with their subjects, even a kind of clear-eyed compassion, that is a profound
departure from the usual Chinese practice of portraying low-life figures—happy fishermen, care
free wood-gatherers, and the like—so idealized and sentimentalized as to allow no real feeling
T'ANG YIN • 193
of concern for the realities of their condition. Chou Ch'en has not only observed closely, but
seems also to have experienced empathically, the emaciation and brutalization of the people he
paints. They include a demonic street-sweeper and afierce-lookingcharacter who may be an ex
orciser of demons, since he brandishes a paddle that bears an image of Chung-k'uei the Demon
Queller (Pi. 88), a beggar with a hideous grin revealing rows of crooked teeth, and a seller of
snakes for medicinal use or as a delicacy for eating (Pi. 89). Another (Color Pi. 12), wearing
only a loincloth and carrying a broken begging bowl, with a bundle of firewood slung on his
back, is so gaunt and ghostlike as to inspire more awe than pity. His neck seems barely able to
hold his head up.
Although the individualfiguresare to be understood as single and separate, the pairings of them
on facing pages of the original album are formally and psychologically effective, offering similari
ties and contrasts in type, posture, costume, and accessories. The drawing seems, in the Chi
nese context, informal and sketchy, and even after one has noted its adherence to the "scribbly"
manner and precedents in great early masters such as Liang K'ai, one must in the end see it as
basically descriptive, rendering superbly the tattered cloth and unkempt hair in a way that calls
no attention to "brush manner." There is enough deference to established conventions and
techniques to make the pictures acceptable to Chou's contemporaries, along with, more impor
tantly, an eye and a brush that penetrate deeper beneath surface appearance than the Chinese
painter offiguresnormally does. The style, that is, while by no means realistic, conveys a reality
that the artist perceived and felt.
The anatomical understanding that Chou Ch'en displays and the sensitivity and skill with
which he embodies it in his drawing were never to be matched, and scarcely attempted, in later
painting, at least as we know it from surviving examples. Once again, as with "Early Autumn"
(Color Pi. 8), we are faced with the troublesome question of why post-Sung Chinese artists,
when they were capable of such trenchant realism, so seldom chose to practice it. And again the
possibility must be allowed that we have been deprived, by the narrowness of taste of later critics
and collectors, of whole rich categories of painting that existed once but have not been pre
served except in such chance survivals as this.
One can imagine that some, at least, who saw Chou Ch'en's painting in his time responded by
thinking: here, at last, is an artist who gives us pictures that are not of the same old things, who
presents his unhackneyed subjects movingly, who is more concerned with vivid portrayal than
with refined brushwork or stylistic knowingness or Confucian reticence. To recognize this was
to acknowledge the considerable strengths of Chou Ch'en. Unhappily, these were not in China
the strengths that obtained for one a place in the first rank of artists, and Chou was never accord
ed that rank, in his own time or later. His pupil T'ang Yin was esteemed so much higher that,
the story goes, Chou sometimes served as his "ghost painter" ; when T'ang was too busy to keep
up with the demand for his pictures, he would ask Chou to paint them for him, and sign them
and sell them as his own. The story, which is told by both Ho Liang-chiin and Wang Shih-chen,3
has recently been branded apocryphal by Chiang Chao-shen in his study of T'ang Yin; in fact, we
have no evidence either to confirm or disprove it.
2. T'ANG YIN
T'ang Yin was born in Soochow in 1470 and died in 1524; he was thus about twenty years the
junior of Chou Ch'en, who nevertheless outlived him by at least eleven years. His father was a
man of the merchant class, a restaurateur. Such a calling brought no elevated social status but
enough material prosperity, evidently, for him to start his son, who showed early signs of bril
liance, on a good education. This was continued under the guidance of Wen Lin, the father of
Wen Cheng-ming, who introduced his young protege to the gentry and literati society of Soo
chow. T'ang was able in this way to meet Shen Chou, Wu K'uan, and the great calligrapher Chu
Yiin-ming. He was a profligate youth, who spent too much of his time and money on drinking and
debauchery; but after a terrible two-year period in 1493-94, during which he lost successively
both parents, his wife, and a beloved younger sister (the last by suicide), he grew soberer, shut
himself away from temptations, and studied for the examinations.
In 1498 he took first place in the provincial examination in Nanking (Wen Cheng-ming also
tried it and failed), and the following year he traveled to Peking with a friend, a rich playboy
named Hsu Ching, for the metropolitan examination, the most important of all. In this, T'ang was
again favored to take first place, and perhaps he would have; but he and Hsu Ching fell under
suspicion of having received advance information on one of the questions from the chief ex
aminer, and Hsu, under torture, confessed to having bribed a servant of the examiner. T'ang Yin,
although probably innocent and the victim of envy, returned to Soochow under the cloud of
scandal and had to give up hope of a bureaucratic career. At this time he wrote a long, moving
letter to Wen Cheng-ming, in which he protests his innocence: "I have been, as it were, ad
justing my cap under a plum tree, and I deserve to be suspected of stealing plums and must there
fore suffer the consequences!"4
Back in Soochow, T'ang returned to his old life of drinking and dissipation; he also took up
painting for a living. He had learned painting earlier, and around 1500 he began studying under
Chou Ch'en. By 1 SOS he was so successful that he could build himself a villa on the Peach Blos
som Embankment near the city, where he entertained friends such as Chang Ling, also a painter,
and Chu Yiin-ming. In 1514a prince of the imperial family named Chu Ch'en-hao, who was plot
ting a rebellion, enlisted T'ang in his cause; but T'ang, after accepting a position on Chu's staff,
became aware of the danger into which he had fallen and pretended madness until the prince
finally allowed him to leave. In his late years he was famous, even notorious, in Soochow for his
libertine ways, as well as for his painting, which captured the popular fancy of Soochow society
in this heyday of the city's cultural life.
He was surely one of those whom Frederick Mote was thinking of when he wrote, in his study
on the history and culture of Soochow: "There is no doubt that in traditional cities such as
Soochow in Ming and Ch'ing times, freer expression of individual eccentricities was possible,
and deviant behavior escaped some of the surveillance and restriction that the village would have
imposed. In Soochow, with its great wealth, pleasures became more varied, the idle could con
gregate, imaginations stirred each other. . . . Many of those who lived on the fringes of Soo-
chow's moreflamboyantdissipation were the immortals in scholarship, in thought, in literature
and the arts."
We cannot, of course, be sure just how dissolute or eccentric T'ang Yin really was, and how
much belongs to a cultivated image or posthumous legend. In any case, he himself helped to feed
the legend—while still in his forties he wrote of himself as "old, mad, and stubborn," and his
letters and poems contain many passages that tend to confirm the popular image of him. It is
also true, however, that he continued at the same time to occupy himself with serious scholar
ship and literary production. Testifying to this is a letter written to a friend some time late in his
life, in which he lists the books he has written—works on painting and calligraphy, on fortune-
telling, on the annual festivals of the Wu region, on old and modern history.5 Unfortunately,
none of these seem to have survived.
He continued an off-and-on friendship with Wen Cheng-ming, who, with his more severe
temperament, disapproved of T'ang's behavior and probably of a good deal of his painting as
well. Late in life, T'ang turned to Buddhism but never seems to have adopted wholeheartedly
the austerities it advised. His relatively early death, at the age offifty-four,was said to have been
the result of his overindulgences.
It will be apparent even from this brief account that T'ang Yinfits—infact, is one of the prime
Ming-period examples of—the pattern outlined in the foregoing chapters, that of the artist who
T'ANG YIN • 195
is educated for an official career but fails somehow to pursue or achieve one and who takes to
painting instead as a means of winning for himself a respected and economically secure position
in society. Typical features for this artistic type are present in his case: intellectual brilliance as
a child, a leaning toward profligacy and attachment to the pleasures and entertainments of the
popular urban culture, a flirting with madness or pseudo-madness (which was one of the few
acceptable ways of placing oneself outside normal social obligations), friendships and associations
with people in both high and low positions. The stylistic analogue to this mobility (or ambiguity)
of social status, we have suggested, is a repertory of styles that cuts across, or rather attempts
with varying success to cut across, the distinctions and semibarriers that separated scholar-
artists from professionals. In actual practice, the pattern tended to manifest itself in a relatively
wide stylistic range that moved from a base in some careful and conservative manner through
more calligraphic and cursive versions of essentially the same manner, into extreme positions
that in their time seemed distinctly unorthodox and, in their departures from normal expecta
tions, were suited to the life style of this kind of painter as the styles of the established scholar-
gentry artists were to theirs, or the painstaking performances of the ' 'artisan painters'' to theirs.
T'ang Yin eminently exemplifies this part of the pattern as well; and with him, the crossing of
social and artistic boundaries was more than usually successful. He seems often to be demonstrat
ing that he can equal or best the masters of both camps, amateur and professional, on their own
terms, in a single picture that combines the strengths of both.
Chiang Chao-shen, author of the most recent and thorough study of T'ang Yin's stylistic
development, believes that T'ang began painting in the manner of Shen Chou (this first period is
represented, in Chiang's view, by a handscroll in the Palace Museum, Taipei), then adopted the
Li-T'ang-derived manner of Chou Ch'en when he turned professional around 1S00. To this ac
count of his early development should certainly be added the strong influence of Wu Wei, Tu
Chin, and other Nanking masters. He came to know their styles and, at least in Tu's case, the
painter himself, during his stay in that city in 1498-99. Of T'ang Yin's works that show clear
influence from these Nanking artists, none is safely datable to his early period; but two paintings
dated 1S01 and 1504 by his intimate friend and drinking companion Chang Ling, obviously in
the Wu Wei manner,6 are evidence that that manner was surely known to T'ang Yin, and pre
sumably practiced by him, in the years immediately following his trip. T'ang may well have
been instrumental in introducing these Nanking styles, and the life style associated with them, to
Soochow art circles and may also have been inspired by the models he encountered in Nanking
in the creation of his own artistic persona. (We should note here in passing that Chang Ling
appears to be another example of our type: he passed his chu-sheng examination but was "de
prived of his degree, because of his mad ways"7 and became a hard-drinking "bohemian"
artist.)
A handscroll titled "Secluded Fishermen on an Autumn River" (Pi. 90) is a particularly fine
example of T'ang Yin's most finished and conservative style, as he learned it from Chou Ch'en.
The passage we reproduce, near the end of the long scroll, depicts a scene on the river shore,
where a retired scholar has built an elegantly rustic retreat; he relaxes on his veranda, engaged
only in a silent interchange of gaze with a friend in a boat who fishes, no more purposefully. A
third figure, a visitor, arrives at the right, leaning on his staff. All are attended by servants. The
images, the attitudes, the occupations, are all ideal and conventional; we are back in the familiar,
escapist world of the scholar-recluse whose disengagement from all disturbing realities becomes
the very theme of art. As an artist, T'ang Yin, for all the bitterness of his own experience with the
harsher world outside the charmed circle of the Soochow gentry-scholars, never ventures to
disrupt their complacency, as he might have done by following the lead of Chou Ch'en's "Beg
gars" scroll—or if he did (we must add, as always) the paintings have not survived.
The landscape setting of his scroll is sleek and tidy; even the fallen leaves produce no clutter
but serve only as scattered symbols of autumnal decay, meant to arouse a feeling of pleasant melan
choly. The clarity and order that distinguished Li T'ang's style in the Sung period, and Chou
Ch'en's works in that style, persist in the works of T'ang Yin—in which, however, the order
is more artistic than natural: firm boundaries set off each object from the rest, and ink washes of
varying value add further visual distinctions. Ts'un, or texture strokes, serve more to separate
light and shadow than to describe surfaces. In some places they are dry, applied with a "squeezed
brush" held obliquely to the surface; elsewhere they are laid on more broadly and wetly, with
the spaces left between the pale, overlapping strokes reading as highlights—a technique used
also by the Che-school artists and sometimes by Chou Ch'en.
One of the most striking features of T'ang Yin's individual style is his way of animating his
structures of earth and rock by making their component masses lean and twist; his compositions
are thus typically more dynamic than those of Shen Chou or Chou Ch'en. This is true of "Seclud
ed Fishermen" ; it is even more marked in a hanging scroll titled "Poetic Thoughts: Traveling
by Donkey" (Pi. 92). The quatrain inscribed on it by the artist reads (translated by T. C. Lai):8
A failure, taking my books, I go back home
Riding a mule again up the blue hills.
Tired with a world of wind, frost, and dust,
I greet my wife, poor but not destitute.
Chiang Chao-shen believes that the "failure" must be T'ang's disastrous trip to Peking, and that
the last line refers to his second wife, whom he divorced in 1S00; he would date the picture,
accordingly, to that year. If this interpretation is correct, the figure on the donkey, ascending
the mountain path toward a house in a ravine at center right, would be T'ang himself. Going be
yond Chiang's reading, one might take the feeling of instability and insecurity in the landscape,
sharply in contrast with the amiable world of "Secluded Fishermen," as an expression of T'ang's
emotional state. The trouble with such an interpretation is that the qualities of the picture which
one is tempted to explain in this way are common to too many others, from different stages in
his career, that cannot similarly be taken as autobiographical.
The composition is based on a monumental type but is not made up of massive, stable forms as
a typical Northern Sung work of the type would have been; everything in T'ang Yin's picture is
calculated, on the contrary, to induce a feeling of perturbation. The separation of light and dark
is stronger and more sudden, with patches of deep shadow placed rhythmically throughout the
composition. Local texturing is replaced by a system of lines and long strokes of wash that cover
all the forms, following and emphasizing their larger movements. These movements are carried
from one mass to the next, pushing and curving in a surging motion, first in one direction and then
in another, up along the central ridge to the peak, which thrusts leftward and ends. This dynamic
mode must be seen as totally free of the influence of Shen Chou, perhaps even as a reaction against
his stabilizing, broad-line drawing and more firmly rooted forms. T'ang Yin seems to have opted
for excitement.
Many of T'ang's best surviving paintings are, like this one, virtuoso performances, highly
active compositions that are executed in swift, sure drawing. As the paintings of Shen Chou
or Wen Cheng-ming reflect the temperaments of those artists, so do T'ang Yin's reflect his: bril
liant, mercurial, often impatient. If their styles seem ideally suited to quiet contemplation, his
often aim rather at impressing, entertaining, even dazzling the viewer. We speak, of course,
only of a strong tendency within his works, and in noting it do not mean to deny that he could
also paint, when he chose to, as part of his amazing versatility, landscapes of a soberer character,
whether simple lyrical scenes or complex, monumental compositions. The latter are well rep
T'ANG YIN • 197
resented by a superb series of "Landscapes of the Four Seasons" in the Shanghai Museum,9 the
well-known "Whispering Pines on a Mountain Path" in the Palace Museum, Taipei,10 in which
an imposing and basically stable design is made to incorporate outbreaks of the "scribbly" man
ner with no loss in power, and the smaller "Clearing After Snow in a Mountain Pass" (Pi. 93),
which Chiang Chao-shen believes to be a work of the artist's late thirties.
This painting admirably combines grandeur of scale with sensitivity of execution. The season
is early winter, when brown leaves are still on the trees but snow lies lightly on the ground.
Ox carts heavily laden with bales of rice approach the end of their day's journey, a village in
the pass which is overlooked by a Buddhist temple. The mood is quieter; instead of thrusting its
masses forcibly upon the viewer by shading them heavily and filling the entire picture space
with them, as does "Traveling by Donkey," the painting opens hollows of space in the central
area of the composition and encloses them with terrain masses that curve into depth at the sides,
carrying the eye in a winding progress from foreground to farthest mountain peak. Similarly
hollow-cored compositions had been painted in the Sung and Yuan periods, especially by artists
of the Kuo Hsi tradition (cf. Hills, Pi. 35-36). Here, it is certainly Sung painting that is evoked,
not least in the restraint of the drawing.
Among T'ang Yin's essays in the running-line manner—a manner in which he is rivaled, for
sheer technical mastery, only by Chou Ch'en at his best— "Parting at Chin-ch'ang" (Pi. 91) is
outstanding. It belongs to a special subject category, the "parting at the shore" scene, of which
other Ming examples (by Wang E among others) are known. These were used as farewell pres
ents and follow an established convention, always depicting a riverbank where the subject, the
recipient of the picture, is shown bidding farewell to a party of grieving friends and admirers be
fore boarding the boat that will carry him away. In the present painting, it is a man named Cheng
Ch'u-chih who is departing, as T'ang Yin writes in his inscription, for an audience with the em
peror in Peking. As T'ang arranges his composition, this properly focal scene occurs almost as
a postscript to an elaborate landscape with buildings and figures that seems irrelevant to the
ostensible theme—except insofar as T'ang is conveying the painfulness of leaving Soochow by
contrasting its rich and busy scenery, in the first part of his scroll, with the sparse concluding sec
tion, which represents the world beyond its walls. The artist wisely recognized, we may sup
pose, that Cheng Ch'u-chih would rather own a full-scale T'ang Yin painting than one that con
centrated on the farewell group and hence treated the landscape setting, as was normal in such
paintings, in a perfunctory way. One aspect of T'ang's superiority to the ordinary artist-for-hire
is illustrated here: even when producing an occasional painting, he treats his task as a fresh artis
tic problem and creates a work that can stand on its own merits, without reference to its origi
nal purpose.
As the scroll opens, a section of the Soochow city wall is seen through bare trees, enclosing a
pagoda and a large multistoried building, all no doubt immediately recognizable to people of
that time and locale. The Chin-ch'ang Gate, from which the farewell party has issued, is not
shown; it may be farther to the right, outside the boundary of the picture. In the foreground is
a cluster of small houses and boats, busy with figures. A long bridge joins this area of land to an
island, or promontory, from which Mr. Cheng is preparing to embark. The well-wishers stand
in a crowd with their hands clasped before them; Cheng faces them, in the same respectful
posture; the boatman behind him is hauling up the sail, suggesting imminent departure.
All this is drawn with a vivacious freehand virtuosity, in line that is constantly moving, as if
impelled by sheer calligraphic buoyancy, but which nevertheless delineates clearly, even though
almost casually, all the materials of the picture. That this effect of spontaneity can be sustained
evenly in rocks, trees, hills, even buildings and bridges (which nowhere settle into orthodox
straight-line patterns) and in the tiny figures, is one aspect of the effortless tour-de-force quality
of the painting; another is the total absence of routine and repetitive patternization from those
passages where lesser artists, including T'ang Yin's numerous imitators, fall into just that trap:
the texturing of the rocks, the lacy profusion of bare branches and twigs.
These examples do not by any means exhaust T'ang's versatility as a landscapist, but they are
all that space allows. A like versatility is to be seen in his figure compositions, for which he was
equally famous. In these, the influence of Wu Wei and Tu Chin is present along with that of
Chou Ch'en. T'ang probably met Tu Chin in Nanking in 1499; one of his poems is dedicated to
Tu, and on at least one occasion he inscribed a painting by him. T'ang Yin painted several
garden scenes with figures and furniture that closely resemble Tu's works not only in general
type but also in particular motifs and features of style. His "T'ao Ku Presenting a Poem" (Pi.
96) is one of the best of these. The figures of T'ao Ku and the courtesan Ch'in Jo-lan are set
back behind a huge garden rock and a row of banana palms, which form the lower two sides
of a parallelogram; two screens and the tree branches form the upper, the whole containing the
figures within their private environment, allowing the viewer to look down upon them but
screening them even from the boy servant at the lower left, who blows the fire in the stove to
warm their wine. All this makes them a bit remote, as befits people from the past.
T'ao Ku (903-70) was a scholar-official in the late Five Dynasties period and the early Sung;
he was sent by the first Sung emperor as an emissary to the Southern T'ang state, which at that
time had not yet capitulated to the Sung (as it would do in 975). There he met the courtesan
Ch'in Jo-lan and, mistaking her for the daughter of the posthouse keeper, composed a lyric for
her. The next day the ruler of the Southern T'ang gave a banquet for him. T'ao acted unbending
and unapproachable until Ch'in Jo-lan, who was in fact a court entertainer, was brought in and
began to sing his song, whereupon he became aware of his blunder and was overcome with
embarrassment.
The painting depicts the two in a garden, on the night preceding the banquet; a candle burns
on an elaborate stand between them. T'ao, beating time to the music with hand and foot,
gazes at her with obvious design; the poem is already taking form in his mind. Beside him are
his brush and a roll of paper and an inkstone on which the ink is already rubbed. Ch'in Jo-lan
sits on a stool facing him, playing the p'i-p'a, an instrument associated (like the samisen in Japan)
with women entertainers and prostitutes, love affairs, popular songs, and drinking parties—just
as the ch'in was associated, by contrast, with scholars, quiet and meditative solos played on
mountain terraces, and high-minded communion between friends.
The picture is surrounded by an aura of delicate associations: refined eroticism, historical
allusion, amusing incident. The agreeable looseness of the style, theflowingoutlines and surfaces
of the rock and tree, the relaxation of the figures, are in keeping with the mood of the scene
it describes, a formal equivalent for transient feelings rather than permanent principles. Pictures
of "singing girls" or courtesans, and of their romantic liaisons with scholars of the past, are
conspicuous among T'ang Yin's works, and the girls may well have been favorite subjects for him
as an artist as they were favorite companions for him in his own life. They were also painted by
artists of the Nanking group, such as Wu Wei (cf. PI. 48), and T'ang's paintings of them are close
in style to the Nanking examples. (Both T'ang Yin and Ch'iu Ying were also apparently famous,
or notorious, in their time and later for erotic scenes or "spring pictures''; unfortunately, none
seem to have survived in originals, although copies or imitations and woodblock-print repro
ductions to which their names are attached are to be seen in some number.)
T'ang Yin's handscroll titled Kao-shih t'u ("The Noble Scholars," Pi. 94) is an excellent
example of his most cursive, "running" style. According to a colophon by Wang Chih-teng writ
ten in 1594, now partially lost but recorded, the scroll originally consisted of four paintings in
the manners of four great Sung-dynasty masters of figure painting: Li Kung-lin, Liu Sung-nien,
T'ANG YIN • 199
Ma Ho-chih, and Liang K'ai. It was owned by the same Wu Hung-yu who as he was dying in
1650 tried to burn Huang Kung-wang's "Dwelling in the Fu-ch'un Mountains"; T'ang Yin's
scroll was thrown into the fire with Huang's, and only the last picture, the one done in imitation
of Liang K'ai, was saved. T'ang's own inscription, now also lost but recorded, contained a ded
ication to a Mr. Ching-ch'iian.
Our present-day understanding of the early-thirteenth-century master Liang K'ai is based
chiefly on a few works preserved in Japan which have for centuries been venerated as Ch'an
(Zen) Buddhist paintings and thus as works of a serious, semireligious character. Liang's repu
tation in China in the later centuries was very different: he was remembered as a somewhat ec
centric painter who drank a lot, called himself Liang the Wastrel, left the Imperial Academy
abruptly after a period of service in it, and liked to paint sketchy, facetious pictures. Works that
go under his name in Chinese collections, most of them spurious, agree with this image better
than with that of the revered Ch'an master of the Japanese, and it is the Chinese image that T'ang
Yin must have had in mind when he painted "The Noble Scholars."
The title, together with the nature of the picture, makes one suspect satire or irony; the
scholars are not so much "noble" as pompous, with their upturned faces and strutting de
meanors. The servant boy at the beginning, thrusting his pinched, overeager face farther forward
than laws of balance would strictly allow, seems a similarly ironic portrayal of servility. The three
scholars have gathered in a garden for a session of composing poetry and writing calligraphy,
and all their implements and materials are spread out: a mat on which are lying a brush, inkstone,
copybook (probably an album of rubbings from a stone engraving of some masterwork of
calligraphy), and roll of paper, other rolls on the ground and on a stone table which also holds
an incense burner and a vase with a flowering branch. All the necessities for cultivated creativity
are at hand (an earlier portion of the picture, now missing from the original but preserved in a
copy, includes the stove that will warm their wine).
On the surface, then, this is another glorification of the scholar-gentlemen in their pursuit of
rarefied aesthetic experiences. An artist of another kind (such as Hsieh Huan, cf. Color Pi. 2)
would have presented it in a straightforward and straight-faced way. T'ang Yin declines to take
the scene quite seriously and, far from concealing himself in his style, asserts a creative freedom
of his own to match that of his Noble Scholars: his painting is not an impersonal report of
something outside the artist but is itself like a work of calligraphy, a poem, a piece played on the
ch'in, similarly conveying momentary mood through modulations and nuances of touch; it is a
direct and personal communication that places artist and viewer on an equal plane by proclaim
ing its independence from objective description and by demanding that the viewer create the
scene himself from the visual data that T'ang Yin supplies. The sharp tipping of the ground, ac
complished in large part by an audaciously two-dimensional drawing of the mat and implements,
helps to hold the picture on the plane of calligraphy; in particular, the mass of rocks, trees, and
grass at the top, boldly cut off by the upper edge of the picture, is rendered in nondescriptive,
amorphous strokes—one can scarcely distinguish the tree from the rock. T'ang Yin, like Chou
Ch'en, has learned much of this from Wu Wei and his Nanking followers but performs with
greater ease and less tension, in keeping with the generally more relaxed brush-manners favored
by the Soochow artists.
T'ang Yin's versatility extends to the other, lesser branches of painting such as flowers and
birds, bamboo and rocks, and blossoming plum branches, all of which he practiced at times. A
picture of "Trees, Bamboo, and Rocks by a River" exists in three versions, all incomplete, of
which the best is now cut into two hanging scrolls (Pi. 98). u Once more the possibility must be
raised that we are dealing with pieces of what was originally a screen—the similarity in composi
tion to the screen depicted behind Ch'in Jo-lan in Tang's "T'ao-Ku" picture (PI. 96) is striking.
Judging from this and other examples of screens that can be seen represented in paintings of
different periods, the scenes chosen for portrayal on them were usually spacious, opening into
distance with the aim of seeming to expand the space of the rooms or enclosures in which they
were placed. This may be part of the reason why T'ang Yin's picture, for all the brilliance of its
calligraphic brushwork, is no flat, semiabstract performance like the typical scholar-artist s
rendition of similar scenes (cf. Hills, Pi. 85) but is painted with what is, in the sixteenth-century
context, a naturalistic concern for atmosphere, space, light and shade, and a sense of vigorous
growth that is not merely a reflection of vigorous brush movement.
T'ang Yin's visual (rather than schematic or formalistic) approach to his subject, integrating
luxuriant vegetation with an earthy and airy environment through highly adept handling of ink
gradations and supple brushwork, relates his style to that of his contemporary Chang Lu (cf. Pi.
55). Chang, however, attains this height less often than T'ang, who is, moreover, a far more in
ventive master, seldom following established conventions or repeating his own. For another
aspect of the painting, the constant, restless movement that inspires all the forms, a closer
parallel might be seen in the work of Sheng Mou (Hills, Pi. 23), whose drawing seems similarly
a manifestation of a controlled, artistically channeled nervous energy.
The successful reconciliation of naturalistic values with the abstract ones of brush and ink, in
a way that entails no serious sacrifice of either, is a far rarer phenomenon in the later centuries
of Chinese painting than it had been in the Sung, and when it occurs (in exhilarating, sometimes
breathtaking moments) it is less often in the works of either the proper scholar-amateurs or the
truly conservative or academic professionals than in paintings by those in-between artists whom
we have been trying to characterize as a group, without meaning to classify, since they elude
classification: Wu Wei, T'ang Yin, later Hsu Wei, still later a few of the Individualist masters
of the early Ch'ing, with Tao-chi supreme among them.
If one were obliged to choose a single painting from among the surviving works of T'ang Yin
that best exemplifies that ideal achievement, it might be his "Singing Bird on a Branch" (Pi. 99).
The intense lyricism of the picture is captured also in the couplet that T'ang has inscribed in the
upper right:
The mountain deserted, everything still, no human voices heard.
With the last drops of a spring shower, the songs of a roosting bird.
The leafy branch, still wet after rain, extends upward from the bottom of the tall composition,
tracing an S-curve for most of its length and springing up at the top in a long, taut twig. After
one has apprehended the branch and bird as a unified image, it is all the more impressive to note
that T'ang Yin, far from relying on ready-made types of brushstrokes to depict them, has
scarcely repeated a stroke in the entire picture. His brushwork in this small space runs through
virtually the entire possible range of tonal depth, wetness or dryness, momentum, shape, without
in the end giving any impression of calculated virtuosity or variety. It seems rather to adapt
with the utmost responsiveness to the essential character of what it is describing, conveying the
stiffness of the branch or the suppleness of a twig, a sinuous vine or soft cluster of leaves.
This informal, ad hoc quality in the drawing contributes to a feeling of exuberance that builds
upward as the brush movement quickens and reaches its climax in the bird, which lifts its head
and opens its beak to pour forth song (detail, PI. 100). The bird, a myna, is painted in slightly
shaded but unbroken ink wash, except for the eye, beak, leg, wing tips, and tail feathers; but in
the consummately conceived shape of this simple patch of wash is implicit the structure of a
vital organism. T'ang Yin's technical mastery is in the service of a poetic mode of apprehending
reality; together they raise the picture to the plane of the Sung-dynasty masterworks of ink
monochrome painting.
CH'IU YING • 201
3. CH'IU YING
T ang Yin was an educated and cultured man forced by circumstance to become a professional
artist; the third of this group, Ch'iu Ying, was a professional artist who found himself by
circumstance associating closely with educated and cultured men, with profound effects on his
painting. He was younger than the other two, born probably in the last decade of the fifteenth
century; he may have been dead, and in any case was inactive as an artist, by 1S52, since a
colophon written in that year by the writer and calligrapher P'eng Nien (1505-66) remarks that
his paintings "are no longer to be obtained."12 His active career cannot have covered much
more than thirty years. He came from a humble family in T'ai-tsang, near present-day Shanghai,
but moved to Soochow while still young. There he worked as a painter's apprentice, no doubt
producing decorative pictures as well as, quite likely, copies of old paintings intended for sale as
forgeries.
His talents came to the attention of Chou Ch'en, who took him on as a pupil. Chou, and
perhaps T'ang Yin, whom Ch'iu must have known, probably introduced the young man to some
of the eminent literary men of Soochow, including Wen Cheng-ming and his circle of friends;
Wen and others, such as the poet-calligrapher Wang Ch'ung (whom we will encounter as a
painter in the next chapter), inscribed many of his paintings. By the 1530s he was established
as a successful and admired artist, with a studio and students of his own. He not only could paint
near-faultless landscapes in the Li T'ang manner already popularized by Chou and T'ang, but
also gratified the art-historical tastes of his patrons by doing superlative copies and imitations
of old works that they owned or had seen.
During his later years he lived with several collectors as a "painter in residence," a common
arrangement in China by which the painter was lodged, entertained, and supported by a patron,
who received paintings in return. Ch'iu lived in this manner for several years at the mountain
retreat of a minor official named Ch'en Te-hsiang, several more with a certain Chou Yii-shun
in nearby K'un-shan, and, most importantly of all, a period with the greatest collector of the
age, Hsiang Yiian-pien (1525—90).
Hsiang, the youngest son in a wealthy family, had tried for an official career but, after failing
in the examination, devoted himself to managing the family estate at Chia-hsing and to building
up a huge collection of art.13 Among his business interests was a pawnshop, and he probably made
some of his acquisitions by giving loans against objects of art that were forfeited for nonpayment.
The famous pieces of painting and calligraphy that he owned must have numbered many hundreds,
perhaps thousands; he left no catalogue, so we have no way of determining the number, but a
great many of those to be seen today bear his seals. The collection attracted art lovers from far
and near, including some of the Soochow connoisseurs.
An album of six landscapes after old masters and a picture of narcissus and apricot flowers,14
both painted by Ch'iu Ying for Hsiang in 1547, place their association around that time; how
long it lasted is unknown, but it was long enough for Ch'iu to produce for him hundreds of
paintings. Many of these were copies or imitations of older works that Hsiang owned. Ch'iu's
extraordinary facility for re-creating antique styles, and his familiarity with classic modes of
composition, doubtless went back to his period as apprentice in some Soochow commercial-
painting atelier but was immeasurably refined by all his later opportunities to see, study, and
copy the paintings in Hsiang's and other collections. Such opportunities placed him in a funda
mentally different art-historical situation from that of the ordinary professional artist, who had
no such extensive access to the past history of his art; where others normally followed a tradi
tion, the one to which circumstances of time and place assigned them, Ch'iu Ying found a
diversity of traditions open to him.
Mere skill in copying and imitating never earned a painter much esteem in China (contrary
to a misconception common in Western writings, which should be laid to rest once and for
all, along with the notions that an excellent copy was considered as valuable as the genuine work,
