CLP 166: 2004-5 Lectures given where "Mists and Clouds" exhibition of my family collection was being shown: U. Wisconsin

Lectures for "Mists and Clouds" Exhibition

Madison lecture, Feb. 4 2004

Great pleasure to be here, especially because I stand here in so many roles--old friend and colleague of one, Julia Murray, former teacher of one, Gene Phillips; father and father-in-law of two, Nick and Kay; Grandpa of (-) as well as of (-) who were too young to come. Not often one can play so many roles at once. Equally importantly, it's a pleasure to be here on the occasion of this exhibition of our family collection, and to be speaking about my experiences in bringing it together--and now, seeing much of it disperse. The "Mists and Clouds" of the exhibition title refers to an essay by the 11th century scholar-statesman Su Shi, in which he advised that the paintings and works of calligraphy one collected should be thought of as passing before one's eyes like mists and clouds, and should not be permitted to get their barbs into you, which is what would happen if one tried to hang onto them.

My talk tonight will be informal and anecdotal, and will generally follow the theme of the exhibition: how a scholar-teacher who is also an active collector, and who kept the family collection at the University Art Museum (its old name) for constant use by himself and students, was able to integrate his collecting with his scholarship and his teaching, to the benefit of all three. Or so he hoped and believed, and still does.

As a prefatory note, I should say that the ptgs I'm talking about are mostly in the exhibition, and mostly represent the best of the collection. And in talking only about these, I might give the impression of boasting that I never made mistakes. That would be far from the truth--I could give another lecture on bad purchases, which turned out to be less than genuine, or otherwise a mistake. The collection also includes some study material, minor but interesting paintings, even some of insecure authenticity--these, too, are sometimes useful in teaching. And a few of these have found their way into the exhibition--the selection wasn't mine, although I gave advice.

S,S. Lo P'ing, 1799 Portrait of Artist's Friend I-an. (This is one of the ptgs that unfortunately couldn't be included in the exhibition.) My collecting began during my Fulbright year in Japan, 1954-55. During most of year, I took every opportunity to look at all the public and private collections I could get access to, often with great introductions from my mentor Shujiro Shimada (who gave name Ching Yuan Chai to collection, name by which it's been known.) As I went around the great collections--Sumitomo, Takashima, Hashimoto, others--I assumed, without asking, that good Ch ptgs must all be extremely expensive, far beyond what a Fulbright scholar's stipend would allow; for me to acquire anything good myself seemed beyond dreaming. I'd spent a year at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, and knew what they paid for their acquisitions of Chinese paintings. Then, after my Fulbright year was more than half over, I met through an introduction an old Japanese professor of Chinese literature, Prof. Ueda, and was intro. by him, in turn, to the shops of several less-known but knowledgeable dealers and other outlets for Chinese paintings.

In going around among dealers, famous and obscure, I learned about what I came to call the "schools of fish" situation in the ptg market in Japan. (Describe: Mayuyama, Setsu, Kochukyo on upper level; others middle: Eda Bungado, Yushima Seido, Tajima Teishodo; others on lower levels. At these less prestigious sources, ptgs could be very cheap, w/o necessarily being lower in quality--unpub., no guarantees. Sometimes problems of condition. But if you trusted your eyes, could find bargains, good ptgs by known artists in the low hundreds of dollars, what other Fulbright families were paying to buy tansu or ceramics. (I had no private funds to speak of then, never have had--most professors don't get rich.) My acquisitions in that first year included the ptgs by Lo P'ing and Wu Wei (the latter withdrawn from exhib.--will show next.)

I learned also something about my own evaluations of ptgs: going back over things I seen, I realized that many that I'd written in my notes as genuine, and now realized were potentially available, were ptgs I wouldn't especially want to own myself. And that there were others that I really wanted to have, at least for a time, in my possession. That perception, refined over many years of collecting and thinking through why these were desirable and those weren't, certainly had an effect on my scholarship, in which I've always tried to confront directly questions of value--on a level above a simple "I like it" or "I don't like it"--trying to analyze what in the ptg makes it successful, desirable, something one wants to have around for a long time. (Poor ptgs quickly become boring). Also, of course, selecting ptgs for purchase sharpened my eye for decisions about authenticity. And collecting gave me much greater access to dealers' holdings--they would bring out more pieces, and better pieces, knowing I was a prospective purchaser. Jap. dealers often hold out things to show only to their special customers; sometimes they won't sell a piece to an outsider until all of their regular circle of customers has seen it.

S,S. Wu Wei. Now owned by my then-wife Dorothy Cahill, as is the Lo P'ing. The collection is now owned by her and myself, with smaller groups of particularly good things owned by our children Nicholas and Sarah. This ptg was at the Yushima Seido (describe). Brought out from back room--I hadn't bought enough from them to reach this status. American ...

S,S. Story. Famous ptr-collector Chang Ta-ch'ien was in Tokyo--spent a lot of time with him in Japan--and I asked him to come with me to Yushima Seido to look at it. (etc.)

S,S. Two more sections, at beginning. I should explain here, before going on: great dif. bet. E. Asian brush ptg and European-American oil ptg is that the former is produced in vastly greater quantities--Tomioka Tessai, for instance, in 1924, is estimated by his grandson to have produced about 20,000 ptgs during his lifetime. Wu Wei, this artist, partly because he worked fast, was very prolific. And lesser works by prominent artists, if unknown and unpublished, and bought through small dealers (no guarantees), could be surprisingly cheap. What I came to understand is that you could go to Tokyo Nat'l Mus. and see work by some artist you especially admired, then go out on market and find another by same artist that you could acquire w/o being rich. Not so with Fragonard or van Gogh or Matisse.

S,S. During the period from the later 50s through the 70s, I found occasion at least once a year for regular travels in E. Asia, research trips mostly; often w. my good friend the late Hugh Wass, who lived for years in Japan before teaching at Mills College in Oakland. We would meet in Tokyo, go on to Kansai, then to Taiwan, HK, following up scholarly projects, seeing exhibitions and collectors, but also dealers. My pursuit of Chinese ptgs (and occasionally Japanese) came to be the cloak-and-dagger side of my life--keeping on the move, frequenting unlikely places, matching wits w. wily dealers, some of whom wanted to cheat me or sell me bad ptgs, while I wanted to take advantage of some blind spot of theirs to buy a fine ptg cheap. Part of the excitement, of course, was risking our limited funds. I can't recall these times and these travels without poignant twinges of nostalgia.

What is now on the screen is the scroll now recognized as a major work by Chang Lu, Su Tung-p'o Returning to the Hanlin Academy, now owned by my daughter Sarah. One Tokyo dealer, who had earlier been established in Beijing, was Sammy Lee (still alive and active in Los Angeles), who has a good eye for ceramics, lacquer, objects, didn't deal in ptgs. (etc.--story. Visited with Hugh.). Left it with friend Cheng Chi, himself a major collector, to be mtd by Meguro as handscroll; w/o asking me, Cheng Chi added a colophon (insc. mtd after ptg) saying it was definitely by Wu Wei. Good try, but not right attribution.

S --. I myself took it at first to be a work by the Ming figure master Tu Chin, because I'd found a reproduction of a scroll w. more or less the same subject and composition on which the artist (Fang Hsun) writes that he's copying a scroll by Tu Chin. But: giving a seminar on Zhe-school ptg in Ming:

S,S. One of students argued in seminar paper that it wasn't by Tu Chin, it was by Chang Lu. And as soon as comparisons made, it was obvious she was right. (Always encouraged students to argue agst my opinions, so long as they could back up their arguments.)

- S. Detail. Point out similarities.

S --. Another Chang Lu ptg, alb. leaf in Shanghai Museum. Very consistent. I trained students to recognize individual styles of artists, regional styles, large period styles; they had to pass a connoisseurship exam, as part of their Ph.D. qualifying exams. All that pretty outmoded now (still stronger in Asian art than other fields, I think.)

S,S. Hua Yen, 18th cent., Animals Fleeing from Brushfire. a ptg now much admired and reproduced. But for quite a long time it was hanging in the shop of a NY dealer, nobody would touch it. I recommended to Freer--John Pope, then director, didn't like. "Bad brushwork." This was before I had developed argument abt how Ch artists often had to slip into what critics denounce as bad brushwork to achieve effects they wanted--well know example is what's called Ch'an or Zen ptg. This is now owned by Nicholas Cahill (studied archaeology at Univ. of Michigan, later at Berkeley; now teaches here, book out recently from Yale U. Press.)

-- S. Ptg in private col. in Taipei, by? Hua Yan. Same subject, but far less moving, lacks immediacy, coherence, of other. . .

I'll show a few other things in exhib., only identifying them and adding brief commentary, while continuing w. theme of the lecture: the scholar-teacher as collector.

S,S. Lu Chi, Nick's. Cranbook Academy auction.
S,S. Ch'en Lo, from Contag Collection. BAM now.
S,S, Ch'en Ch'uan, Gazing at Moon.
S,S. Kung Hsien, ca. 1665, also Nick's. LS done for famous poet Wang Shih-chen. Was centerpiece in article I wrote on early styles of Kung Hsien.
There were, of course, ethical issues raised by my being a museum curator, and later a teacher, while collecting ptgs myself. Some even feel this is bad idea.

