The Song Dynasty Page 2

Perfection takes time …
My first landscape is progressing. The Pine tree is in the style of Li Chéng (the artist I will feature next. The linework of this and the man paddling with oar were both copied from The Jieziyuan Huazhuan (Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting).

I was very fortunate to purchase a box set copy of this Manual and The Tao of Painting this summer, and it uses The Shanghai edition (published in 1887-88) as its basis. This edition utilised lithography reproducing examples drawn by brush, copied from original woodblock prints published in 1679 and 1701. The illustrations are framed and appear in their actual size.It is easy to become critical of your work when you start on a path of artistic development. But, if You, like me, are beginning, be kind to yourself. You will make precious mistakes; we can learn from them.

Li Chéng

As a person, Li Chéng represented a certain kind of Chinese ideal the artist of a good family, educated in the humanities, without ambition for a high place, and who painted for his delight. Like many other landscape painters of this period, he preferred wintry scenes, bleak, stony crags, and gnarled trees with leafless, ‘crab claw’ branches. Unfortunately, it isn’t very sure whether any original works of his survive. Still, the Buddhist Temple in the Hills after Rain’ is a picture bearing a traditional attribution to Li Chéng and possibly close to his style.

The painting is very similar to a subject by Juran, ‘Buddhist Monastery by Streams and Mountains’. The landscape has genuinely become the subject of these two paintings. Both are hanging scrolls and in them, there are to be found centralised compositions which have relatively equal emphasis on their various parts. The fore and middle grounds are united but separated in space from the distant mountain masses whose bases are lightened to silhouette and separate nearer details. A careful and clear series of flat rock or mountain planes parallel to the picture plane accomplish the recessions in space.

Representationally, the forms of nature are translated into brush terms but have yet to be at the expense of the natural state. Instead, there is a tremendous effort to grasp the reality of nature within a highly schematic and intellectual format.

These two paintings serve as an introduction to the experimental period, as seen in the hanging scroll. Later hanging scrolls of the Northern Sung period often displayed a greater depth of space and an increased feeling of mood but a subsequent loss of monumentality. This loss is compensated for and is likely related to the growth of interest in the handscroll format.

This is a painting I have just completed under Maggie Smith’s tuition in a workshop environment; I have again turned to Li Chéng's Pine as a reference source.

Xu Daoning

One of the earliest handscrolls is attributed to Xu Daoning, an artist of the early eleventh century who modelled his style on Li Chéng. He was known as a master of painting winter moods freshly and spontaneously in his later years.

In his painting ‘Fishing in a Mountain Stream,’ there is an apparent compromise between the verticality in the older hanging scroll format and the horizontal movement through time appropriate to the handscroll. Scrolls of this kind are mounted on a roll and opened from right to left, flat on a table, the viewer seeing no more than two feet at a time. Xu Daoning’s scroll is nineteen inches high and eighty-two inches long.

The scroll is the only painting presentation form that brings to the art an actual progression through time. It is impossible sympathetically to view a landscape scroll without becoming part of it and entering the artists’ world of paths, peaks and streams. The handscroll is never spread out and considered in its entirety because to do so violates its spirit and purpose.

Fàn Kuan

The early twelfth-century imperial collection claimed fifty-eight paintings by Fàn Kuan , many of them in sets of two, four, and one of twelve scrolls. The catalogue of this collection (preface dated 1120) says that Fàn Kuan was: ‘a stern and old fashioned man, careless in his behaviour, fond of wine and with no command of the world’s ways.

To begin with, he studied Li Chéng, but one day, he woke up and said to himself with a sigh: ‘My predecessors have not yet tried to understand life at source; surely it is better to take life in all its forms rather than men for teachers, and an even better teacher than material objects is the heart’. Thereupon, he gave up his old manner of study and retired to T’ai-hua in the Chungman mountains.

Among the paintings in the Palace Museum, Taipei, attributed to masters of the tenth century to the eleventh century, one of the best in quality is a large landscape entitled ‘Travelling among Mountains and Streams’ attributed to Fàn Kuan.

There is no virtuosity of brushwork throughout this picture, no showy display of strongly contrasting tones, but rather an extremely competent, straightforward painting that is perfectly consistent and controlled from top to bottom and from side to side. Whoever painted ‘Travelling Among Mountains and Streams’ , and it could well have been Fa'n Kua¯n, was a master of his craft, working in an age when balance, moderation, realism in the sense of an understanding of natural laws, and visual integrity was the highest norm. Landscapes like this are the apex of the grand manner born during the Five Dynasties and early Northern Song.