that originality was not especially valued, etc.). If Ch'iu had been a simple copyist, his reputation
would not be what it is today; he was much more than that. The long landscape handscroll now
in the Freer Gallery of Art, for example, painted for Hsiang and designated in Ch'iu's own in
scription as a copy after a scroll by Li T'ang,15 is in fact executed in a style distinctively of its
time and would never be mistaken for a Sung painting; nor could the superb "Spring Morning
in the Han Palace," based at least in part on passages from old paintings of palace ladies, be
confused with the works of Chang Hsiian or Chou Fang, the T'ang-dynasty originators of the
tradition, or with ordinary copies after their works.
At the same time, it must be granted that one comes away from viewing Ch'iu's works with
an impression of a transcendental talent and technique that constantly required inspiration from
outside; the imagination that creates individual worlds of form, the forceful personality that
stamps itself on everything it conceives, are not present. Chinese critics would explain this lack
by pointing to Ch'iu's illiteracy, his exclusion by birth and upbringing from the literary culture
that shaped their sensibilities. Their charge is in itself not entirely without foundation—Ch'iu
probably was illiterate, or close to it. He has written no poetic or other lengthy inscriptions on
any of his works; they bear, at most, a signature and a simple dedication, with perhaps the
name of the old master imitated ;16 it was even said (and this probably was unfounded) that he
could not write at all and that his signatures were inscribed by others, especially by Wen Cheng
ming's eldest son, Wen P'eng (1498-1573), who was a noted calligrapher.
Chinese prejudices can be noted here once more—proficiency in literary composition and
calligraphy are obviously not requisites for being able to paint well. But it seems nonetheless
justified, and not prejudiced, to mark in Ch'iu Ying's works a quality of art-historical un
consciousness and naivete, and to account for this by suggesting that Ch'iu had the wrong back
ground for developing the kind of style-consciousness that the scholar-artists possessed—and the
wrong professional status, probably, for manifesting it even if he had it. Ch'iu painted what his
patrons wanted, and did it wonderfully well, (Looking at his versatile re-creations of a variety
of styles, one has the feeling that if Hsiang Yiian-pien had given him a few Italian Renaissance
portraits to study and the materials he needed, with a day or two to master the medium, he
would have been capable of producing on demand a creditable portrait in Quattrocento style of
Hsiang as a Florentine nobleman.) He and his works raise the complex and fascinating question
of internal and external motivations in artistic creation, to which we will return after consider
ing a few of the paintings.
A good introduction to Ch'iu's painting, since it displays so many of his particular strengths,
is a large, majestic landscape titled "Waiting for the Ferry in Autumn" (PI. 97), which bears
seals of Hsiang Yiian-pien and was probably painted for him. Resemblances to the conservative
works of Chou Ch'en and T'ang Yin are obvious. Like them, Ch'iu Ying avoids the overtly
expressive devices of Southern Sung painting and its Che-school followers to return to the
more objective mode of Li T'ang; or, for some elements, perhaps even further back, to Northern
Sung masters. The composition isfirmlyand stably put together, amply spacious and symmetrical.
(Each of the vertical halves separated by the seam down the center could stand as a satisfying
picture, and broad compositions such as this were often turned into two pictures in just that
way, since the two would have a greater combined market value than the single large picture.)
The tree groups, treated as decorative silhouettes and colored with rich red, yellow, and green
for an autumnal appearance, diminish systematically in size and grow paler in tone to reinforce
the recession into distance, which is flat and visually convincing.
The narrative elements of the picture are as neatly distributed as the rest and are similarly
graduated in size and specificity as the eye moves back through successive stages of depth. A
CH'IU YING • 203
gentleman sits on the bank at the lower left with his servants beneath tall trees, awaiting the
return of the ferry. It is to be seen across the water; two other men are about to disembark and
make their way to a house almost hidden by trees, where their host is no doubt preparing for
them a literary banquet or drinking party. Moving back across the river we see a houseboat
near a spit of land in the middle ground and, on the far shore, houses among leafy trees. The
farthest hills are encircled by fog; otherwise, everything in the picture is viewed with telescopic
clarity. The hills are smooth, with well-defined, continuous surfaces broken by only a minimum
of texturing and treated with washes of pale ink and warm color for a surprisingly illusionistic
rendering of late-afternoon sunlight and shade.
The painting, like others by Ch'iu, is difficult to discuss, easy to describe. Its meaning and
expression lie almost exclusively in pictorial values: the touch of autumnal melancholy inheres
in the red-leafed trees, the placid mood in the proportioning and placing of the forms, and one
does not associate either with the temperament of the artist. Ch'iu Ying, here as elsewhere, is
strangely invisible as an artistic personality. His contemporaries mention him without telling us
anything about him, and his paintings tell us little more, apart from testifying to his unsurpassed
technical proficiency. His subjects, and the characterizations of them, seem to pertain more to
the experience and vision of his patrons than to his own. Another question arises, then, with
respect to this remarkable master: how can an artist of such dazzling attainments conceal himself
so completely ? One looks in vain for some small outbreak of individuality, even a turn of line
that betrays the person behind the brush.
Two large, signed, superb pictures of figures in garden settings by Ch'iu Ying are among the
treasures of the Chion-in, a Buddhist temple in Kyoto (Pi. 101-102). Both represent historical
gardens.
The Chin-ku Yuan, or Golden Valley Garden (Pi. 101), belonged to Shih Ch'ung, who lived
in the Western Chin period; he made a fortune in the shipping trade at the end of the third
century A.D. and built the garden in Golden Valley in the outskirts of Loyang as a place to hold
lavish entertainments. The awnings over the walkways were of rich brocades from Szechwan,
and trees of coral and other rare and beautiful objects assembled from far places stood around
the house and garden. Guests at his parties were set to composing poems, and those who failed
to complete theirs in the allotted time drank three tou of wine as penalty.
In Ch'iu Ying's picture the party has not yet begun—here as in his "Waiting for the Ferry"
he chooses the moment of arrival, touching perhaps deliberately on the viewer's memories of
occasions when the excitement of anticipation surpassed that of the event. Shih Ch'ung stands
at the entrance, receiving a guest. Flanking the steps are two dwarf trees and, to the left and
right of the door, two trees of coral in antique bronze vases. A quartet of girl musicians waits
nearby, and girl servants carrying trays of food and wine can be seen walking along the covered
walkway farther back. In the garden are fantastically eroded T'ai-hu stones, brought from the
great lake of that name in Kiangsu Province and set up like sculptures. Peacocks and peonies,
emblems of wealth, complete the sumptuousness of the scene. Beyond the flowering shrubs in
the distance one sees the top of a frame for hanging a swing, put there for the recreation of the
ladies of the household (gentlemen in China do not swing). The tone of the sky and of the whole
picture is of dusk, within which the white and colored pigments glow.
The figure groups and other elements of the composition may have been taken, like the figures
in the companion piece and in other works of this type by Ch'iu, from some old model. Such
groups were preserved in sketch copies or tracings called Jen-pen, which artists made, as the
opportunity arose, for later use. Collections of these were passed from master to pupil and
were a principal means of transmission of motifs and designs. Few old examples are preserved,
but a collection of them in album form by a seventeenth-century follower of Ch'iu Ying named
Ku Chien-lung, now in the Nelson Gallery, Kansas City, is probably representative of such
collections, being a small repertory of the favorite school motifs. A painting inscribed as being
"after" some old master was probably based in most cases on fen-pen taken from a work ascribed
to him. (This was true at least for the professional artists; the amateurs were likely to do their
"copies" from memory, and accordingly these works are usually looser approximations of the
originals.)
Ch'iu Ying made copies of all the Tang and Sung paintings to which he had access, the
Wu-sheng-shih shih tells us, and kept them as kao-pen ("draft sketches") to use later in his
finished paintings. His imitations of old styles were thus so exact, it comments, that they could
be confused with the originals. As noted above, this is true only of Ch'iu's most conservative
and derivative works, some of which may indeed be mixed in among the masterpieces from the
early periods that are most esteemed today. In any case, the comment reveals the nature of
Chinese estimations of Ch'iu's works. The Wu-sheng-shih shih describes them as "beautiful and
elegant, full of delicate and graceful detail. The brushwork was so refined that the pictures
looked as if they had been carved in jade."17 This is a good description of the truly lapidary
character of Ch'iu's most polished productions, of which the Golden Valley Garden is certainly
one. We might also, however, find the profusion and variety of jadelike detail in it a bit excessive
and agree with Wang Chih-teng who (borrowing a phrase from the pre-Han work Chan-kuo ts'e)
charged that Ch'iu, "when painting a snake, could not refrain from adding feet."
The other painting, of which we reproduce a detail (Pi. 102), represents the T'ao-li Yuan, or
Garden of Peach and Pear Trees, in Ch'ang-an. The name suggests an orchard, but the peach and
pear, like the prunus or blossoming plum, were grown and enjoyed in gardens more for their
flowers than for their fruit. During their brief season of blossoming the master of the garden and
his guests would hold parties beneath the trees to contemplate the flowers, drink wine, and
compose poems. (The custom is still followed, loosely, in cherry-blossom season in Japan.) At
one such memorable gathering in the T'ao-li Yuan, on an early spring evening in the eighth
century when T'ang culture was at its glorious peak and Ch'ang-an was its center, the poet Li
Po wrote a famous prefatory essay to the series of poems that he and the others had composed,
and this is probably the occasion that is the theme of Ch'iu Ying's painting.
Li Po, whose dependence on alcohol to inspire his poetry is well known (his contemporary
Tu Fu remarked that "one gallon produces a hundred stanzas") may be the figure holding a cup
seated at the right of the table. Servant boys and women are pouring, warming, and carrying
more wine to ensure the unimpeded flow of poetic sentiments. The blossoming trees, enough in
themselves to intoxicate the senses, frame the scene. But where another artist might have
painted them as great masses of bloom, with thefiguresseen between them, to convey something
of the experience that one has in a grove of flowering fruit trees of being enveloped in a fragrant
cloud, Ch'iu Ying separates figures from trees with expanses of empty ground and is sparing in
his distribution of blossoming branches. The postures of the seated poets similarly suggest their
inebriation only delicately.
It is Ch'iu Ying's artistic method, whether or not conscious, to depict the physical elements
that make up or contribute to an experience or mood, without attempting to induce that ex
perience or mood directly in the viewer's mind by any of the abstract means of expression that
were by this time so highly developed. He presents the materials of his picture meticulously,
spacing them on the surface for optimum legibility, drawing them with a technical finish that is
unmatched in Ming painting, but remaining always coolly aloof from them, as though they
concerned no more of his being than his artist's eye and hand.
The great gardens of Soochow, laid out and built in the Yuan and Ming periods and in many
cases still to be seen there, were not only the settings but also the subjects for much of the best
CH'IU YING • 205
and most typical work of Soochow poets and artists. In themselves private pleasances from which
everything harsh and upsetting could be expelled, they translated easily into an art that had the
same character and aims. If the paintings seem two-dimensional transcriptions of the gardens, so
do the gardens exist as physical embodiments of the paintings and the ideals they express and as
midway realms between art and life. Early sixteenth-century Soochow, like Fujiwara-period
Japan, represents one of those rare moments in human history when a society, or a privileged
segment of it, succeeds in structuring itself so that people within it can live as though they were
inhabiting works of art. The garden was situated just on this blurred boundary between real and
aesthetic modes of being. It stood equally, and again like the work of art, for the interpenetration
of present and past, since it could span the centuries (one might compose a poem or paint an
album in the very garden that Ni Tsan and Chao Yuan had once portrayed, the Shih-tzu-lin or
Lion Grove Garden) and could be made (or imagined) to reincarnate gardens of the past that were
known to all within the circle through literary accounts or paintings.
We have no clue to the identity of the patron for whom the Chion-in pair were executed; he
may have been a scholar-official who inherited such a garden with the family estate or a rich
merchant who had built his own as a visible proclamation of new wealth and who saw himself
as a latter-day Shih Ch'ung. Whoever he was, his ideals are embodied by Ch'iu Ying in paintings
as unproblematic and perfectly controlled as the gardens themselves. Prototypes for the composi
tions can be found in Sung-period paintings depicting garden banquets and parties, and some of
those were based on even earlier models. The serving women in both pictures are obviously
descended from the court ladies who appear in paintings by or after Chang Hsiian and Chou Fang
of the T'ang period, whom Ch'iu is said to have imitated.
But finding sources for motifs in Ch'iu Ying's paintings is an academic exercise that scarcely
affects our appreciation of them, since they are, with a few exceptions (one of which we will
consider later), quite devoid of deliberate archaism, conscious stylistic allusion, or any variety of
primitivism. The absence of any of these qualities that the scholar-artists were inclined to mix
into their styles as added flavorings, and the absence as well of conscious individuality of style,
sets Ch'iu's works apart from theirs, even when the subjects are similar and the styles superficial
ly so. The difference, then, is not so much in awkwardness and skill as in the greater or lesser
degree of self-consciousness, or style-consciousness, in the artist that is manifested in the paint
ings. The scholar-painter, when he invoked old styles, was likely to exaggerate their archaic
features, or introduce subtle distortions, to signal that his use of the past was a knowing one, not
simple imitation. He put his quotations, that is, within quotation marks, with the same double
implication that they carry as punctuation: that the user is quoting from some earlier source and
that he stands off or dissociates himself slightly from what is expressed. Ch'iu Ying does neither;
his uses of the past, and his dissociation from his subjects, are of other kinds. He remains always
on the plane of total seriousness, from which the archaistic works of the scholar-artists are often
removed by touches of irony or wit (cf. Wen Cheng-ming's "Red Cliff," PI. 117).
In addition to pictures of gardens and villas of antiquity, Ch'iu Ying was sometimes called on
to do idealized portrayals of his patrons' "rustic retreats." We have already seen examples of
this special Chinese genre in the works of scholar-artists of the Yuan and Ming periods; it was
not ordinarily among the categories of subjects that the professional artist was commissioned
to undertake—none are to be found, for instance, among the works of the Che-school masters
or of Chou Ch'en—and the existence of such pictures by Ch'iu Ying may be another indication
of the degree of esteem in which he was held by the cultivated gentry and literati of Soochow.
The prestige attached to such a picture, when the owner of the villa later brought it out to show
his guests, normally depended less on its artistic excellence or success in describing the place
than on the fame and stature of the painter—anyone with money could hire a competent limner
to portray his summer home, but not everyone could have had Wang Meng or Shen Chou as an
obligated guest. Presumably it was through association with Wen Cheng-ming and his circle
that Ch'iu obtained such commissions.
Outstanding among his works of this type is the handscroll titled "Master Tung-lin's Villa"
(Pi. 95). It was painted, according to his dedication, for a certain Master Tung-lin, who may be
an imperial censor named Chia Ting (1448—1523). It exists in at least three versions, and the
question of which if any of them is Ch'iu Ying's original remains to be investigated thoroughly.18
The one we reproduce is the better of two in the Palace Museum, Taipei, and could be from
Ch'iu's hand, although certain weaknesses in some passages suggest that it too may be an ex
cellent copy by one of his followers. In its present form it is accompanied by only two inscrip
tions, poems written by T'ang Yin and his friend Chang Ling. The other version in the Palace
Museum bears a more informative colophon, consisting of two poems with a prose note, written
by Wang Ch'ung in 1532. It is likely, however, that this colophon belonged originally to a
different picture, done for another patron. Even so, it is worth quoting for the information it
gives on how such a scroll came into existence: "These are two poems that I composed for Mr.
Wang Ching-chih's Garden Dwelling. Now he has engaged the painter Ch'iu Shih-fu [Ying] to
depict it in a small handscroll. Ching-chih, in a leisure moment, brought out the scroll to show
me and asked me to inscribe it; so I wrote out the two poems to follow the picture."
Wang Ching-chih was Wang Hsien-ch'en, a Soochow scholar-official who, like Chia Ting, rose
to the position of imperial censor. He "engaged" Ch'iu Ying, who is designated a hua-shih
(limner, artist-on-hire), to do a picture of his garden dwelling; the word rendered as "engaged"
means to hire as a workman. Even in this brief note, then, Ch'iu is implicitly relegated to the
status of artisan-painter.
The "Master Tung-lin's Villa" scroll opens with a small waterfall in a rocky ravine and con
tinues with a passage in which leafy trees enframe two servant boys who are engaged in their
customary chore, warming the wine. Master Tung-lin sits in the doorway of his house, talking
with a guest. Another stream runs past the house at the left, crossed by a plank bridge over
which another servant approaches, carrying a package. The ending is pure Southern Sung: a slant
ing foreground rock announces a change of key; a river appears, revealing that the whole scene
has been set on its shore; the bank recedes into mist and, paralleling it and echoing the recession,
a grove of peach trees in the distance, through which a band of fog floats. The whole composition
is exquisitely calculated, moving from constriction to expansion, from dense textures to smooth,
from the sterner symbolism of weathered rock and twisted shade trees to the exuberance of
spring freshets and blossoming fruit trees. Once more, the style is virtually beyond discussion;
one can neither find serious fault with it nor find much to praise, apart from the same near-
perfection of technique within a highly derivative mode that we have seen in Ch'iu's other
works.
The looser manners of brushwork, the bold calligraphic gesture, "scribbliness," and other
modes of drawing that exploited the spontaneous effects of relaxing kinesthetic control over the
movements of the brush—none of these seems to have held much attraction for Ch'iu Ying. No
doubt this is in part a matter of his temperament and training, but it has to do also with the late
ness of his main period of activity, relative to Chou Ch'en's and T'ang Yin's: by the second
quarter of the sixteenth century, the restrained and highly refined taste of Wen Cheng-ming had
permeated Soochow painting, and those styles of the preceding decades that had washed over
from Nanking and the late Che school were mostly out of fashion. Ch'iu Ying's alternatives to
the sleek manner that he shares with Chou and T'ang generally do not take the form of excursions
into activated calligraphy, like theirs, or indeed of stylistic adventurism of any kind. He follows,
always comfortably, in ways well prepared by others, whether they are his contemporaries or
masters working centuries before, taking no chances and making no mistakes. He does excellent
CH'IU YING • 207
pai-miao drawing, landscapes with palaces and figures in the chieh-hua ("boundary painting")
tradition, blue-and-green landscapes in the archaistic-decorative mode developed by Ch'ien
Hsiian, and paintings in the mild and poetic manner used by Wen Cheng-ming and Lu Chih, in
which pale washes of cool and warm color are added to brush work of extreme finesse.
We will see excellent examples of this last style by Wen and Lu themselves in the following
chapter. Ch'iu uses it in a number of his works, probably under their guidance and certainly
under their influence; one of the finest is his "Lady in a Pavilion Overlooking a Lake" (Pi. 103).
The composition clearly depends on the common Che-school type in which the main elements
are aligned vertically up one side and spaced horizontally on the other, a type also used occa
sionally by Chou Ch'en and T'ang Yin. But the resemblance goes no further. The tight interlock
ing of strongly defined units that is typical of the Che-school productions is inimical to Ch'iu's
aim, nor does he use this compositional plan as a stable frame within which to generate dynamic
tensions.
His drawing is everywhere unassertive, reticent, in keeping with the poignant but understated
theme of his picture. It is a theme that might equally have been expressed in a poem—and had
been, innumerable times. A woman stands at the balcony in the open upper story of a house by
the river, looking out over the water. As any reader of T'ang poetry (and this meant any educated
Chinese) would know immediately, she is thinking of her absent husband or lover and watching
for his returning boat. But, just as the composer of a classical quatrain might reserve this image
for the third line, using the opening distich to establish setting and mood, Ch'iu removes his
house and melancholy lady to the middle ground, beyond a stretch of water, a steep cliff, a flat
bank on which grows a screen of fully foliated trees, and a wall.
All this is arranged and portrayed with cool precision, leaving one no doubt about the place
ment of each part; the sharp cutting of the bank and the uncompromising horizontality of the
wall, its top and bottom edges drawn as if with a ruler, seem to reflect the painter's scorn, which
he shares with Wen Cheng-ming, for blurred transitions and softening of any sort. From the
house to the far distance the river stretches unbroken until a few spits of land with stubby trees
enter from the left, and low hills a little farther back close the recession, except for the dim
silhouettes of still more distant hills. The evocation of loneliness through physical remove is
worthy of Ni Tsan, a master to whom Ch'iu Ying is not ordinarily likened.
The Sung styles that Ch'iu re-created for his patrons usually extended no further down through
that dynasty than the mid-twelfth century, as represented by the followers of Li T'ang and by
Chao Po-chii. Beyond lay the romantic realm of Ma Yuan and Hsia Kuei, which seemed separated
from sixteenth-century Soochow by some fundamental disjuncture of sensibility. On the rare
occasion when Ch'iu Ying ventures into that realm, the outcome is more akin (to use a musical
analogy) to the post-romantic restraint of French composers of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries than to the full-blown richness of the Germans or Russians.
Ch'iu's "Fishing Boat by a Willow Bank" (Pi. 105), one of his few hanging scrolls in the ink-
monochrome medium, is also one of his very few in the Ma-Hsia mode. In it we can observe the
artist making use of selected aspects of that mode without compromising his basic approach,
which remains cool and controlled. His adaptation of the diagonally oriented composition is es
pecially interesting. The placement of thefishermanand his boat establishes the viewer's vantage
point with unusual firmness: one looks at the boat downward and to the left, and the drawing of
it, besides being far more structurally descriptive than was usual by this time in pai-miao drawing,
is meticulously consistent with that perspective (see detail, Pi. 107). Consistent with this, in
turn, are the flat plane of the water and the outline of the riverbank. Countering the diagonals
set by all these, in good Southern Sung fashion, is another that is felt rather than seen, between
the fisherman and a pair of small ducks near the opposite shore, above him and to the right. Of
the willows, only the tops enter the picture space, where they catch the wind, together with
the wave-ruffled surface of the water and one tassel of the fisherman's cap, for a delicate impres
sion of summer breeziness. That Ch'iu Ying achieves this effect while yielding nothing of his
propensity for the explicit over the suggestive is remarkable: the curving strokes of the willow
tendrils do not simply form patterns but describe growing forms; the bank is rendered with a
calculated semivagueness that in fact implies nothing beyond what is there; thefishermanis drawn
with the anatomical accuracy of Chou Ch'en's beggars.
Around this time, the very tall hanging scroll, intended for display in high-ceilinged reception
halls, becomes popular and continues so through the seventeenth century. Examples exist by
Wen Cheng-ming, Hsieh Shih-ch'en, Tung Ch'i-ch'ang, and others to be treated in the suc
ceeding volume. Two of the most impressive works of Ch'iu Ying are on this scale, over nine
feet tall. They are the surviving pieces from a set of four corresponding to the seasons and were
no doubt meant to be hung in rotation throughout the year. Collector's seals of Hsiang Yiian
pien on the paintings again indicate that they were probably painted for him.
The one we reproduce (Pi. 104) is the spring scene of the set and is titled "Conversation in
the Shade of Wu-t'ung Trees." Two men are standing beneath the broad-leafed trees (Firmiana
simplex) near tall rocks, beside a rushing stream which is the main indicator of the season. The
other scroll extant from the set, the summer scene, is titled "Passing a Summer Day Beneath
Banana Palms."19 The standing figures in the "Conversation" (detail, Pi. 106) are not unlike
T'ang Yin's "Noble Scholars" (Pi. 94) in their costumes and staid postures; the difference,
and it is fundamental, is that Ch'iu Ying takes them perfectly seriously, as he does all his sub
jects. They clasp hands with calm dignity, as if meeting or parting, their faces impassive. The
swift-flowing water and the rocks echo the human theme, suggesting the passage of time and
endurance, two aspects of friendship; the enclosure formed by the rushing stream, the trees,
and the shadowy undersides of the rocks suggests the mood of leisurely conversation in the cool
shade more than do the figures themselves. Unlike most of his scholar-artist contemporaries,
Ch'iu manages the tall composition without resorting to mannerist attenuation or episodic piling
of incident; the focus is maintained, the structure clear. Seen in detail, and in relation to Ch'iu's
other works, the execution of the picture seems fluid, even dashing, with taut, resilient brush-
lines for the figures and split-brush contours for the rocks.
Ch'iu Ying adds to his signature on the accompanying summer scene a phrase meaning "play
fully drawn," a conventional disclaimer of seriousness which he must have meant to apply to the
whole set. The phrase was often used by the amateur artists on their small, improvisatory "ink
plays," to which it seems appropriate. But to apply it to four huge, highly finished works seems,
on the contrary, anomalous; one does not dash off such paintings as these. In fact, they show no
evidence at all of improvisation, or even of much real spontaneity. The compositions must have
been carefully planned, and each stroke in them plays its role faithfully. Within Ch'iu's whole
oeuvre, these two scrolls do indeed represent his nearest approach to the impulsive, semi-
controlled drawing of artists who were truly able to relax the discipline of their brushes; but
it is not very near, and Ch'iu Ying remains always in full control of his means and his forms,
always the master painter. What he demonstrates here is not that he too can relax, but that
these broader, more brilliant manners of brushwork are not completely incompatible with his
totally disciplined way of working.
From the time of Wen Cheng-ming, in keeping with the literary and poetic orientation that
he gave to Soochow painting, pictures based on old stories and poems appear with greater fre
quency among the works of the major and minor Soochow masters. These are not straightforward
storytelling pictures like, for instance, the early Ming Academy masters' depictions of ku-shih,
"events of antiquity" (cf. ShangHsi's "Lao-tzu Passing the Barrier," PI. 6). They wereindepend
CH'IU YING • 209
ent landscapes, in which the narrative elements were often inconspicuous; the audiences for
whom they were done knew the stories well and needed only minimal clues. Often they ac
company transcriptions of the texts, written out by noted calligraphers of the time such as P'eng
Nien and Wen P'eng. Themes of a meditative or melancholyflavorwere preferred; the favorites
were T'ao Yuan-ming's "Peach Blossom Spring" story, Su Tung-p'o's "Red Cliff Ode," and
Po Chu-i's "Lute Song" (P'i-p'a Hsing).
The last was written in 816 when Po Chu-i (772-846) was serving in a lowly post in exile at
Chiang-chou in Kiangsi Province. He had come to the shore of the river to see off a departing
friend. Hearing the sounds of a p'i-p'a being played in a nearby boat and recognizing the style of
playing as that of the capital, Ch'ang-an, Po plied the performer with wine and persuaded her to
sing for them, later inquiring and learning that she was an old courtesan who, when her period
of youth and popularity was over, had married a tea merchant and moved to this hinterland.
As he listened to her and remembered his own years in Ch'ang-an, he realized poignantly how
much he missed the good music and companionship of which his exile had deprived him.
Of the hundreds of paintings based on this poem that are still to be seen, one by Lu Chih,
painted in 1554, best matches the nostalgic tone of the poem with a pictorial style that evokes a
similar complex of feelings (Pi. 121). Ch'iu Ying's "Lute Song" handscroll (Color PI. 9) is less
evocative, more explicit, like others of his works. In spite of the literary subject his scroll re
mains squarely in the realm of painting: where Lu Chih recalls delicate sentiments transmitted
by the ninth-century poet, Ch'iu Ying recalls the archaic blue-and-green landscape manner as
transformed by Ch'ien Hsiian and others in the Yuan dynasty (cf. Hills, Color Pi. 1). A T'ang
derived style was, of course, proper for a picture to accompany a T'ang poem; but this is more a
matter of history than of any real correspondences between pictorial and literary styles.
In Ch'iu's hands, the archaistic manner becomes more abstract and schematic than ever be
fore, the waves more insistently patterned, the mountains more geometrically striped and
segmented. Colors are conventionally applied, with blue clearly separated from, green, and
conventional, hard-edged bands of fog cut across the middle distance. As in the archaic originals,
everything is equally weighted and the composition is not made to direct attention to the boat
with the p'i-p'a player, which is the proper narrative focus of the scene. But, as noted above, the
storytelling aspect of the picture is almost peripheral; what is most impressive, in the end, is its
sheer decorative beauty. Once again we may recall descriptions of Ch'iu's painting as "jadelike"
and remember that Soochow was famous for handicrafts such as embroidery, lacquer, and carving
in a variety of materials, with all of which this painting has qualities in common: rich surface,
decorative flatness, great precision of workmanship.
It is, however, a painting, and demands to be judged and understood as a painting, not as a
craft production. Such a spaceless and schematic offering from an artist who could, when he
chose, create illusionistic effects more skillfully than anyone else in his time raises questions of
intent. We have encountered already, in the works of Wang Meng and others, deliberate de
nials of space for effects of oppressiveness or disjunction from the physical world, or the reduc
tion of natural form to pattern for similar ends. But the expressive neutrality of Ch'iu Ying's
picture makes it difficult to regard the painting as the outcome of any expressionist urge.
Archaistic pictures we have also seen, by artists such as Chao Meng-fu who explore old styles
partly out of devotion to the past and partly in search of new creative possibilities as alternatives
to those generally current in their time. But again, neither of these motivations seems quite to
fit the character of Ch'iu Ying's work. A good assumption might be that he was provided by one
of his collector-patrons with some antique model and commissioned to paint a scroll in a similar
or related style, a work that would gratify an antiquarian taste. It is this situation and its conse
quences that we meant to suggest in writing earlier in this chapter about internal and external
motivations: the involvement with the past that underlies the painting, in this case, would be
external, more that of the patron than of Ch'iu Ying, to whose own taste such primitivist awk
wardness and stiffness cannot have been entirely congenial. His use of the manner is accordingly
detached and coolly objective; the commitment is not thoroughly his own.
The resemblance of this and others of Ch'iu's archaistic pictures to Ming-dynasty forgeries of
antique paintings, however, suggests another explanation for some aspects of the style: it may
well be that Ch'iu, who was very likely employed as a forger himself in his early years (and also
later, for all we know), is not only referring to a truly ancient style, but also—perhaps primarily
—giving us a more accomplished and refined rendering of a style that was normally used, in his
time, by low-level hack artists in producing fakes for equally low-level and undiscerning buyers.
Connoisseurs belonging to the circle in which Ch'iu Ying worked were not likely to be taken in
by such forgeries, which to them must have seemed crude and garish. What, then, can have
been their response to Ch'iu's work? All we know of them suggests that their sophistication was
sufficient, their style-consciousness highly enough developed, for them to savor a bit perversely,
by a turn-about phenomenon of aesthetics familiar to anyone who follows even superficially the
fashions of art in our own time, a technically superior but otherwise only slightly altered form of
a "vulgar" style at which, in other contexts, they would scoff. If this is a valid interpretation of
the implications of Ch'iu's painting, we are in the presence of a fascinating phenomenon, the
"feedback" of late and low-class or even degenerate derivatives of an old tradition into high-
class revivals of that tradition; it is a phenomenon we will encounter in unmistakable form in
the late Ming, especially with Ch'en Hung-shou. When we turn from the response of the con
noisseurs, however, to try to imagine how Ch'iu Ying may, in turn, have responded as an artist
to the demands of that kind of taste—what, that is, his own feelings about the style can have
been—we realize how far we have already extended our argument beyond what the evidence
will safely sustain, and leave the question unanswered.
T'ang Yin and Ch'iu Ying had no direct followers of any significance; Ch'iu's son-in-law Yu
Ch'iu, who paints neat, uninspiredfigure-in-landscapescenes, is no exception. A whole industry
of imitators and forgers grew up in Soochow, however, feeding the demand that T'ang and Ch'iu
had been so instrumental in arousing, turning out thousands of routine copies and pastiches, some
of which were given the signatures of great early masters while others were ascribed to T'ang and
Ch'iu themselves. The spurious "Chiu Yings" that have flooded the painting market ever since
have in fact injured his reputation by their association with his name, and it is only when the
genuine works have been separated from this marsh of mediocrity that Ch'iu's real stature can be
assessed. Already in the late sixteenth century he and T'ang Yin, along with Shen Chou and
Wen Cheng-ming, were numbered as the "Four Masters" of Ming painting. T'ang, Ch'iu, and
their teacher Chou Ch'en had brought professional painting to a plane of excellence and prestige
from which it had slipped badly with the decline and discrediting of the Che school. But no fol
lowers were to appear who could keep it on that plane. Soochow continued to be the principal
center for the commercial production of paintings into the seventeenth century, and several
more excellent artists were to take their places in the tradition before its virtual extinction at the
end of Ming. But few painters of any later period even attempt to equal Chou, T'ang, and Ch'iu
on their own ground, and none succeed.
CHAPTER SIX
Wen Cheng-ming and His Followers: The Wu