-- S. (Another, 1688, late work, also Nick's.) During my time at Freer, always showed my acquisitions to Director & Vice-Director (Archibald Wenley and John Pope, most of the time) and recommended the ones I thought to be of Freer quality and importance; they could decide which Freer would take (at price I paid, of course). Happened several times. But more often, even when I recommended the ptg to them, they would decide agst it, say I could keep it. All this time, of course, I was also searching out really top things for Freer to acquire, without thinking of pursuing them myself.

S,S. Huang Shen, alb of Beggars & Street Entertainers. Some of my colleagues, as I say, felt strongly that a scholar-teacher shouldn't himself collect, because of possible conflicts of interest. But there are other notable cases of scholar-teachers who have had collections themselves: Cary Welch at Harvard, Max Loehr (on smaller scale), others. Wen Fong did for a time; but for family, with all ending up as gifts (I believe) to Princeton Art Museum or Met. , so collecting for good cause. I always believed, and argued, that under certain self-imposed rules it was OK to do, and that the benefits to myself & students in training their eyes, allowing them to handle real works of art (which wouldn't otherwise have been possible at Berkeley, on any large scale) more than offset the disadvantages and dangers.

S,S. Two more leaves. After my move from the Freer to Berkeley to be a professor, less a problem, since Univ. Art Mus. had no funds for acquisition of Asian art. (Some generous gifts, later; and fumpon sales. Also, persuading people with large incomes, notably two doctors, to buy pieces I'd find in Asia, give them to us with somewhat larger but quite honest appraisals, and come off fine in their income taxes--perfectly legitimate game that was very beneficial to both parties.

S --. Huang Shen, big one, prob. orig. screen. Before leaving this artist, want to tell how this ptg came into my possession. (Story)

S,S. Ch'en Hung-shou, Su Wu and Li Ling. (won't tell stories at length.) (Visit w. C.C.Wang, Anne Burkus, trade.) (She's teaching now at U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign--just pub. article on another work of this artist, on whom she wrote dissertation.) Work of 1630s, when Ch'en production appears to have had a more commercial character, worked w. help of assistants, some of it rather heavy-handed. But:

S,S. Ptg w. more subtleties than appear at first--another advantage to owning a ptg is the familiarity you can develop with it, hanging it on wall.
S,S. Quickly: album by him, in exhib. Wasn't sure myself if it was genuine, for years--acquired for nothing in bookstore. But publication of several others, one in Gugong, w. colophons by important people--
S,S. In early years, playing between "art" and "craft"--did both. Like designs for lacquer--
S,S. Ts'ui Tzu-chung, Farewell Meeting in Apricot Gathering, 1638. Acquired in Japan, from Eda Bungado; now Nicholas's. Subject was identified by Judy Andrews, who took on certain aspects of this artist's work as her dissertation topic. (She now teaches at Ohio State U.) (Describe)
S --. This apparatus, a mystery to me for a long time, was identified for me by a dealer-friend Kobayashi Katsuhiro of Tekisendo in Tokyo: (describe)

S,S. Sun Chun-tse. Another work that was on NY market for a long time, w/o finding a buyer; this was bought in 1968, after I had moved to Berkeley, and now belongs to Sarah Cahill. Symposium in Cleveland in that year on art of Yuan dynasty (etc.) Ended among "World Treasures of Art" at Osaka World's Fair.

-- S. Several signed works by Sun Chun-tse are preserved in Japan; highly regarded there, Important Cultural Properties etc.. Chinese collectors, with their obsession with big names, didn't want works by minor masters such as Sun Chun-tse, so dealers obligingly removed original signatures, added those of Ma Yuan. Several ptgs of this kind have been preserved in Japan; this one came from China (know from mounting) but escaped by being falsely identified--label on outside says "Sung work, surely by Ma Yuan"--tried to obliterate signature w. stroke of ink, but still readable under strong light.

-- S. Signature matches exactly those on ptgs in Japan; so does style. So has become famous work.
S,S. Two Ma Yuans, Taipei
-- S. Tai Chin
S --. Sun Chun-tse again.

S,S. Another case of unnoticed signature, or in this case a seal, is this large ptg now in the BAM and recognized as major work by leading Zhe-school master Tai Chin. (Story). Four-char. title, "Summer Trees Casting Shade," in court calligraphy. Ptg of this title by Tai Chin recorded as having been in col. of Yen Sung, prime minister who was overthrown in 1565; could be this ptg.

S -- Closer detail: house among trees. Close resemblance to:
S -- . One in Shanghai Museum. Same seal appears on both! altho very dif. in sizes--matches. Once real authorship is realized, similarities seem so obvious one wonders how he could have missed them--

S,S. Continuing with theme of using ptgs in seminars: I held Wen C-m seminar in 1976-77,acquired a good, although modest, ptg by him while seminar was going on. From the col. of Huang Pao-hsi, noted HK collector; Huang sold many of his best ptgs at auction in NYC; I acquired this one then. But before buying, went over it carefully w. seminar, comparing to other works of artist around same time (Note way of formal repetitions, trees to mts above) We decided it was certainly authentic, and I bought it. Reached Berkeley in time for seminar to use.
S --. (Subject of ptg: done for young friend Wang Ch'ung who was studying for the exams there.)
S --. Insc., in Wen's famous hsiao-k'ai or small-standard script. Chiang Chao-shen, who did major study of Wen C-m, said when he saw it that he hadn't been sure (etc.) (some repair, filling in.)

S,S. Other Wen C-m had been reprod. in Siren's book, in Yamaguchi Col. in Japan; also came up for auction in NYC (long after seminar.) Leading Chinese authority on Ch. ptg in NYC just then, Xu Bangda, who was going about pronouncing things fake; did so for this, others wouldn't touch it. They were wrong, for reasons I could again point out, with time. Same kind of echoings of form: shapes in upper part
S -- repeated in lower, tops of trees. And so forth--lots of correspondences.
S --. Belongs in series of late works featuring groups of old coniferous trees; this is one in Cleveland,
S --. or well-known one in K.C., of which I have only detail slide. Smaller, on paper; same hand, same intelligence. Negative spaces ...

Cypresses were favorite subj. of artist; great old cypresses at Point Lobos, down near Carmel on California coast. I took seminar there; one of students was Chang Sing, daughter of Chang Ta-ch'ien, who did graduate work with me; we stayed at his house in Pebble Beach. (I took students regularly on outings, often overnight to Marin County, for spiritual recharging: to beach, or on what students called Long March.)

S.-- I had two Shitao seminars, one early (Rick Vinograd took), one late. First, again, coincided w. Dick Edwards Tao-chi exhib. I myself could never afford major Shitao, other than this lovely leaf, bought during my Fulbright year in Japan (not in exhib.)

S,S. But did acquire good late Shitao album for Univ. Art Museum, in trade w. C.C.Wang--had something he believed in, I didn't. Again, received it during time of exhib. (later one), worked through it, decided OK, agreed to his proposal for trade. (W/o purchase funds for Museum, had to be ingenious.)

S,S. These are two leaves from s, late works, which I acquired in curious way. Dealer in D.C.; accepted as study pieces. During seminar, brought them out, realized real thing (I had come to understand Shitao's late period in interim.) What to do? dealer long retired, didn't know how to reach. Not properly mine.

S,S. Two more leaves (of six). After consultation w. students, we put in auction, used money it brought to establish The Shitao Fund (etc.) But also made point: possible for genuine works by great artist to be undesirable. (Still upsets some people to say this abt Shitao. But it was something my students learned---)

S,S. This pairing I use only to tell another story: Orthodox LS seminar, 1969 or 1970, coincided w. Princeton exhib. & symposium, Earl Morse collection. Twd end, I had briefly in my possession, conveying it from CCW to Morse, two great ptgs : handscrolls by Wang Y-c and Wu Li. Brought to seminar and showed; after months of immersal in special values of this kind of ptg, these were breathtaking for seminar students. As it happened, rec'd at same time in mail a ptg by 18th cent. Japanese Nanga master Ikeno Taiga, from dealer in Japan. Brought it to show seminar. Their response was: Prof. Cahill, how can you buy such an awful ptg! They were by then so imbued w. values of Orthodox-school Ch ptg--brushwork, highly structured compositions, etc.--that they couldn't quickly shift aesthetic gears to appreciate Taiga. (Some people turn out to be altogether incapable, never wiil enjoy Taiga or Nanga or Jap. pg generally.)

-- S. Detail of Taiga (describe.). Like being a Beethoven enthusiast and not being able to appreciate Ravel. This brought home to seminar radical differences in criteria of value, fallacy of thinking that one can recognize "quality" in art of any period and kind. Part of my attempted training for students was to open their minds of diversity of kinds of ptg--like moving, to take an example from Western art, from Poussin to van Gogh in European oil ptg. Museum curators have to do it; scholars sometimes find it easier to hold on to their prejudices and blind spots. Nothing in Taiga ptg that Chinese could call good brushwork; rules it out, for many of them. But same true of much of Chan or Zen ptg,, other kinds rejected by Chinese.

