The Song Dynasty Page 3

The Academy of Hangzhou

A son of the emperor Huizong was in Nanking attempting to levy troops when disaster overcame his father and the Imperial capital in 1127. This son, known to history as Kao-Tsung was proclaimed emperor.

After several years of hardships, when the Chin Tartars made a sally across the Yellow River, the invaders at length retired, and Kao-Tsung, in 1138, was able to establish the Court of Southern Sung at Hangzhou in the Chekiang Province (now Zhejiang Province). Strong support at the Court favoured a vigorous policy of opposition to the Tartars and the recovery of the lost provinces of the Yellow River Valley and the North. The approach advocated was conservative and Confucian and was countered by a clique advocating compromise and conciliation: the latter won, no doubt, from more realistic considerations than from the weight of their arguments. The Southern Song then settled down to enjoy what time was left to them in the productive and beautiful lands of central and Southern China.

After establishing his dynastic Court at Hangzhou, Kat-Tsung energetically set about trying to recapture as much as he could of the cultural brilliance that had illuminated the Court of his father. The Academy of Painting was reinstated, and many painters who had practised their art in the old days of Huizong’s Academy were reunited at the Academy in Hangzhou .

This southward flight of the Court marked the beginning of a century and a half of academic and individualistic painting activity. In addition to the hanging scroll and handscroll, the album painting, square or fanshaped, was a significant ground for painting. The typical styles of the Southern Song, despite sporadic efforts to revive the monumental style, were the Lyric and later the Spontaneous.

The Lyric style involved sudden arbitrary juxtapositions of selected details or motifs, misty washes, and highly calligraphic brushwork. The Spontaneous style was more conservative, even archaistic in composition, expanded and specialised the intuitive and spontaneous command of the brush.

My attempt at Ways of Painting trunks from The techniques of Chinese Painting by Wu Yangmu … practice, practice, practice!

Chiang Ts’an (Jiang Shen) and Juran

Chiang Ts’an was a member of the old Northern Sung Academy. His most important work is a long landscape in slight colour wash and ink on silk in the Palace Museum. The landscape Verdant mountains is now in The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, and is a smaller but very similar scroll. The Style in both these paintings is close to that associated with the painter Chu-Jan (Juran) .

In Verdant Mountains, the dramatic effect is obtained by sudden changes in depth; in parts of the scroll, the nearest trees show only the upper half emerging above the picture’s lower edge. The immediate middle distance opens, revealing a broad lake and a vast expanse of space extending to where a few hazy peaks are but half indicated through the misty atmosphere.

Wind in Pines Among Myriad Valleys (1124) Li? Ta´ng

Li Tang (Connecting Northern and Southern Song Landscape Art)

Li Tang was born in 1050 and earned the highest rank in the Painting Academy at the court in Bianjing (now Kaifeng). Surviving the invasion by the Jurchen Jin dynasty, he and the court moved to Qiantang (now Hangzhou), where he continued to serve as a painter in the court under Emperor Gaozong.

Li represented a vital link between the Northern Song school (Guo Xi, Fan Kuan and Li Cheng and others) and the later Southern Song painters, such as Xia Gui and Ma Yuan, both of whom studied Li’s art.

In the ‘Wind in Pines Among a Myriad Valleys’, Li uses the so called “axe cut” brushstrokes, which he developed and gives rocks and mountains an excellent quality.

Li Tang – Intimate Scenery of River and Mountains

Liu Songnian, Ma Yuan and Xia Gui

The original contributions of the Southern Song Academy to the body of Chinese Landscape tradition lay in the work of three of the greatest landscape painters: Liu Songnian, Ma Yuan and Xia Gui. All three won the title of Painter in Attendance, were members of the Academy in the last decade of the twelfth century, and worked into the first quarter of the thirteenth.

Liu Songnian is referred to as a gifted contemporary of Ma Yuan and Xia Gui, these latter two are often paired together, and indeed it was they who developed the style of Liu Songnian to the full.

The Ma-Xia School, as it is often called, had its roots, like so much of later Chinese landscape painting, in the works of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Ma Yuan came from a family of painters, and his son Ma Lin carried on the tradition.

Walking on a Mountain Path in Spring

Ma Yuan

Ma Yuan was born in Qiantang (Hangzhou, Zhejiang) into a family of painters. His great-grandfather Ma Fen served as painter in attendance at the Northern Song court in early 12th century, and both his grandfather Ma Xingzu and his father

Ma Shirong held the same position at the Southern Song court in Hangzhou. At some point after 1189, Ma Yuan received the same position under Emperor Guangzong. He evidently enjoyed a high reputation at the court and was a favorite of Emperor Ningzong (who wrote several poems inspired by Ma Yuan’s paintings); but nothing more is known about his life. He died in 1225.

His son, Ma Lin, who rose to the rank of painter-in-waiting, was the last painter in the family.

‘Walking on a Mountain Path in Spring’ is a characteristic landscape of Ma Yuan from the National Palace Museum, Taipei. It combines a nostalgic, poetic mood, handsome design, and brilliant brushwork. The sage, with his attendant, stands and looks out across a deep and mistfilled chasm.

In pictures of this kind, the strict elimination of all that is unessential and the concentration upon the elements that will most directly suggest the communion of man with the wonders of the infinite world of nature must be the product of deep sensitivity and natural genius; otherwise, they slip on the one hand into mere decoration and on the other into insipid romanticism.