School in the Sixteenth Century
1. WEN CHENG-MING
Although Shen Chou is properly given credit by historians for "founding the Wu school," i.e.,
establishing Soochow as the leading center of literati painting in the Ming, it was not Shen's styles
but those of his pupil Wen Cheng-ming (1470-1559) that were most influential and most widely
imitated among the local group of scholar-painters in the sixteenth century. Wen Cheng-ming,
more than anyone else, gives Soochow painting of this period its special color and flavor.1
T H E EARLY DECADES Wen's family had been distinguished in scholarship and public service
since the Sung dynasty. They had moved to Soochow in the generation of his great-grandfather
and were among the leading gentry families of the region. Wen Cheng-ming's grandfather Wen
Kung-ta and his father Wen Lin (1445—99) have already appeared on the fringes of our discus
sions, the former as the recipient of a painting by Yao Shou presented to him on his retirement in
1479 (PI. 25), the latter as a patron of T'ang Yin. Wen Cheng-ming and T'ang Yin were born
in the same year, 1470, a circumstance that led inevitably to rivalry, in which Wen seems to have
come off badly: while T'ang was a precocious child and brilliant youth, Wen was reportedly a
dullard in his early years. Although he received the best education available in his time—Wu
K'uan, for one, was his tutor in classical literature—he tried and failed the examination for an
official post no less than ten times, between 1495 and 1522, before he wasfinallygiven a posi
tion at the capital in 1523 on the basis of a recommendation from the local governor.
This succession of failures left Wen bitter; characteristically, he blamed them on his inability,
or disinclination (as one devoted to classical literature), to write in the modern prose style.
When T'ang Yin passed the local examination with distinction, Wen's father wrote to his son:
"T'ang Yin's talent is such that it is right he should succeed in the examination. But he is un
disciplined and I fear in the end he will not accomplish anything. You will go far on some future
day. He is not your match." After T'ang returned to Soochow in disgrace, suspected of having
cheated in the examination, relations between him and Wen worsened until they saw very lit
tle of each other. Two long letters from T'ang suggest that he wanted to keep Wen's friendship
and support but recognized that they were opposites in character. A few excerpts from one of
these letters will convey their tone:
"You and I have been friends for thirty years. I met your late father at a tender age and he was
211
212 • WEN CHENG-MING AND HIS FOLLOWERS
fond of me and thought highly of my qualities and had hoped that I would one day achieve some
thing. . . . In Peking when I was the victim of the slanderous tongue of someone who was en
vious of my popularity, you were the only person to rise and speak in my defense. . . .
"I was careless in speech and often offended your servants; I was addicted to drinking and
often was penalized for it; I often got myself in trouble because of my predilection for beauty,
song, flowers and birds. But you were so different . . . you are so calm and imperturbable in
spite of all the multitudinous forms of temptation. . . . So let me follow the precedent of Con
fucius and call you teacher. I do not say this just to please you; I really mean it. As far as poetry
and painting are concerned, I can claim to be your peer; as for scholarship and personal conduct,
I am ashamed to say that I am a far cry from you. When I say I want you to be my teacher, my
sole purpose is to be able to win your friendship so that I might improve my mind and make it
more perceptive: it is not for the sake of distinguishing myself. . . . " 2
Wen Cheng-ming never lost his confidence of excelling in the end. While T'ang Yin and his
friends Chu Yun-ming, Chang Ling, and others were taking their pleasure in the elegant and
erotic diversions that the city offered, Wen practiced calligraphy at home. He was abstemious,
never drinking more than six cups of wine at a party. Invited on one occasion to a dinner on a
houseboat by T'ang Yin and suddenly confronted with a selection of Soochow party girls who had
been smuggled aboard, Wen "started screaming and threatened to jump into the water until
T'ang Yin finally let him escape in a sampan. " 3 Stories such as this, like the similar ones told about
Ni Tsan, may be apocryphal but indicate that their subject was at least sufficiently strait-laced to
inspire them, and they provide a counterbalance to the more frequent expressions of admiration
for Wen's moral rectitude.
From the late 1480s Wen was also studying painting under the guidance of Shen Chou. In an
inscription written much later on a landscape handscroll that Shen began in 1489 and he him
self completed, Wen quotes the older master as having given him this advice: "As far as methods
of painting are concerned, the basis is planning the composition; but 'engendering movement
through spirit resonance' is essential if one is to attain the level of the marvelous. Planning the
composition is easy to master, but spirit resonance is a matter of mental concentration that can
not be conveyed in words." 4
Wen Cheng-ming continued to learn from Shen Chou until Shen's death in 1S09, after which
he studied independently, in part by imitating old works in his own and other local collections.
A problematic work that may date from the period 1496—97, titled "Leisurely Living at the
Stream Pavilion," is a loose, still immature essay in the manner of Huang Kung-wang and, if
genuine, can serve to represent his early studies of the Yuan masters, presumably undertaken with
the encouragement of Shen Chou.5
Of more sure authenticity, and more useful for understanding on the one hand Wen's debt to
Shen Chou and on the other his emergence as a distinct and independent master, is "Spring Trees
After Rain" (Pi. 111-12). It is useful to compare it with Shen Chou's "Walking with a Staff"
(Pi. 29). As we might expect after reading Shen's advice quoted above, the immediately striking
similarities between the two pictures are compositional, having to do especially with the way
the picture areas are divided. Compositions based on clear divisions of the picture surface into
large geometric shapes were characteristic also of the Che-school masters, but in their works the
shapes were usually fewer, simpler, and not locked together so tightly or interrelated so dynam
ically as those in the works of Shen and Wen. Shen Chou avoids the static and stereotyped com
positions of most of his contemporaries, working with greater versatility to reveal a whole
new set of compositional problems and possibilities. Wen Cheng-ming begins by imitating
Shen's compositions but goes on to imitate, more creatively, his experimental approach.
Read upward as formal sequences, the two pictures prove to have a great deal in common.
WEN CHENG-MING • 213
Each begins with a wedge-shaped area of water and continues with slanting banks joined by a
bridge and surmounted by trees. A larger water area occupies the center of each; it is in each case
a positive shape that exerts its counterpressure against the earth masses, not merely a neutral
ground that sets them off. The farther banks, which in Wen's picture seem to lie on the water
like floating cakes of ice, are again slanting and again divided by the river. The "principal
mountain," really only a steep ridge or bluff, is centrally located in each, with its peak offset to
the left, so that the eye ascends to it on a curving movement into depth. Foreground and back
ground are about equally weighted in each, with some key forms in the upper part that seem
almost mirror reflections of those in the lower. The mode of composition that the two paintings
share depends on delicately calculated repetitions, proportionings, instabilities, imparting a
sense of precise planning and suggesting that the removal or displacement of any part would
upset the fine-strung balance of the whole.
Wen Cheng-ming's rendering of the composition, however, reveals an artistic personality very
different from Shen's in many respects. His thin dry-brush contour lines move slowly in delineat
ing the forms; the dotting (sparsely applied, with no aim of enriching the surface, since a
thinness of texture is crucial to the expression of the work) and the meticulous rendering of tree
foliage are done with the same deliberation. There is not an impulsive stroke in the entire
painting. Shen Chou's early works (PI. 30-31) were also executed in more slender brushwork
than his typical late ones, but were done with touches of exuberance and impromptu invention
that are wholly absent from Wen's picture, in which evidences of afterthoughts and corrections,
although fairly numerous (Wen is still far short of complete technical control), are carefully con
cealed, to the best of the artist's ability. Where Shen Chou's landscape is bold, robust, built up
of powerfully assertive masses, Wen's is cautious and reserved, made up of smaller and unasser
tive forms.
This quality of reserve in Wen's style had its own positive value and seems to have exerted a
quiet but strong appeal to the temper of early-sixteenth-century Soochow, underlying a poetic
mildness of mood and slight nostalgia that eventually imbue much of the output of the school.
If we look for precedents in the past for this quality, or flavor, they are to be found in the works
of Ch'ien Hsiian and certain of those by or after Chao Meng-fu, notably "The Mind Landscape
of HsiehYu-yu" and "Gazing at the Stream" (Hills, Pi. 10, 18). We know from Wen's writings,
including inscriptions on paintings, that Chao was the artist he most admired and his principal
model for many features of his style, as well as for the air of classical coolness in his works.
Wen's inscription on his picture informs us that it was painted for a certain Lai-shih, who was
about to depart for Peking, presumably to take up some official post; Wen suggests that Lai-shih
can look at it while traveling by boat, when he wishes to remember the scenery around Soochow.
His quatrain reads:
After rain, the spring trees cast a green shade.
I love most the western hills as they turn to evening light.
There should be people's houses at the foot of the hills—
Across the river, in far distance, rises a white fog.
"Spring Trees After Rain" indicates the principal direction of Wen Cheng-ming's early
stylistic explorations and the character of most of his work: methodical, sensitive, reserved.
Admirable as it is in its cool clarity, it leaves room for progress, as Wen must have realized, in
the convincing rendition of mass and space. His progress beyond this point and his solutions to
the fundamental problems of painting landscape are of the kind we might expect from what we
know of him—a man for whom nothing came easy, who had to work through each achievement of
his life slowly, carefully, after failures and false starts. Wen was not the kind of painter (as T'ang
Yin was) who could evoke effects of massiveness and spaciousness as if effortlessly, in brilliantly
pictorial creations; he had to master his technical means painstakingly. Several pictures dated
or datable to the following decade reveal him thus working out, with help from a number of old
masters, a consistent system for constructing a landscape "from the ground up," with each
part firmly related to the others, and the whole readable and (in imagination) traversable.6
A good example is a well-recorded painting that has only recently come to light, "The Chih
p'ing Temple" (PI. 113). It was painted in midwinter, on a day corresponding to January 8,
1516, as we learn from the artist's inscription; after writing out a long poem (which was later
included in his literary collection Fu-t'ien chi) in the "small standard'' (hsiao-k'ai) script for which
he was renowned, Wen adds: "Li-jen [Wang Ch'ung] has been staying for a long time at Mount
Chih-p'ing. As the [lunar] year closes, I thought fondly of him and inscribed this to send to him."
Wang Ch'ung (1494—1533) we will re-encounter later as a painter; although scarcely over
twenty when the picture was painted, he was already one of Wen's close friends and was staying
at the Chih-p'ing monastery on Mount Shang-fang, located a few miles southwest of Soochow,
probably to study for the official examinations, away from the distractions and temptations of
the city. He may be the man seen in a house at the center of the picture, with shelves of scrolls
beside him, and the wall and gate seen in lower right may belong to the temple. But the painting,
typically for Wen Cheng-ming, seems in itself neither topographical nor very personal.
Anne Clapp has written that this painting "shows in uniquely pure form the Northern Sung
Academy style which Wen derived from Chao Meng-fu, or in this case perhaps directly from a
Sung original, and which became the starting point of his garden style. Here at the beginning of
the series he is so faithful to his model that we would not know without his inscription and signa
ture that the 'Chih-p'ing Temple' is his own handiwork."7 Although this greatly exaggerates
the derivativeness of the painting (Wen Cheng-ming's hand is, on the contrary, apparent every
where), Clapp is certainly correct in stressing the studies of Sung painting, whether or not first
hand, that must underlie it.
A work from the same year in the Li Ch'eng manner (cf. note 6, above), designated as such in
Wen's own inscription, corroborates the evidence to be seen in the style of the present work:
the patient, systematic blocking out and building up of the landscape indeed recalls Northern
Sung painting. In the solidly based foreground, flat banks are raised above the water surface, as in
"Spring Trees After Rain" ; the wall, fences, and groups of trees surround areas of space and take
us back gradually into depth. From the centrally placed house, the focus of the composition,
space opens back diagonally to each side, while the steep ridge rises between these two reces
sions, curving off rightward at the top. The aim of the artist is to create a sense of substance and
space, the former through volumetric drawing supplemented by earthy texture strokes and dot
ting on the slopes, the latter through a calculated echoing of nearer forms by farther, which es
tablishes a resonant interval between them: the foreground and middle-ground figures, one ar
riving and the other waiting (active and passive); the pairs of trees in lower right and middle
left; the parallel ascensions of ridges at the right.
Paintings in the restrained, rather remote manner of "Spring Trees After Rain" and in the
careful brushwork of "The Chih-p'ing Temple" continue throughout Wen's painting career;
those in a bolder style are fewer. A saying current among Chinese collectors is that one should
look for "fine Shen and rough Wen"—for the more careful works of Shen Chou, that is, and the
bolder ones of Wen Cheng-ming.
A striking example of the "rough Wen" category is a large painting of 1519 titled "Lofty
Leisure Beneath a Sheer Cliff" (PI. 108-10). In a rocky ravine a man sits on the riverbank, at
tended by a boy holding books; he awaits the arrival of a friend, who approaches across a stone
bridge, walking with a staff. The pairing—one arriving, one waiting—follows the formula that
Wen used in "The Chih-p'ing Temple" and several others. The space of the picture, here more
constrained, funnels back to a waterfall at the upper left. The waterfall does not (as in many
other works of the school) perform a simple compositional role as a conventional motif but seems
to fill the scene with sound and mist. The shade of the pines and leafy trees that occupy the upper
part of the composition is similarly felt rather than represented and enhances the sense of cool
atmosphere, as do the overhanging cliffs. The impassivity of the figures is in keeping with all
this; Wen Cheng-ming's world is made up of clear, fast-moving water, rocks, and trees, and
humans have a place in it to the extent that they assume the qualities of their surroundings.
Wen's broad-brush drawing, superficially similar to Shen Chou's, has none of the implica
tions of relaxation and amiability with which Shen invests his, especially in his later works; it
carries far more tension and, when applied to these more angular forms (distantly derived, in
part, from the tradition of Li T'ang), creates a sense of severity, even harshness. Nor does Wen
ever seem to be improvising, as Shen sometimes does. One is aware always of a powerful intel
lect behind the paintings, exercising tight control. It can be seen operating in the composition,
which introduces a new mode that we will see brought to culmination in a work of 1542 (Pi.
114). The picture surface is divided into large segments; the dense, busy area at the upper right,
filled with tree branches and leafage, is set against an open area at lower left, while the lower-
right and upper-left segments are occupied by large pairs of crossed trees, the farther echoing
the nearer. Compositions of this type had first appeared among the late works of Shen Chou, for
instance in some leaves of the "Tiger Hill" album (PL 39-40).
PEKING INTERLUDE The majority of Wen's works, and the best of them, belong to the last
three decades of his life, when he was again living in Soochow, in retirement after his brief period
of service at the capital. He traveled to Peking in 1523, already in his fifties but hopeful of an
official career that would at last vindicate his confidence in his scholarship and justify his decades
of study. He was appointed, without having to go through the usual final examination, to a posi
tion as consultant in the Han-lin Academy, where he worked on compiling the official history of
the era that had just ended, the Cheng-te (1506—22). However, fora complex of reasons, he was
unhappy in his post and petitioned the emperor three times for permission to retire before he
was finally, in 1526, allowed to return home.
During his three years at court he was homesick, beset with illnesses, and underpaid (or, some
of the time, not paid at all). A series of nine letters written to his wife and two sons, Wen P'eng
and Wen Chia, are poignant accounts of his arduous journey to Peking and frustrating life there.8
He was beset by requests for occasional writings: "I am in a bad state of mind—and without a
single vacant day, writing poems and compositions for social occasions." He was probably also
well enough known as an artist to be subject to requests or demands for his paintings from higher
officials and colleagues. At the same time, as we learn from Ho Liang-chim (1506-73), who seems
to have known him and is thus a relatively reliable source of information, Wen was resented
by others who felt that a painter had no place in the Han-lin Academy: "In the days when
Master Heng-shan [Wen Cheng-ming] was serving in the Han-lin Academy, he was harassed by
Yao Ming-shan and Yang Fang-ch'eng. At times they would speak out directly to everyone, saying:
'Our office is not the Painting Academy; what is a workman-painter doing here ?' '>9 To call Wen
a "workman-painter" and to imply that he did not merit a place in the Han-lin on his scholarly
merits alone were serious insults and, if the story is true, must have added to his other afflictions
during the Peking period. Ho Liang-chim goes on to suggest that Yao and Yang, two fellow
compilers in the Han-lin Academy who had taken first place respectively in the chin-shih examina
tions of 1523 and 1521, had devoted themselves too narrowly to their studies to be interested
in anything else and mentions others who were Wen Cheng-ming's friends, men of broader
cultural attainments with whom he chose to associate and exchange verses.
Another reason why, within the Academy, respect for Wen's literary and artistic abilities was
mixed with resentment was that scholars of longer standing at court and with far more practical
experience were placed under him. The Grand Secretary Chang Ts'ung, an old friend of Wen's
father, gave him support that proved in the end an embarrassment when, in 1S26, Chang criti
cized other court officials to the emperor so vehemently that they were flogged, several of them
to death.
In the winter of that year Wenfinallyresigned, and his resignation was accepted. His son Wen
Chia, in his biography of his father, reports that he said at this time: "Ever since I was a young
man I have devoted myself to writing, hoping to establish a career in government service. But I
have not been able to win even one degree. How can I now have the temerity to remain here
any longer, especially when I have nothing to do and am still being paid a salary? I am uneasy in
my mind."10
T H E LATER YEARS Back in Soochow, Wen devoted his time to poetry, calligraphy, and
painting more assiduously than ever. He never again tried to hold office and reportedly even re
fused requests from politicians for his works, to avoid incurring or imposing obligations of any
kind with them. He also refused to paint, we are told, for foreigners or merchants. (Several of
Wen's friends were the sons of merchants, but they were educated men with the proper creden
tials for acceptance into literati circles; it was presumably with the ill-educated mercantile sort
that Wen high-mindedly declined to engage in the kind of social intercourse that giving paintings,
and being recompensed for them, entailed.) His art, then, was directed more or less exclusively
to an audience of literati, most of them of the gentry class, who shared his tastes and admired his
achievements; after his bitter experience in the larger world of practical affairs, with which he
could not cope, he was determined to limit his involvements to those over which he had a large
measure of control. With all ambitions toward publicly recognized scholarship and socially bene
ficial service put behind him, Wen became reconciled to his role as litterateur and painter;
aiming at last at what was within his reach, he was an unqualified success. A circle of poets and
artists formed around him, of which he was indisputably the center, as he was of the whole Soo
chow literary and artistic culture.
Since we have stressed, in the preceding chapter, the professional standing of Chou Ch'en,
T'ang Yin, and Ch'iu Ying, we must distinguish the economic basis of Wen Cheng-ming's paint
ing career from theirs. The distinction, while not absolutely clear-cut, is real and important. It
is not based so much on whether or not the artist derived some profit or material benefit from
his paintings—most artists did, whatever their status—but rather on questions (crucial ones for
the Chinese) of whether the artist painted his pictures with the aim of selling them, accepted
commissions, worked for any patron who would pay a high enough price or provide him with
support of another kind (such as lodging and entertainment), or otherwise allowed the demands
of others to affect his choice of subjects and styles.
T'ang and Ch'iu would have had to answer most if not all these questions in the affirmative;
Wen would give a vehement (and indignant) no to all of them, even though he must at times
have lapsed from pure amateurism. He seldom if ever painted, as Ch'iu and T'ang regularly did,
pictures of a decorative or functional character (i.e., those designed to be hung on special occa
sions, holidays, etc.) or pictures with narrative, genre, or other popular themes (a few paintings
based on poems such as the "Red Cliff Ode" being exceptions). He gave his paintings to friends
and relatives, we are told, especially those who were poor and could sell them to get living
expenses. He also engaged, we may assume, in the kind of informal exchange of gifts and favors
that we described earlier in connection with Shen Chou's paintings. If he sometimes accepted
gifts from wealthier recipients in exchange for his works, it was at no sacrifice of artistic independ
ence.
Nevertheless, in the eyes of most Soochow citizens, no doubt, a painter was a painter, to
whom one went when one wanted a painting. This was the paradox: learning and a high level of
culture theoretically placed one outside the marketplace, where one's creations were not for
sale; but in a strictly practical sense, the fruits of learning were objects of value, marketable
commodities just as were the productions of the artisan. The noncommercial, "literary" aspect
of the scholar-amateur's painting enhanced its value in the eyes of the connoisseurs and thus,
surely, for many Soochow collectors of that time, its monetary value as well. It is often said that
the emergence of the literati school raised painting to the status of afineart alongside calligraphy
and literary composition, but in fact those arts were beset with the same ambiguities. A leading
calligrapher might be regarded as only a loftier counterpart to the village scribe: one went to
the scribe for ordinary, functional writing, such as a letter, and to the calligrapher for beautiful,
prestigious writing, such as an inscription for the plaque over the door of one's studio.
Painting in Soochow can be viewed as belonging to a similar continuum, from the simplest
decorative and functional works up to those intended for the most rarefied aesthetic contempla
tion. As for literature, Wen himself, in a letter to his friend Wang Ao, dispels any notion that it
was produced in a purely disinterested way out of the writer's inner necessity: "Now crowds
come seeking my writing and I am often overwhelmed with work. I do not like to turn down
people's requests and try to fulfill them all. What they want are always farewell letters, elegies,
and, even worse, the minor works the common call miscellaneous. What I term my literary crea
tions are usually this kind of perfunctory and impersonal composition. Alas! Can such things
still be considered literature?"11
We can be sure that Wen did not expend his time and abilities on such writing purely out of
friendship ; but here, too, the mode of recompense must have been something other than simple
cash payment. Wen, who was not a rich man, must have been well aware of the monetary value of
his paintings, many of which found their way onto the market during his lifetime. Also, as in the
case of Shen Chou, forgeries were already in circulation. A revealing story is told in a late Ming
miscellany about Wen's pupil Chu Lang, who is said to have "ghost-painted" for Wen, doing
pictures for the master to sign when Wen was too busy to produce all the paintings he needed
to requite favors or discharge obligations. (The practice was apparently common, the pictures
presumably being intended for those not perceptive enough to know the difference.) A visitor
from Nanking sent a boy servant bearing presents to Chu, to ask him for a "fake Wen Cheng
ming." By mistake the boy delivered the presents and the request to Wen himself, who laughed,
accepted the presents, and said: "I'll paint him a genuine Wen Cheng-ming; he can pass it off as
a fake Chu Lang."12
All the tensions and ambiguities implicit in this complex situation were heightened, in Wen
Cheng-ming's case, by the high level of technical proficiency in his paintings, which must have
ensured their appeal to people of widely divergent tastes. Ho Liang-chim stresses this aspect of
his art: "Heng-shan [Wen Cheng-ming] was basically an amateur; but when we look at his col
ored paintings done in imitation of Chao Meng-fu, or his small landscapes in the Li T'ang man
ner, they are all works of the utmost refinement—works of an amateur, that is, but with nothing
in them that is really unprofessional. Tai Chin, by contrast, was simply a professional and to the
end was unable to be amateurish at the same time. This was because of limitations in his person
al quality."13
Many of Wen Cheng-ming's paintings are of houses set in gardens and represent the residences
or studios of his Soochow friends and acquaintances. Whether or not they bear inscriptions with
dedications, we may assume that these were done as presents. A painting of this kind dated 1543,
titled Lou-chu t'u or "Living Aloft" (Color Pi. 13), is dedicated to a Mr. Liu Lin (1474-1561),
who had just left government service at the age of seventy and returned to Soochow, where he
planned to build a two-story house and dwell on the upper floor. Wen Cheng-ming, who suggests
(perhaps punningly) that the plan reveals Liu's "lofty-mindedness," portrays the house before it
was in fact completed, with Liu and a friend seen in the upper window, and adds a poem describ
ing how the windows of this room would open "on all eight sides." The poem ends: "While
worldly affairs shift and change, the lofty man is centered and at peace."14
Like Shen Chou in his "Night Vigil" of 1492 (Pi. 37), Wen places the house andfiguresin
the far middle ground, transmitting in pictorial language the desire for aloof withdrawal, occa
sioned perhaps by bitter experiences during his official service, that underlay Mr. Liu's aspira
tion toward second-story living. The upstairs room is the apex of one of the orderly, symmetri
cal compositions that Wen loved. He begins it at the bottom with two bare willows growing on
a slope and continues it across a stream and over a sharp-cut bank and a wall; these are the lower
sides of a lozenge-shaped space of which the upper sides are marked by the bases of trees. The
trunks and leafage of this grove form a dense screen across the middle of the composition, out of
which the house rises. The whole is rendered in fine lines and strokes overlaid by light washes of
ink and cool color; it is done with the same air of exactitude as the 1S07 "Spring Trees" and the
1516 "Chih-p'ing Temple."
Wen Cheng-ming's decades of devotion to historical and literary scholarship deeply affected
his painting. As Anne Clapp writes: "His long academic experience . . . reinforced his native
tendency to austerity and restraint of feeling, and brought to his art an intellectual discipline
which shows in all styles."15 Like his favorite exemplar, Chao Meng-fu, Wen approached paint
ing with a historian's dedication to the past, working in a number of manners that were rooted
in old painting traditions. So, one might interject, did such a professional master as Ch'iu Ying;
but, as we have tried to show in the preceding chapter and in this one, Ch'iu's uses of the past
differed in important respects from Wen's. Moreover, Ch'iu's set of preferred models, as well
as T'ang Yin's, corresponded only in part with Wen's, although their acquaintance with old
paintings and old traditions cannot have been so very different. They made different choices, that
is, in drawing upon a more or less commonly held understanding of their past.
It might be said that each major school of Chinese artists, in making its choices of past styles as
models, constructed its own history of painting. The sixteenth-century Soochow artists, whether
professional or amateur, seem to have held a view of earlier painting and the significant moments
in it that differed from the "histories" of both the late Yuan before them and the late Ming after
them. We can understand this middle-Ming Soochow version of the history of painting both from
the uses of old styles in surviving works of Soochow artists and from critical discussions or
accounts of collections seen there. In this version, polite recognition was given to T'ang and pre-
T'ang painting, but Soochow artists seldom imitated directly styles of such antiquity. The land
scape styles of Tung Yuan and Chii-jan in the tenth century and those of the Northern Sung
masters were similarly appreciated and discussed without playing much part in the actual pro
duction of the school. (The revival of Northern Sung monumental landscape in the late Ming thus
ends a long period of relative neglect, and a painter of that age can write: "It is a long time since
anyone has carried on the styles of the Northern Sung masters.")16 The works by Wen Cheng
ming and a few others "in the Li Ch'eng manner" mostly reveal little real acquaintance with
the early phase of that tradition, seeming to be based more on the Li Ch'eng mode as practiced
by Yuan masters.
The period most favored by Soochow painters and connoisseurs was from the twelfth century
through the fourteenth. Li T'ang looms large at the outset of the period, and his conservative
followers later in the Sung, notably Liu Sung-nien, seem more important as stylistic models than
Ma Yuan or Hsia Kuei in the same period. Chao Meng-fu is the commanding figure in the early
Yuan and Ch'ien Hsiian a much lesser one. The Four Great Masters of the late Yuan are especial
ly revered and are major influences on the Soochow painters.
Out of this repertory of models, the Soochow professionals favored the Li T'ang lineage, the
amateurs the Yuan literati masters; but the restriction to "suitable" lineages was not sofirmas
it was to become in late Ming theory and practice. Wen Cheng-ming sometimes adopts elements
of style from the Li T'ang manner, and other influences from Sung painting can be found in his
works. He never imitates Sung painting so closely as do T'ang Yin and Ch'iu Ying, however, and
on the whole his works follow the formalist directions established by the Yuan scholar-artists
rather than the more naturalistic, truly pictorial modes of Sung.
Another source of inspiration and influence for Wen Cheng-ming and others of his group was
in the works of a few sophisticated and style-conscious artists of the late Northern and early
Southern Sung, i.e., the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, beginning with Li Kung-lin and Mi
Fu, artists who were themselves archaistically inclined. On one occasion, for instance, Wen
made a copy of a handscroll by the mid-twelfth-century artist Chao Po-su illustrating the latter
of Su Tung-p'o's two "Red Cliff" odes (Pi. 117). A colophon by Wen Chia dated 1S72 relates
the circumstances under which his father had made the copy in 1548 :
"The Later Red Cliff Ode was a favorite subject in the Painting Academy of the Sung period;
both Chao Po-su and [his older brother] Po-chu depicted it. I have seen both versions. It is Po
su's which was in a local collection. Later there was an official who wanted to acquire it in order
to present it to the prime minister of that time [Yen Sung]. But the owner was reluctant to give
it up. My father said to him: 'You can't miss a chance to sell it at that price; I'll draw you
another one that will at least preserve its general appearance.' And so he did this scroll."
The original painting by Chao Po-su does not seem to have survived; the most closely related
Sung-period representation of the subject is a handscroll by a slightly earlier artist, Ch'iao Chung
ch'ang, now in the Crawford Collection, New York.17 No surviving paintings can be reliably
ascribed to Chao Po-su, but an unpublished handscroll attributed to him in the Palace Museum,
Peking, representing a riverside landscape with pine trees and cranes, indicates that he belonged,
along with his contemporary Ma Ho-chih and the late-eleventh-century Chao Ling-jang, to a
small and very interesting group of artists active in the middle Sung period who might be called
"poetic archaists" since they use antique styles for poetic, unrealistic, sometimes dreamlike ef
fects, perhaps in reaction to the strong realistic tendencies in other painting of their time. Even
when they are associated with the imperial court and the Painting Academy, these artists stand
somewhat apart from the main Academy tradition, having closer ties, in their styles and ap
proach, with Li Kung-lin and others of the early scholar-painters; and it is chiefly the scholar-
painters in later centuries who admire and imitate them. Ch'ien Hsiian and Chao Meng-fu are
not unaffected by them, although the acknowledged sources of their archaistic styles are further
back in time; Wang Meng (especially in his figures and houses), Ch'en Ju-yen, and others later
in the Yuan draw on them in various ways; and they are an important part of the background
of Wu-school style in the sixteenth century.
In the paintings of Ma Ho-chih, and presumably those of Chao Po-su, archaism takes the form
of a concentration on certain conspicuous elements of style, such as insistent linear rhythms and
a childlike or Jaux-naij drawing of figures, animals, buildings, etc.; such concentration on
antirealistic aspects of style drops a screen, as it were, between the painting and both its subject
and its model. The artist, that is, is neither portraying his subject nor imitating the antique in a
simple and direct way, but is regarding both from a certain distance and from a sophisticated,
art-historical viewpoint. When these archaistic styles are in turn imitated in later periods, the
distancing is compounded. It is this quality of remove that we alluded to in the preceding
chapter, using a different metaphor, as putting stylistic quotation marks around the picture. Wen
Cheng-ming's scroll is a perfect exemplification of the practice, displaying his stylistic awareness
in touches of irony or antiquarian whimsy that prevent the viewer from taking it quite seriously
as illustration.
The passage that we reproduce represents the moment when Su Tung-p'o, after climbing at
night to a ledge atop the Red Cliff, suddenly becomes frightened: "The grass and trees stirred
and shook, cries in the mountains were answered in the valleys, the wind rose and the water
seethed. I felt uneasy and dispirited, frightened by the eeriness of it; I shivered, it Was impossible,
to stay there." 18 Wen Cheng-ming, doubtless following his Sung original, begins to step up the
intensity of activity in his composition as he approaches this climactic scene from the right
(which is always the direction from which handscrolls are read) by such standard deyices as
increasing the steepness of diagonals and crowding the space of the scroll with huge, unstable
forms. There is a sudden shift from quiet to wind-whipped trees, and the small figure of the poet
on the ledge, his sleeves and robe blowing in the wind, is poised precariously between a layer of
scudding fog above and the churning waves below. Yet to depict a figure in a situation that
would in real life excite feelings of turbulence and insecurity is not the same as conveying those
feelings; Su and his surroundings are not believable enough to be deeply moving, nor is it Wen s
intention to move the emotions—he is not telling a story but presenting a style.
Admirable and entertaining as such paintings of narrative and otherwise particularized subjects
may be, Wen Cheng-ming's most innovative works, and ultimately his most important, are the
pure landscapes of his late period. In these, evocations of old styles matter far less than the
creation of new ones. The compositional inventiveness that he inherited from Shen Chou and the
self-confidence of his own maturity ensured that even when he was ostensibly working "in the
manner of" some earlier master, the outcome would be fresh and creative.
To say that his "Verdant Pines and Clear Springs" of 1542 (Pi. 114), for instance, is in the
manner of Wang Meng is true enough, by the Chinese definition of what makes up a manner,
but scarcely touches on the fundamental qualities of the painting, which is conceived on differ
ent premises from any by the Yuan master. This small, delicately executed picture is an es
sentially two-dimensional creation (or "frieze-like" in Anne Clapp's term), divided vertically
by a tall pine, which seems unnaturally to hold in the cliff and foliage to the left of it, and
horizontally by the farther limit of the shallow platform on which the two men are seated. An
earlier, less extreme example of this mode of composition may be seen in "Lofty Leisure" of
1519 (Pi. 108). Densely textured areas at the upper left and lower right are balanced by open
spaces in the other two segments, and each area is further divided into interesting shapes by tree
trunks and branches, the edges of the bank, and the odd configurations of the cliffs. This flat
patterning of the picture surface is accomplished by deliberately compressing planes of depth,
so that, for example, the upper branches of the cypress tree at right seem to tangle with one
projecting from the central pine, which is located some distance behind it. Even thefiguresare
treated as shapes, set within and against the larger ones. The convoluted, churning earth masses
of the Wang Meng manner here serve to build up pressures within the circumscribed areas,
pressures that are exerted against the surrounding spaces but at the same time tightly contained
by firm contours and rigid trees, so that there is little dynamic interaction between the parts of
the picture. That this effect of suppressed energy is accomplished in a picture representing what
would normally be a placid theme—two friends on the bank of a stream under the trees, gazing
down into the water—only demonstrates once more the separation of expressive content, in
much of Ming painting, from its subject matter.
The landscape composed within a narrow vertical shape was a type that Shen Chou, while he
did not invent it, had exploited brilliantly and no doubt popularized in Soochow painting circles.
It was also favored by Wen Cheng-ming, perhaps because it permitted, even encouraged, the
radical compacting and stretching of form on which the power of his pictures often depends.
Two notable examples, dated 1535 and 1550 (PL 115-16), almost identical in size, look very
similar at first glance but are significantly different in plan, and the difference corresponds to a
change in Wen's style, from the more delicately executed works of his middle period (a des
ignation that will sound strange, especially to Occidental ears, when applied to a work of his
List of Plates p.xii Go to page: 214, 220, 238
1 0 8 - 1 0 . W e n C h e n g - m i n g : " L o f t y L e i s u r e B e n e a t h a S h e e r C l i f f . " Dated 1519. Hanging scroll