S.S. Very fine LS ptg in Orthodox style in exhib., by Wang Hui; early work, when he was at best. Insc. by his mentor Wang Chien. Belongs to Nicholas.

S,S. Two sec'ns of another long handscroll version of the Wang-ch'uan Villa composition, also with sig. of Wang Yuan-ch'i, in exhib.; of course not by him. Bought in Japan, from dealer who knew it wasn't real Wang Y-c; didn't know who really painted it--I did, much less famous artist named Chang Chi-su, no reputation, but very fine.

S,S. Before concluding with two early paintings, I want to show a few works, all in exhib., by Jen Hsiung and Jen Po-nien, two 19th cent. masters who stand out as brilliant artists in a period that didn't produce more than a few. Jen Hsiung, who died young in 1851, painted figures in variety of styles--Ch'en Hung-shou, Huang Shen--

S,S. and beautiful-women pictures not so vapid as most from that period. This is very fine album by him. (Story: Taipei in winter-spring 1963--)
S,S. This ptg of pheasants on a rock, from 1850, using new technique (describe)--changes character of bird-and-flower ptg.

S,S. Jen Po-nien, active in Shanghai in 1880s-90s, was extremely versatile, prolific master who left a large, very impressive body of work. Singing Bird on Bamboo Branch, after Hua Yen, 1880;
S,S. Pair of album leaves, one representing the Ming ptr Hsu Wei. One of everybody's favorites.
S,S. Rarer: landscapes by him; this is one of largest, finest. (Describe) No insc. on this ptg, but
-- S. On a study sketch, hua-kao, dtd. 1885, he reveals that the composition is based on a painting by the late Ming master Ting Yun-p'eng that he used to own and has copied a number of times. One of few really original landscapes from 19th cent., in my view.

S,S. In 1982 we had seminar called Sogenga (explain). Small exhib. w. catalog, drawn from our olw collections (UAM + mine) plus dealers in Japan, mostly. Two of works in it: Wen Jih-kuan, Ma Yuan (now both in BAM).

S --. Famous work by Jih-kuan in Jap. col., ptd in 1291. Reproduced widely. Other unknown, unpub., except for minor exhib. cat. Japanese scholars tend to be conservative in their judgements, uneasy abt works that suddenly appear, not santified by previous publication by some established scholar. So other one stayed in hands of dealer until I acquired it (in complicated trade, again.)
S --. Detail. Buddhist assoc: from West, like Buddhism (Sakyamuni, Bodhidharma)
S --. Another, closer. Pinnacle in dev. of ink-monochrome ptg in China; absolutely free of any brush discipline, hand of artist, style--all of which would have detracted from success of image. Completely outside scholar-amateur ptg or wenrenhua; scarcely preserved in China. With such a ptg in front of you, you can talk to students and others about these qualities. One of my students, now well-estab. in museum career, is quoted in wall panel (Berkeley? here?) for this ptg telling how seeing real ptg i/o slides, and his almost visceral response to it, was factor in his career choice ...

S,.S. Lastly, the Ma Yuan ptg. Signed work; trimmed at bottom, sig. partly missing; upsets composition a bit. Was in Akaboshi col., along with several now-famous Sung ptgs; passed into col. of Matsunaga Jisai, founder of electric company, his Kinenkan. (etc.) Auction; dealer bought it from whom I'd acquired quite a lot in past, Heisando, Takahashi Taihei. Alb leaf w. similar subject in Palace Mus., Beijing

S --. Other ptgs by Ma Yuan of quiet scenes in nature w. birds; this is one in Japanese col. Another in Palace Mus.: egrets (add?) Indications of season: typical of So. Sung ptgs. Must have been one of his specialties.

Various features of ptg can be matched w. reliable Ma Yuan works; stepped recession marked by hilltops, dimming into distance, no texture;
S --. One in Cleveland Mus., similar subject, profoundly dif. otherwise. Some believe; I don't. (Point out things wrong.) In recent writings I've emphasized looking hard at Chinese paintings, seeing how they stand up as pictures.

As a general comment, to conclude, let me say that a big deficiency in Chinese ptg studies has been a weakness of some otherwise strong scholars and teachers in the practice of close visual engagement w. ptgs, careful comparisons and analyses. Coming myself from a museum background (curator at Freer before becoming professor) and studying mainly with a teacher who was strongly committed to a visual approach (Max Loehr), I worked very hard, during my three decades as scholar-teacher-collector at Berkeley, to inculcate what I took to be right habits of looking in my students--using for this purpose, along with other materials, ptgs in Ching Yuan Chai collection. I'm very glad that quite a lot of them are now finding their way into the BAM collection, a development that is celebrated in this exhibition, and others may well end up as long-term loans to the Evajhem (?). I trust they will be used in similar ways by my successors, and by Julia and her students, far into future

Ann Arbor Lecture

(Thanks to everybody.) Cannot come here without being filled with feelings of nostalgia for AA: First came nearly sixty years ago, in 1944, having just been inducted into the Army and sent to the Japanese Language School that was then located here. Here for graduate work in 1951-3. working with Max Loehr, Jim Plumer, others; back many times after that for lectures, exhibitions, symposia. This has been my second alma mater, along with Berkeley and U.C. Great pleasure to be welcomed back on the occasion of this exhibition of my family collection, and to be speaking about my experiences in bringing it together--and now, seeing much of it disperse. The "Mists and Clouds" of the exhibition title refers to an essay by the 11th century scholar-statesman Su Shi, in which he advised that the paintings and works of calligraphy one collected should be thought of as passing before one's eyes like mists and clouds, and should not be permitted to get their barbs into you, which is what would happen if one tried to hang onto them.

My talk today will be informal and anecdotal, and will generally follow the theme of the exhibition: how a scholar-teacher who is also an active collector, and who kept the family collection at the University Art Museum (its old name) for constant use by himself and students, was able to integrate his collecting with his scholarship and his teaching, to the benefit of all three. Or so he hoped and believed, and still does.

As a prefatory note, I should say that the ptgs I'm talking about are mostly in the exhibition, and mostly represent the best of the collection. And in talking only about these, I might give the impression of boasting that I never made mistakes. That would be far from the truth--I could give another lecture on bad purchases, which turned out to be less than genuine, or otherwise a mistake. The collection also includes some study material, minor but interesting paintings, even some of insecure authenticity--these, too, are sometimes useful in teaching. And a few of these have found their way into the exhibition--the selection wasn't mine, although I gave advice.

S,S. Lo P'ing, 1799 Portrait of Artist's Friend I-an. (This is one of the ptgs that unfortunately couldn't be included in the exhibition.) My collecting began during my Fulbright year in Japan, 1954-55. During most of year, I took every opportunity to look at all the public and private collections I could get access to, often with great introductions from my mentor Shujiro Shimada (who gave name Ching Yuan Chai to collection, name by which it's been known.) As I went around the great collections--Sumitomo, Takashima, Hashimoto, others--I assumed, without asking, that good Ch ptgs must all be extremely expensive, far beyond what a Fulbright scholar's stipend would allow; for me to acquire anything good myself seemed beyond dreaming. I'd spent a year at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, and knew what they paid for their acquisitions of Chinese paintings. Then, after my Fulbright year was more than half over, I met through an introduction an old Japanese professor of Chinese literature, Prof. Ueda, and was intro. by him, in turn, to the shops of several less-known but knowledgeable dealers and other outlets for Chinese paintings.

In going around among dealers, famous and obscure, I learned about what I came to call the "schools of fish" situation in the ptg market in Japan. (Describe: Mayuyama, Setsu, Kochukyo on upper level; others middle: Eda Bungado, Yushima Seido, Tajima Teishodo; others on lower levels. At these less prestigious sources, ptgs could be very cheap, w/o necessarily being lower in quality--unpub., no guarantees. Sometimes problems of condition. But if you trusted your eyes, could find bargains, good ptgs by known artists in the low hundreds of dollars, what other Fulbright families were paying to buy tansu or ceramics. (I had no private funds to speak of then, never have had--most professors don't get rich.) My acquisitions in that first year included the ptgs by Lo P'ing and wuWei (the latter in the exhib.--will show next.)

I learned also something about my own evaluations of ptgs: going back over things I seen, I realized that many hat I'd written in my notes as genuine, and now realized were potentially available, were ptgs I wouldn't especially want to own myself. And that there were others that I really wanted to have, at least for a time, in my possession. That perception, refined over manyyears of collecting and thinking through why these were desirable and those weren't, certainly had an effect on my scholarship, in which I've always tried to confront directly questions of value--on a level above a simple "I like it" or "I don't like it"--trying to analyze what in the ptg makes it successful, desirable, something one wants to have around for a long time. (Poor ptgs quickly become boring). Also, of course, selecting ptgs for purchase sharpened my eye for decisions about authenticity. And collecting gave me much greater access to dealers' holdings--they would bring out more pieces, and better pieces, knowing I was a prospective purchaser. Jap. dealers often hold out things to show only to their special customers; sometimes they won't sell a piece to an outsider until all of their regular circle of customers has seen it.