Guo Xi

Guo Xi was a painter of enormous energy and output who loved to cover large walls and standing screens with monumental compositions.

One of his most famous works is Early Spring, which demonstrates his ability to produce multiple perspectives, which he referred to as “the angle of totality.” This type of representation, “Floating Perspective”, is a technique that displaces the static eye of the viewer and highlights the differences between Chinese and Western modes of spatial representation.

In his advice on landscape painting, he repeatedly insists on the necessity for keen observation. Observing how a mountainscape changes from morning to evening and from season to season is essential. Guo Xi stated, “Watercourses are the arteries of a mountain, grass and tree its hair; mist and haze its complexion”.

Indeed, as the painter knows the mountains to be alive, so must he transmit that life into his painting. Thus, the Chinese Landscape Painter was responsible for absorbing the mountain into him self, expressing it in his image, and bringing it home to the cities to inspire others.

He opened his essay by declaring that it is the virtuous man above all who delight in landscapes. Being virtuous (in other words, a good Confucian), he accepts his responsibilities to society and the state, which ties him down to the urban life of an official. He cannot seclude himself and shun the world. He cannot wander for years among the mountains. Still, he can nourish his spirit by taking imaginary journeys through a landscape painting into which the artist has compressed nature’s beauty, grandeur, and silence and returned to his desk refreshed.

Guo Xi could well be taken to represent the end of a classic and balanced moment for monumental Chinese landscape painting following the almost legendary founders of the tenth and early eleventh centuries, i.e. artists like Jing Hào, Fàn Kuan, Li Chéng, and Xu Dàoníng.

Streams & Mountains Without End

There are indications in various paintings (Streams and Mountains without End being a good example) that there was a transitional period between the Northern and Southern Sung dynasties. The painter of Streams and Mountains Without End is anonymous , though its date has been established beyond a reasonable doubt to the early twelfth century.

As a contribution to landscape painting, it offers the opening and closing of flatlands. There is a gentler, lyrical, and more intimate approach than has been seen before. The actual effect of a small and distant scale is also more in keeping with a realist approach to reconciling the monumental with a small format, the conceptual and austere with the visual and intimate.

Mi Fú and Mi Youren

Mi Fú was to become, in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, the great ideal of the gentleman painter. He was a gifted writer of poetry and prose, one of the greatest calligraphers of his time. He held many official posts, including Secretary of the Board of Rites and Military Governor of Kiangsu. Still, it is said that he was not a great success because of his severe and cutting tongue and an unwillingness to conform to the habitual behaviour of officialdom. Moreover, he was a somewhat eccentric character. Among his oddities was a fixation on cleanliness, which kept him constantly washing, and he allowed no one but himself to touch his pictures.

To crown matters, he dressed in robes of the Tang Dynasty. Unfortunately, original paintings by Mi Fú are scarce, and it is questionable if any have survived. The traditions, however, about his style are consistent, and there can be little doubt about the kind of landscapes he painted. One of the most convincing pictures is a small landscape in the collection of Mr. Fusetu Nakamura, Tokyo. In this work, there is almost no drawing in the strict sense but a straight painting of colouristic effects in ink.

Instead of the beautifully constructed rock formations and carefully drawn trees of the earlier painters, all is sacrificed to the impressionistic recording of mood. The solid form and realism of the tenth and early eleventh-century painters are dissolved into a far more personal and intimate style. The drawing of the fisherman’s huts and the little bridge perfectly creates the rustic setting, but they are sketched in a very loose, almost careless manner.

The accompanying inscription, judged by specialists in calligraphy to be in Mi Fú´’s hand,is dated in correspondence with A.D.1102. (unfortunately, I cannot link to this painting and calligraphy, but the detail from Mountains and Pines in Spring attached above is similar).

The Sung emperor Hui-Tsung, an essential art patron of the early twelfth century, did not appreciate the style of Mi Fú´. As a result, not one of the paintings by Mi Fú´ or his son Mi Youren , who painted in the same manner, is listed in the catalogue of the Imperial Collection.

In the fourteenth century, such leading painters as Ni Zan discovered that Mi Fú was then a ‘modern’. He became the ideal of the gentleman scholar painters, men equally at home in Chinese literature, music, calligraphy, and poetry, and who painted for their enjoyment and the pleasure of their friends.

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