(with details), ink and light colors on paper, 148.9 X 177.9 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
111-12. Wen Cheng-ming' " pring Trees
After Rain." Dared J 507. Han8jna scroll
(n"ilh detail), ink and colors on paper, 94.3
X 33.3 em ..\'or;onal Palace Museum, Taipei.

List of Plates p.xii 113. W e n C h e n g - m i n g : " T h e C h i h - p ' i n g T e m p l e . " Dated 1SI6. Hanging scroll,
Go to page: 214 ink and light colors on silk, 77.4 X 40-6 cm. Ching Yuan Chai collection.
mtnt
i f II ? J
•wi
QY^'J^M.-;.*•< ?-rSi
?p'i^vf:; iv
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Go to page: 215, 220 1 14. Wen Cheng-ming: "Verdant Pines and Clear Springs." Dated 1542. Hanging
scroll, ink and colors on paper, 89-9 X 44.1 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
A r^ft
115. Wen Cheng-ming: "Landscape in the Manner of 116. Wen Cheng-ming: "A Thousand Clilt's Contend in Splen-
Wang Meng." Dated 1535. Hanging scroll, ink on paper, d o r . " Dated 1 548-50. Hanging scroll, ink and light colors on
133.9 X 35.7 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. paper, 132.6 X 34 cm. Sational Palace Museum, Taipei.
117. Wen Cheng-ming: " 'The Red Cliff' After Chao Po-su." Dated 1S48. Hand-
scroll, ink and colors on silk, 3 1 . 5 X 5 4 1 . 6 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
118. Wen Cheng-ming: "Cypress and Rock." Dated 1550- Handscroll,

ink on paper, 26 X 48.9 cm, Nelson-Atkins Gallery, Kansas City.
III!
119. Lu Chih: "Portrait of T'ao Yuan-ming." Dated 1523. Album
Go to page: 240 leaf, ink on paper, 34.2 X 23.8 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
120. Lu Chih: "Jade Cave on an Immortal's Mountain." Hanging scroll,
List of Plates p.xii ink and colors on silk, 1 50 X 80 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
Go to page: 241
121. Lu Chih: "Autumn Colors at Hsiin-yang." Dated 1554. Handscroll, ink and light colors on
paper, 22.3 X 100-1 cm. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
tCv\
5
>
* - -
122. Lu Chih: "Landscape." Hanging scroll, ink on paper. Soochow Museum.

tut:
•'Si*
;
: : : , • / ! ' J \ . ••••• 5
123. Lu Chih: "Fisherman-Recluse at Hua-ch'i." 124. Wang Ch'ung: "Landscape." Hanging scroll,
/ 568. Hanging scroll, ink and light colors on paper, ink on paper, 100.8 X 30.5 cm. Soochow Museum.
119.2 X 26'8 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. List of Plates p.xii Go to page: 243, 244
List of Plates p.xii Go to page: 245 125. Detail from Plate 124.
126. Ch'en Shun: "Landscape." Dated 1540- Album leaf, ink
on paper, 30.1 X 48.2 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
127. Ch'en Shun: "Peonies." Dated 1 538. Section of a handscroll,

ink on paper, 34-9 X 2S3~3 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei,

Mim
128. Shen Shih: "Sunset in an Autumn Valley." 129. Wen Chia: "Temples on Immortals' Mountains.
Dated 1 544. Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 96-8 Dated / 5 S 5 . Hanging scroll, ink and light colors on
X 30.8 cm. Ching Yuan Chai collection. paper, 102 X 28-2 cm. Ching Yiian Chai collection.
53?
1 3 0 - 3 1 . W e n P o - j e n : from " T h e Four M y r i a d s . " Left, " A Myriad Ravines w i t h

W i n d b l o w n P i n e s " ; right t " A Myriad Hectares of Sunlit W a v e s . " Dated 1SS1.
Hanging scrolls, ink on paper, each 191.1 X 74.6 cm. Tokyo National Museum.
List of Plates p.xii Go to page: 250

mm
wJ
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9.
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1 3 2 . Detail from Plate 130.

1 3 3 . Detail from Plate 131.

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134. Hou Mou-kung: "Landscape." Hanging 135. Chii Chieh: "Spring in Chiang-nan." Datet/ 7S37
scroll, ink and light colors on paper, 112.3 X but probably later. Hanging scroll, ink and light colors on
34.9 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. silk, 113.6 X 31 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
sixty-fifth year, but is justified in the context of his late-starting, long-lasting career) to the
more strongly and clearly structured creations of his late period. Interestingly, a precedent for
important compositional features of both paintings can be seen in "Gazing at the Stream" (Hills,
PI. 18), which is probably a copy after a work by Chao Meng-fu and is dated 1309. Like Wen
Cheng-ming's 1S3S landscape, it is constructed around a ravine with a succession of waterfalls
that divides the picture vertically, and the mountainside fills almost the entire picture space.
As in Wen's 15S0 "Thousand Cliffs," the lower section is conceived as a concavity, a rocky
grotto, while the upper section slopes upward steeply. This small work, '' Gazing at the Stream,
when its true historical position is determined, may well prove to have been a significant element
in the background of sixteenth-century Wu-school painting.
Wen does not, however, mention Chao Meng-fu in the inscription on either of his two
pictures. The 1S35 landscape is inscribed by the artist as being in the manner of Wang Meng
(literally "done in imitation of Wang Meng's brush-idea"); in this case, in addition to the
Chao Meng-fu composition, it must have been paintings like Wang's "Dwelling in the Ch'ing
pien Mountains" or his "Forest Grotto at Chii-ch'u" (Hills, Pi. S3, 58) that inspired Wen
Cheng-ming to eliminate space from his picture and to fill it from the base almost to the top
with a steeply rising mountainside. The painting is in fact more spaceless than any of Wang's,
and also more restrained and stable: the dry-brush ts'un (texture strokes) that impart a twisting
motion to the earth masses are sparingly applied, and the energies they generate are confined
within the forms and compartments of the composition (as in the 1542 "Verdant Pines"), the
only pervasive movements being the long, slow, winding ones that carry the eye up the ravine.
The painting cannot easily be comprehended as a single coherent image and must be read
episodically, like a vertical handscroll. But the events that one encounters as he climbs are formal
rather than anecdotal: the buildings and figures spaced neatly at the sides of the central axis are
too simply and conventionally drawn to arrest one's upward progress for long. One is given,
instead, a remarkable complex and varied succession of abstract incidents in clusters of rocks
and leaning trees, paths and ledges and cliffs that provide counterpoint to the main path of
ascent, which is along the series of waterfalls and cascades. The brushwork, dry and fastidious,
belongs to Wen's "fine style" ; the unremitting concentration on refinement of execution rules
out all possibility of spontaneity or of dramatic development. Disciplined, unimpassioned, the
painting radiates an austere beauty.
The other work, titled "A Thousand Cliffs Contend in Splendor,'' was begun in 1548 and final
ly finished in 1550, when Wen added this inscription:
"Once on a winter's night when I couldn't sleep I playfully sketched out this 'Thousand Cliffs
Contend in Splendor' picture but scarcely finished a single tree. Since then I have worked on it
off and on from 1548 until now, 1550, when I have finally finished it; the seasons have gone
around three times.
"Long ago Wang An-shih, in selecting T'ang poems, said: 'It's a shame to spend so much time
and energy on this.' It is an even worse shame for me to spend my time on this [painting]! "On
the tenth day of the third month, inscribed by Wen Cheng-ming at the age of eighty."19
This later work is even more austere than the 1535 landscape, the drawing firm where that of
the other was sensitive and soft, the ordering of forms more systematic and lucid. The com
position is an ambitious one: instead of weighting the elements of his picture more or less
equally, as in the 1535 work, and distributing them evenly around the picture surface, strung
together on a few long connecting lines, the artist essays the difficult feat of combining systems
of larger and smaller forms, and two different compositional formulae, into a single strong design.
The lower half repeats the compositional type that Wen had used so successfully forty years
before in his "Lofty Leisure" of 1519 (Pi. 108), with two men on the bank of a stream beneath
trees, and behind them a pool extending back to a waterfall that drops between overhanging
cliffs. The center of this lower portion of the picture is thus occupied by a hollow of space,
which the solids serve to enclose.
In the upper half, the roles are reversed and the mountain masses dominate, defining only
their own volumes and scarcely opening any chinks for space to penetrate. This upper portion,
while it is not painted in any distinct "manner," belongs in a broad sense to that of Huang
Kung-wang in its reordering of the natural materials into an elaborate but comprehensible
structure. The masses here are physically locked together, interpenetrating, the smaller boulders
firmly embedded in the slopes. The lower part, by contrast, is unified by repetitions of line or
shape: the pyramidal mass in the foreground answered by the recessed limits of the pool and
the arching branches of the trees, a slanting bank at the lower right by a slope farther back, the
verticals of the tree trunks by the waterfall. Considering these differences in plan between the
two sections, the integrity of the whole design is all the more remarkable.
It is typical of the development of an artistic school or movement that the polarities which will
eventually pull it apart, by drawing the artists ever further in conflicting directions, are con
tained already in the works of the early, founding masters, who are able to reconcile these
directions as later artists cannot. The Che school, for instance, might be seen as pulled apart by
the issue of orthodox academicism versus unorthodox individualism; the two are harmonized
in many works of Tai Chin, less often in those of Wu Wei, and hardly at all afterwards.
In the Wu school, the central issue could be defined as the particularized versus the abstract,
attachment to concrete experience as against aspirations toward the universal. The former, the
particularized, itself contains a further distinction, between depictions of literary themes of the
past and portrayals of present reality, since what we have termed the poetic mode within the
Wu school, the mild evocation of poetic sentiment in delicate depictions of the materials of
subjective experiences, was used for both: whether the experiences were those of the artists
or those of earlier poets seems almost immaterial, perhaps understandably so in view of the
fusion of poetic and mundane reality in the Soochow scholar's world. To the realm of the
specific, then, belong paintings of local scenery and records of meetings and partings, along with
pictures based on old poems, while explorations into the realm of pure form and semiabstract
construction are carried on in landscape compositions devoid, or all but devoid, of specific ref
erences to time and place or human activities. The distinction is relatively clear in the works of
later artists of the school but less so in the early period, when Liu Chiieh could record the im
pression of a journey in a generalized depiction of hills and trees (Pi. 27) or a gathering of
scholars in a landscape that follows the constructivist manner of Huang Kung-wang (Pi. 26),
and Shen Chou could portray a friend's retreat nearly hidden in a landscape composed in that
same manner (Pi. 32).
Wen Cheng-ming, while many of his works belong clearly to one or the other category, in
others seems to move between them or to combine or harmonize them. His "Thousand Cliffs,"
seen in this light, brings the two not only into juxtaposition but into concord, opening with a
passage that draws the viewer into sharing a particular experience—this is no conventional sign
for sitting-by-the-water—and then shifting, above and farther back, to the more abstract and
universal mode.
Paintings of old trees, especially the pine and cypress, are conspicuous among Wen Cheng
ming's late works. Like waterfalls and rocks, they belonged to an austere, uncompromising
environment, free of blandishments; that was the way Wen sometimes chose to see his world,
as one in which survival required tireless effort, and in which life made a place for itself through
steadfastness and integrity. This may seem a curious attitude for a member of the affluent
Soochow gentry, and at odds with the concurrent view of the world as a garden; but, for Wen
WEN'S FRIENDS, CONTEMPORARIES, AND STUDENTS • 239
Cheng-ming, commitment to the austere was a matter of moral principle, not of physical
circumstance. With similar motivation he painted wintry landscapes, writing on one of them:
"The lofty scholars and recluses of the past . . . often did snow scenes; they chose to make use
of that subject in order to embody their feelings of noble loneliness, of freedom from vulgarity."
As early as the T'ang dynasty, evergreen trees had become symbols, in poetry and art, of the
perseverance and immutability of virtuous men's minds. Yuan-period artists often made them the
central themes of their paintings but usually placed them in landscape settings, which could be
reduced to the most minimal role but were seldom eliminated altogether. Shen Chou's "Three
Juniper Trees" (Pi. 42-43) is to that degree innovative in presenting a close-up portrayal of the
trees alone, cut off at top and bottom by the edges of the handscroll.
Wen Cheng-ming apparently painted scrolls of that type, although it can be questioned
whether any genuine example survives. We have, on the other hand, three masterworks from
his late years that follow Yuan precedents in including only enough additional elements to
provide the trees with a spatial context and to reinforce their expression with symbolically re
lated motifs—a sheer cliff, a waterfall, a stream, a stone. The "Old Trees by a Cold Waterfall"
in the Palace Museum, Taipei, and the "Old Trees by a Wintry Brook" in the collection of
Mrs. A. Dean Perry, Cleveland, were painted in the winter of 1S49 and the spring of 1551.20
Between them falls the small, superb "Cypress and Rock" (Pi. 118), which Wen painted
(according to a colophon by the calligrapher P'eng Nien) in 1550.
It represents a twisted, stunted cypress tree growing beside an equally twisted-looking rock.
That the tree has reached its present condition by slow, steady growth and the rock by much
slower erosion—the one by internal, the other by external process—is a distinction that reg
isters as another overtone in the mind of the viewer without being specified in the picture,
which scarcely distinguishes texturally between bark and stony surface. The remarkable fusion
of the two elements of this double theme is effected even more by compositional means: a line
drawn so as to enclose the tree would trace a shape virtually congruous with that of the rock,
and the arching and thrusting movements of the one are repeated in the other. A third, lesser
element is space, but flat space; the limbs of the tree and outline of the rock define empty shapes
between them that work with the forms of the rock and tree themselves into a complex and ab
sorbing pattern. This densely compacted, tightly composed design is executed in brushwork
that offers as tactilely satisfying a combination of sensitivity and strength as is to be seen in all of
Chinese painting; the concept of integrity as revealed in the artist's hand is nowhere better
exemplified. Working through the full range of dry to wet and pale to sooty black, Wen Cheng
ming sustains an intensity which, as Max Loehr wrote of this picture, "is a matter of mental and
psychic energy, not of keen observation."21
2. W E N ' S F R I E N D S , CONTEMPORARIES, AND STUDENTS
Lu C H I H The next best painter in Wen Cheng-ming's circle, after Wen himself, was Lu
Chih (1496—1576). He was a native of the region and came from a gentry family; after receiving
the standard education for one of his social class, he became a chu-sheng, a scholar in the district
school, and was recommended by the local education inspector for the kung-sheng degree, which
was based on recognized merit and bypassed the examination. But Lu disliked officialdom and
seems never to have held office. Like Wen Cheng-ming, he gained a local reputation for upright
ness of character, which in his case was based on filial piety (solicitude for his aged mother) and
a high-minded unconcern for money—he gave what he had to a younger brother and used a
piece of land that he owned to build an ancestral temple. The biographical sources supply no
information on how he made his living. He was proficient in poetry and other literary com
position in old forms. According to Wang Shih-chen, his calligraphy teacher was Chu Yiin-ming,
and Wen Cheng-ming taught him painting; these accomplishments probably earned him most
of his income, presumably received in return for gifts freely given (at least in principle) through
one or another of the roundabout methods of repayment on which the scholar-artists insisted.
Lu is said to have rejected indignantly a direct cash payment for one of his paintings, saying: I
paint for my friends, not because I'm poor." Anyone who tried to get a painting from him by
applying pressure of any kind stood no chance, we are told, but those who didn't force the
matter might succeed. He did not participate much in the rounds of drinking parties given by
rich hosts. In his later years his eccentricities became more pronounced. He retired to live in
poverty in a house at the foot of Mount Chih-hsing, south of Soochow, which was (again ac
cording to Wang Shih-chen, who composed Lu's biography in 1571) "surrounded by clouds and
mists on all sides, with a running stream winding around it. There he planted hundreds of kinds
of beautiful flowers, and when a guest whom he liked arrived, at any time of the year, he would
go to greet him among the flowers and would cut off a piece of honeycomb or a bamboo shoot
to give him. But if it was someone he didn't want to see, he would put a stone against the door
and, no matter how loudly the person knocked, he wouldn't hear."
Lu Chih as a painter was highly praised by Ming writers for his pictures of flower-and-bird
subjects, but his reputation today is based chiefly on his landscapes, for which, the critics say,
he took Sung-dynasty masters as his models. Wang Shih-chen writes that "he practiced painting
in an effort to exteriorize the strange feelings in his breast and in order to vie with the old
masters; people of the time liked to praise him as the equal of Wen Cheng-ming." We may not
agree in ranking him so high as that; he sets himself less serious and usually less interesting artistic
problems than Wen, and too much of his work is merely charming. But even then it is more
charming, inspires more sheer delight, than the paintings of most other artists of his time; the
sterner virtues of Wen Cheng-ming, when imitated by others, tended to produce uncomfortable,
sometimes tortured mannerisms, which Lu Chih generally escapes.
Lu is perhaps the supreme master of that special mode of landscape cultivated in sixteenth-
century Soochow that treats the local scenery as neat, fragile, cleansed of clutter; appeals to
tactile sensation are avoided in such paintings, as are overt emotional statements; figures and
buildings are depicted with a light ingenuousness that expresses, as the artist intended it should,
disengagement from mundane reality. If we find this attitude in the paintings and their artists
escapist, we must say the same of most of the rest of Soochow culture and remember that this
was a period when attempts at political or social action were unlikely to achieve any beneficial
effects but were quite likely to bring about the extinction of the well-intentioned official who
made the attempt, sometimes along with his entire family.
The Chia-ching era, 1522—67, i.e., the forty-five-year reign of the emperor Shih-tsung, who
came to the throne at the age of fifteen and was the pawn of court cliques throughout his
period of rule, was a dark chapter even in the shadowy history of the Ming: intrigues at court,
corruption in the levying of taxes (despite attempts at reform in the "Single Whip" system,
which simplified the setting of rates and collecting of taxes), and other economic disorders that
brought about widespread poverty, continuing war against the Mongols, ill-conceived expedi
tions into Southeast Asia, revolts at home, raids by Japanese pirates—all weakened the effective
ness and authority of Ming rule.
Lu Chih's earliest dated painting, "Portrait of T'ao Yiian-ming" (Pi. 119), is in fact an imagi
nary portrait of the outstanding Chinese exemplar for all refugees from political life, T'ao Ch'ien,
or T'ao Yiian-ming (365—4-27), who resigned from a good job as magistrate to return to his
country villa and live in seclusion, avoiding (like Lu Chih) all contact with people in high
positions. Lu Chih's first inscription begins: "On an autumn day Nan-lou brought a present of
chrysanthemums, and Lu Chih drew this to thank him." A second inscription by the artist reads:
"This is a work I did in the kuei-wei year [1523] at the Ch'en Lake. In the third month of the
jen-shen year [1S72] Shen-yii [a name meaning 'excessive care' or 'solicitude'] brought it here
to my dwelling on Mount Chih-hsing. I turn my head, and already fifty years have passed! But
the paper and ink of this are like new. It can be safely said that he has given it 'excessive care'!
I have written this second inscription for him." Shen-yii is probably an official named Li Chao
hsiang, who served as secretary of the Board of Works in Nanking.
T'ao Yiian-ming sits in a relaxed posture on a slope, his seat the roots of a pine tree, holding
a few chrysanthemums. These are his usual attributes in painting—the pine as a symbol of the
moral rectitude he exemplified, the chrysanthemums because he was especially fond of them and
cultivated them in his garden. T'ao's virtues and way of life correspond so well to Lu Chih's
that we may suppose this to be another double image, an idealized self-portrait as well as an image
of the ideal on whom the Ming scholar-recluse modeled himself. The drawing of the figure is
expressive of self-sufficiency and inner harmony, the face alert but impassive, the simple oval
of the head answered by the larger ovals of the body in its loose-fitting robe.
This image of the scholar-gentleman, drawn in fine lines that trace smooth, harmonious
curves, became a hallmark of Wu-school painting; in the late Ming it was subjected to whimsi
cal distortions, but in this early appearance it is still relatively naturalistic and innocent of style-
conscious mannerism. Pronounced traits of individual style are absent as well from the depiction
of the setting, although Lu Chih's characteristic use of chiao-mo ("roasted ink," deep black ink
applied dry and sparingly) can already be marked.
In most of Lu Chih's landscapes it is difficult to discern the signs of adherence to Sung painting
traditions that the critics refer to, but a few large, imposing hanging scrolls do appear to be based
on the Northern Sung monumental-landscape model. The delicate linearity of Lu's usual manner
would seem ill adapted to such compositions, incapable of creating the sense of bulk that they
normally required, and Lu Chih thus foregoes, in these, his characteristic lightness of touch
and tonal paleness. In "Jade Cave on an Immortal's Mountain" (Pi. 120), a large, undated
picture painted on silk, he has applied extensive washes of ink and color so that the component
masses of his mountainside appear to be illuminated by a subdued, inconstant sunlight, and has
drawn his contour lines and rock divisions more heavily than in his typical works. The passage
with trees and fog in the foreground is treated as atmospheric space, in contrast to the con
ventionalized clouds in the distance. The theme and scale are Northern Sung, but the dynamics
of the composition relate rather to Yuan-dynasty painting: beginning at the lower-right corner a
rising slope establishes a dominant diagonal movement, paralleled above and below; at the left
it is caught up, twisted powerfully, and diverted downward through a succession of impulsive,
powerfully plastic masses toward the cave, which is the vortex of the main compositional
movements. Above and to the right are quieter passages which serve, with the foreground villa
and trees, to frame and contain the active center. Two gentlemen sit at the mouth of the cave,
one of them pointing out some notable feature of it to the other.
Despite the fanciful title, the picture represents an actual place, Master Chang's Grotto,
located at I-hsing across Lake T'ai to the west of Soochow. It was named after the Han-dynasty
Taoist magician Chang Tao-ling, who was supposed to have lived in it, and had been the subject
of paintings by Shen Chou and others. Caverns and grottoes are in fact common in Wu-school
landscape, and one could, without lapsing into the Freudian mode, see in the prevalence of this
motif another expression of the urge to withdraw into safe seclusion, especially since the caves
are usually not portrayed as awesome or frightening places. What Lu Chih emphasizes—and this
is another recurrent theme in Soochow painting, which will be brilliantly exploited in the late
Ming by Wu Pin—is the impression of otherworldliness, escape from everyday existence, which
strange formations in nature can evoke by themselves and which an artist can intensify. Lu's poem
likens Master Chang's Grotto to Mount P'eng-lai, the legendary Isle of Immortals beyond the
ocean:
The Jade Cave, a thousand-year-old secret;