S,S. Wu Wei. Now owned by my then-wife Dorothy Cahill, as is the Lo P'ing. The collection is now owned by her and myself, with smaller groups of particularly good things owned by our children Nicholas and Sarah. This ptg was at the Yushima Seido (describe). Brought out from back room--I hadn't bought enough from them to reach this status. American ...

S,S. Story. Famous ptr-collector Chang Ta-ch'ien was in Tokyo--spent a lot of time with him in Japan--and I asked him to come with me to Yushima Seido to look at it. (etc.)

S,S. Two more sections, at beginning. I should explain here, before going on: great dif. bet. E. Asian brush ptg and European-American oil ptg is that the former is produced in vastly greater quantities--Tomioka Tessai, for instance, in 1924, is estimated by his grandson to have produced about 20,000 ptgs during his lifetime. Wu Wei, this artist, partly because he worked fast, was very prolific. And lesser works by prominent artists, if unknown and unpublished, and bought through small dealers (no guarantees), could be surprisingly cheap. What I came to understand is that you could go to Tokyo Nat'l Mus. and see work by some artist you especially admired, then go out on market and find another by same artist that you could acquire w/o being rich. Not so with Fragonard or van Gogh or Matisse.

S,S. During the period from the later 50s through the 70s, I found occasion at least once a year for regular travels in E. Asia, research trips mostlyp; often w. my good friend Hugh Wass, who lived for years in Japan before teaching at Mills College in Oakland. (And who was still working on a Ph.D. here, with encouragement from a very patient Dick Edwards, at the time of his early death.) We would meet in Tokhyo, go on to Kansai, then to Taiwan, HK, following up scholarly projects, seeing exhibitions and collectors, but also dealers. My pursuit of Chinese ptgs (and occasionally Japanese) came to be the cloak-and-dagger side of my life--keeping on the move, frequenting unlikely places, matching wits w. wily dealers, some of whom wanted to cheat me or sell me bad ptgs, while I wanted to take advantage of some blind spot of theirs to buy a fine ptg cheap. Part of the excitement, of course, was risking our limited funds.

What is now on the screen is the scroll now recognized as a major work by Chang Lu, Su Tung-p'o Returning to the Hanlin Academy, now owned by my daughter Sarah (she and Nick were both U.M. students at one time, as was Dorothy. Strong family connections.) One Tokyo dealer, who had earlier been established in Beijing, was Sammy Lee (still alive and active in Los Angeles), who is strong in ceramics, lacquer, objects, didn't deal in ptgs. (etc.--story). Left it with friend Cheng Chi, himself a major collector, to be mtd by Meguro as handscroll; w/o asking me, Cheng Chi added a colophon (insc. mtd after ptg) saying it was definitely by Wu Wei.

S --. I myself took it at first to be a work by the Ming figure master Tu Chin, because I'd found a reproduction of a scroll w. more or less the same subject and composition on which the artist (Fang Hsun) writes that he's copying a scroll by Tu Chin. But: giving a seminar on Zhe-school ptg in Ming:

S,S. One of students argued in seminar paper that it wasn't by Tu Chin, it was by Chang Lu. And as soon as comparisons made, it was obvious she was right. (Always encouraged students to argue agst my opinions, so long as they could back up their arguments.)
-- S. Detail. Point out similarities.

S --. Another Chang Lu ptg, alb. leaf in Shanghai Museum. Very consistent. I trained students to recognize individual styles of artists, regional styles, large period styles; they had to pass a connoisseurship exam, as part of their Ph.D. qualifying exams. All that pretty outmoded now (still stronger in Asian art than other fields, I think.)

S,S. Hua Yen, 18th cent., Animals Fleeing from Brushfire. a ptg now much admired and reproduced. But for quite a long time it was hanging in the shop of a NY dealer, nobody would touch it. I recommended to Freer--John Pope, then director, didn't like. "Bad brushwork." This was before I had developed argument abt how Ch artists often had to slip into what critics denounce as bad brushwork to achieve effects they wanted--well know example is what's called Ch'an or Zen ptg. This is now owned by Nicholas Cahill (studied archaeology here, later at Berkeley; now teaches at U. Wisconsin in Madison, book out recently from Yale U. Press.)

I'll show a few other things in exhib., only identifying them and adding brief commentary, while continuing w. theme of the lecture: the scholar-teacher as collector.

S,S. Kung Hsien, ca. 1665, also Nick's. LS done for famous poet Wang Shih-chen. Was centerpiece in article I wrote on early styles of Kung Hsien.

There were, of course, ethical issues raised by my being a museum curator, and later a teacher, while collecting ptgs myself. Some even feel this is bad idea.During my time at Freer, always showed my acquisitions to Director & Vice-Director (Wenley and Pope, most of the time) and recommended the ones I thought to be of Freer quality and importance; they could decide which Freer would take (at price I paid, of course). Happened several times. But more often, even when I recommended the ptg to them, they would decide agst it, say I could keep it. All this time, of course, I was also searching out really top things for Freer to acquire, without thinking of pursuing them myself.

S,S. Huang Shen, alb of Beggars & Street Entertainers. Some of my colleagues, as I say, felt strongly that a scholar-teacher shouldn't collect himself, because of possible conflicts of interest. But there are other notable cases of scholar-teachers who have had collections themselves: Cary Welch at Harvard, Max Loehr (on smaller scale), others. Wen Fong did for a time; but for family, with all ending up as gifts (I believe) to Princeton Art Museum or Met. , so collecting for good cause. I always believed, and argued, that under certain self-imposed rules it was OK to do, and that the benefits to myself & students in training their eyes, allowing them to handle real works of art (which wouldn't otherwise have been possible at Berkeley, on any large scale) more than offset the disadvantages and dangers.

S,S. Two more leaves. After my move from the Freer to Berkeley to be a professor, less a problem, since Univ. Art Mus. had no funds for acquisition of Asian art. (Some generous gifts, later; and fumpon sales. Also, persuading people with large incomes, notably two doctors, to buy pieces I'd find in Asia, give them to us with somewhat larger but quite honest appraisals, and come off fine in their income taxes--perfectly legitimate game that was S --. Huang Shen, big one. Before leaving this artist, want to tell how this ptg came into my possession. (Story)

S,S. Ch'en Hung-shou, Su Wu and Li Ling. (won't tell stories at length.) (Visit w. C.C.Wang, Anne Burkus, trade.) (She's teaching now at U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign--just pub. article on another work of this artist, on whom she wrote dissertation.) Work of 1630s, when Ch'en production appears to have had a more commercial character, worked w. help of assistants, some of it rather heavy-handed. But:

-- S. Ptg w. more subtleties than appear at first--another advantage to owning a ptg is the familiarity you can develop with it, hanging it on wall.

S,S. Ts'ui Tzu-chung, Farewell Meeting in Apricot Gathering, 1638. Acquired in Japan, from Eda Bungado; now Nicholas's. Subject was identified by Judy Andrews, who took on certain aspects of this artist's work as her dissertation topic. (She now teaches at Ohio State U.) (Describe)
S --. This apparatus, a mystery to me for a long time, was identified for me by a dealer-friend Kobayashi Katsuhiro of Tekisendo in Tokyo: (describe)

S,S. Sun Chun-tse. Another work that was on NY market for a long time, w/o finding a buyer; this was bought in 1968, after I had moved to Berkeley, and now belongs to Sarah Cahill. Symposium in Cleveland in that year on art of Yuan dynasty (etc.) Ended among "World Treasures of Art" at Osaka World's Fair.

-- S. Several signed works by Sun Chun-tse are preserved in Japan; highly regarded there, Important Cultural Properties etc.. Chinese collectors, with their obsession with big names, didn't want works by minor masters such as Sun Chun-tse, so dealers obligingly removed original signatures, added those of Ma Yuan. Several ptgs of this kind have been preserved in Japan; this one came from China (know from mounting) but escaped by being falsely identified--label on outside says "Sung work, surely by Ma Yuan"--tried to obliterate signature w. stroke of ink, but still readable under strong light.
S --. Signature matches exactly those on ptgs in Japan; so does style. So has become famous work.

S,S. Another case of unnoticed signature, or in this case a seal, is this large ptg now in the BAM and recognized as major work by leading Zhe-school master Tai Chin. (Story). Four-char. title, "Summer Trees Casting Shade," in court calligraphy. Ptg of this title by Tai Chin recorded as having been in col. of Yen Sung, prime minister who was overthrown in 1565; could be this ptg.
S -- Closer detail: house among trees. Close resemblance to:

-- S. One in Shanghai Museum. Same seal appears on both! altho very dif. in sizes--matches. Once real authorship is realized, similarities seem so obvious one wonders how he could have missed them--

S,S. Continuing with theme of using ptgs in seminars: I held Wen C-m seminar in 1976-77, making heavy use of Dick Edwards's Art of Wen Cheng-ming catalog, just out. Both the ptgs by him I acquired, both in present exhib., weren't in Dick's, for different reasons. One, from the col. of Huang Pao-hsi, became while the seminar was going on, and Huang sold many of his best ptgs at auction in NYC; I acquired this one then. But before buying, went over it carefully w. seminar, comparing to other works of artist around same time (early-1516) such as this 1515 snowscape

S --. Or this one, 1517 (both in Palace Mus.) (Note way of formal repetitions, trees to mts above) We decided it was certainly authentic, and I bought it. Reached Berkeley in time for seminar to use.

S --. (Subject of ptg: done for young friend Wang Ch'ung who was studying for the exams there.)

S --. Insc., in Wen's famous hsiao-k'ai or small-standard script. Chiang Chao-shen, who did major study of Wen C-m, said when he saw it that he hadn't been sure (etc.) (some repair, filling in.)

S,S. Other Wen C-m had been reprod. in Siren's book, in Yamaguchi Col. in Japan; also came up for auction in NYC (long after seminar.) Leading Chinese authority on Ch. ptg in NYC just then, Xu Bangda, who was going about pronouncing things fake; did so for this, others wouldn't touch it. They were wrong, for reasons I could again point out, with time.

S --. Belongs in series of late works featuring groups of old coniferous trees; this is one in Cleveland,
S --. or well-known one in K.C., of which I have only detail slide. Smaller, on paper; same hand, same intelligence.
S --. Cypresses were favorite subj. of artist; great old cypresses at Point Lobos, down near Carmel on California coast. I took seminar there; one of students was Chang Sing, daughter of Chang Ta-ch'ien, who did graduate work with me; we stayed at his house in Pebble Beach. (I took students regularly on outings, often overnight to Marin County, for spiritual recharging: to beach, or on what students called Long March. Those who are here will remember.)

S.-- I had two Shitao seminars, one early (Rick Vinograd took), one late. First, again, coincided w. Dick Edwards Tao-chi exhib. I myself could never afford major Shitao, other than this lovely leaf, bought during my Fulbright year in Japan (not in exhib.)

S,S. But did acquire good late Shitao album for Univ. Art Museum, in trade w. C.C.Wang--had something he believed in, I didn't. Again, received it during time of exhib. (later one), worked through it, decided OK, agreed to his proposal for trade. (W/o purchase funds for Museum, had to be ingenious.)

S,S. These are two leaves from six, late works, which I acquired in curious way. Dealer in D.C.; accepted as study pieces. During seminar, brought them out, realized real thing (I had come to understand Shitao's late period in interim.) What to do? dealer long retired, didn't know how to reach. Not properly mine.

S,S. Two more leaves (of six). After consultation w. students, we put in auction, used money it brought to establish The Shitao Fund (etc.) But also made point: possible for genuine works by great artist to be undesirable. (Still upsets some people to say this abt Shitao. But it was something my students learned---)

S,S. This pairing I use only to tell another story: Orthodox LS seminar, 1969 or 1970, coincided w. Princeton exhib. & symposium, Earl Morse collection. Twd end, I had briefly in my possession, conveying it from CCW to Morse, two great ptgs : handscrolls by Wang Y-c and Wu Li. Brought to seminar and showed; after months of immersal in special values of this kind of ptg, these were breathtaking for seminar students. As it happened, rec'd at same time in mail a ptg by 18th cent. Japanese Nanga master Ikeno Taiga, from dealer in Japan. (This not it, but will serve.) Brought it to show seminar. Their response was: Prof. Cahill, how can you buy such an awful ptg! They were by then so imbued w. values of Orthodox-school Ch ptg--brushwork, highly structured compositions, etc.--that they couldn't quickly shift aesthetic gears to appreciate Taiga. (Some people turn out to be altogether incapable, never wiil enjoy Taiga or Nanga or Jap. pg generally.)

-- S. Detail of Taiga (describe. 1748; making ptg style out of what he learned from Mustard Seed Garden; turning it into Rimpa-like forms.). Like being a Beethoven enthusiast and not being able to appreciate Ravel. This brought home to seminar radical differences in criteria of value, fallacy of thinking that one can recognize "quality" in art of any period and kind. Part of my attempted training for students was to open their minds of diversity of kinds of ptg--like moving, to take an example from Western art, from Poussin to van Gogh in European oil ptg. Museum curators have to do it; scholars sometimes find it easier to hold on to their prejudices and blind spots.

-- S. Closer detail. Nothing Chinese could call good brushwork; rules it out, for many of them. But same true of much of Chan or Zen ptg; also much of ptg I'll be talking abt in other lectures here.

S,S. In 1982 we had seminar called Sogenga (explain). Small exhib. w. catalog, drawn from our olw collections (UAM + mine) plus dealers in Japan, mostly. Two of works in it: Wen Jih-kuan, Ma Yuan (now both in BAM). Our show and its catalog supported by grant of $5000 from Soc. for Asian Art in S.F.; cheapest exhib. I can recall.

S --. Famous work by Jih-kuan in Jap. col., ptd in 1291. Reproduced widely. Other unknown, unpub., except for minor exhib. cat. Japanese scholars tend to be conservative in their judgements, uneasy abt works that suddenly appear, not santified by previous publication by some established scholar. So other one stayed in hands of dealer until I acquired it (in complicated trade, again.)

S --. Detail. Buddhist assoc: from West, like Buddhism (Sakyamuni, Bodhidharma)

S --. Another, closer. Pinnacle in dev. of ink-monochrome ptg in China; absolutely free of any brush discipline, hand of artist, style--all of which would have detracted from success of image. Completely outside scholar-amateur ptg or wenrenhua; scarcely preserved in China. With such a ptg in front of you, you can talk to students and others about these qualities. One of my students, now well-estab. in museum career, is quoted in wall panel (Berkeley? here?) for this ptg telling how seeing real ptg i/o slides, and his almost visceral response to it, was factor in his career choice ...

S,.S. Lastly, the Ma Yuan ptg. Signed work; trimmed at bottom, sig. partly missing; upsets composition a bit. Was in Akaboshi col., along with several now-famous Sung ptgs; passed into col. of Matsunaga Jisai, founder of electric company, his Kinenkan. (etc.) Auction; dealer bought it from whom I'd acquired quite a lot in past, Heisando, Takahashi Taihei.
S --. Alb leaf in Palace Mus., Beijing
S --. Other ptgs by Ma Yuan of quiet scenes in nature w. birds; this is one in Japanese col. Another in Palace Mus.: egrets (add?) Indications of season: typical of So. Sung ptgs. Must have been one of his specialties.

Various features of ptg can be matched w. reliable Ma Yuan works; stepped recession marked by hilltops, dimming into distance, no texture;
S --. Pine tree w. supple drawing of trunk and branches (this one in BMFA)
S -- where stiffer, more angular in imitations (one I pub. in Skira book!)
S --. Finally, one in Cleveland Mus., similar subject, profoundly dif. otherwise. Some believe; I don't. (Point out things wrong.) Will make similar points in seminar -- "Looking Hard at Chinese Paintings."

As a general comment, to conclude, let me say that a big deficiency in Chinese ptg studies has been a weakness of some otherwise strong scholars and teachers in the practice of close visual engagement w. ptgs, careful comparisons and analyses, of kind I've tried to demonstrate tonight, and will continue in seminar. Some otherwise very good people work mainly on insc. and seals; others so committed to literati or scholar-amateur values can't easily shift to other modes; and so forth. Coming myself from a museum background (curator at Freer) and studying mainly with a teacher who was strongly committed to a visual approach (Max Loehr), I worked very hard, during my three decades as scholar-teacher-collector, to inculca_ie what I took to be right habits of looking in my students--using for this purpose, along with other materials, ptgs in china Yuan Chai collection. I'm very glad that quite a lot of them are now finding their way into the BAM collection, a development that is celebrated in this exhibition, and I trust they will be used in similar ways by my successors, far into future, just as excellent collection here at U. Mich. Art Museum is used by teachers and students of Chinese art here.

Williams College lecture, Nov. 16, 2005

Introductory. Here before, in 1979—giving lectures at Harvard.

Tribute to Scarlett.

It's a special pleasure to be here on the occasion of this exhibition of our family collection, and to be speaking about my experiences in bringing it together--and now, seeing much of it disperse. The "Mists and Clouds" of the exhibition title refers to an essay by the 11th century scholar-statesman Su Shi or Su Dongpo, in which he advised that the paintings and works of calligraphy one collected should be thought of as passing before one's eyes like mists and clouds, and should not be permitted to get their barbs into you, which is what would happen if one tried to hang onto them. Nevertheless, I can’t escape the thought that since this is the last showing of the exhibition, and since many of the paintings are no longer mine, I may be seeing some of them for the last time.