From it a stream flows out of endless darkness.
Its farthest depths enclose a cavern dwelling,
Towers and terraces concealed in clouds.
A cavern in the cliff, the sky lighting its floor,
A forest of jasper grown in this underground palace.
What need have we to go beyond the ocean?
Here in a foot of space we view P'eng-lai.
The portrayal of real and identifiable places in landscape paintings had not been a widespread
practice in China before this period; even when the literati artists of the Yuan and early Ming
depicted the retirement villas of their friends, they placed them in generalized settings, with
terrain features perhaps recognizable to intimates but appearing in themselves unspecific, more
affected by considerations of style than by any intention to describe how the places really looked.
Shen Chou, as we have seen, painted scenes of Tiger Hill and other landmarks of the region,
and the practice continues among later Wu-school artists, culminating in the truly topographical
works of late-Ming Soochow masters, notably Chang Hung. Lu Chih did a number of pictures
of this kind, in both hanging-scroll and handscroll form.
One of the hanging scrolls, undated but probably belonging to his middle period, the 1540s
or 1550s, represents Mount Chih-hsing, where Lu was eventually to retire (Color PI. 14).
Perhaps as a reflection of a greater feeling of intimacy toward this less awesome scenery, he
chooses a thinner, linear style, with flat washes of light green and yellow-orange color, using the
denser patterns of the buildings and the carefully spaced clusters of leafy trees to give weight
where needed. This is another compartmented composition, constructed on a series of rising
diagonals that seem to allow a continuous ascent of the mountainside, even though none proceeds
more than a short distance before it is broken off. One would not, in any event, wish to be
hurried, since Lu provides so much entertainment along the way; unlike Wen Cheng-ming,
he is not chary of human-interest embellishments.
At the bottom is a house overlooking the river, with the owner and a friend visible in the
window. Above and to the right is the approach to a Buddhist temple; sedan chairs and donkeys
have brought visitors and wait for them outside, and roadside stalls offer refreshment. Several
gentlemen stand near the gate, and several more are seen in a courtyard over the wall. They have
the air more of people on an outing than of pilgrims drawn by religious urges. Others sit on the
bank of a rocky pool to the left, and two more are being borne up the steep path that continues
up the mountain.
Although the figures suggest different ways of experiencing the scenery, this is not a painting
that draws the viewer into it; hovering as it does between reality and poetry, insubstantial and
devoid of rich textures, it delights the aesthetic sense without seriously engaging the tactile or
spatial. Characteristic of Lu Chih's drawing of rocks and slopes is the multiplication of bent
strokes, angular but never harsh, that cross and interweave to create flattening configurations of
lozenge shapes.
Lu Chih's "Autumn Colors at Hsun-yang" (PI. 121), dated 1554, is probably a later work. It
illustrates the poem by Po Chii-i in which the poet tells of parting from a friend at the river
shore and hearing the p'i-p'a song of the old courtesan; we have already seen a depiction of the
same subject by Ch'iu Ying under the title "The Lute Song" (Color Pi. 9), and many other
Wu-school artists did versions of it. Lu Chih's conveys better than any other its fragile sentiment,
the awareness of the evanescence of human attachments, dispersing small and virtually weightless
forms sparsely over an expanse of calm water. Stably planted on horizontal bases, his land masses
do not interact dynamically, except through the slight tensions of intervening space. The
drawing is Lu's most delicate and refined and can hardly be matched, for these qualities, in Ming
painting: the brush seems to have been lightly touched to the paper and nowhere impelled with
any force. The red-leafed maple in the foreground, the light ruffling of the river and the green
islets floating on it in the distance, create an aura of autumnal melancholy that echoes, across
the centuries, the feeling that invests Po Chu-i's poem. The properly narrative materials of Lu
Chih's picture, the boats and figures, play so small a part in its expression that the artist can
reduce them to miniature scale and give them a place of so little prominence against the fore
ground shore that they can easily go unnoticed on one's first viewing of the scroll.
The model for some of the distinctive properties of the foregoing painting is Ni Tsan, whom
Lu Chih admired and imitated throughout his life—not, like some others, by doing overtly
"manner of Ni Tsan" pictures, but by adopting traits of Ni's style that he found congenial into
works of a basically independent character. For "Autumn Colors" it is the sparse composition,
its parts separated to evoke a feeling of loneliness, and the feather-soft touch of the brush. For the
superb landscape in the Soochow Museum (Pi. 122), which is probably a late work of the artist,
judging from its resemblance to a landscape dated 1S64 in the Palace Museum, Taipei,22 it is
Ni's use of bent, angular strokes to construct multifaceted masses, endowing them with three-
dimensional structure while preserving the transparency fundamental to the style. There is no
color and no wash, unless the strokes of dilute ink sparingly applied to indicate depressions in
the earth surfaces can be called that. Thefigures—aman standing on a bridge in the foreground,
another in a boat farther back—are purely conventional, as are the houses ; nothing of the specific
or narrative has a place here.
The composition moves back from a foreground slope through a succession of carefully scaled
forms, with precisely calculated repetitions and spacings. The means used for locking together
the parts of the composition are those of Huang Kung-wang—for instance, the way the two
curving movements of the ridges at the upper right fit together; and some of the terrain forms,
such as flat-topped bluffs and slopes with squared outcroppings, along with such motifs as the
tree that leans almost horizontal over the water, can be traced to sources in the Yuan master's
works. But brushwork is sharper, the composition more complex, than in any surviving work of
either Ni or Huang, and the whole effect of crystalline clarity all Lu Chih's own. Landscapes of
this kind represent, among Lu Chih's works, his furthest excursions into the realm of abstract
manipulations of pure form; they are few but significant contributions toward this important
development in middle Ming painting.
Lu also experimented with the landscape in the tall, constricted format that was favored by
Wen Cheng-ming. His most interesting use of this shape, more attenuated even than any of Wen's
(the height is nearly four and a half times the width) is a late work, "Fisherman-Recluse at Hua
ch'i" of 1568 (Pi. 123). The title and part of the composition are taken from one of Wang
Meng's masterworks (Hills, Pi. 52), which was known to the Soochow painters, being at this
time in the collection of Hsiang Yuan-pien; copies must also have existed in some number, since
two of them are still in the Palace Museum, Taipei, along with the original.
Lu Chih opens with an unmistakable reference to Wang's picture, placing thefishermanin his
boat at the bottom, overhung by spreading trees. The top, with a steep mountain of distinctive
shape rising from the river shore and low hills in the far distance, returns to the Wang Meng
original to reproduce fairly literally its concluding passage. But the central section of Lu's
painting, bracketed by these two borrowings, is not responsible either to Wang Meng or to
nature; it would be difficult to understand it art-historically as anything but another move in an
intricate game played by the Soochow painters among themselves. (One is tempted to add : and
by the paintings, following Harold Rosenberg, who advises that the viewer of twentieth-century
Occidental paintings must be aware "of what the paintings have been saying among them
selves.")23 Like Wen Cheng-ming in his "Thousand Cliff's" of twenty years earlier, Lu Chih
treats his composition in two halves, above and below a midpoint which he carefully leaves
undefined so as not to create a feeling of disjunction. The lower section is constructed, again
like Wen Cheng-ming's, as a rocky ravine on which overhanging cliffs press, making it into one
of those grottoes that play so important a role in the landscape iconography of the school. A
man is seated rather disconsolately on the bank at the base of the obligatory waterfall, with his
servant. Above this is a spatially perplexing transition in which a vertically rising mass is
abruptly transformed into a receding ridge, alongside which the river assumes its place, asserting
more persuasively the new theme of flat recession. And so, after these curious sixteenth-century
excursions, we rejoin Wang Meng in the distance.
Following the strangely ingrown course of Soochow landscape in this period, and familiar
with the Yuan-dynasty or earlier styles and paintings that underlie some of it, we can under
stand and accept the "rules of the game" well enough to appreciate the special values involved
in such a work as this. But if we step back for a moment and try to view it more objectively,
less art-historically, as a picture, we are forced to acknowledge that it exhibits a dangerously
esoteric character, a strong tendency to turn away from ordinary pictorial concerns; the
aesthetic premises on which this stylistic direction is based seem to make a healthy continuation
of it more and more difficult, since they drive the painter into more and more extreme and
contrived solutions to increasingly artificial problems. Numerous other examples of this land
scape type, at once attenuated and compressed, could be adduced from the later sixteenth
century; they would testify to the rapidity with which its somewhat forced fascination falls off
when it is performed by the secondary masters, who understood less clearly the original goals
of the game and play it with less elan and a lower level of proficiency.
WANG CH'UNG Wen Cheng-ming and Lu Chih were prolific painters whose surviving
works can be numbered in the dozens. Another of the most admired painters of early-sixteenth
century Soochow, by contrast, painted very little and is represented today by only a single
major work. This is Wang Ch'ung (1494—1533). Although he came from a merchant family and
was Wen Cheng-ming's junior by nearly a quarter-century, he was Wen's intimate friend.
Like Wen, he failed repeatedly in the civil service examinations, the last time in 1531; two years
later he died, not yet forty. Wen composed his epitaph. If he had lived longer, the critics said,
he would have been the equal of Shen Chou and Wen himself. He was one of the best calligra
phers of his age, ranking only after Wen and Chu Yiin-ming, and was also an accomplished poet.
Wen Chia wrote on one of his few recorded paintings: "Li-chi [Wang Ch'ung] was not known
[chiefly] for his paintings. This work was one that he did casually, in a moment of exhilaration,
'following the brush' [sui-pi] with dots and washes. But it nonetheless captures profoundly the
transcendental qualities of Huang Kung-wang and Ni Tsan. We can see from it that nothing is
impossible to the mind of a noble man."24
The landscape in the Soochow Museum which is Wang Ch'ung's only known and published
painting (PI. 124) is, as we would expect after reading Wen Chia's and other descriptions of
his works, a translation of the Huang-Ni mode of the Yuan dynasty into a Ming idiom. It is ap
parent from the painting that even after Wen Cheng-ming's influence had swept through
Soochow painting, it was not a clean sweep; in spite of Wang Ch'ung's close friendship with
Wen, his painting adheres firmly to the older style of Shen Chou. Broad, blunt brush-work,
perfectly controlled by the hand of a master calligrapher, invests this cool presentation of forms
with a singular purity.
This much belongs to the tradition of Ni Tsan; the composition owes most to Huang Kung
wang, its architectural stability expressing the same impulse to order, with Shen Chou's re
working of this distinctive system of forms intervening. But Wang Ch'ung's proportioning and
placing of geometric shapes, with carefully spaced repetitions, are even more calculated than
Shen Chou's, and his distribution of dark accents over a limited range of ink tones even more
refined. The detail (Pi. 125) conveys, even in reproduction, some sense of the extraordinary
brush-and-ink qualities of the painting, one of the most visually satisfying works of the whole
Soochow school.
The stylistic direction that it represents is the one we have called abstract, using the term, of
course, in a different sense from its common (and equally loose) application to some kinds of
recent Occidental art that are otherwise termed nonobjective or nonfigural. The Chinese paint
ers never arrived at a truly abstract art in that sense, since their works could always be seen,
although at times only with difficulty, as images of natural or imaginary objects and scenes. We
use the term rather to designate those varieties of Chinese painting in which the image is
abstracted, i.e., divested of specific reference to time and place, of individually characterizing
attributes, and of the close rendering of textures, light and shadow, or surface detail which, in
paintings of other kinds, served to engage the senses more strongly. We mean to distinguish this
abstract mode of landscape from particularized depictions of places and incidents and from
paintings with literary and narrative themes or those in which the theme is the enjoyment of
nature—scholars contemplating waterfalls or listening to the wind in the pines. These made
up the bulk of Soochow painting throughout the Ming period. The abstract mode, as we will see,
was to be powerfully asserted in both theory and practice by Tung Ch'i-ch'ang and his followers
in the late Ming. Perhaps the distinction can best be stated as depending on whether it is the
subject matter of the painting or its formal properties that dominate in determining its expres
sion or (in the broadest sense) its meaning. This is, of course, a matter of relative weighting,
since these wellsprings of expressive content are interdependent, not mutually exclusive.
C H ' E N SHUN Another excellent example of the abstract mode, and another indication of
the persistence of Shen Chou's influence for some decades after his death, can be seen in a land
scape by Ch'en Shun, the first leaf in an album dated 1540 (Pi. 126). Typical landscapes by this
artist portray hills and trees in clouds, in a loose manner based on the style of the Sung master
Mi Fu, his son Mi Yu-jen, and their Yuan-period followers. In this one the rocks and hills are
more firmly bounded with broad, wet outlines that are scarcely darker than the washes. A row
of roughly rectangular boulders stretches across the picture space at a slight diagonal, sur
mounted by leafy trees and echoed by a series of similar forms projecting from the hilltops.
Houses are seen behind this middle-ground screen of rocks and trees, and through it streams pour
into the foreground expanse of water that separates the whole scene from the viewer. The at
traction of the picture is in the ease with which it can be apprehended, as a set of pleasing
variations on a few simple motifs. The changing slope of the upper sides of the boulders, the rise
and fall of the tree groups, the differing arrangements of the clusters of small rocks are descrip
tively inconsequential but formally significant events that occur as one reads the picture laterally,
like a musical score. Even the spotting in the areas of ink wash, whether intended by the artist
(who may have spattered the paper lightly with something that affected its absorbency) or ac
cidental, add to the effect of rich variety within a simple scheme.
The artist, Ch'en Shun or Ch'en Tao-fu (1483-1544), is another of the Wen Cheng-ming
circle of painters who like the others was born in the city, the son of an imperial censor named
Ch'en Yii, and was well educated but never pursued a career as a bureaucrat. He probably made
his living mostly as a painter and calligrapher—the scanty biographical accounts are typically
silent on this question. Shen Chou may have been his painting teacher, and in any case he was
one of Shen's young friends.
Wen Cheng-ming is often credited with having taught him painting, but (according to Wang
Shih-chen) disclaimed that honor when questioned on the matter by one of his disciples: "Our
Tao-fu is himself an established teacher; in both calligraphy and painting he has his own school
and goes his own way. He is not my pupil." Wang Shih-chen suggests that Wen's words contain
some sense of dissatisfaction with Ch'en's accomplishments.
Wang also relates, and other sources repeat, that in his landscape style Ch'en Shun imitated
the Yuan masters (presumably the usual models—Huang Kung-wang, Ni Tsan, and Wang Meng)
in his early period, in works that were refined and skillful, but that he changed direction
suddenly in his middle years and began doing sketchy pictures in the tradition of Mi Fu, Mi Yu
jen, and their Yuan-period follower Kao K'o-kung. This skeletal account of his career is gener
ally borne out by extant paintings, but we may add that he was apparently strongly influenced
also by the works of artists active in Nanking a few decades earlier, such as Wu Wei, Shih Chung,
and Kuo Hsu. Some other leaves in the 1540 landscape album use compositional types and motifs
favored by those artists, such as the fisherman under the overhanging cliff. The Mi manner of
landscape and the tradition of Kao K'o-kung, as we pointed out in an earlier chapter, played
little part in the scholar-amateur current of painting in the Ming but were often adopted or
adapted by academic artists and by the related group of unorthodox masters in and around
Nanking, who endeavored to escape academicism by violating some of its rules while continuing
to adhere to others. Ch'en Shun's affinities with this latter group are strong and help explain
why his style was, in turn, so influential in the development of Hsu Wei's painting. Ch'en applies
ink more liberally and with a richer range of values than do other Soochow artists, and his
brushwork is looser, less restrained.
The best among Ch'en Shun's many flower pictures, such as the series in a handscroll in the
Palace Museum, Taipei, dated 1538 (Pi. 127), are brilliant performances in brush and ink besides
being penetrating portrayals of their subjects, combining these two kinds of excellence in a way
that rivals, for instance, T'ang Yin's "Singing Bird" (Pi. 99-100). In particular, the techniques
of allowing controlled suffusions of darker ink within a still-wet lighter area and loading the
brush one-sidedly for shaded strokes are effectively exploited and developed to new heights of
coloristic beauty by Ch'en Shun. They serve representationally to render shadows within the
depths of a flower, or leaves turning at varying angles to the picture plane, and thus relieve the
flatness of most earlier flower painting in ink as it was practiced by Shen Chou and others.
Wang Chih-teng writes of Ch'en's paintings of this kind: "In painting [flower subjects] from
life, he did each flower and half-leaf in dilute ink, slanting and bold, spread out randomly and
turned at oblique angles, seeming disordered and even upside down but wondrously pursuing
the truth. He overturned [surpassed] the common crowd of painters. Their tricks of blue-greens
distinguished and reds nicely calculated, petals separated and stamens and pistils divided—these
are the cheap devices of the ordinary artisan and can't be spoken of in the same breath with the
free-running styles of the upper-class artist."
SHEN SHIH As we learn more about the Soochow painting world in the sixteenth century, we
begin to see in it a rich and elaborate fabric of interwoven styles and traditions, the product of a
complex interaction of artists and patrons, collectors and dealers and connoisseurs. Styles were
subject to class distinctions as people were. Those who wanted paintings approached particular
artists with particular expectations, going to Ch'iu Ying for one kind of picture, T'ang Yin for
another, Wen Cheng-ming for still another. One might assume that Ch'iu's and T'ang's styles
had a broader appeal on different social and economic levels, while Wen's attracted a more
exclusive circle of admiring collectors. That was doubtless true in the early decades of the
century, but by Wen's later years the preponderance of taste seems to have shifted, and the
somewhat exclusionist, "in-group" status that the scholar-amateurs' painting had held from the
time of Liu Chiieh and the early period of Shen Chou was eroded by an increasing popularity.
That a number of Wen Cheng-ming's followers were semiprofessionals or outright professionals

testifies to this change in the status of the school.
While these followers of Wen Cheng-ming dominated the scene, the styles of Ch'iu Ying and
T'ang Yin, as we noted earlier, were scarcely carried on after their deaths except by minor
masters. It was a time when a professional painter might have been well advised to learn and
practice the "literary" styles, for mercenary reasons even if he did not share the general sense
that these represented the progressive trend of the time. On the other hand, the demand for
paintings in Sung-derived styles did not cease altogether, and collectors continued to pursue the
works of old masters with a zeal that inspired forgers to augment the insufficient supply of
genuinely antique works. (Besides being sold to the unwary as originals, forgeries were regularly
used as more or less symbolic gifts, or bribes; it would have been ungrateful and unmannerly
for the recipient of a "Sung" scroll to inquire too closely into the actual date of its execution.)
A painter of sufficient skill and versatility, then, might combine the roles of a traditionalist
adept in academic Sung styles, a copyist or forger of old paintings, a follower of T'ang and
Ch'iu, an imitator of Shen and Wen—and, if his creative powers could survive all this, an
original artist in his own right.
Just such a painter, it would appear, was the little known Soochow master Shen Shih, who
adopted all these roles and others, including that of connoisseur. His birth and death dates are
not recorded, but his period of activity can be placed provisionally at around 1540—80—his
two dated paintings are 1543 and 1544, and he was the friend of the younger painter-collector
Chan Ching-feng, who took his chii-jen degree in 1567 and was active in painting circles from
around that time until the end of the century, with dated works in the 1590s.
Shen Shih was a native of Ch'ang-chou, the eastern sector of Soochow, but lived for some
part of his life in Nanking. When he first determined to learn to paint, we are told by the
Ming-hua lu, he worked at it for three years "without coming downstairs." He modeled his
style on the Sung masters Li T'ang and Liu Sung-nien, as well as on Wu Chen of the Yuan, but
also followed T'ang Yin and Ch'iu Ying. Several writers state that he excelled in copying old
paintings. In Chan Ching-feng's Tung-t'u hsiian-lan pien, a miscellany probably written in the
1590s, Shen Shih is mentioned several times as a copyist of Sung and Yuan paintings. The im
plication is that he was engaged in the production of forgeries, although Chan Ching-feng does
not say so plainly, nor do other writers. Chan also quotes Shen's opinions on old paintings,
indicating that he had some standing as a connoisseur. This could also be a source of income,
since it was normal for owners of paintings to pay in cash or gifts for opinions and authentications.
Filling in with imagination the spaces around these scraps of information, we can suppose Shen
Shih to have been a man of wide acquaintance with all aspects of painting old and new, gained
through study of collections in the Soochow and Nanking regions, who put his knowledge and
talents to use in a variety of ways. His is not the only case of one who combined the activities of
artist, forger, collector, connoisseur, and (quite likely) dealer; a distinguished example of that
combination is widely known in our own time.
How many of Shen's copies and imitations pass today under more famous names we cannot say,
but his original, signed works are rare. Apart from a fan painting in the style of Shen Chou,
only two are presently known: a landscape handscroll, dated 1543,23 and the work reproduced
here, "Sunset in an Autumn Valley," dated 1544 (Pi. 128). The latter was painted in Nanking
for a certain Mr. Chu-lin and bears poetic inscriptions by two other artists, Wen Cheng-ming's
nephew Wen Po-jen and Shen Shih (unrelated to our painter, his given name written with a
different character). It represents a wooded valley opening onto a broad river, probably the
Yangtze. A man, presumably Chu-lin, is seated in the upper story of a house set among trees.
The house is situated in the middle distance, set back from the foreground by a winding stream
and seen through an opening in dense foliage. The use of graded ink tones to create the sunlit
hollow of space among the trees and to clarify spatial relationships is masterly; the brushwork is
deft and sensitive, seeming unusually "painterly" for this age of more linear modes.
Although Shen Shih reveals a thorough awareness of the styles of Shen Chou and Wen Cheng
ming and could doubtless imitate them closely if he chose to, his chief models are in the Yuan
dynasty, Wu Chen and even more Sheng Mou (cf. Hills, Pi. 21, 23, and Color Pi. 3). When an
almost forgotten artist demonstrates such mastery of earlier styles as Shen Shih does here and in
his 1543 handscroll and is, moreover, identified in literary sources as a professional copyist, we
may be warned against any feeling of complacency in our judgments on the authenticity of old
paintings, or at least against the common blunder of accepting a painting as genuine because of
its high quality.
3. WEN'S DESCENDANTS AND FOLLOWERS IN THE

LATER SIXTEENTH CENTURY
A number of Wen Cheng-ming's relatives and descendants were painters and calligraphers; as
late as the mid-nineteenth century one of them, Wen Ting, was still carrying on the family tradi
tion.26 Only two others of the Wen family, however, both in the generation following Cheng
ming, were artists of any note. They were his second son Wen Chia (1501—83) and his nephew
(brother's son) Wen Po-jen (1502-75).
W E N CHIA Wen Chia served for a time as an instructor in a sub-prefectural school, probably
a ju-hsueh, or Confucian school, in Ho-chou in Anhui Province, but seems to have spent his later
years back in Soochow. Through his aesthetic upbringing, his familiarity with the family col
lection, and his constant association with collectors in his father's circle of friends, he acquired
effortlessly enough expertise as a connoisseur to undertake the judging and authentication of
paintings and calligraphy in at least a semiprofessional capacity, as did his older brother Wen
P'eng, who was an art adviser to the greatest collector of the time, Hsiang Yiian-pien. Inscrip
tions by Wen Chia, some in the form of poems, some offering art-historical judgments, are still
to be seen on many important paintings; these were composed and inscribed, ordinarily, at the
request of the owner of the scroll and were (like paintings by the scholar-amateurs) in theory
done for pure friendship but in practice often for recompense of some kind (as noted already
with respect to Shen Shih). When the Grand Secretary Yen Sung (1480—1565) fell from power
and his collection of works of art, acquired as gifts from people who had sought favor with him,
was confiscated, Wen Chia was employed in making a catalogue of the calligraphy and paintings.27
Wen Chia's immersion from childhood in an environment of the highest aesthetic refinement
affected his painting just as deeply by instilling standards that prevented it from ever falling below
that level of refinement, but also by virtually ruling out the kinds of originality and experimen
tation that risk lapses from good taste in the pursuit of greater goals thantastefulness. Wen Chia's
paintings are exploratory only in moving into the further reaches of that unreal realm of poetic
fancy in which Lu Chih was at home, and the only danger they court is preciosity. Whether or
not they succumb to it is a question to be decided by personal judgment. Their subjects are
often old poems, or local scenery, or traditional themes; their style offers some of the most
fastidious and cultivated brushwork, the coolest coloring, the most rarefied transformations of
tactile reality into expressively dilute images, in all of Ming painting.
A landscape dated 1555 (Pi. 129), more substantial than most of Wen Chia's others, is titled
"Temples on Immortals' Mountains" and presumably represents, unless the scene is purely
imaginary, some place in the environs of Soochow where a Taoist temple was situated on a
WEN'S DESCENDANTS AND FOLLOWERS • 249
cliff, with some kind of cavern below. Whether or not the picture portrays any real place, the
composition is in the main invented, or (to state the matter more accurately) derived by variation
from the Wu-school formula for landscapes of this narrow shape. When we realize that it was
painted just five years after Wen Cheng-ming's "Thousand Cliffs" (PI. 116) and try to imagine
the creative predicament of the painter working under the eye of his strong-willed and illustrious
octogenarian father, a certain note of willful aberration becomes as understandable as in, say, a
sonata by K. P. E. Bach. A less creative artist would simply have repeated the formula, a more
creative one might have rejected it altogether; Wen Chia stretches it out of shape, almost but
not quite to the breaking point.
The composition divides in the middle, like Wen Cheng-ming's; a pine tree, its height
emphasized by the bareness of its trunk, acts as a skewer to help hold the two halves together.
The grotto at the bottom, out of which a torrent of water pours, sets a theme that is taken up as
the formal basis of the whole painting, which is built around a single long concave movement
stretching from bottom to top. At the base, two gentlemen and their servants walk beside the
stream, beneath an old tree that overhangs the water. The ropy vines with which it is entwined
already inject a tone of slight eeriness, which deepens in the cavern, with its strangely uniform
and pendulous stalactites, and turns to queasiness in the landscape above, on which the eye can
take no firm hold—the paths slant steeply, the pilings of the buildings rest on no solid surface.
The coloring is very cool, limited to blue-green and sallow yellow-brown tones instead of the
slightly warmer greens and red-oranges of Lu Chih and others.
W E N PO-JEN WenPo-jen (1502—75), the nephew of Wen Cheng-ming, was one year younger
than Wen Chia and must have grown up in much the same environment, but his was a personality
of another kind: he was reportedly sulky and short-tempered, given to scolding people, and
consequently disliked. While young he sued his famous uncle over some dispute, was sued in
return, and ended up in jail. "There he fell ill and was nearly dying. Then in a dream he saw a
man in golden armour who told him that in a previous life he had been a painter who always
washed and purified himself before painting images of Kuanyin Bodhisattva. By this he had
acquired merit and would escape further trouble in his present life."28 He recovered from his
illness, settled the lawsuit, and went on to become, we are told, the next most distinguished
painter of the family tradition, called by many the equal of Wen Cheng-ming himself.
Few of his landscape compositions justify such an assessment; they are mostly exaggeratedly
narrow in shape and crowded with details taken from the school repertory, compiled more than
composed into assemblages that may impress the viewer by excess but can scarcely be com
prehended as pictures at all. Compositions put together in this way, by accumulating small
elements until they fill the available space through sheer numbers, were in fact common in
Soochow painting around the third quarter of the sixteenth century; they are the unfortunate
products of attempts to emulate those works of Wen Cheng-ming that similarly incorporated a
multiplicity of elements into an elaborate whole, but in which the formally related materials
were, by contrast, effectively organized into strong, clearly readable structures. Other works by
Wen Po-jen, at an opposite extreme in effect but similar in their compositional extremism, are
excessively empty, giving more of the area of the painting to an expanse of water and stretching
the foreground and distant shores further apart than anyone had dared to do before.
Wen Po-jen's masterworks among surviving paintings, to which the negative aspects of the
above characterization only partly apply, are four huge hanging scrolls in the Tokyo National
Museum, painted in ink on paper and titled Ssu-wan t'u ("The Four Myriads"). All are inscribed
by the artist with titles and signatures, and the last bears an additional inscription that supplies
the date, 1551, and a dedication to Ju-ho, a friend of the artist whose proper name was Ku
Ts'ung-i. The word "myriad" (or "ten thousand") is used in Chinese in the sense of "in
numerable." Each composition is based on the repetition of some motif in nature until it fills
the picture space and extends beyond, by implication, into countlessness. The four make up,
moreover, a set of the four seasons: the spring scene is "A Myriad Stalks of Bamboo in Mist
and Rain"; summer (PI. 130, 132), "A Myriad Ravines with Windblown Pines"; autumn
(PI. 131, 133), "A Myriad Hectares of Sunlit Waves"; and winter, "A Myriad Peaks with
Flying Snow." Tung Ch'i-ch'ang, who inscribed each of the paintings, added still another
dimension to them by suggesting (as Wen Po-jen may not have intended) that each is in the
manner of some master of the past. One is expected, then, to view the paintings in relation to
whatever understanding one may have of those old masters (and the relationships are not easy to
discern, since Tung's suggestions are somewhat farfetched); to recognize and appreciate the
underlying theme of "The Four Myriads," a conceit more poetic than pictorial, and the con
gruence of this with the seasonal aspect of the series; to see the paintings in the context of the
Wen Cheng-ming school and as "moves" in the "game" referred to above; and—if this is still
possible—to enjoy them as pictures.
In fact, for all their density of design, they are far easier to enjoy as pictures than most of
Wen Po-jen's other works; they must represent the kind singled out by the author of the
Ming-hua lu for special praise: "His landscapes are done in clean and supple brushwork. He
follows the family manner but on occasion brings forth ingenious ideas of his own, in horizontal
scrolls or large hanging scrolls full of heights and depths and fine detail; in these he is not
inferior to Wen Cheng-ming."
Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's inscription on the "Myriad Ravines" (Pi. 130) reads: "This picture is in
the manner of Ni Tsan. It is like 'Shih-heng suffering from an excess of literary talent'—[Wen
Po-jen] is stronger even than Ni and cannot reduce himself [i.e., conceal his strength]. He unites
the best skills of Lu Chih [with his own]." The allusion to Shih-heng, or Lu Chi (261-303), the
author of the famous "Essay on Literature," refers to a remark made about him by his con
temporary Chang Hua: where most people, Chang said, regret the paucity of their literary
talents, Lu is troubled by the profusion of his.
Considering Tung's expressed disdain, on another occasion, for "recent painters" who "pile
up small pieces to make a mountain," we may suspect that his effusive praise for Wen Po-jen,
especially his ranking of him above Ni Tsan, is best understood as more or less obligatory
enthusiasm for paintings that were owned by a friend, or by someone to whom Tung was some
how obliged. As we will see when we consider Tung as a painter, his stark, stripped-down
style represents a reaction against just their proliferation of textural detail, which tends to
obscure the clarity of structure on which Tung insisted.
But in fact, within the terms of this style, Wen Po-jen is remarkably successful in arranging his
pines, rocks, and ridges according to an unobtrusively effective compositional scheme. A formal
motif of bifurcation is announced at the base of the composition by two pine trees in the center
that lean away from each other; a stream goes off diagonally to the left, a ridge to the right, and
so forth, with successive diagonal elements diverging as we ascend and leading the eye upward
and sideward from the central axis, which is marked at intervals by vertical trees, and along
which are located the inconspicuous figures that people the ravine, seven of them in all. The sky
line at the top departs from the standard "central mountain" formula to state the V-motif one
last time. The drawing, dry and sensitive throughout, must account for Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's
allusion to Ni Tsan; it is hard to see what else could.
It would be easier to associate the summer scene, "A Myriad Hectares of Sunlit Waves"
(Pi. 131), with Ni Tsan, since the composition, at least, recalls Ni's spacious riverscapes; but
this time it is Chao Meng-fu whom Tung invokes: "This picture follows Chao Meng-fu. It has
the empty expansiveness of the sky over the [Great] Lake. The 'Water Village' picture [by Chao]
in my collection is just like it." The "Water Village" (Shui-ts'un t'u) is a landscape handscroll
that Chao painted in 1302 (Hills, Pi. 13); it resembles Wen's picture in offering a limited
number of delicately drawn forms spread sparsely over a ground plane that stretches to hills on
a high horizon.
At the base of Wen Po-jen's composition, a boatman, identified by scrolls, books, and wine
pot as a cultivated gentleman for whom this excursion on the lake is purely a mind-cleansing
activity, is playing his flute (detail, PI. 133). The ripples on the water continue its melancholy
reverberations into far distance, where another boat serves as a faint echo. Only a flight of birds,
skimming the surface, helps to carry the eye across the intervening expanse. The quality of
fragile refinement in Wu-school painting here reaches an apogee from which the aftermath can
only be descent: like some landscapes of the late Sung period, this seems to have reached the
uttermost limit in its reduction of solid form, to have made the ultimate permissible demands
on the viewer in its reliance on the pregnancy of space.
The later phases of Wu-school painting, from the late sixteenth century through the end of
Ming, will be considered in a subsequent volume. We will end this one with two landscapes
that lead in a different stylistic direction from that of the younger Wens, continuing the formalist
or abstract trend noted earlier in several paintings of the school and anticipating the next truly
decisive change in landscape style, which was to be accomplished by Tung Ch'i-ch'ang (1555
1636) around the turn of the century.
H o u MOU-KUNG The first is an undated landscape by Hou Mou-kung (Pi. 134). Very little
is known about the artist. He was a native of Soochow; his birth and death dates are unknown,
and even his period of activity is problematic. His dated works fall between 1569 and 1604.29
The Ming-hua lu describes his landscapes as "sparse and thin, pure and refined" and says that
he studied painting under Ch'ien Ku (1508 to after 1574) who was a pupil and close follower of
Wen Cheng-ming. Later, it goes on to relate, Hou turned to the styles of Huang Kung-wang and
Wang Meng and gradually "entered the chambers of," or penetrated the methods of, these great
Yuan-period masters, in works that were markedly different from his earlier ones. The landscape
we reproduce would, in that case, belong to this later period, since it is, as Tung Ch'i-ch'ang
notes in an inscription written at the upper right, "in the style of the late Yuan masters." It
departs not only from the artist's earlier work but from Wu-school practice generally in being
made up of earthy, soft-edged, volumetric forms arranged in a three-dimensional space.
This is not to say that Hou Mou-kung's picture is notably more realistic—the logic of this
system of forms has no heavier debt to nature than one of Wen Cheng-ming's—but an effect of
greater naturalism arises from the relatively unpatterned, informal treatment of trees and the
rendering of the surfaces of earth masses more tactilely with dry, uneven applications of light
ink. The visually compelling plasticity that results reminds us of the works of Huang Kung-wang,
as it should, since they are the main sources of the style; the contrapuntal development of the
rising mountain ridges also depends on Huang's formula (cf. Hills, Pi. 40), with the same three
basic units recurring regularly: the triangular shape, the cluster of darker boulders, and the
flat-topped mass, tilted toward the viewer and sometimes projecting sideward as a plateau or
ledge.
The verticality of the composition and its dependence on a long, winding movement up the
center, with subsidiary movements paralleling this at the sides, belongs to the sixteenth century,
but the rest is new, or old: landscapes "in the manner of Huang Kung-wang" by Shen Chou,
Wen Cheng-ming, and others had been flatter, more geometrically patterned, less earthy in
substance. Hou Mou-kung's painting argues for direct contact with some work or works by
Huang, and probably for a conscious reversion to the original source. In this, too, it anticipates
the fundamentalist attitudes of Tung Ch'i-ch'ang.
CHU CHI EH We conclude with a painting that not only is by another artist whose period of
activity is problematic, but which is itself problematic in date, even in authenticity. But it is too
fine and important a work to be ignored because we have not yet solved the problems associated
with it. This is "Spring in Chiang-nan" signed by Chii Chieh and dated 1531 (Pi. 135). The
artist was a native of Soochow who studied painting in his youth under Wen Chia; when Wen
Cheng-ming saw his work he was surprised and delighted, and gave him personal instruction.
Both his painting and his calligraphy came to resemble Wen's closely, and some considered him
Wen's outstanding pupil. His success as a painter, at least until he attained some recognition in
his own right, was doubtless based largely on his ability to imitate or even replicate Wen's works.
Chii Chieh's family was connected with the imperial silk factory in Soochow, which was
managed by a eunuch named Sun Lung (d. 1601, not to be confused with the fifteenth-century
painter of the same name). Sun heard of Chii's ability as a painter and summoned him; Chii
refused to come; Sun was furious, and brought about the financial ruin of Chii's family by
accusing them of delaying tax payments. Chii Chieh built a small house in Nan-ts'un (Southern
Village) at the foot of Tiger Hill and lived there in semipoverty and ill health for the rest of his
life. "When he earned a bit of money with his brush, he would invite his friends in for feasting
and drinking; when he ran out of food, he would get up early and do a picture of a lonely pine
tree and far-off hills and send a boy out to trade it for some rice." So writes the Ming-hua lu
and adds that he finally died of undernourishment when he was sixty.
The chronological problem raised by his dated works is that they seem to stretch over too
long a period, from 1531 to 1583 ; afifty-yearactive period as an artist is not impossible but is
obviously incompatible with the information that he died at sixty. The 1531 "Spring in Chiang-
nan," moreover, would seem on the basis of style to be a late work, surely postdating Wen
Cheng-ming's well-known painting of 1547, which bears the same title and poem.30 A few
other works from the 1530s are recorded, and one painting dated 1534 bears his signature but
is probably spurious.31 Apart from these, Chii Chieh's extant dated works fall within a comfort
able twenty-four year period, from 1559 to 1583.
The inscription and signature on the "Spring in Chiang-nan" do not themselves arouse sus
picion, and the painting can be convincingly related to others by Chii Chieh. Only the date is
difficult to accept. The possibility should be considered that we have here a case (like that of
Watanabe Kazan in nineteenth-century Japan or de Chirico in our time) of an artist who, in his
later period, puts early dates on his works in order to sell them. Perhaps by the Wan-li era
(1573-1620), paintings from what must by then have been regarded as the golden age of the
Wu school were valued far more highly than contemporary works, whoever the artist. It may
be hard to believe such a trick of Chii Chieh, who was reportedly a person of the highest
moral character, but the extreme poverty suggested by the statement that he died of malnutrition
is surely sufficient excuse.
This is speculation; the painting is a reality and, whatever its date, represents a remarkable
transformation of the earlier Wu-school style and of Wen Cheng-ming's own "Spring in Chiang-
nan" into the geometricized, abstract mode that was to become dominant in the succeeding
period. (Chii Chieh's interest, in his late years, in that new stylistic direction is indicated also
by other paintings, especially certain leaves in two albums in the Palace Museum, Taipei.)32
Wen Cheng-ming's painting is made up of three land masses spaced by intervals of river,
against which are silhouetted tall trees on the nearest promontory and smaller trees on the middle
one. This much Chii Chieh retains. Most of Wen Cheng-ming's landscapes have figures in the
foreground, providing the viewer with an easy ingress; in his "Spring in Chiang-nan" it is a
man in a boat. Chii Chieh eliminates the figure and boat. Wen's picture is in his most delicate,
insubstantial manner; the forms in it are defined by dotting, by the faintest of contours, and by
washes of light color; scarcely anything is firmly bounded. Chii Chieh, who proves himself a
master of this understated, poetic style in some of his other paintings, sacrifices delicacy to
clarity in this one; his forms are clear-cut, sharp-edged, essentially abstract. One is reminded
of the transition from the Impressionists to Cezanne to the Cubists. Space is distorted by tilting
the shorelines and, in the upper part, mismatching the. angles of view between one side and the
other; the river plane also seems to shift uneasily. The trees are less individualized and are
treated rather as compositional units, their strictly triangular tops and straight trunks serving
to break up and structure the water areas and enhance their function as active parts of the
whole design. Where all the earth elements of Wen Cheng-ming's picture are stable, even
static, those of Chii Chieh's are activated (like the forms of Hou Mou-kung's landscape) by the
device of drawing them with slanting upper surfaces so that they point, or thrust, in one di
rection or the other, interacting dynamically. The instability of the composition is intensified
by the weightiness of the upper part, which is also depicted in such a way that it seems to slip
rightward.
The all but exclusive concern with problems of pure form that characterizes this landscape,
and to a lesser extent Hou Mou-kung's, is untypical of later Wu-school painting, i.e., that of the
late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries; it is taken up and exploited rather by
the school of artists active in this same period in nearby Sung-chiang, above all by Tung Ch'i
ch'ang. Soochow painters working in the last phase of the Wu school would emphasize instead
the poetic, narrative, and lyrical aspects of their tradition. But these are developments beyond
the scope of our present subject. Chii Chieh's picture does not represent a total break with
earlier phases of the Wu school, in which precedents can be found for some features of it: Shen
Chou (cf. PI. 29) for the topheavy composition, Lu Chih and others for the angularity of the
forms, Wen Cheng-ming's "Spring Trees" (PI. I l l ) for the slanting shorelines, and so forth.
But they are used to new purpose in an essentially new style, one that augurs a new age in land
scape painting. The characteristics of painting in this new age, and how it represents another
revolution in painting style comparable to the one that took place at the beginning of the Yuan
dynasty, are matters that will be considered in the next volume of this series, on painting of the
late Ming period.
Reference Matter
Notes
References to publications are usually given below in abbreviated form, with only enough information to
guide the reader to full entries in the Bibliography.
CHAPTER 1 must await the time when it is accessible for