My talk tonight will be informal and anecdotal, and will generally follow the theme of the exhibition: how a scholar-teacher who is also an active collector, and who kept the family collection at the University Art Museum (its old name) for constant use by himself and students, was able to integrate his collecting with his scholarship and his teaching, to the benefit of all three. Or so he hoped and believed, and still does.

As a prefatory note, I should say that the ptgs I'm talking about are mostly in the exhibition, and mostly represent the best of the collection. And in talking only about these, I might give the impression of boasting that I never made mistakes. That would be far from the truth--I could give another lecture on bad purchases, which turned out to be less than genuine, or otherwise a mistake. The collection also includes some study material, minor but interesting paintings, even some of insecure authenticity--these, too, are sometimes useful in teaching. And a few of these have found their way into the exhibition--the selection wasn't mine, although I gave advice.

S,S. Lo P'ing, 1799 Portrait of Artist's Friend I-an. (This is one of the ptgs that unfortunately couldn't be included in the exhibition.) My collecting began during my Fulbright year in Japan, 1954-55. During most of year, I took every opportunity to look at all the public and private collections I could get access to, often with great introductions from my mentor Shujiro Shimada (who gave name Ching Yuan Chai to collection, name by which it's been known.) As I went around the great collections--Sumitomo, Takashima, Hashimoto, others--I assumed, without asking, that good Ch ptgs must all be extremely expensive, far beyond what a Fulbright scholar's stipend would allow; for me to acquire anything good myself seemed beyond dreaming. I'd spent a year at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, and knew what they paid for their acquisitions of Chinese paintings. Then, after my Fulbright year was more than half over, I met through an introduction an old Japanese professor of Chinese literature, Prof. Ueda, and was intro. by him, in turn, to the shops of several less-known but knowledgeable dealers and other outlets for Chinese paintings.

In going around among dealers, famous and obscure, I learned about what I came to call the "schools of fish" situation in the ptg market in Japan. (Describe: Mayuyama, Setsu, Kochukyo on upper level; others middle: Eda Bungado, Yushima Seido, Tajima Teishodo; others on lower levels. At these less prestigious sources, ptgs could be very cheap, w/o necessarily being lower in quality--unpub., no guarantees. Sometimes problems of condition. But if you trusted your eyes, could find bargains, good ptgs by known artists in the low hundreds of dollars, what other Fulbright families were paying to buy tansu or ceramics. (I had no private funds to speak of then, never have had--most professors don't get rich.) My acquisitions in that first year included the ptgs by Lo P'ing and Wu Wei (the latter withdrawn from exhib.--will show next.)

S --. I learned also something about my own evaluations of ptgs: going back over things I seen, I realized that many that I'd written in my notes as genuine, and now realized were potentially available, were ptgs I wouldn't especially want to own myself. And that there were others that I really wanted to have, at least for a time, in my possession. That perception, refined over many years of collecting and thinking through why these were desirable and those weren't, certainly had an effect on my scholarship, in which I've always tried to confront directly questions of value--on a level above a simple "I like it" or "I don't like it"--trying to analyze what in the ptg makes it successful, desirable, something one wants to have around for a long time. (Poor ptgs quickly become boring). Also, of course, selecting ptgs for purchase sharpened my eye for decisions about authenticity. And collecting gave me much greater access to dealers' holdings--they would bring out more pieces, and better pieces, knowing I was a prospective purchaser. Jap. dealers often hold out things to show only to their special customers; sometimes they won't sell a piece to an outsider until all of their regular circle of customers has seen it.

S,S. Wu Wei. Now owned by my then-wife Dorothy Cahill, as is the Lo P'ing. The collection is now owned by her and myself, with smaller groups of particularly good things owned by our children Nicholas and Sarah; the best from my part have gone to our Berkeley Art Museum . This ptg was at the Yushima Seido (describe). Brought out from back room--I hadn't bought enough from them to reach this status. American ...

S,S. Story. Famous ptr-collector Chang Ta-ch'ien was in Tokyo--spent a lot of time with him in Japan--and I asked him to come with me to Yushima Seido to look at it. (etc.)

S,S. Two more sections, at beginning. I should explain here, before going on: great dif. bet. E. Asian brush ptg and European-American oil ptg is that the former is produced in vastly greater quantities--Tomioka Tessai, for instance, in 1924, is estimated by his grandson to have produced about 20,000 ptgs during his lifetime. Wu Wei, this artist, partly because he worked fast, was very prolific. And lesser works by prominent artists, if unknown and unpublished, and bought through small dealers (no guarantees), could be surprisingly cheap. What I came to understand is that you could go to Tokyo Nat'l Mus. and see work by some artist you especially admired, then go out on market and find another by same artist that you could acquire w/o being rich. Not so with Fragonard or van Gogh or Matisse.

S,S. During the period from the later 50s through the 70s, I found occasion at least once a year for regular travels in E. Asia, research trips mostly; often w. my good friend the late Hugh Wass, who lived for years in Japan before teaching at Mills College in Oakland. We would meet in Tokyo, go on to Kansai, then to Taiwan, HK, following up scholarly projects, seeing exhibitions and collectors, but also dealers. My pursuit of Chinese ptgs (and occasionally Japanese) came to be the cloak-and-dagger side of my life--keeping on the move, frequenting unlikely places, matching wits w. wily dealers, some of whom wanted to cheat me or sell me bad ptgs, while I wanted to take advantage of some blind spot of theirs to buy a fine ptg cheap. Part of the excitement, of course, was risking our limited funds. I can't recall these times and these travels without poignant twinges of nostalgia.

What is now on the screen is the scroll now recognized as a major work by Chang Lu, Su Tung-p'o Returning to the Hanlin Academy, now owned by my daughter Sarah. One Tokyo dealer, who had earlier been established in Beijing, was Sammy Lee (still alive and active in Los Angeles), who has a good eye for ceramics, lacquer, objects, didn't deal in ptgs. (etc.--story. Visited with Hugh.). Left it with friend Cheng Chi, himself a major collector, to be mtd by Meguro as handscroll; w/o asking me, Cheng Chi added a colophon (insc. mtd after ptg) saying it was definitely by Wu Wei. Good try, but not right attribution.

S --. I myself took it at first to be a work by the Ming figure master Tu Chin, because I'd found a reproduction of a scroll w. more or less the same subject and composition on which the artist (Fang Hsun) writes that he's copying a scroll by Tu Chin. But: giving a seminar on Zhe-school ptg in Ming:
S,S. One of students argued in seminar paper that it wasn't by Tu Chin, it was by Chang Lu. And as soon as comparisons made, it was obvious she was right. (Always encouraged students to argue agst my opinions, so long as they could back up their arguments.)
-- S. Detail. Point out similarities.
S --. Another Chang Lu ptg, alb. leaf in Shanghai Museum. Very consistent. I trained students to recognize individual styles of artists, regional styles, large period styles; they had to pass a connoisseurship exam, as part of their Ph.D. qualifying exams. All that pretty outmoded now (still stronger in Asian art than other fields, I think.)

S,S. Hua Yen, 18th cent., Animals Fleeing from Brushfire. a ptg now much admired and reproduced. But for quite a long time it was hanging in the shop of a NY dealer, nobody would touch it. I recommended to Freer--John Pope, then director, didn't like. "Bad brushwork." This was before I had developed argument abt how Ch artists often had to slip into what critics denounce as bad brushwork to achieve effects they wanted--well know example is what's called Ch'an or Zen ptg. This is now owned by Nicholas Cahill, my son, who is now professor at U. Wisconsin in Madison.
-- S. Ptg in album of same subject, simplified.
-- S. Another, formerly private col. in Taipei, now Palace Museum, more or less Same subject, but far less moving, lacks immediacy, coherence, of other. . .

I'll show a few other things in exhib., only identifying them and adding brief commentary, while continuing w. theme of the lecture: the scholar-teacher as collector.

S,S, Ch'en Ch'uan, Gazing at Moon.

There were, of course, ethical issues raised by my being a museum curator, and later a teacher, while collecting ptgs myself. Some even feel this is bad idea. During my time at Freer, always showed my acquisitions to Director & Vice-Director (Archibald Wenley and John Pope, most of the time) and recommended the ones I thought to be of Freer quality and importance; they could decide which Freer would take (at price I paid, of S,S. Lo P'ing, 1799 Portrait of Artist's Friend I-an. (This is one of the ptgs that unfortunately couldn't be included in the exhibition.) My collecting began during my Fulbright year in Japan, 1954-55. During most of year, I took every opportunity to look at all the public and private collections I could get access to, often with great introductions from my mentor Shujiro Shimada (who gave name Ching Yuan Chai to collection, name by which it's been known.) As I went around the great collections--Sumitomo, Takashima, Hashimoto, others--I assumed, without asking, that good Ch ptgs must all be extremely expensive, far beyond what a Fulbright scholar's stipend would allow; for me to acquire anything good myself seemed beyond dreaming. I'd spent a year at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, and knew what they paid for their acquisitions of Chinese paintings. Then, after my Fulbright year was more than half over, I met through an introduction an old Japanese professor of Chinese literature, Prof. Ueda, and was intro. by him, in turn, to the shops of several less-known but knowledgeable dealers and other outlets for Chinese paintings.

In going around among dealers, famous and obscure, I learned about what I came to call the "schools of fish" situation in the ptg market in Japan. (Describe: Mayuyama, Setsu, Kochukyo on upper level; others middle: Eda Bungado, Yushima Seido, Tajima Teishodo; others on lower levels. At these less prestigious sources, ptgs could be very cheap, w/o necessarily being lower in quality--unpub., no guarantees. Sometimes problems of condition. But if you trusted your eyes, could find bargains, good ptgs by known artists in the low hundreds of dollars, what other Fulbright families were paying to buy tansu or ceramics. (I had no private funds to speak of then, never have had--most professors don't get rich.) My acquisitions in that first year included the ptgs by Lo P'ing and Wu Wei (the latter withdrawn from exhib.--will show next.)

S --. I learned also something about my own evaluations of ptgs: going back over things I seen, I realized that many that I'd written in my notes as genuine, and now realized were potentially available, were ptgs I wouldn't especially want to own myself. And that there were others that I really wanted to have, at least for a time, in my possession. That perception, refined over many years of collecting and thinking through why these were desirable and those weren't, certainly had an effect on my scholarship, in which I've always tried to confront directly questions of value--on a level above a simple "I like it" or "I don't like it"--trying to analyze what in the ptg makes it successful, desirable, something one wants to have around for a long time. (Poor ptgs quickly become boring). Also, of course, selecting ptgs for purchase sharpened my eye for decisions about authenticity. And collecting gave me much greater access to dealers' holdings--they would bring out more pieces, and better pieces, knowing I was a prospective purchaser. Jap. dealers often hold out things to show only to their special customers; sometimes they won't sell a piece to an outsider until all of their regular circle of customers has seen it.

S,S. Wu Wei. Now owned by my then-wife Dorothy Cahill, as is the Lo P'ing. The collection is now owned by her and myself, with smaller groups of particularly good things owned by our children Nicholas and Sarah; the best from my part have gone to our Berkeley Art Museum . This ptg was at the Yushima Seido (describe). Brought out from back room--I hadn't bought enough from them to reach this status. American ...

S,S. Story. Famous ptr-collector Chang Ta-ch'ien was in Tokyo--spent a lot of time with him in Japan--and I asked him to come with me to Yushima Seido to look at it. (etc.)

S,S. Two more sections, at beginning. I should explain here, before going on: great dif. bet. E. Asian brush ptg and European-American oil ptg is that the former is produced in vastly greater quantities--Tomioka Tessai, for instance, in 1924, is estimated by his grandson to have produced about 20,000 ptgs during his lifetime. Wu Wei, this artist, partly because he worked fast, was very prolific. And lesser works by prominent artists, if unknown and unpublished, and bought through small dealers (no guarantees), could be surprisingly cheap. What I came to understand is that you could go to Tokyo Nat'l Mus. and see work by some artist you especially admired, then go out on market and find another by same artist that you could acquire w/o being rich. Not so with Fragonard or van Gogh or Matisse.

S,S. During the period from the later 50s through the 70s, I found occasion at least once a year for regular travels in E. Asia, research trips mostly; often w. my good friend the late Hugh Wass, who lived for years in Japan before teaching at Mills College in Oakland. We would meet in Tokyo, go on to Kansai, then to Taiwan, HK, following up scholarly projects, seeing exhibitions and collectors, but also dealers. My pursuit of Chinese ptgs (and occasionally Japanese) came to be the cloak-and-dagger side of my life--keeping on the move, frequenting unlikely places, matching wits w. wily dealers, some of whom wanted to cheat me or sell me bad ptgs, while I wanted to take advantage of some blind spot of theirs to buy a fine ptg cheap. Part of the excitement, of course, was risking our limited funds. I can't recall these times and these travels without poignant twinges of nostalgia.

What is now on the screen is the scroll now recognized as a major work by Chang Lu, Su Tung-p'o Returning to the Hanlin Academy, now owned by my daughter Sarah. One Tokyo dealer, who had earlier been established in Beijing, was Sammy Lee (still alive and active in Los Angeles), who has a good eye for ceramics, lacquer, objects, didn't deal in ptgs. (etc.--story. Visited with Hugh.). Left it with friend Cheng Chi, himself a major collector, to be mtd by Meguro as handscroll; w/o asking me, Cheng Chi added a colophon (insc. mtd after ptg) saying it was definitely by Wu Wei. Good try, but not right attribution.

S --. I myself took it at first to be a work by the Ming figure master Tu Chin, because I'd found a reproduction of a scroll w. more or less the same subject and composition on which the artist (Fang Hsun) writes that he's copying a scroll by Tu Chin. But: giving a seminar on Zhe-school ptg in Ming:
S,S. One of students argued in seminar paper that it wasn't by Tu Chin, it was by Chang Lu. And as soon as comparisons made, it was obvious she was right. (Always encouraged students to argue agst my opinions, so long as they could back up their arguments.)
-- S. Detail. Point out similarities.
S --. Another Chang Lu ptg, alb. leaf in Shanghai Museum. Very consistent. I trained students to recognize individual styles of artists, regional styles, large period styles; they had to pass a connoisseurship exam, as part of their Ph.D. qualifying exams. All that pretty outmoded now (still stronger in Asian art than other fields, I think.)

S,S. Hua Yen, 18th cent., Animals Fleeing from Brushfire. a ptg now much admired and reproduced. But for quite a long time it was hanging in the shop of a NY dealer, nobody would touch it. I recommended to Freer--John Pope, then director, didn't like. "Bad brushwork." This was before I had developed argument abt how Ch artists often had to slip into what critics denounce as bad brushwork to achieve effects they wanted--well know example is what's called Ch'an or Zen ptg. This is now owned by Nicholas Cahill, my son, who is now professor at U. Wisconsin in Madison.
-- S. Ptg in album of same subject, simplified.
-- S. Another, formerly private col. in Taipei, now Palace Museum, more or less Same subject, but far less moving, lacks immediacy, coherence, of other. . .

I'll show a few other things in exhib., only identifying them and adding brief commentary, while continuing w. theme of the lecture: the scholar-teacher as collector.

S,S, Ch'en Ch'uan, Gazing at Moon.

There were, of course, ethical issues raised by my being a museum curator, and later a teacher, while collecting ptgs myself. Some even feel this is bad idea. During my time at Freer, always showed my acquisitions to Director & Vice-Director (Archibald Wenley and John Pope, most of the time) and recommended the ones I thought to be of Freer quality and importance; they could decide which Freer would take (at price I paid, of course). Happened several times. But more often, even when I recommended the ptg to them, they would decide agst it, say I could keep it. All this time, of course, I was also searching out really top things for Freer to acquire, without thinking of pursuing them myself.

S,S. Huang Shen, alb of Beggars & Street Entertainers. Some of my colleagues, as I say, felt strongly that a scholar-teacher shouldn't himself collect, because of possible conflicts of interest. But there are other notable cases of scholar-teachers who have had collections themselves: Cary Welch at Harvard, Max Loehr (on smaller scale), others. Wen Fong did for a time; but for family, with all ending up as gifts (I believe) to Princeton Art Museum or Met. , so collecting for good cause. I always believed, and argued, that under certain self-imposed rules it was OK to do, and that the benefits to myself & students in training their eyes, allowing them to handle real works of art (which wouldn't otherwise have been possible at Berkeley, on any large scale) more than offset the disadvantages and dangers.

S,S. Two more leaves. After my move from the Freer to Berkeley to be a professor, less a problem, since Univ. Art Mus. had no funds for acquisition of Asian art. (Some generous gifts, later; and fumpon sales. Also, persuading people with large incomes, notably two doctors, to buy pieces I'd find in Asia, give them to us with somewhat larger but quite honest appraisals, and come off fine in their income taxes--perfectly legitimate game that was very beneficial to both parties.

S --. Another Huang Shen ptg in exhib., quite large, horizontal, probably mtd originally as small screen. (How I acquired …) No market for such in Japan: where to hang? (How I acquired.)

S,S. Ch'en Hung-shou, Su Wu and Li Ling. (won't tell stories at length.) (Visit w. C.C.Wang, Anne Burkus, trade.) (She's teaching now at U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign--just pub. article on another work of this artist, on whom she wrote dissertation.) Work of 1630s, when Ch'en production appears to have had a more commercial character, worked w. help of assistants, some of it rather heavy-handed. But: Ptg w. more subtleties than appear at first--another advantage to owning a ptg is the familiarity you can develop with it, hanging it on wall.

S,S. Ts'ui Tzu-chung, Farewell Meeting in Apricot Gathering, 1638. Acquired in Japan, from Eda Bungado; now Nicholas's. Subject was identified by Judy Andrews, who took on certain aspects of this artist's work as her dissertation topic. (She now teaches at Ohio State U.) (Describe)

S --. This apparatus, a mystery to me for a long time, was identified for me by a dealer-friend Kobayashi Katsuhiro of Tekisendo in Tokyo: (describe)
S,S. Ch’en Kuan. From Contag col. Dtd. 1638. Lesser artist, but fine, impressive work. (Describe: birthday picture, presumably.)