study.
1. Biographical notes on Wang Li are to be 4. Sheng Chu is represented today by two al
found in Ming-hua lu (Hua-shih ts'ung-shu ed., ch. bum leaves, one in the Palace Museum, Taipei
2, p. 21), Wu-sheng-shih shih (ch. 1, p. 6), and (VA 7K), and the other in the Metropolitan Mu
P'ei-wen-chai shu-hua p'u (ch. 55, p. 40b) quoting seum, New York (1973.121.14). Neither reveals
from Lieh-ch'ao shih-chi by Ch'ien Chien-i (early any interesting departure from the manner of the
Ch'ing period). Sheng Mou school. A signed album-leaf painting
2. Wang's two essays are printed in P'ei-wen of "T'ao Yuan-ming Returning Home Drunk"
chai shu-hua p'u, ch. 16. I am grateful to Thomas in the Palace Museum, Taipei, seems to be the
Lawton for giving me a copy of his draft transla sole surviving work of Chou Wei.
tions of both; the renderings used here are, how 5. MV 23; see Ku-kung ming-hua, vol. 7, pi.
ever, my own. For derogatory assessments of Ma 9, and Cahill, Chinese Painting, pi. 120 (detail).
Yuan and Hsia Kuei by Yuan-period writers, see 6. A landscape dated 1452, now known only
the treatment of them by Chuang Su (Hua-chi in reproduction, would, if genuine, represent the
pu-i) and T'ang Hou (Hua chieri); both books are "amateur" aspect of his painting; see I-yiian
included in the bibliography for Hills. chen-shang, vol. 9.
3. The inscriptions in the album were first 7. The painting is unsigned, but Hsieh is iden
recorded in T'ieh-wang shan-hu (ca. 1600), where tified as the artist in Yang Shih-ch'i's colophon.
they make up most of ch. 6; if they all belong to a Another version of the painting, also ascribed to
single album of paintings, it must have contained Hsieh, is in the Chen-chiang Museum in China
many more than the "forty-odd" leaves men (see Wen-wu, 1963, no. 4) but is reproduced so
tioned in Wu-sheng-shih shih and other seventeenth- badly that no assessment of it is possible. A deci
century sources. The catalogue Hua-jiian to-ying sion as to which is Hsieh Huan's genuine work—
(1955) states that eleven leaves survive in modern it is possible that both are—must be postponed
times, and that number of leaves were included in until the scroll in China is accessible for study.
an album publication by Shen-chou Kuo-kuang 8. For the illustrations to ku-shih, see Kokka
She in 1929, in which the paintings were ascribed no. 283 (a pair) and Toyo bijutsu taikaa, 10. The
misleadingly to Fan K'uan. Five of these leaves handscrolls are the "Searching for Flowers" in
were shown to me at the Shanghai Museum in the Hashimoto Collection, Takatsuki (Hashimoto
1973. However, three others, not among the cat. no. 2), mistakenly listed by Sirdn (Annotated
eleven in the Shen-chou publication, were on Lists, Chinese Painting, vol. VII, p. 232) as two
view in the Palace Museum, Peking; and still paintings, and a recent acquisition of the Cleve
others may be in storage there. The solution of land Museum of Art; see Sherman Lee, "Early
numerous problems associated with this album Ming Painting," pp. 244-^7. The other hanging
257
2 5 8 • NOTES For pages 25—55
scroll, besides the one reproduced here, is in the for at least eight years after this. Even if we
Nezu Museum, Tokyo. disbelieve the painting dated 1452 (see note 6—
9. The complete scroll is reproduced in the reproduction is too indistinct to allow any
Chung-kuo hua, no. 13; a section in Siren, Chinese firm judgment of its authenticity), we are still
Painting, vol. Ill, PL 271. No color reproduction confronted with a reference in the "Veritable
has been published, but in studying the coloring Records" of the emperor Ying-tsung, cited by
and detail drawing of this painting I have used Suzuki (note 217, p. 315) to Hsieh's promotion
color slides that I was able to make from the orig to the rank of Assistant Commander of the Guard
inal in 1973. The text of Hung-wu's colophon, in that same year, 1452. This chronological dis
written after the scroll was presented to the em parity is difficult to resolve; Lang Ying, writing
peror by a mounter in 137S, is recorded in P'ei a century or so after the events, must have had
wen-chai, ch. 84. faulty information.
10. Liaoning Provincial Museum; see Liao 15. Cahill, Chinese Painting, p. 64. The pose of
ning, Pis. 8-14. Tai Chin's figure is so close to that of the anony
11. Many others, both earlier and later, could mous "Noble Scholar Under a Willow" (ibid.,
be cited. Especially interesting is a large, bizarre p. 63) as to suggest that Tai may have known that
painting by Ma Shih in the Palace Museum, Tai picture, or something based on it.
pei (MV 41, unpublished), in which an anomalous 16. Palace Museum, Taipei (MV 33); see Si
passage at the center right of Kuo Hsi's work, ren, Chinese Painting, VI, PI. 145. See also Sher
where the artist in an apparent change of plan man Lee, "Early Ming Painting," where this in
opened a view into a seemingly subterranean terpretation is followed and both paintings are
world in order to overcome the excessive sta reproduced.
bility and weightiness of an earth slope, has been 17. See Fontein and Hickman, no. 55.
transferred and enlarged by Ma Shih so as to 18. They include "Autumn Colors on Moun
undermine his main central mass and negate its tain Peaks," attributed to Kao K'o-kung, in the
thickness: a curious case of a mistake become part Palace Museum, Taipei (YV 16), and "Taoist
of a tradition. The painting otherwise follows Temple in the Mountains," attributed to Tung
closely the style of Tai Chin, as seen, for exam Yuan, in the same collection (WV 10), which
ple, in our PI. 17. appears to be the work of some early Ming fol
12. Suzuki, Mindai, pp. 15-23, "The Biogra lower of Kao K'o-kung, possibly an Academy
phy of Tai Chin and Critical Comments on master.
Him" ; pp. 24-37, "The Works of Tai Chin and 19. Lee and Ho, pp. 26-62.
Their Style" ; pp. 151-63, "Tai Chin's Influence 20. Sickman and Soper, PI. 118.
Inside and Outside the Academy." I am indebted 21. Cited by Whitfield, p. 286.
also to Howard Rogers, who composed a tenta 22. By Chaoying Fang, pp. 30—32.
tive chronology of Tai's career based largely on 23. One is in the Palace Museum, Taipei
Ming sources cited by Suzuki, and Mary Ann (MV 40); see Ku-kung shu-hua chi, 43. The other
Matteson, who used this chronology in a paper is now in the Princeton Museum; see Toyo Bijutsu
proposing a developmental sequence in Tai's Taikan 10.
works, for my seminar in Ming Academy Paint 24. See Li T'ien-ma, "Yen Tsung."
ing given in winter-spring, 1974; both have 25. Standard late sources state that he was
contributed to my treatment of Tai Chin. called to court, along with Lii Chi, in the Hung
13. Ch'un-Jeng-t'ang sui-pi, see Suzuki, Mindai, chih era (1488-1506), and this statement is re
note 12. Ni Tuan's only work known to me, peated in modem books. Recent Chinese schol
apart from a problematic picture in the Palace arship, however, places him earlier, giving his
Museum, Taipei, is an unpublished painting in birth and death dates as ca. 1416 to ca. 1480, and
the Palace Museum, Peking, that fits very well his main period of activity as the Ching-t'ai and
the definition of the conservative Academy style T'ien-hsiin eras (1450-64). See Li T'ien-ma,
outlined above. "Lin Liang"; also the note on him in Ku-kung
14. Lang Ying states that Tai returned only po-wu-yuan, notes to no. 36.
after Hsieh Huan's death; but he goes on to say 26. Quoted in the entry on Lin Liang in
that one of Tai's patrons at the capital was Yang Hua-shih hui-jao; see also Suzuki, Mindai, note
Shih-ch'i, who died in 1444, while Hsieh lived 305.
For pages S8-103 NOTES • 2 5 9
CHAPTER 2 tation by some later master, probably of the
seventeenth century. See Shen Shih-t'ien Ling-fin
1. Biographical material has been taken from Shan t'u-chuan, Shanghai, 1924.
the biography by Lee Hwa-chou in Dictionary of 11. Adapted from Edwards, Field of Stones, p.
Ming Biography, pp. 1375-76. 91.
2. Chinese Art Treasures, no. 91. 12. I have used the rendering of Edwards,
3. The serious reader is urged at this point to Field of Stones, p. 57, for the opening lines, but
read the excellent essay by Frederick Mote, "A have retranslated the remainder. Professor Wei-
Millennium of Chinese Urban History." ming Tu gave me invaluable help in rendering and
4. As pointed out by Susan Bush, pp. 164-65, understanding the inscription.
the tradition that became the "Northern 13. Relevant here is the difficult but rewarding
school," from Li Ssu-hsiin to Li T'ane and Ma essay of Victoria Contag, "The Unique Char
Yuan, was spelled out as early as 1387 in Ko-ku acteristics of Chinese Landscape Pictures."
yao-lun. Tu Ch'iung begins to introduce value 14. Edwards, Field of Stones, pp. 23-31; Ca
-' O C>
judgments into this system, evidencing a leaning hill, Chinese Painting, pp. 128-29.
toward those artists who would later be assigned 15. Ch'ang-chou ch'ii t'u-chuan, Peking, 1961.
to the "Southern school." For the text of Tu 16. Wang Shih-chen, 1-yuan chih-yen, in Ku
Ch'iung's verses, see Yii Chien-hua, Chung-kuo, kung chou-k'an, no. 77.
vol. I, p. 103. 17. For an account of the grove and other de
5. For the Wu Chen scroll, see Sickman and pictions of it, see Tseng Yu-ho's "Seven Juni
Soper, Pi. 118. Yao Shou's copy of Chao Meng pers." Until recently the Nanking Museum scroll
fu's painting is now in the Peking Palace Mu was inaccessible for study in the original; there
seum (see Chin Tang Wu-tai, Pi. 99). has thus been some uncertainty over which of the
6. Cahill, Fantastics, no. 13. several versions of this painting is to be credited
7. The chief biographical work on Shen Chou as Shen Chou's original. A viewing of the paint
has been done by Richard Edwards, whose Field ing leaves no doubt; it is clearly superior not only
of Stones (1962) was, excepting a few early and to the other versions of the same composition but
abortive efforts by others, the first comprehensive also to the several handscrolls of the same type
study of an individual Chinese painter to be pub ascribed to Wen Cheng-ming, including the
lished in English. I have also made use of his more much overpraised scroll in the Honolulu Acade
recent biography of Shen Chou for the Dictionary my of Art. A copy of Shen Chou's scroll in the
of Ming Biography, pp. 1173—77. Osaka Municipal Museum (see Osaka Shiritsu Bi
8. Both Edwards (Field of Stones, xxi) and Siren jutsukan, no. 79) has copies of the original in
(IV, 155) render this first line as "Mi is not Mi, scriptions by Shen Chou (dated 1484 and 1492)
Huang is not Huang." But this rendering, besides and Wang Shih-chen, which are now missing from
being meaningless, is grammatically impossible: the original painting in Nanking.
pu ("does not") in the Chinese text (Mi pu Mi,
Huang pu Huang) can only be followed by—and
in this case also preceded by—a verb. So "Mi" CHAPTER 3
here must be taken to mean "to be in the Mi
style" or "to resemble Mi." (Any Chinese noun 1. The biographical account given here is
can in theory thus be pressed forcibly into service pieced together from a variety of sources, of
as a verb.) The cryptic quality of this line might varying reliability. Again, I have depended on
be caught by "Mi won't Mi, Huang won't the material brought together by Suzuki; and I
Huang," or even "To Mi or not to Mi . . . " am indebted to Holly Holtz, on whose paper on
9. Chinese Art Treasures, no. 44. Wu Wei, prepared for my seminar and later
10. The "Landscape of Mount Ling-yin" reworked into a master's thesis, I have drawn
handscroll of 1471, mentioned above as having freely.
been painted on the same trip as Liu Chiieh's 2. See, for example, Suzuki's Ri To. Here
work of that year, would upset this account of too, however, the qualitative level is untypically
Shen Chou's development if it were reliable. I high. The bulk of the ordinary Che-school work
am inclined, however, without having seen the remains unpublished.
original, to suspect it of being a copy or an imi- 3. For an excellent discussion of this scroll,
2 6 0 • NOTES For pages 104—38
and of the fishermen theme in early Chinese liter 19. Siren, III, PI. 325.
ature and art, see Hay's article. 20. Sickman and Soper, Pi. 32B.
4. See Barnhart. 21. Two figure-in-landscape paintings by
5. Barnhart, p. 178, quoting from 1-jiian chih Cheng Wen-lin are in the Hashimoto Collection,
yen. Takatsuki (Hashimoto catalogue, PI. 15, 16), and
6. Siren, vol. Ill, PI. 328. another in the Ching Yuan Chai Collection
7. Dictionary of Ming Biography, pp. 591-93. (Suzuki, Ri To, Pi. 25). Other paintings can be
8. To So Gen Min meiga taikan, PI. 308-11. A tentatively added to his oeuvre on the basis of
landscape dated 1548 (Shcn-chou kuo-kuang chi, style, including a large, unsigned landscape with
vol. 19) must be rejected as spurious now that figures attributed to Tai Chin in the Palace
Chaoying Fang has established Hsu's death date a Museum, Taipei, titled "Inebriated in Spring"
decade earlier. (MV 355).
9. Pageant of Chinese Painting, 536—39; So Gen 22. Cahill, "Yuan Chiang."
Min Shin, Appendix 18-21. 23. Suzuki, Ri To, Pi. 84. Two other paintings
10. Suzuki, Mindai, 297. by Chu Pang are in the British Museum; see
11. See the article on Wang E by Kawakami Whitfield, PI. 11, 14.
and also Suzuki's Mindai, pp. 184—85.
12. For biographical information and apprais CHAPTER 4
als of Chung Li's position in the Che school, see
Yonezawa's "Sho Rei" and Suzuki's Mindai, pp. 1. Wilson and Wong, p. 20.
205-8. 2. Paintings of this school are treated by
13. Suzuki, Ri To, Pi. 81. This painting, Shimada, "Lu Ching-fu's Painting." The sur
the one reproduced here, and another "Gazing vival of the school into the early Ch'ing period
at a Waterfall" picture formerly in the Strehl is indicated by a painting of lotuses in the mo-ku
neek Collection (Collection E. A. Strehlneek, manner dated 1671 by T'ang Kuang (1626-90);
auction catalogue, Tokyo Art Club, n.d., PI. 147) see Ku-kung po-wu-yuan, Pi. 71.
are the only works published under Chung Li's 3. See Ku-kung shu-hua chi, vol. 39; detail in
name. However, two large paintings traditionally Cahill, Chinese Painting, p. 120.
ascribed to Ma Yuan in the Palace Museum, Tai 4. The hakogaki (box inscription) is for an
pei, representing scholars on mountain terraces undated landscape painted on paper. The third
gazing at the moon and drinking wine, can be work of Yang Hsiin presently known is a large
added to his extant oeuvre, one (SV 97) because winter landscape in the Tokyo National Museum.
it bears his signature and seal in the lower left I am indebted to Professors Frederick Mote of
comer, the other (SV 104) because of close cor Princeton and Gari Ledyard of Columbia, both of
respondences in composition and style. whom gave generously of their time and knowl
14. The date is from a seal that he used on edge in the pursuit of the elusive Yang Hsiin,
several of his paintings, with the legend hsin-yu without turning up any reference to a man of that
cheng-shih, or "Called to Court in the Hsin-yu name that matches exactly the information in the
Year" (1501). Japanese hakogaki or mentions that he was a
15. See Suzuki, Mindai, pp. 4-7 and Chapter painter. Two other Yang Hsiins are recorded; one
VI passim for discussions of these critical con was from Hsiin-chou in Hupei Province and took
demnations of the later Che-school artists. his chin-shih degree in 1493; the other, noted
16. The Li Chu painting is in the collection of chiefly for filial piety, took his chii-jen degree in
Sueyoshi Hashimoto, Takatsuki; see Hashimoto 1597. Neither is recorded as having been a
catalogue, Pi. 8. The only other known work of the painter. The writer of the Japanese hakogaki of
artist is a small landscape bearing his seal owned 1874, who signs "Rimpo Sansho," cites two
by Dr. Eugene Gaenslen, San Francisco, and kept sources for his information: a seventeenth-
at the University Art Museum, Berkeley. century work called Ming-chi hui-tsuan, and the
17. Kuo Wei-ch'u gives "1464-1538," and K'ang-hsi imperial encyclopedia P'ei-wen-chai
the same dates are used by Siren, but without shu-hua p'u. However, repeated perusals of both
citing sources in either case. works have failed to produce a single mention of
18. 1-yuan chih-ycn; see Ku-kung chou-k'an, 78. Yang Hsiin. It is unlikely that Rimpo Sansho in
The same story is told of Tai Chin in two later vented the information or the sources; he may
books, Wu-tsa-tsu and Wu-sheng-shih shih. have somehow misidentified the latter; we record
For pages 140-99 NOTES • 261
provisionally the biographical data that he pro k'uang-sheng ("Master Mountain-crazy"). One
vides, in the hope that eventually it can either be almost feels ready to fill in, roughly, the remain
confirmed or replaced with a firmer identifi der of his biography simply on the basis of his
cation. style. But that would push too far our argument
5. Shimada, "Ippin gaffl." about correlations.
6. Speiser and Franke.
7. The Ni Tsan bamboo painting, dated 1374, CHAPTER 5
is in the Palace Museum, Taipei; see National
Palace Museum Quarterly, vol. I, no. 3, pi. 19. 1. One of the pictures also exists in two other
8. Sullivan, "Early Chinese Screen Paint versions, both in the Palace Museum, Taipei,
ing." ascribed to Li Sung (SV92) and Liu Sung-nien
9. See P'ing-chin-kuan shu-hua chi, pp. 3Sa-36a. (SV86); both are superior to the Tofuku-ji paint
The catalogue was written by Sun Hsing-yen ings, which suggests that these represent Ch'en
(1753-1818) and published in 1841. The author Hsien only as a copyist, and should not be taken
comments on several depictions of the subject as his typical works.
by other artists and mentions that in Tu Chin's, 2. Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Portfolio, I,
Fu Sheng is not shown holding a scroll (the PI. 79.
Shu-ching), which is also the case in our plate. 3. For Ho's version, see his Ssu-yu-chai hua
10. Osaka Municipal Museum; see Siren, III, lun, Mei-shu ts'ung-shu ed., p. 45. For Wang's,
PI. 90; and Cahill, Chinese Painting, p. 18. I-yiian chih-yen, in Ku-kung chou-k'an no. 75.
11. A thorough biography of Wang Wen, on 4. Complete translation in T. C. Lai, pp. 40
which this account is based, was prepared by Lee 43; see also pp. 32-40 for a full account of the
Hwa-chou for the Dictionary of Ming Biography "bribery" affair. Another good treatment of his
(pp. 1447—48.) The notes on Hsieh Shih-ch'en life, by Chu-tsing Li, is included in the same
below are similarly based on the entry prepared book, pp. 115—21. See also the series of articles
for that project by the same author {ibid., pp. by Chiang Chao-shen in the National Palace
558-59.) Museum Quarterly, II/4 through III/3, April 1968
12. Adapted from the rendering in Siren, IV, to January 1969.
pp. 169-70. 5. Wilson and Wong, pp. 12—IS. The so-
13. Tseng Yu-ho, "A Study on Hsu Wei" ; I called Tang Liu-ju hua-p'u, a compilation of ex
cheng Liang and L. Carrington Goodrich, bi cerpts from earlier writings on painting which
ography for the Dictionary of Ming Biography, pp. circulates under the name of T'anp Yin, is actual
609—12; Faurot. Tseng and Faurot provide exten ly a late-Ming reprint of a sixteenth-century work
sive translations from original sources. titled Tu-shih hua-p'u to which T'ang's name was
14. Two of the Four Cries are translated by falsely attached.
Faurot, who believes that one of them may 6. The 1501 painting is a figure-in-landscape
actually have been composed late in his life. His composition with an inscription by Wen Cheng
essay on Southern drama has recently been trans ming dated to that year (see To So, PI. 361); the
lated and studied in another doctoral dissertation, 1504 work depicts the Weaving Maiden (see /
by K. C. Leung. lin ts'ung-pien, 11.)
15. Translation by Tseng, "Study," p. 249. 7. Siren, vol. IV, p. 207, quoting Wang
Tseng notes that the wording is very obscure and Chih-teng.
speaks of her rendering as a tentative one. 8. T. C. Lai, p. 100.
16. Siren, III, PI. 368. 9. Vang Liu-ju hua-chi, PI. 22-25.
17. For instance, two leaves have recently 10. Chinese Art Treasures, no. 100.
been reproduced from an album by Tu Ta-ch'eng 11. The other two compositions include the
(Liao-ning, II, 20-21). His dates and period of portion covered by the right scroll of the Boston
activity are unknown, and no other work by him pair and another portion further to the right,
has been published. However, when we note that which completes the horizontally extended
the paintings are of plants and insects in the loose branch and provides a view of the opposite shore
"boneless" manner of Sun Lung and Kuo Hsu, of the river; they lack the left portion of the
it is not surprising to learn from literary sources Boston pair, with vertical tree trunks and the
that he was born and active in Nanking, was a cliff. The composition, and the screen shape,
poet and musician, and called himself Shan- would seem to require still another section to the
262 • NOTES For pages 201-14
left of the Boston portions, which has not Kuwana Collection, Kyoto (reproduced in Tayd
survived in any version. Both of the other ver bijutsu taikan, vol. X), are so alike as to be all but
sions are inscribed with poems, almost identical indistinguishable in reproduction. The third
in wording, signed by T'ang Yin, and the same version, also in the Palace Museum, is on paper
poem was probably on the lost right section of the and goes under a different title, Yuan-chii t'u
original work to which the Boston scrolls belong. ("Dwelling in the Garden").
See Chiang Chao-shen's article in the National 19. Cahill, Chinese Painting, p. 141. A third
Palace Museum Quarterly, vol. Ill, no. 3, January, picture, representing "Wang Hsi-chih Inscribing a
1969, PI. XX-XXII, for all three. One of the two Fan," has been said to belong to the same set,
other versions (Chiang's PI. XXI) is in a main but the dimensions and proportions are not the
land Chinese collection, the other (Chiang's PI. same, and it is probably a separate work, un
XX) in a private collection in Taipei. The former related to these two except in style. See Chin
seems in reproduction to be distinctly the better T'ang Wu-tai, PL 151.
of the two in both calligraphy and painting and
may be a genuine work of T'ang Yin, who might,
CHAPTER 6
as Chiang suggests, have done the composition
more than once. For another painting by T'ang 1. The biographical notes that follow are based
Yin of a similar subject that may also have been on Chiang Chao-shen's very detailed chronologi
mounted originally on a screen, see the catalogue cal biography (nien-p'u); see Bibliography. Also
of the Nanking Museum (Nan-ching po-wu-yuan helpful was Richard Edwards' biography for the
ts'ang-hua chi), vol. I, PL 31; it is roughly 1.5 Dictionary of Ming Biography, pp. 1471—74. Three
meters square. important publications on Wen Cheng-ming have
12. For biographical information on Ch'iu appeared recently, and although my chapter was
Ying I have depended partly on the biography by substantially completed before their publication,
Martie Young in the Dictionary of Ming Biography I gratefully acknowledge a debt to all of them.
(pp. 255-57). They are by Wilson and Wong, Anne Clapp, and
13. For an account of Hsiang Yuan-pien's life, Richard Edwards (The Art of Wen Cheng-ming, the
see the biography by Ch'en Chih-mai in the catalogue of a major exhibition held in Ann Arbor,
Dictionary of Ming Biography (pp. 539-44). which also contains contributions by Anne Clapp
14. The album is in the Palace Museum, and others). I am especially grateful to Anne
Taipei (MA 12); the picture of narcissus and Clapp for making a draft of her work, then in
apricot flowers is in the Freer Gallery of Art, the form of a doctoral dissertation, available to
with a copy in the Palace Museum, Taipei (MV me while I was writing.
453). 2. The excerpt from Wen Lin's letter is from
15. For a detail, see Cahill, Chinese Tainting, the biography of Wen Cheng-ming composed by
p. 146; for a section of the "Spring Morning" his son Wen Chia; the translation is by Anne
scroll, ibid., p. 145. Clapp, p. 8. The letters from T'ang Yin are
16. A possible exception to this statement is a translated in Lai, pp. 48—50.
handscroll by Ch'iu Ying formerly owned by 3. Tseng Yu-ho, "The Seven Junipers," pp.
Chang Ta-ch'ien, depicting Taoist Immortals in 22-23.
the pai-miao manner, with accompanying poems, 4. Chiang Chao-shen, Part I, pp. 66-67; the
apparently by Ch'iu Ying himself (see Chin T'ang translation is taken, with minor changes, from
Wu-tai, Pi. 153). I have not seen the original, and Anne Clapp, p. 5. "Engendering movement
cannot judge its authenticity. through spirit resonance" (ch'i-yun sheng-tung) is
Another example of Ch'iu Ying's calligraphy of course the first of the Six Canons of Painting
is a letter published by Jean-Pierre Dubosc in by Hsieh Ho of the fifth century.
"A Letter and Fan Painting by Ch'iu Ying." The 5. See Edwards, The Art of Wen Cheng-ming, no.
letter is of considerable interest also as evidence VIII; collection of Edward Binney, 3rd. Edwards
of the manner in which Ch'iu accepted and ful discusses the problems associated with the paint
filled commissions for paintings. ing and its inscription, finally accepting it as an
17. Wu-sheng-shih shih, Hua-shih ts'ung-shu ed., early work, as does Anne Clapp.
Ill, 41. The rendering is Siren's. 6. Besides the work here reproduced, these
18. The version in the Palace Museum, Taipei, include a "Winter Landscape in the Manner of
reproduced here and another formerly in the Li Ch'eng" from the preceding year (Clapp, Fig.
For pages 214-5 2 NOTES • 2 6 3
4) and two handscrolls in the manner of Ni Tsan, Taipei; see Ku-kung chou-k'an no. 64. The hand-
one dating from around 1512 (Edwards, Wen scroll is in the Asian Art Museum of San Fran
Cheng-ming, no. XIII) and the other to around cisco, and is unpublished.
1517-19 (ibid., no. XIV). The last has especially 26. For a list of them and their genealogy, see
close affinities in compositional method with the Siren, IV, p. 186, footnote 1.
"Chih-p'ing Temple." 27. Chi'en-shan-t'ang shu-hua chi; Wen Chia's
7. Clapp, p. 47. This was written when she postface is dated 1568. The larger inventory of
knew the painting only from a photograph; later, Yen Sung's collection, T'ien shut ping-shan lu,
seeing the original, she pronounced it to be a literally "Heaven Reduces the Iceberg to
close copy. Richard Edwards holds the same W a t e r , " was published in 1728 by a descendant
opinion, one with which, needless to say, I of Yen Sung from a manuscript in the family
disagree. collection.
8. Edwards, Wen Cheng-ming, no. XVIII. 28. The story is told in Wu-sheng-shih shih, II,
9. Ssu-yu-chai ts'ung-shuo, c h a p t e r I S ; p . 1 2 5 29; the translation is Siren's, IV, p. 187.
in the Peking edition of 1959. Yao Ming-shan 29. The Wilson and Wong book, in entry no.
was Yao Lai (d. 1537), who entered the Han-lin 26, written by Elizabeth Fulder Wilson, argues
Academy in the same year as Wen, 1523, after for an earlier period of activity, around 1540-80,
taking top place in the chin-shih examinations of but on insecure grounds. The landscape dated
that year; Yang Fang-ch'eng was Yang Wei-ts'ung 1604 (1-shu ts'ung-pien 8), which the authors
(b. 1500), who had taken top honors in the believe bears only a cyclical date and which they
examinations of 1521. accordingly redate sixty years earlier to 1544, in
10. Anne Clapp, pp. 22-23. fact bears an absolute date, Wan-li chia-ch'en,
11. Clapp, p. 2. which can only be 1604. A copy of the painting
12. Chin-ling so-shih, 126b; repeated in Wu (T'ien-yin-t'ang ming-hua hsiian, no. 33, Arthur
sheng-shih shih, ch. 3. M. Sackler, Jr., Collection) can be dismissed
13. Ssu-yu-chai ts'ung-shuo, chapter 29; p. 267 easily, but the version reproduced in I-shu ts'ung
in the Peking edition of 1959. pien appears, so far as one can judge in repro
14. Edwards, Wen Cheng-ming, no. XLI; the duction, to be a genuine work. The recorded
translation of the poem is by Ling-yiin Shih Liu. handscroll by Hou Mou-kung with inscriptions
15. Clapp, p. 25. by Wen Chia and Wen P'eng dated 1548, which
16. Tai Ming-yiieh, inscription on a land Wilson and Wong adduce in favor of the earlier
scape; see Siren, Chinese Painting, vol. VI, PL period of activity, is on the contrary unsafe evi
308B. dence, both because the original scroll is not avail
17. Chinese Calligraphy and Tainting in the John able for study and because the painting itself is
M. Crawford, Jr., Collection, New York, 1962, no. undated—it was common, in the cases of scrolls
14. devoted to someone's villa, as this one is, for the
18. Translation by A. C. Graham, in Birch, p. owner to collect inscriptions—essays on the
383. villa, poems, etc.—and have the painting done
19. Adapted from the rendering of Anne later. Thus the Crawford painting of 1569 prob
Clapp, p. 62. A companion picture titled "A ably is the artist's earliest known dated work; it
Myriad Streams Contend in Flowing," dated represents Hou's essay into the elongated com
1550, is in the Nanking Museum; see Nan-ching position divided at the middle (or "double-
po-wu-yiian, Pi. 27. decked" in E. Wilson's term), of which we have
20. The 1549 painting is reproduced in Cahill, discussed several examples by other artists. An
Chinese Painting, p. 130; the 1551 one in Siren, unpublished album of landscapes in the C. C.
VI, Pi. 21 IB. Wang Collection, dated 1577, suggests that the
21. Loehr, Chinese Art, p. 59. undated landscape under discussion may belong
22. A leaf in a collective album (VA 9K) titled around the same time, i.e., around the middle
"Visiting Plum Blossoms After Snow." of the painter's active period.
23. Harold Rosenberg, "A Risk for the In 30. Chinese Art Treasures, no. 97. Wen
telligence," The New Yorker, October 27, 1962, p. Cheng-ming's poem was based on one of the same
152. title and theme by Ni Tsan, using the same rhyme
24. See P'ei-wcn-chai, ch. 87, pp. 37b-38a. words.
25. The fan painting is in the Palace Museum, 31. Kinjiro Llarada, Nihon genzai, p. 165, an
264 • NOTES For page 252
other painting dated 1531; Lu Hsin-yiian, Jang-li whose paper on Chti Chieh, delivered in my
kuan, ch. 20, p. 21, dated 1530; and ibid, supple seminar on Wu-school painting just as this chap
ment ch. 8, p. 5, dated 1537. A work with Chu ter was in final editing, led to some valuable
Chieh's signature titled "Drinking Tea" in the emendations.
Palace Museum, Taipei (MV 199), dated 1534, is 32. Palace Museum, Taipei: an album of eight
a poor copy of a painting by Wen Cheng-ming in leaves (MA 23) titled "Poetic Thoughts" and
the same collection, and can be dismissed. I must dated 1583, and a twelve-leaf album (MA 80),
here acknowledge a debt to Miss Cheng-chi Hsu, undated.
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Index
abstract art (in China), 245 bamboo painting, 59, 78, 95, 199
"Academy," Ming dynasty: described and com "Beggars and Street Characters," Chou Ch'en,
pared to the Sung dynasty Painting Academy, 156, 168, 191-93, PI. 88-89, Color PI. 12
8, 21, 23; fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Berlin Museum, 51
styles of, 127; subjects depicted by, 25, 26, "Bidding Farewell at the Brushwood Fence,"
47, 48, 102, 125; Sung-dynasty styles used by, Chou Ch'en, 190, Pi. 83
4, 21-22, 23-24, 25, 26, 77-78; Tai Chin's bird painting, 52, 54-55, 200
conflict with, 46-A7; Yuan-dynasty painting bird-and-flower painting, 22-23, 78, 94, 107-8,
styles used by, 49-50, 104. See also entries 136, 164, 199, 240
under specific reign titles and artists blossoming plum, 95, 199
"Album of Landscapes with Figures for Chou "blue-and-green" landscape painting, 26, 207,
Wei-te," Shen Chou, 88-89, Color PI. 4-5 209. See also "gold-and-green" landscape paint
albums, 83, 92-93, 131, 153, 156 ing; "Landscape with Buildings and Figures,
amateur painting. See scholar-amateur painting in the Blue-and-Green Manner," by Shih Jui,
Anhui SSfc Province, 134, 248 26-27, Color PI. 1
animal painting, 22, 23, 25, 52, 94-95 blue-and-white porcelain, 53
anonymous masters, paintings by: "Arriving "Bodhidharma Meditating in a Cave, with Hui-
Home by Moonlight," 133-34, Pi. 63; "Early k'o," Tai Chin, 48-49, Pi. 10
Autumn," 137-38, Color PI. 8; "Noble Schol "boneless" (mo-ku) style, 95, 136
ar under a Willow," 258 (n. 15) "Quietly Book of Changes, 82
Sitting in a Study Beneath the Pines," 7-8, PI. boundary painting. See chieh-hua
4; "Scholars on a Lakeshore," 7, 28, PI. 3; Buddhism, 194
"Spring Mountains" (Yang Wei-chen?), 127; Buddhist painting, 47, 107, 130. See also Ch'an
"Summer Rainstorm," 125 Buddhist painting
archaism, 26, 205, 207, 209-10, 219
"Arhats Bestowing Alms," Chou Chi-ch'iang, 191 calligraphers, 78, 154, 194, 201, 202,209,214,
"Arriving Home by Moonlight," anonymous, 244
133-34, PI. 63 calligraphy, painting discussed in terms of, 51,
"art-historical art," 59, 86 55, 105, 136, 162
"Autumn Colors at Hsun-yang," Lu Chih, 242 Canton (Kuang-chou), 53, 54, 98
43, PI. 121 Cantonese artists, 53-56
"Autumn Colors on Mountain Peaks," attrib "Central Mountain, The," Wu Chen, 158
uted to Kao K'o-kung, 258 (n. 18) ceramics, 53
"Autumn Landscape," from "Landscapes of the Cha-ch'uan !!JII, 77
Four Seasons," Tai Chin, 51-52, Pi. 16 Chan Ching-feng MMM,, 247
"axe-cut" ts'un 9?%®, 126, 155, 189 Chan-kuo ts'e M J £ , 204
269
2 7 0 • INDEX
Ch'an Buddhist painting, 48, 95, 103, 130, 162, Ch'en Lin WM, 11
199 Ch'en Meng WM, 84
Chang Feng-i WL®M, 192 Ch'en Meng-hsien ISSS, 83
Chang Fu-yang W<ME>, 128 Ch'en Pang-yen W&fe, 103
Chang Hsu 5RM, 165 Ch'en Shun W.S-, 94, 161, 245^-6; "Landscape,"
Chang Hsiian <SS, 202, 205 245-46, PI. 126; "Peonies," 246, PL 127
Chang Hua PMW, 250 Ch'en Tao-fu BiHM. (Ch'en Shun), 245
Chang Hung 5I£, 242 Ch'en Te-hsiang BUJgffl, 201
Chang Ling 3IS, 194, 195, 206, 212 Ch'en Yti WM, 245
Chang Lu«E6, 52, 101, 104, 128, 129-32, 133, Cheng Ch'u-chih 9»t, 197
134, 136, 139, 154, 160, 166, 200; "Fisher Cheng Ho IflW, 21
man Under a Cliff," 130, Pi. 55; "Playing the Cheng Hsia U $ , 192
Ch'in for a Friend," 131, Pi. 61; "Shih-te Cheng Kuo-pin t$m% 192
Laughing at the Moon," 130-31, Pi. 56; Cheng-te emperor, 106, 125, 127, 191, 192
"Su Tung-p'o Returning to the Han-lin Acade Cheng-te EH era, 99, 127, 191, 192, 215
my," 131-32, Color PI. 7 Cheng Tien-hsien gCHllll (Cheng-Wen-lin), 132
Chang Shih-ch'eng <I±iSc, 59 Cheng Wen-lin 8 t e # , 128, 132-33, 136, 260
Chang Tao-ling 351111?, 241 (n. 21); "The World of the Magic Pot," 132
Chang Ts'ung 3i3g., 215-16 33, PI. 62
Chang W u S j l , 104, 155 Ch'eng-hua 0Mb era, 56, 88, 104, 154
Chang Yuan Slit, 4 Ch'eng-huo, Duke of, J&S&, 98
Ch'ang-an S S , 204 Chia-ching UrSff era, 240
Ch'ang-chou #W, 90, 247 Chia-hsing Mfk, 78, 80, 98, 201
Chao Ch'ang it§g, 136 Chia Ting H§e, 206
Chao Kan m&, 103 Chiang Chao-shen, 193, 195, 196, 197
Chao Ling-jang ffi^nlB, 219 Chiang-nan 1£M, 4, 78
Chao Meng-fu S S I , 8, 57, 77, 78, 79, 209, 213, Chiang Pin XSM, 192
214, 217, 218, 219, 237, 250-51; "Fisher Chiang Sung igjS, 128, 129, 132, 136, 140;
men on an Autumn River," copy by Yao Shou, "Spring Landscape," from "Landscapes of the
78; "Gazing at the Stream," 213, 237; "The Four Seasons," 132, Pi. 57, 59; "Winter
Mind Landscape of Hsieh Yu-yii," 213 Landscape," from "Landscapes of the Four
Chao Po-chii ffiteffij, 26, 207, 219 Seasons," 132, PI. 58, 60
Chao Po-su Him, 219 chiao-mo MM ("roasted ink"), 132, 241
Chao Wu-niang i E i , 105 Ch'iao Chung-ch'ang SHt^, 219
Chao Yuan SiC, 8, 21, 57, 77, 82, 205 chieh-hua j?lr ("boundary painting"), 26, 154, 207
Che school mm, 27, 77-78, 89, 98, 100, 101, Ch'ien Hsi-li S^m., 24
130, 157, 158, 196, 205, 238; compared with Ch'ien Hsiian ®M, 26, 27, 77, 137, 207, 209,
the Soochow masters, 190-91; compositions 213, 218, 219; "Dwelling in the Floating
used by, 85-86, 129, 207, 212; decline of, Jade Mountains," 27
107, 128, 133, 134; definition of, 5, 52; Ch'ien Ku ®SS, 251
founding of, 52; influence on Sesshu, 8, 48; Ch'ien-t'ang SSS, Chekiang, 45, 46, 47, 49,
subjects depicted by, 102-3, 125; versus the 52, 53
Wu school, 5, 85-86, 135, 163-65 Chih-hsing shan 5BHUJ (Mount Chih-hsing), 240,
Chekiang 8ffil Province, 5, 22, 23, 24, 26, 45, 242
46, 49, 52, 57, 108, 125, 126, 127, 128, Chih-p'ing ssu )&¥# (Chih-p'ing Temple), 214,
134, 159, 160, 167 218
Chen-chiang HiX, Kiangsu, 154 "Chih-p'ing Temple, The," Wen Cheng-ming,
Chen-chiang Museum, 257 (n. 7) 214, 218, PI. 113
Ch'en Chin Gfcfe, 54 ch'ih m (fool), 140, 165
Ch'en Hao WM,, 161 Ch'ih-weng ^.m (old fool, or foolish graybeard;
Ch'en Hsien WM, 168 Shih Chung), 140
Ch'en Hsung-shouffl&kWt.,210 Chin-ch'ang gate ^MFI, 197
Ch'en Ju-yen H&W, 25, 57, 104, 219 Chin-ku Yiian &SH ("Golden Valley Garden"),
Ch'en Kung-fu GfeSfi, 168 Ch'iu Ying, 203-5, Pi. 101
INDEX • 271
Chin-ling so-shih &BH§#, 129 Chu-lin Yi#, 247
chin-shih jfti degree, 8 Chu Neng * f i , 98
Chin Tsung &SS, 155 Chu Pang *l[i, 133-34
c/i'in^, 87, 131, 160, 156, 189, 198 chu-shcng W^., 239
Ch'in-huai River £jtJII, 99 ChuTa *if, 160
Ch'in Jo-lan HHiM, 198 Chu Ti * $ (Yung Lo), 21
Ch'in Shih-huang-ti SttoM'fiT', 156 Chu Tuan *Jg, 127-28, 133; "River Landscape
Ching-t'ai S ^ era, 24, 53 with Fishermen," 127-28, PL 54
Ching Yuan Chai, 206 (n. 21) Chu Yuan-chang * % $ , 3-4, 59, 60, 137
Ch'ing-k'uang ^ E (Kuo Hsu), 1S4 Chu Yiin-ming WtW, 194, 212, 239, 244
"Ch'ing-pai Hsiian" ffiSfr ("Pure and Plain Chii Chieh JSiJ, 252-53; "Spring in Chiang-
Pavilion"), Liu Chueh, 79-80, 81, PI. 26 nan," 252-53, PL 135; "Drinking Tea,"
Chion-in, Kyoto, 203 263-64 (n. 31); "Poetic Thoughts," 264 (n.
Ch'iu Shih-fu fll5t5£ (Chiu Ying), 206 32)
Ch'iu Ying 0 L £ , 22, 134, 156, 198, 201-10, Chu-jan mm, 4, 77, 218
216, 218, 246, 247; "Conversation in the Shade chii-jen S A degree, 54, 58
of Wu-t'ung Trees," 208, PI. 104, 106; "Fish Ch'ii Yuan SgC, 155
ing Boat by a Willow Bank," 207, Pi. 105, 107; Chuang-tzu ffif1, 100
"The Garden of Peach and Pear Trees," 204-5, Chung K'uei MM, 129, 193
PI. 102; "The Golden Valley Garden," 203 Chung Li mm, 126-27, 128, 129, 133; "Scholar
5, PI. 101 ; "Lady in a Pavilion Overlooking Contemplating a Waterfall," 126-27, 260
a Lake" 207, PI. 103; "The Lute Song," (n. 13), PL 53
209-10, 242, Color PI. 9; "Master Tung-lin's Chung Tzu-ch'i ffl^ffl, 131
Villa," 206, PI. 95; "Passing the Summer Day "Cicada and Water Weeds," Sun Lung, 137,
Beneath Banana Palms," 208; "Spring Morning PL 64
in the Han Palace," 202; "Waiting for the Clapp, Anne, 214, 218, 220
Ferry in Autumn," 202-3, PI. 97 "Clearing After Snow in a Mountain Pass,"
Chou Ch'enJSe, 22, 52, 134, 168, 189-93, 201, from "Landscapes of the Four Seasons," Hsieh
202, 207, 210, 216; association with T'ang Yin, Shih-ch'en, 159, PL 77
193, 194, 195, 196, 198; "Beggars and Street "Clearing After Snow in a Mountain Pass," T'ang
Characters," 28, 156, 168, 191-93, PI. 88-89, Yin, 197, PL 93
Color PL 12 ; "Bidding Farewell at a Brushwood "Clearing After Snowfall," Shih Chung, 153,
Fence," 190, Pi. 83; "Enjoying the Dusk," PL 68
189, PL 86; "North Sea," 168, 189, PL 84; Cleveland Museum of Art, 47, 55, 91, 108, 155,
"Playing Wei-ch'i Beneath Pines," 189, PL 191, 257-58 (n. 8)
85; "Poetic Feelings Beneath Pines by a "Coming of Autumn," Hung-jen, 82
Stream," 190-91, PL 87 commercial painting. See professional painting
Chou Chi-ch'ang S * ^ , 191 Confucianism and Confucian subject matter, 3,
Chou Fang ffity, 202, 205 91, 95, 103, 156
Chou Tun-i MUSiM., 53; "Chou Tun-i Gazing at "Conversation in the Shade of Wu-t'ung Trees,"
Water Lilies," by Chou Wen-ching, S3, PL Ch'iu Ying, 208, PL 104
18 "Crab and Shrimp," from "Drawings from Life,"
Chou Wei m&, 8, 21, 257 (n. 4) Shen Chou, 95, PL 36
Chou Wei-te ^ t i S , 88; "Album of Landscapes "Cranes by a Rushing Stream," Lti Chi, 108,
with Figures for Chou Wei-te," by Shen Chou, PL 50
88-89, Color PL 4-5 Crawford Collection, New York, 219
Chou Wen-ching MSJff, 53 ; "Chou Tun-i Gazing "Cypress and Rock," Wen Cheng-ming, 239,
at Water Lilies," 53, Pi. 18; "Wintry Crows PL 118
in an Old Tree," 53
Chou Yu-shun S T ^ , 201 decorative painting, 22, 136, 201, 216. See also
chrysanthemums, 95, 241 functional painting
Chu Ch'en-hao 'MUM, 194 deer, 50
Chu-ko Liang MMfE, 107 Detroit Institute of Fine Arts, 137
Chu Lang *68, 217 drama and dramatic lyrics, 97, 106, 160, 161, 165
272 • INDEX
"Drawings from Life," Shen Chou, 95, PI. 36 "Fishing from a Riverbank," Wu Wei, 101-2,
("Crab and Shrimp") PL 46
"Drinking Tea," Chu Chieh, 263 (n. 31) "Five White Deer Beneath Pines," Tai Chin,
"Drought Demon Spring," from "Twelve Views 49-50, PL 14
of Tiger Hill," Shen Chou, 91-93, PI. 40 flower and plant painting, 25, 136, 161-62,
"Dwelling in the Ch'ing-pien Mountains," Wang 246. See also bird-and-flower painting, chrysan
Meng, 237 themums, "Peonies," orchids
"Dwelling in the Floating Jade Mountains," "Flowers and Other Plants," Hsu Wei, 161-62,
Ch'ien Hsuan, 27 163, PL 78-80
"Dwelling in the Fu-ch'un Mountains," Huang "Forest Grotto at Chii-ch'ii," Wang Meng, 237
Kung-wang, 199 forgery, 54, 94, 201, 210, 217, 247
"Four Accomplishments," 156
"Early Autumn," anonymous, 137-38, 193, "Four Cries of the Gibbon," Hsu Wei, 160
Color PI. 8 Four Great Masters of the late Yuan, 77, 218
"Early Snow on the River," Chao Kan, 103 Four Masters of Ming Painting, 210
"Early Spring," Kuo Hsi, 45 "Four Myriads, The" (Ssu-wan t'u), Wen Po-jen,
emaki, 191 249-51, PL 130-133
Embroidered Uniform Guard, 24, 25, 54, 99, 107 Fu Sheng ftB (£), 156; "The Scholar Fu Sheng
"Emperor Wen-wang Visiting T'ai Kung-wang," in a Garden," by Tu Chin, 156, Color PL
Tai Chin, 48 10-11
"Enjoying Antiques," Tu Chin, 155-56, PL 73 Fu-t'ien chi WOM, Wen Cheng-ming, 214
"Enjoying the Dusk," Chou Ch'en, 189, PL 86 Fukien lift Province, 22, 23, 27, 53, 54, 56,
Erh-ku r § , 157 98, 132, 167
erotic subjects ("spring pictures"), 198 functional painting, 129, 155, 158, 216. See also
"Essay on Literature," Lu Chi, 250 decorative painting
eunuchs, 22, 24, 60, 191
examination system, 3, 8 "Garden of Peach and Pear Trees (T'ao-li Yuan),
expressionism, 163 Ch'iu Ying, 204-5, PL 102
gardens as subjects of paintings, 204-5, 217
Fan Chung-yen TSf+Jt, 94 "Gazing at a Waterfall," Chung Li, 260 (n. 13)
Fan K'uan TEH, 6 "Gazingat the Midautumn Moon," Shen Chou, 91
Fang, Chaoying, 106 "Gazing at the Stream," Chao Meng-fu, 213, 237
Fang Tsung-i ^«6S, 83, 92, 140 gentry-literati class, 5, 21, 59-60, 98, 211, 216
"Farewell Meeting at Feng-ch'eng," Wang Fu, ghost painters, 88, 193, 217
59, PL 23 "gold-and-green" landscape painting, 26, 77
fei-pai ffi& ("flying white), 154, 162 "Golden Valley Garden" (Chin-ku Yuan), Ch'iu
fen-pen © ^ (sketch copies or tracings), 203, 204 Ying, 203-5, PL 101
Feng-ch'eng MM., 59 Grand Canal, 60
"Fisherman-Recluse at Hua-ch'i," Lu Chih, 243
44, PL 123 Han-lin Academy ®#&, 3, 8, 58, 59, 131, 215
"Fisherman-Recluse at Hua-ch'i," Wang Meng, Han-shan *lU, 130
27, 243 Hangchow tftffl, Chekiang: artists from, or active
"Fisherman Under a Cliff," Chang Lu, 130, PL in, 26, 45, 46, 47, 48, 139, 159; as a painting
55 center, 4-5, 53-54, 57, 98, 107, 167
"Fishermen," Wu Chen, 51, 78, 79 hanging scrolls, 208
fishermen as subjects of paintings, 46, 51, 102—3 Hashimoto Collection, 257-58 (n. 8), 260 (n.
"Fishermen on an Autumn River," Chao Meng 16, n. 21)
fu, copy by Yao Shou, 78 "Heavenly Fragrance in a Secluded Place," Tu
"Fishermen on a River in Autumn," Shen Chou, Ch'iung, 78, PL 24
86, PL 33 Heng-shanffiUJ(Wen Cheng-ming), 215
"Fishermen on the River," Tai Chin, 51, 102, "Hermit Hsu Yu Resting by a Stream, The," Tai
Color PL 3 Chin, 47-48, PL 12
"Fishing Boat by a Willow Bank," Ch'iu Ying, "Heterodox school," 126, 128-34
207-8; PL 105, 107 Ho-chou ftWI, Anhui, 248
INDEX • 273
Ho Liang-chun fsjg®, 128, 193, 215, 217 Hua-shan Hill (Mount Hua), 5-6; "Scenes of
Ho, Wai-kam, 48, 108 Hua-shan," by Wang Li, 6-7, 92, PI. 1-2
Ho Yu-hsien HBEfll, 140 hua-shih SSl (limner, artist-on-hire), 206
"Homecoming Ode" by T'ao Yuan-ming, 28 Hua-shih hui-yao « £ # S , 54-55, 137, 155, 168
Honan Hit Province, 129 Huang Chi-shui 1%M7k, 192
Honolulu Academy of Arts, 82, 191 Huang Ch'tian StS, 55
Hou Mou-kung m^J}, 251, 253; "Landscape," Huang Kung-wang St&S, 77, 80, 83, 84, 85,
251, PI. 134 86, 92, 94, 128, 153, 199, 212, 238, 243, 244,
Hsi-t'ien shang-jen S H ± A , 79 246, 251; "The Stone Cliff at the Pond of
Hsia Ch'ang Sfi, 59 Heaven," 85
Hsia Chih Hi£, 27, 46 Hui-k'o mfl, 48
Hsia Kuei H 3 , 4, 5, 6, 21, 27, 53, 77, 125, "Hui-neng Chopping Bamboo," Liang K'ai, 104
190, 207, 218 Hui-tsung WITK, emperor, 21, 23
Hsiang Yiian-pien ^Sff, 128, 201, 202, 208, Hung-chih emperor, 87, 125
243, 248 Hung-chih &»& era, 90, 99, 104, 107, 108, 125,
Hsiao ChingHSii:, 154 126
Hsiao-hsien 'Mill (Wu Wei), 98, 106 Hung-jen 5 i t , 82
hsiao-k'ai 'ls$t ("small standard") script, 214 Hung-wu emperor, 3-4, 8, 21, 24, 57, 82
Hsiao-tsung #^? emperor, 99, 138 Hung-wu &K era, 3, 5-8, 21
Hsieh Chao-che aJS&U, 53 Hupei ffiit Province, 98, 105, 138
Hsieh-hsueh p'ai 3I5PSS ("Heterodox school"),
128-34 I-hsing JSPI, 241
Hsieh Huan MM, 22, 24-25, 53; conflict with "Illustrations to the Homecoming Ode of T'ao
Tai Chin, 46, 47, 48; "A Literary Gathering Yuan-ming, Li Tsai, 28, Pi. 9
in the Apricot Garden," 24-25, 28, 48, i-min j t E , 154
Color PI. 2 i-p'in itqn ("untrammeled class"), 160, 162
hsieh-i MM ("setting down the idea"), 55 "Inebriated in Spring," attributed to Tai Chin,
Hsieh Shih-ch'en ffiBfE, 94, 158-59, 161, 208; 260 (n. 21)
"Clearing After Snow in a Mountain Pass," ink monochrome, 54-55
from "Landscapes of the Four Seasons," 159, "ink-splashers," 100, 140, 162
PL 77; "Landscape After Rain," 158, Pi. 75; insect painting, 136-38, 261 (n. 17)
"Misty Trees by a Level Lake," from "Land "Iron Flute, The," Wu Wei, 104-5, Pi. 48
scapes of the Four Seasons," 159, PI. 76
hsienfill("transcendent"), 165 "Jade Cave on an Immortal's Mountain," Lu
Hsien-ning J^¥, Hupei, 138 Chih, 241-42, PI. 120
Hsien-tsung MTK, emperor, 56, 99 Jan-hsien Mitil (Hsu Lin), 106
hsing-shu frit ("running script"), 51 Japanese painting, 8, 28, 48, 133, 156, 159, 191
Hsu Ching &M, 194 Jen-chih tien C f K, 22, 26, 27, 46, 53, 54,
Hsu Ch'ung-ssu M s IB, 136 99, 107, 125
Hsu Hsi &&, 55, 136 Jih chin ch'ing-kuang ("Daily Approaching the
Hsu Lin &M, 97, 106-7, 129, 166; "Winter Pure and Radiant"), 108
Landscape with a Man Arriving at a House," Jih-kuan BH, 162
107, PI. 49 Ju-ho ikm, 249
Hsu Tuan-pen &£!# (Shih Chung), 140 ju-hsueh S P (Confucian school), 248
Hsu Wei &?I, 134, 135, 157, 159-63, 166, 200, juniper trees, 95, 239
246; "Flowers and Other Plants," 161-62,
163, Pi. 78-80; "Landscape with Figures," K'ai-feng M*f, Honan, 129
162, Pi. 81-82 Kano-school painting, 28, 156, 159
Hsu Yu m&, 48; "The Hermit Hsu Yu Resting Kao K'o-kung i^jfciS, 49, 50, 77, 89, 126, 154,
by a Stream," by Tai Chin, 47-48, PI. 12 246, 258 (n. 18)
Hsuan-te emperor, 23, 24, 46, 47 Kao Lien MW., 128
Hsiian-te S H era, 23^-5, 46, S3 kao-pen #S$ (draft sketches), 204
Hu Tsung-hsien M^5§, 160 "Kao-shih t'u" Si±H ("The Noble Scholars"),
Hu Wei-yung iMtSSf, 58 198-99, PI. 94
2 7 4 • INDEX
Kiangsi ffiS Province, 154 "Landscape in the Manner of Wang Meng," Wen
Kiangsu KM Province, 5, 25, 59, 154, 157 Cheng-ming, 220, 237, PI. 115
Kongobu-ji, 156 "Landscape with Buildings and Figures, in the
Ku Ch'i-yuan HiBx, 97 Blue-and-Green Manner," Shih Jui, 26-27,
Ku Chien-lung BUffi, 203 Color PI. 1
Ku K'ai-chih HtS£, 58, 100, 104 "Landscape with Figures," Hsu Wei, 162, Pi.
Ku-k'uang *ff (Tu Chin), 154 81-82
ku-shih #<: ("events of antiquity"), 25, 26, 46, "Landscape with Pavilion," Wang Wen, 157,
47, 102, 166, 208 PL 74
Ku Tsung-i BI&8, 249, 250 "Landscape with Travelers," Yang Hsiin, 138—
K'uai-yiian ft@ (Satisfaction Garden, belonging 39, 153, 260 (n. 4 of 4), Pi. 66
to Hsu Lin), 106 Lang Ying fipgj, 46, 47, 52, 125
Kuang-chou Kffl (Canton), 53, 54, 98 Lao-tzu ^ i 1 , 25
Kuang-chou Provincial Museum, 54 "Lao-tzu Passing the Barrier," Shang Hsi, 25-26,
Kuangtung S.'M. Province, 167 PI. 6-7
k'uang •££ (crazy), 165 Lee, Sherman, 51
K'uang Chung ffiffi, 60, 79 Legalism, 4
Kubler, George, 81 "Leisurely Living at the Stream Pavilion," Wen
Kun-ming SW, Yunnan, 27 Cheng-ming, 212
K'un-shan SUU, Kiangsu, 5, 201 Li-chai ftH, 85
Kung K'ai gM, 133 Li Chao-hsiang *Bgi¥, 241
kung-sheng M£. degree, 239 Li Chao-tao ^BSit, 77
Kuo Hsi nm, 4, 27, 45, 54, 127, 128, 197; Li Ch'eng 2pSX, 4, 214, 218, 262-63 (n. 6)
"Landscape in the Manner of Kuo Hsi," by Li-chi m.^ (Wang Ch'ung), 244
Li Tsai, 45 Li Chu mW, 94, 129, 132, 157, 260 (n. 16)
Kuo Hsu Mm, 153-54, 155, 166, 246; "Land Li-jen JS£ (Wang Ch'ung), 214
scape," 154, PL 70; "Woman and Child in a Li J i h - h u a ^ 0 ¥ , 83, 92
Garden," 154, Pi. 71 Li Kung-lin $£gJ), 104, 105, 198, 219
Kuon-ji, Japan, 125 Li-Kuo tradition, 4, 54
Li Meng-yang $£&§, 55
"Lady Carrying a P'i-p'a," Wu Wei, 105-6, LiPo ? & , 126, 204
PL 47 Li Ssu-hsun £.©il, 77
"Lady in a Pavilion Overlooking a Lake," Ch'iu Li Sung m#, 22, 25, 191
Ying, 207, PI. 103 Li T'ang mm, 5, 6, 22, 25, 77, 125, 126, 139,
Lai-shih if 5 , 213 155, 168, 189, 190, 195, 196, 201 202, 207,
Lan Ying ^M, 134 215, 217, 218, 219, 247
"Landscape," Hou Mou-kung, 251, PL 134 Li Ti m&, 22
"Landscape," Kuo Hsu, 154, PI. 70 Li T'ieh-kuai $ S i $ , 104
"Landscape," Liu Chueh, 80, Pi. 27 Li Tsai m&, 27-28, 45, 46, 47, 50, 52, 53,
"Landscape," Lu Chih, 243, Pi. 122 138; "Illustrations to the Homecoming Ode
"Landscape," Shih Chung, 140, 153, Pi. 67 of T'ao Yuan-ming," 28, PI. 9; "Landscape
"Landscape," Shih Jui, 27, Pi. 8 in the Manner of Kuo Hsi," 45, Pi. 11
"Landscape," Wang Ch'ung, 244-45, PI. 124-125 Li Tung-yang $S|S§, 78
"Landscape After Rain," Hsieh Shih-ch'en, 158, Liang K'ai Igft, 28, 104, 130, 159, 165, 193,
PI. 75 199; "Hui-neng Chopping Bamboo," 104;
"Landscape for Liu Chueh," Shen Chou, 84, "Sakyamuni Descending from the Mountains,"
PL 31 130
"Landscape for Wen Kung-ta's Retirement," Lin Ch'un 1*1#, 22
Yao Shou, 78-79, PI. 25 Lin Kuang ttS, 138; "Spring Mountains" 138,
"Landscape for Wu K'uan," Shen Chou, 87, PL 65
PL 35 Lin Liang # H , 52, 53, 54-55, 107-8, 137;
"Landscape in the Manner of Kuo Hsi," Li Tsai, 45 "Phoenix," 55, PL 21
"Landscape in the Manner of Ni Tsan," Liu Lin Pu Pf-m, 155
Chueh, 80-82, PL 28 Ling-yin shan SffliUJ, 259 (n. 10)
INDEX • 2 7 5
Lion Grove Garden, 205 Ma Ho-chih ,B|fD±, 199, 219
"Listening to the Rain," Tai Chin, 49, Pi. 13 Ma-Hsia tradition, 4, 5, 7, 8, 21, 27, 28, 47, 51,
"Listening to the Wind in the Pines," Ma Lin, 47 54, 77, 126, 207
literati. See gentry-literati Ma Lin WM, 47; "Listening to the Wind in the
literati painting. See scholar-amateur painting Pines," 47
literature, 97. See also drama and poetry MaShih,l«, 27, 258 (n. 11)
"Literary Gathering," Wang Fu, 59 Ma Wan ,i§S6, 57, 80
"Literary Gathering in the Apricot Garden, A," Ma Yuan Hit, 4, 5, 6, 7, 21,27, 28,77, 89, 125,
Hsieh Huan, 24-25, 48, Color PI. 2 129, 155, 190, 207, 218, 260 (n. 13)
Liu ChinaSI, 191, 192 maritime expeditions, 23
Liu Chueh §i]5, 57, 79-82, 83, 84, 85, 93, 94, "Master Tung-Lins's Villa," Ch'iu Ying, 206, PI.
238; "Landscape," 80, PI. 27; "Landscape in 95
the Manner of Ni Tsan," 80-82, PI. 28; "Pure "Men in a House Over a Stream," Tai Chin,
and Plain Pavilion," 79-80, PI. 26; relation to 50-51, PI. 17
Shen Chou, 79, 80-82 ; Shen Chou's "Landscape Meng Yii-chien iklSM, 23
for Liu Chueh," 84, 93, PI. 31 merchant class, 97, 98, 129, 193, 216
Liu Chun fl]®, 104 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 132,
Liu Hung SlJJfc, 85 257 (n.4)
Liu Kuan-tao ilJIM, 8, 22 Mi Fu *3?0i), 77, 84, 136, 137, 153, 219, 245,
Liu Lin SMS, 217 246
Liu Pei SMI, 107 Mi Yu-jen * £ t , 77, 137, 245, 246
Liu Sung-nien SM&^, 22, 25, 198, 218,247,261 "Mind Landscape of Hsieh Yu-yii, The," Chao
(n.l) Meng-fu, 213
"Living Aloft," Wen Cheng-ming, 217-18, Col Ming Academy painting. See "Academy"
or PL 13 Ming-hua lu W«£t, 127, 132, 134, 158, 247, 250,
"Living in Retirement," Shen Chou, 83-84, Pi. 251, 252
30 "Misty Trees by a Level Lake," from "Land
Loehr, Max, 59, 239 scapes of the Four Seasons," Hsieh Shih-ch'en,
"Lofty Leisure Beneath a Sheer Cliff," Wen 158-59, PI. 76
Cheng-ming, 214-15, 220, 237, PI. 108-110 mo-ku S # ("boneless"), 95, 136
"Lofty Mount Lu," Shen Chou, 85 Mongols, 2, 21, 23, 46, 53, 240
"Lou-chu t'u" mf§m ("Living Aloft"), Wen Mote, Frederick, 194
Cheng-ming, 217-18, Color PI. 13 "Mount Chih-hsing," Lu Chih, 242, Color PI. 14
Lou Kuan ttffi, 22 Mount Koya, 156
Lu Chi mm, 250 "Mountains Seen From a Riverbank," Ni Tsan, 81
Lii Chi B S , 52, 55, 107-8, 125; "Cranes by a Mu Ch'en WB., 47, 49
Rushing Stream," 108, Pi. 50 Mu-ch'i t&M, 95
Lu Chih mfe, 94, 209, 239-44; "Autumn Colors Museum of Far Eastern Art, Cologne, 140
at Hsiin-yang," 242-43, Pi. 121; "Fisherman- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 9, 125, 127, 191
Recluse at Hua-ch'i," 243-44, PI. 123; "Jade "Myriad Hectares of Sunlit Waves, A," Wen
Cave on an Immortal's Mountain," 241-42, PI. Po-jen, 249-50; Pi. 131, 133
120; "Landscape," 243, Pi. 122; "Mount "Myriad Peaks with Flying Snow, A," Wen Po
Chih-hsing," 242, Color PI. 14; "Portrait of jen, 249
T'aoYuan-ming," 240-41, Pi. 119 "Myriad Ravines with Windblown Pines, A,"
Lu Hung SSI, 133 Wen Po-jen, 249; PI. 130, 132
Lu Shen WM, 46, 52 "Myriad Stalks of Bamboo in Mist and Rain, A,"
Lu Wen-ying B £ £ , 98, 108, 125; "River Vil Wen Po-jen, 250
lage in a Rainstorm," 108, 125, PL 51
Lung-men HH, 131 Nan-ts'un $?tt, 252
Lute Song, The (P'i-p'a chi), 105 Nanking U S : artists born in, or active in, 4, 22,
"Lute Song, The," Ch'iu Ying, 209-10, 242, 46,58,98,99, 106, 129, 132, 138, 140, 154,
Color PI. 9 166, 168, 195, 198, 247, 261 (n. 17); city life
"Lute Song, The" (P'i-p'a hsing), Po Chu-i, 209, of, not depicted in painting, 103; as a painting
center, 8, 27, 57, 97-98, 107, 134, 135, 157,
242
2 7 6 • INDEX
167; as a political center, 3, 21, 97; scenery "Peach Blossom Spring, The," T'ao Yuan-ming,
depicted in paintings, 132; social, economic, 155, 209; "T'ao Yuan-ming Viewing a Paint
and cultural life, 97 ing of the Peach Blossom Spring," by Tu
Nanking Museum, 161, 263 (n. 19) Chin, 155, PI. 72
National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, Re Peking its( '• artists born in, or active in, 22, 46
public of China, Collection of the. See Palace 47, 49, 51, 58, 99, 194, 215; city life of, not
Museum, Taipei depicted in painting, 103; as a painting center,
National University (T'ai-hsiieh), 3, 79, 129, 138 27, 57, 98, 107; as a political center, 3, 21
Nelson Gallery, Kansas City, 203 P'eng-lai shan MM\U (Mount P'eng-Iai), 241,
Neo-Confucianism, 3 242
Nezu Museum, Tokyo, 258 (n. 8) P'engNienS^, 201,209,239
Ni Tsan &% 6, 58, 77, 85, 93, 154, 205, 212, "Peonies," Ch'en Shun, 246, Pi. 127
243, 244, 246, 250, 261 (n. 7 of 4), 262 (n. 6); Perry, Mrs. A. Dean, collection of, 239
' 'Mountains seen from a Riverbank, " 8 1 ; "Land "Phoenix," Lin Liang, 55, Pi. 21
scape in the Manner of Ni Tsan," by Liu Chiieh, P'i-ling Ktt^, 107, 136-37
80-82, Pi. 28 ; "River Landscape in the Manner p'i-p'a S§@ (lute), 105, 131, 140, 198, 209, 242
of Ni Tsan," by Wang Fu, 58-59, Pi. 22 P'i-p'a chi mW.m (The Lute Song), 105
Ni Tuan fiS, 46, 56, 258 (n. 13) "P'i-p'a hsing" mmn ("The Lute Song"), Po
"Night Vigil," Shen Chou, 89, 90-91, 218, PI. Chii-i 209, 242
37-38 Pien Ching-chao iS«BS (Pien Wen-chin), 22
"Nine Songs, The" (ofCh'tt Yuan), Chang Wu, 155 Pien Wen-chin »3t3i, 22-23, 24, 24, 55, 137;
Ning-p'o, Chekiang, S3, 107, 125, 167 "The Three Friends and Hundred Birds," 23,
"Noble Scholars, The" (Kao-shih t'u), T'ang Yin, 137;' 'Two Cranes and Small Birds, with Bamboo
198-99, 208, PI. 94 and Blossoming Plum," 23, PI. 5
"Noble Scholar Under a Willow," anonymous, Pin-yang cave, Lung-men, 131
258 (n. 15) pines, 95, 238, 241
"North Sea, The," Chou Ch'en, 168, 189, Pi. 94 P'ing-shan ^FUJ (Chang Lu), 130
Northern and Southern schools of painting, 5, 53, "Playing the Ch'in for a Friend," Chang Lu, 131,
77, 135 PI. 61
"Playing Wei-ch'i Beneath Pines," Chou Ch'en,
occasional painting, 58 189, PI. 85
"Old Trees by a Cold Waterfall," Wan Cheng "Pleasures of Fishermen," Wu Wei, 102-3,
ming, 239 Color PI. 6
"Old Trees by a Wintry Brook," Wan Cheng Po Chii-i &M%, 209, 242
ming, 239 p'o-mo §111 (splashed ink), 125
"On Models for Painting," Wang Li, 6 Po Ya ft?, 131
opera, 97, 160 "Poetic Feelings Beneath Pines by a Stream,"
orchids, 95, 154 Chou Ch'en, 190-91, PI. 87
Osaka Municipal Museum, 133, 259 (n. 17) "Poetic Thoughts," Chu Chieh, 264 (n. 32)
"Poetic Thoughts: Traveling by Donkey," T'ang
pai-miao &S, 104-5, 154, 157, 207 Yin, 196, PI. 92
painter-in-attendance. See tal-chao poetry: Hsu Wei's obituary, 160-61; paintings
Palace Museum, Peking, 26, 91, 155, 219, 257 based on, 208-9, 216, 219-20, 242^1-3; rela
(n. 3), 258 (n. 13) tionship to painting in Soochow, 97; written to
Palace Museum, Taipei, 23, 59,127,154,155,195, accompany paintings, 55, 58, 79, 80, 89, 103,
197, 206, 239, 243, 246, 252, 257 (n. 4), 258 196, 200, 213, 217-18, 242
(n. 11, n. 13), 260 (n. 13, n. 21), 261 (n. 7, n. porcelain, 53
1), 262 (n. 14), 263 (n. 25, n. 31), 264 (n. 32) "Portrait of T'ao Yuan-ming," Lu Chih, 240-^t-l,
"Parting at Chin-ch'ang," T'ang Yin, 197-98, PI. 119
PI. 91 portrait painting, 8, 24-25, 78
"Passing a Summer Day Beneath Banana Palms," Princeton Art Museum, 132
Ch'iu Ying, 208 professional painting, 8, 53, 100, 107, 189, 195,
patronage, 57, 87-88, 97, 98, 100, 191, 201. See 201, 204, 205; in Hangchow, 5, 53, 57, 107;
also professional painting in Nanking, 8, 57, 98, 132, 157; in Ning-p'o,
INDEX • 2 7 7
S3, 107; in Soochow, 134, 157, 167-68, 210, Sessha, 8, 48
216-17, 247; Sung-dynasty styles used in, 4-5, "Seven Stars" (juniper trees), 95
21-22, 165, 167-68, 218-19; versus amateur "Seven Worthies Passing the Barrier," Tai Chin,
painting, 4-5, 25, 28, 87-88, 163-65, 167, 46
216-17, 218-19; Yuan-dynasty styles used in, Shan-k'uang-sheng lU£E£ (Tu Ta-ch'eng), 261
49-50 (n. 17)
P'u-hsun # H , 48 Shang-fang shan -h^JllJ (Mount Shang-fang), 214
P'u-t'ienififfl.Fukien, 53 Shang Hsi i&S, 25-26, 27, 47, 50; "Lao-tzu
P'u-yang i£|S§, Kiangsu, 25 Passing the Barrier," 25-26, PI. 6-7
"Pure and Plain Pavilion" (Ch'ing-pai Hsiian), Shanghai ±M, 201
Liu Chueh, 79-80, 81, PI. 26 Shanghai Museum, 51, 137, 153, 154, 197, 257
(n. 3)
"Quietly Sitting in a Study Beneath Pines," anon Shansi UJffi Province, 79
ymous, 7-8 PI. 4 Shao-hsing iSH, Chekiang, 126, 160, 161
Shao-wu SISSS district, Fukien, 54
rainstorms as subjects of paintings, 89, 108, 125 She-hsien Iftft, Anhui, 134
"Rainy Thoughts," Shen Chou, 89, 91, 96, Pi. 34 Shen Chen HcM., 83
realism, 91, 193 Shen Chi-nan ttfiffi, 80
"RedCliff,' After Chao Po-su, 'The," Wen Cheng Shen Chou ikm, 52, S3, 57, 79, 82-96, 97, 106,
ming, 205, 216, 219-20, Pi. 117 161, 165, 194, 210, 213, 214, 215, 238, 241,
Rimpa school, 133 242, 251 ; "Album of Landscapes with Figures,
Rimpo Sansho gfdUJti, 240 (n. 4 of 4) for Chou Wei-te," 88-89, Color PI. 4-5; "Crab
"River Landscape in the Manner of Ni Tsan," and Shrimp," from "Drawings from Life,"
Wang Fu, 58-59, Pi. 22 95, PI. 36; "Fishermen on a River in Autumn,"
"River Landscape with Fishermen," Chu Tuan, 86, PI. 33; founder of the Wu School, S3, 82,
127-28, PI. 54 211; "Gazing at the Midautumn Moon," 91;
"River Village in a Rainstorm," Lu Wen-ying, influence of, on other artists, 94, 129, 138, 157,
108, 125, PI. 51 158, 189, 195, 212, 220, 244-45, 248; "Land
Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The, 107 scape for Liu Chueh," 84, PI. 31; "Landscape
Rosenberg, Harold, 243 for Wu K'uan," 87, PI. 35; Liu Chiieh's rela
tion to, 97, 80-82; "Living in Retirement,"
"Sakyamuni Descending from the Mountains," 83-84, PI. 30; "Lofty Mount Lu," 85; "Night
Liang K'ai, 130 Vigil," 90-91, 103, 218, PI. 37-38; "Rainy
san-ch'u (dramatic lyrics), 97 Thoughts," 89, PI. 34; "Scenery of Ch'ang
scholar-amateur (literati) painting: during the Yuan chou," 91; Shih Chung's meeting with, 140;
dynasty, 4-5; in Soochow 57, 59-60, 211, 216 "Three Juniper Trees," 95, 239, Pi. 42-43;
"Towering Mountains Above a Retreat," 85,
17, 218; method of copying used in, 204; old
PI. 32; "Twelve Views of Tiger Hill," 91-93,
styles used in, 4-5, 60, 139,205,218-19; "play
103, PI. 39-40; "Walking with a Staff," 80-82,
fully drawn," 208 ; professional painting affected
211-12, PI. 29; Wen Cheng-ming as a student
by, 24, 49, 52, 101, 191, 195, 246-47; subjects
of, 212; "The White Cloud Spring," 93-94,
depicted in, 59, 92, 205; theory, 5, 6, 77, 90
PI. 41
91; versus professional painting, 4-5, 25, 28,
87-88, 100, 163-65, 167, 216-17 Shen Heng ifcU, 79, 83
"Scholar Contemplating a Waterfall," Chung Li, Shen Shih itit, 246-48; "Sunset in an Autumn
126-27, PI. 53 Valley," 247-248, Pi. 128
"Scholar Fu Sheng in a Garden, The," Tu Chin, Shen Shih ftE, 247
156, Color PI. 10-11 ShenYuftil, 77
"Scholars on a Lakeshore," anonymous, 7, 28, Sheng Chu iSlf, 8, 49, 257 (n. 4)
PI. 3 Sheng Mou &&, 8, 26, 49, 127, 168, 189, 200,
screen paintings, 155-56, 199-200 248
"Searching for Flowers," Shin Jui, 257-58 (n. 8) Shensi RH Province, 5
"Secluded Fisherman on an Autumn River," Shih Chien £|g, 80
T'angYin, 195-96, Pi. 90 Shih Chung 5t&, 97, 139^-0, 153, 154, 155, 1S9,
Seikado Foundation, Tokyo, 89, 125 160, 161, 166, 246; "Clearing After Snowfall,"
2 7 8 • INDEX
153, PI. 68; "Landscape," 140, 153, Pi. 67; "Strange Masters of Yangchow," 99
"A Solitary Fisherman," 153, PI. 69 Su Shih (Su Tung-p'o) fc«(«E^«c), 131, 209, 219
Shih Ch'ung E i ; , 203 "Su Tung-p'o Returning to the Han-lin Acade
Shih-heng ±8§ (Lu Chi), 250 my," Chang Lu, 131-32, Color PL 7
Shih Jui 5iSi, 26-27, 46, 47, 50; "Landscape," sm-pi mm, 244
27, PL 8; "Landscape with Buildings and Fig "Summer Rainstorm," anonymous, 125
ures, in the Blue-and-Green Manner," 26-27, Sun Chiin-tse WSW, 4, 7, 8, 26, 126
Color PL 1 Sun Hsing-tsu i£»ffl, 137
Shih-te&fl, 130 Sun-hsiieh K ¥ , 78
"Shih-te Laughing at the Moon," Chang Lu, Sun Lung ^ 1 1 , 95, 136-38, 154, 166; "Cicada
130-31, PL 56 and Waterweeds," 137, PL 64
Shih-t'ien EBB (Shen Chou), 82 Sun Lung WM, 252
Shih-tsung t&?r; emperor, 240 Sun Shu-shan WMW, 83
Shih-tzu-lin f l ^ t t (Lion Grove Garden), 205 Sung-chiang ISiX, 253
Shih Yung-ling 55*6$, 89 Sung-dynasty Academy painting. See "Academy"
Shu-ching tfS (Book of Documents), 156 Sung Hsu SfcftS, 94
"Shui-ts'un t'u frHM ("Water Village"), Chao "Sunset in an Autumn Valley," Shen Shih, 247
Meng-fu, 250-51 48, PL 128
silk, paintings on, 93 Suzuki, Kei, 45, 46
"Singing Bird on a Branch," T'ang Yin, 162, 200, symbolism, 50, 55, 95, 102, 131, 138, 239, 241
246, PI. 99-100
"Singing While Boating on an Autumn River," Ta-liang ±m, 77
Sheng Mou, 49 tai-chao #B8 (painter-in-attendance), 22, 26, 27
"Snowy Peaks in a High Wind," Wang E, 125-26, Tai Chin MM, 24, 27, 45-53, 98, 100, 107, 139,
PL 52 164, 165,217, 238; "AutumnLandscape," from
"Solitary Fisherman, A," Shih Chung, 153, PL 69 "Landscapes of the Four Seasons," 51-52, PL
Soochow Hffi, Kiangsu: artists born in, or active 16; "Bodhidharma Meditating in a Cave, with
in, 8, 60, 79, 82, 129, 158, 193, 201, 211, 247, Hui-k'o," 48-49, PL 10; "Emperor Wen-wang
248, 251, 252; as a craft center, 60, 209; Visiting T'ai Kung-wang," 48; "Fishermen on
as a painting center, 5, 57, 98, 134, 135, 157, the River," 51, 102, Color PL 3; "Five White
165, 167-68, 210, 211, 216, 246; scenery of, Deer Beneath Pines," 49-50, PL 14; founder
depicted in paintings, 87, 91, 93-94, 197, 204 of the Che school, 52; "The Hermit Hsu Yu
5, 213; social, cultural, and economic life of, Resting by a Stream," 47^-8, PL 12; influence
59-60, 97, 194, 240 of, on other artists, 45, 54, 100, 101, 102, 108,
Soochow Museum, 243, 244 126, 128, 129, 158, 159, 190; "Listening to
Southeast Asia, 21, 23, 240 the Rain," 49, PL 13; "Men in a House over
"Spring in Chiang-nan," Chu Chieh, 252-53, PL a Stream," 50-51, PL 17; "Winter Land
135 scape," from "Landscapes of the Four Seasons,"
"Spring in Chiang-nan," Wen Cheng-ming, 252 51-52, PL 15
53 T'ai-ho Sftl, Kiangsi, 154
"Spring Landscape," from "Landscapes of the T'ai-hu Xm (Great Lake), 5, 157, 241
Four Seasons," Chiang Sung, 132; PL 57, 59 T'ai-hsiieh * P (National University), 129
"Spring Morning in the Han Palace," Ch'iu Ying, T'ai Kung-wang ^cSS, 48
202 T'ai-tsangici", 201
"Spring Mountains," anonymous (Yang Wei T'ang Hou SIS., 6
chen), 127 T'ang Kuang Jf3j(*), 260 (n. 1)
"Spring Mountains," Lin Kuang, 138, PL 65 T'ang Ti fSm, 45
"spring pictures," 198 T'ang Yin i§%, 22, 134, 155, 166, 193-200,
"Spring Trees After Rain," Wen Cheng-ming, 201, 202, 206, 207, 210, 216, 218, 246, 247;
212-13, 214, 218, PL 111-112 association with Wen Cheng-ming, 193-94, 211
"Ssu-wan t'u" HiÔ ("The Four Myriads"), Wen 12 ; "Clearing After Snow in a Mountain Pass,"
Po-jen, 249-51, PL 130-133 159, 197, PL 93; "The Noble Scholars" (Kao
"Stone Cliff at the Pond of Heaven, The," shih t'u), 198-99, 208, Pi. 94; "Partingat Chin
Huang Kung-wang, 85 ch'ang," 197-98, PL 91; "Poetic Thoughts:
INDEX • 2 7 9
Traveling by Donkey," 196, Pi. 92; "Secluded "Traveling in the Autumn Mountains," T'ang
Fishermen on an Autumn River," 195-96, PI. Ti, 45
90; "Singing Bird on a Branch," 162, 200, trees, 78, 95, 199-200, 238-39. See also pines
246, PI. 99-100; "T'ao Ku Presenting a and juniper trees
Poem," 198, PI. 96; "Trees, Bamboo,and Rocks tsa-chii StiO (plays with songs), 160
by a River," 199, Pi. 98; "Whispering Pines Ts'ao Chih-po W&S, 93
on a Mountain Path," 197 ts'ao-shu ? S ("draft script"), 51, 162
Tao-chi Mm, 200 Tso-chuan %Ei$, 82
Tao-te ching M^.&, 25 ts'vn gj, 50
T'ao Ch'ien. See T'ao Yuan-ming Tu-ch'ih MM (Sun Lung), 137
T'ao Ku mm, 198 Tu Chin f±S, 52, 154-156, 157, 161, 166, 195,
"T'ao Ku Presenting a Poem," T'ang Yin, 198, 198; "Enjoying Antiques," 155-56, PL 73;
PI. 96 "The Scholar Fu Sheng in a Garden," 156,
"T'ao-li Yuan" tt^H ("Garden of Peach and Color PI. 10-11; "T'ao Yuan-ming Viewing
Pear Trees"), Ch'iu Ying, 204-5, PI. 102 a Painting of the Peach Blossom Spring,"
T'ao Yuan-ming WfflW, 28, 95, 155, 209, 240 155, PL 72
41; "Illustrations to the Homecoming Ode of Tu Ch'iung tt®, 47, 60, 77-78, 79, 82, 83,
T'ao Yuan-ming," by Li Tsai, 28, PI. 9; "Por 168; "Heavenly Fragrance in a Secluded Place,"
trait of T'ao Yuan-ming," by Lu Chih, 240-41, 78, PL 24
PI. 119 Tu Fu ttS, 204
"T'ao Yuan-ming Returning Home Drunk," Tu Sheng-chii ttffig (Tu Chin), 155
Chou Wei, 257 (n. 4) Tu Ta-ch'eng t b « , 261 (n. 17)
' 'T'ao Yuan-ming Viewing a Painting of the Peach T'u-hua Yuan @3fK (Painting Academy), 8
Blossom Spring," Tu Chin, 155, PI. 72 Tung Ch'i-ch'ang K K ^ , 5, S3, 77, 88, 128, 163,
Taoism and Taoist subject matter, 25, 103, 104, 208, 245, 250, 251, 253
130, 132-33, 138 Tung-Chu tradition, 4, 5
"Taoist Temple in the Mountains," attributed "Tung-lin t'u" SttBE ("Master Tung-lin's
to Tung Yuan, 258 (n. 18) Villa"), Ch'iu Ying, 206, PL 9S
tarashikomi, 133 Tung-t'u hsiian-lan pien KSSSHffi, Chang Ching
Te-hui W.m (Shih Yung-ling), 89 feng, 247
"Temples on Immortals' Mountains," Wen Chia, Tung Yuan ftW, 4, 60, 77, 218, 2S8 (n. 18)
248-49, PI. 129 "Twelve Views of Tiger Hill," Shen Chou, 9 1
"Thousand Buddha Hall and Pagoda," from 93, 21S, PL 39-40
"Twelve Views of Tiger Hill," Shen Chou, "Two Cranes and Small Birds, with Bamboo and
91-93, PI. 39 Blossoming Plum," Pien Wen-chin, 23, PL S
"Thousand Cliffs Contend in Splendor, A," Wen "Two Taoist Immortals," Wu Wei, 104, PL 44
Cheng-ming, 237-38, 244, PI. 116
"Three Friends and Hundred Birds, The," Pien "untrammeled" painting, 100, 130, 160
Wen-chin, 23, 137
"Three Juniper Trees," Shen Chou, 95, 239, "Verdant Pines and Clear Springs," Wen Cheng
PL 42-43 ming, 220, 237, PL 114
tien S5, 50
T'ien-p'ing shan ^FtfJ (Mount T'ien-p'ing), 94 "Waiting for the Ferry in Autumn," Ch'iu Ying,
Tientsin Museum, 131 202-3, PL 97
Tiger Hill, 91-93, 242, 252; "Twelve Views of "Walking with a Staff," Shen Chou, 80-82, 83,
Tiger Hill," Shen Chou, 91-93, 215, Pi. 39-40 85, 86, 212-13, PL 29
T'ing-mei g f t (Liu Chueh), 84 wall painting, 21
Tofuku-ji, Kyoto, 168 Wan-li MM era, 252
Tokyo National Museum, 108, 249, 260 (n. 4 Wang An-shih I S E , 131, 192, 237
of 4) Wang Ao i ^ , 47, 217
topographical paintings, 242 Wang Chao £ $ , 128
"Towering Mountains Above a Retreat," Shen Wang Chen IS5, 47
Chou, 85, 86, PI. 32 Wang Chih-teng I P S , 168, 198, 204, 246
trade, 21, 97 Wang Ching-chih BEffclh, 206
2 8 0 • INDEX
Wang-ch'uan Wll, 77 Ch'eng," 262 (n. 6); writings by, about other
Wang Ch'ung 3E«, 201, 206, 214, 244-45; artists, 58, 78
"Landscape," 244-45, Pi. 124-125 Wen Chia %M, 192, 215, 219, 244, 248-49,
"Wang E iff, 125-26, 127, 133, 134, 197; 252; "Temples on Immortals' Mountains,"
"Snowy Peaks in a High Wind," 125-26, Pi. 52 248-4-9, PI. 129
Wang Fu 2E££, 57, 58-59, 77, 79, 82, 85; wen-jen hua SAi§, 5. See also scholar-amateur
"Farewell Meeting at Feng-ch'eng," 59, PI. painting
23; "Literary Gathering," 59; "River Land Wen Kung-ta * £ g , 78, 211; "Landscape for
scape in the Manner of Ni Tsan," 58-59, 81, Wen Kung-ta's Retirement," by Yao Shou,
PI. 22 78-79, PI. 25
Wang Hsien-ch'en I8RE, 206 Wen Lin £4*, 85, 193, 211
Wang Li 3E®, 5-7, 8, 92; "Scenes of Hua Wen P'eng %%, 202, 209, 215, 248
shan," 5-7, 92, PI. 1-2 Wen Po-jen i f f i t , 247, 248, 249-51; "A
Wang Meng IS=, 27, 58, 77, 78, 79, 86, 163, Myriad Hectares of Sunlit Waves," 249-250,
209, 219, 220, 237, 243, 244, 246, 251; PI. 131, 133; "A Myriad Peaks with Flying
"Dwelling in the Ch'ing-pien Mountains," Snow," 249; "A Myriad Ravines with Wind
237; "Fisherman-Recluse at Hua-ch'i," 27, blown Pines," 249, PI. 130, 132; "A Myriad
243; "Forest Grotto at Chii-ch'u," 237; Stalks of Bamboo in Mist and Rain," 250
"Landscape in the Manner of Wang Meng," by Wen Ting $M, 248
Wen Cheng-ming, 220, 237, PI. 115 Wen-yiian-ko 3 » 1 , 58, 59
Wang Ning 3E«?, 192 Wen-wang 3 t l , emperor, 48
Wang Shih-chen H&A, 52-53, 87, 104, 129, West Lake, 80
137, 154, 164, 193, 239, 240, 245-46 "Whispering Pines on a Mountain Path," T'ang
Wang Shou-jen ZETF£ (Wang Yang-ming), 154 Yin, 197
Wang Wei EElft, 77, 156 "White Cloud Spring, The," Shen Chou, 93-94,
Wang Wen IB3, 157; "Landscape with Pavil PI. 41
ion," 157, PL 74 "Winter Landscape," from "Landscapes of the
Wang Yang-ming 3EHBJ, 154 Four Seasons," Chiang Sung, 132, PI. 58, 60
Wang Ying EE3S, 24 "Winter Landscape," from "Landscapes of the
"Water Village" (Shui-ts'un t'u), Chao Meng-fu, Four Seasons," Tai Chin, 51-52, Pi. 15
250-51 "Winter Landscape in the Manner of Li Ch'eng,"
wei-ch'ifflffi,189 Wen Cheng-ming, 262 (n. 6)
Wei ffl River, 48 "Winter Landscape with a Man Arriving at a
Wen Cheng-ming i f f f l , 49, 50, 88, 163, 166, House," Hsu Lin, 107, Pi. 49
189, 194, 201, 206, 208, 210, 211-20, 237 "Winter Landscape with Travelers," Wu Wei,
39; "The Chih-p'ing Temple," 214, 218, 100-101, PI. 45
PI. 113; "Cypress and Rock," 239, Pi. 118; "Wintry Crows in an Old Tree," Chou Wen
Fu-t'ien chi, 214; influence of, on other artists, ching, 53
239, 240, 245-46, 248, 249, 252; "Land Wo-ch'ih &M (Fool's Rest; Shih Chung's home),
scape in the Manner of Wang Meng," 220, 237, 140
Pi. 115; "Leisurely Living at the Stream Wo-yun 0,9 (Cheng Kuo-pin), 192
Pavilion," 212; "Living Aloft," 217-18, "Woman and Child in a Garden," Kuo Hsu,
Color PL 13; "Lofty Leisure Beneath a Sheer 154, PI. 71
Cliff," 214-15, 220, 237, PI. 108-110; "A women artists, 164
Myriad Streams Contend in Flowing," 263 (n. "World of the Magic Pot, The," Cheng Wen
19); "Old Trees by a Cold Waterfall," 239; lin, 132-33, PI. 62
"Old Trees by a Wintry Brook," 239; " 'The Wu-ch'ang S^g, Hupei, 98, 105
Red Cliff,' After Chao Po-su," 205, 219-20, Wu Chen %m, 49, 51, 53, 57, 60, 77, 78, 80,
Pi. 117; Shen Chou's influence on, 94, 212; 93, 132, 140, 158, 247, 248; "Fisherman,"
"Spring Trees After Rain," 212-13, 214, 51,78,79
218, PI. 111-112; "A Thousand Cliffs Contend W u - h s i ^ ^ , 5 8 , 157
in Splendor," 237-38, 244, Pi. 116; "Verdant Wu-hsien §kU, 57
Pines and Clear Springs," 220, 237, PI. 114; Wu-hsing MS, 98
"A Winter Landscape in the Manner of Li Wu Hung-yu £ « $ , 199
INDEX • 281
Wu K'uan UK, 78, 85, 87, 93, 95, 194, 211; Yang Jung <§«£, 24, 47
"Landscape for Wu K'uan," by Shen Chou, Yang P'u mm, 24, 47
87, 93, PI. 35 Yang Shih-ch'i f § ± $ , 24, 47
Wu Pin &%, 163, 241 Yang T'ien-tse mHW, 153
Wu school %m, 94, 158, 238; before Shen Yang Wei-chen tlISS, 105, 127
Chou, 57-58; compositions used by, 85-86; Yang Wei-ts'ung StiES (Yang Fang-ch'eng),
founding of, 53, 82, 211; later painting of, 215, 263 (n. 9)
251, 253; subjects depicted by, 241, 242; Yangchow » l | , 138
versus the Che school, 5, 85-86, 135, 163 "Yangchow, Strange Masters of," 99
65 Yangtze River « 7 i l , 3, 4, 59, 60, 154
Wu-sheng-shih shih &S1#£, 99, 130, 132, 158, Yao Lai tt« (Yao Ming-shan), 215, 263 (n. 9)
190, 204 Yao Shou mm, 78-79, 82, 137, 211; "Land
Wu Shun-min i^SJs;, 58 scape for Wen Kung-ta's Retirement," 78-79,
Wu-sung £ « , 59 PL 25
Wu Tao-tzu J*!3-, 97, 100, 104, 129, 165 Yellow River Kffl, 54
Wu-tsung S ^ , emperor, 99, 191 Yen Hui MM, 104, 130, 131
Wu Wei £ » , 52, 56, 94, 97, 98-106, 108, Yen Sung K $ , 160, 219, 248
130, 136, 139, 140, 165, 166, 200, 238; Yen Tsung %tk, 53-54
"Fishing from a Riverbank," 101-2, PI. 46; Yin Hsi 3*S, 25
influence of, on other artists, 107, 128, 129, Yin-yang school, 53
130, 131, 132, 136, 154, 157, 158, 190, Y u C h ' i u * * , 210
195, 198, 199, 246; "The Iron Flute," 104 Yu-ho I S , 49
5, Pi. 48; "Lady Carrying a P'i-p'a," 105-6, Yu-shan StW (Mount Yu), 95
131, PI. 47; "Pleasures of Fishermen," 102 Yuan Chiang g i l , 22, 128, 133
3, 129, Color PI. 6; "Two Taoist Immortals," Yueh Cheng SJE, 45
104, Pi. 44; "Winter Landscape with Travel Yung-chia *J5, Chekiang, 24
ers," 100-101, PL 45 Yung-lo emperor, 21
Wu-ying tien ifeiSSx, 22 Yung-lo &m era, 21-23, 24, 46
Yunnan S i t , 27, 47
Yang Hsiin *§&, 138-39, 153, 260 (n. 4 of 4);
"Landscape with Travelers," 138-39, 153, Zen Buddhist painting. See Ch'an Buddhist paint
PI. 66
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(A History of Later Chinese Painting, 1279-1950 - V. 2) James Francis Cahill - Parting at The Shore - Chinese Painting of The Early and Middle Ming Dynasty, 1368-1580-Weatherhill (1978)

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What are some of the notable Chinese landscape paintings mentioned in the document?

What are some of the notable Chinese landscape paintings mentioned in the document?

What are some of the Chinese artists mentioned in the document?

What are some of the Chinese artists mentioned in the document?

OHIO STATE

Near York • WEATHERHILL • Tokyo

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This is the second in a projected series of five volumes by James Cahill

FIRST EDITION, 1978

I THE EARLY MING "ACADEMY" AND THE CHE SCHOOL

1 The Reign of Hung-wu 3

AND His PREDECESSORS 57

1 The Wu School in the Fifteenth Century 57

1 Nanking as a Painting Center 97

Chiang Sung 132

AND ELSEWHERE 135

1 Beyond the Che and Wu Schools 135

1 Chou Ch'en 168

1 Wen Cheng-ming 211

Maps appear on pages xv and xvi

Between pages 8 and 21:

For Chapter I, between pages 28and 45:

The Early Ming "Academy" and the Che School

1. THE REIGN OF HUNG-WU

2. Two LANDSCAPE TRADITIONS: THE CHE AND Wu SCHOOLS

3. PAINTING IN THE HUNG-WU ERA, 1368-98

List of Plates p.ix Go to page: 24, 28, 47, 199

List of Plates p.ix Go to page: 51, 102

List of Plates p.ix Go to page: 88, 89

List of Plates p.ix Go to page: 102, 129

List of Plates p.ix Go to page: 131

List of Plates p.ix Go to page: 137, 193

List of Plates p.ix

4. PAINTING IN THE YUNG-LO ERA, 1403-24

T H E PERSISTENCE OF CONSERVATIVE SOUTHERN SUNG STYLES In writing of a re­

5. THE HSUAN-TE ACADEMY, 1424-35

7. Detail from Plate 6-

9. Li Tsai: from "Illustrations to the Homecoming Ode of T'ao Yuan-min?."

List of Plates p.ix Go to page: 28, 48, 50

List of Plates p.ix

7. P A I N T I N G D U R I N G T H E " I N T E R R E G N U M , " 1436-65

C H O U W E N - C H I N G A single work datable to the end of this period is a landscape by Chou

The Beginnings of the Wu School

1. THE WU SCHOOL IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

S O O C H O W AND ITS GENTRY-LITERATI CULTURE The artistic career of Wang Fu might

2. PREDECESSORS OF SHEN CHOU

List of Plates p.x

List of Plates p.x Go to page: 78, 211

26. Liu Chiieh: "Pure and Plain Pavilion" (Ch'ing-pai

List of Plates p.x Go to page: 80, 84, 93, 94, 238

List of Plates p.x

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List of Plates p.x

List of Plates p.x Go to page: 83, 84, 213

32. Shen Chou: "Towering Moun-

33. Shen Chou: "Fishermen on

34. Shen Chou: "Rainy Thoughts." •

Tu Ch'iung's finest surviving work (judging from a reproduction—the present whereabouts

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T H E PERSISTENCE OF CONSERVATIVE SOUTHERN SUNG STYLES In writing of a re

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