S,S. Sun Chun-tse. Another work that was on NY market for a long time, w/o finding a buyer; this was bought in 1968, after I had moved to Berkeley, and now belongs to Sarah Cahill. Symposium in Cleveland in that year on art of Yuan dynasty (etc.) Ended among "World Treasures of Art" at Osaka World's Fair.

-- S. Several signed works by Sun Chun-tse are preserved in Japan; highly regarded there, Important Cultural Properties etc.. Chinese collectors, with their obsession with big names, didn't want works by minor masters such as Sun Chun-tse, so dealers obligingly removed original signatures, added those of Ma Yuan. Several ptgs of this kind have been preserved in Japan; this one came from China (know from mounting) but escaped by being falsely identified--label on outside says "Sung work, surely by Ma Yuan"--tried to obliterate signature w. stroke of ink, but still readable under strong light.

-- S. Signature matches exactly those on ptgs in Japan; so does style. So has become famous work.
-- S. Ma Yuan, in Taipei
-- S. one actually ascribed to him, but later—Ming.
-- S. Tai Chin

S,S. Another case of unnoticed signature, or in this case a seal, is this large ptg now in the BAM and recognized as major work by leading Zhe-school master Tai Chin. (Story). Four-char. title, "Summer Trees Casting Shade," in court calligraphy. Ptg of this title by Tai Chin recorded as having been in col. of Yen Sung, prime minister who was overthrown in 1565; could be this ptg.

S -- Closer detail: house among trees. Close resemblance to:
S -- . One in Shanghai Museum. Same seal appears on both! altho very dif. in sizes--matches. Once real authorship is realized, similarities seem so obvious one wonders how he could have missed them--

S,S. Continuing with theme of using ptgs in seminars: I held Wen C-m seminar in 1976-77,acquired a good, although modest, ptg by him while seminar was going on. Chih-p’ing Temple, ptd in 1516 : done for young friend Wang Ch'ung who was studying for the exams there. From the col. of Huang Pao-hsi, noted HK collector; Huang sold many of his best ptgs at auction in NYC; I acquired this one then. But before buying, went over it carefully w. seminar, comparing to other works of artist around same time. (Left: ptg dtd 1517) Note way of formal repetitions, trees to mts above)

S --. Another, dtd. 1515. We decided it was certainly authentic, and I bought it. Reached Berkeley in time for seminar to use. Insc., in Wen's famous hsiao-k'ai or small-standard script. Chiang Chao-shen, who did major study of Wen C-m, said when he saw it that he hadn't been sure (etc.) (some repair, filling in.)

S,S. Other Wen C-m had been reprod. in Siren's book, in Yamaguchi Col. in Japan; also came up for auction in NYC (long after seminar.) Leading Chinese authority on Ch. ptg in NYC just then, Xu Bangda, who was going about pronouncing things fake; did so for this, others wouldn't touch it. They were wrong, for reasons I could again point out, with time. Same kind of echoings of form: shapes in upper part repeated in lower, tops of trees. And so forth--lots of correspondences.

S --. Dated 1549. Belongs in series of late works featuring groups of old coniferous trees; this is one in Cleveland, dtd. 1551.
S --. or well-known one in K.C. Smaller, on paper; same hand, same intelligence. Negative spaces ...
S --. Cypresses were favorite subj. of artist; great old cypresses at Point Lobos, down near Carmel on California coast. I took seminar there; one of students was Chang Sing, daughter of Chang Ta-ch'ien, who did graduate work with me; we stayed at his house in Pebble Beach. (I took students regularly on outings, often overnight to Marin County, for spiritual recharging: to beach, or on what students called Long March.)

S,S. I had two Shitao seminars, one early (Rick Vinograd took), one late. First, again, coincided w. Dick Edwards Tao-chi exhib. I myself could never afford major Shitao. But did acquire good late Shitao album for Univ. Art Museum, in trade w. C.C.Wang—Museum had something he believed in, I didn't. Again, received it during time of exhib. (later one), worked through it, decided OK, agreed to his proposal for trade. (W/o purchase funds for Museum, had to be ingenious.)

S,S. These are two leaves from Shitao’s late period, which I acquired in curious way. Dealer in D.C. given them by Smithsonian, confiscated; I accepted as study pieces. During seminar, brought them out, realized real thing (I had come to understand Shitao's late period in interim.) What to do? dealer long retired, didn't know how to reach. Not properly mine.

--S. One more leaf (of six). After consultation w. students, we put in auction, used money it brought to establish The Shitao Fund (etc.) But also made point: possible for genuine works by great artist to be undesirable. (Still upsets some people to say this abt Shitao. But it was something my students learned---)

S,S. Two sec'ns of another long handscroll version of the Wang-ch'uan Villa composition, also with sig. of Wang Yuan-ch'i, in exhib.; of course not by him. Bought in Japan, from dealer who knew it wasn't real Wang Y-c; didn't know who really painted it--I did, much less famous artist named Chang Chi-su, no reputation, but very fine.

S,S. Two more sec’ns. Several other versions of this have turned up in years since; on one, he inscribes (in 1676) telling of how … (etc.)

S,S. Before concluding with two early paintings, I want to show a few works, all in exhib., by Jen Hsiung and Jen Po-nien, two 19th cent. masters who stand out as brilliant artists in a period that didn't produce more than a few. Jen Hsiung, who died young in 1851, painted figures in variety of styles--Ch'en Hung-shou, Huang Shen--

S,S. and beautiful-women pictures not so vapid as most from that period. This is very fine album by him. (Story: Taipei in winter-spring 1963--)
S,S. This ptg of pheasants on a rock, from 1850, using new technique (describe)--changes character of bird-and-flower ptg.
S,S. Jen Po-nien, active in Shanghai in 1880s-90s, was extremely versatile, prolific master who left a large, very impressive body of work. Singing Bird on Bamboo Branch, after Hua Yen, 1880;
S,S. Pair of album leaves, one representing the Ming ptr Hsu Wei. One of everybody's favorites.
S,S. Rarer: landscapes by him; this is one of largest, finest. (Describe) No insc. on this ptg, but on a study sketch, hua-kao, he reveals that the composition is based on a painting by the late Ming master Ting Yun-p'eng that he used to own and has copied a number of times. One of few really original landscapes from 19th cent., in my view.

S,S. In 1982 we had seminar called Sogenga (explain). Small exhib. w. catalog, drawn from our olw collections (UAM + mine) plus dealers in Japan, mostly. Two of works in it: Wen Jih-kuan, Ma Yuan (now both in BAM).

S --. Famous work by Jih-kuan in Jap. col., ptd in 1291. Reproduced widely. Other unknown, unpub., except for minor exhib. cat. Japanese scholars tend to be conservative in their judgements, uneasy abt works that suddenly appear, not santified by previous publication by some established scholar. So other one stayed in hands of dealer until I acquired it (in complicated trade, again.)

S --. Detail. Buddhist assoc: from West, like Buddhism (Sakyamuni, Bodhidharma)
S --. Another, closer. Pinnacle in dev. of ink-monochrome ptg in China; absolutely free of any brush discipline, hand of artist, style--all of which would have detracted from success of image. Completely outside scholar-amateur ptg or wenrenhua; scarcely preserved in China.

S --. With such a ptg in front of you, you can talk to students and others about these qualities. One of my students, now well-estab. in museum career, is quoted in wall panel (Berkeley? here?) for this ptg telling how seeing real ptg i/o slides, and his almost visceral response to it, was factor in his career choice ...

S,.S. Lastly, the Ma Yuan ptg. Signed work; trimmed at bottom, sig. partly missing; upsets composition a bit. Was in Akaboshi col., along with several now-famous Sung ptgs; passed into col. of Matsunaga Jisai, founder of electric company, his Kinenkan. (etc.) Auction; dealer bought it from whom I'd acquired quite a lot in past, Heisando, Takahashi Taihei. Alb leaf w. similar subject in Palace Mus., Beijing
S --. Other ptgs by Ma Yuan of quiet scenes in nature w. birds; this is one in Japanese col.
S --. Another in Palace Mus.: egrets (add?) Indications of season: typical of So. Sung ptgs. Must have been one of his specialties.

Various features of ptg can be matched w. reliable Ma Yuan works; stepped recession marked by hilltops, dimming into distance, no texture;

S --. One in Cleveland Mus., similar subject, profoundly dif. otherwise. Some believe; I don't. (Point out things wrong.) In recent writings I've emphasized looking hard at Chinese paintings, seeing how they stand up as pictures.

As a general comment, to conclude, let me say that a big deficiency in Chinese ptg studies has been a weakness of some otherwise strong scholars and teachers in the practice of close visual engagement w. ptgs, careful comparisons and analyses. Coming myself from a museum background (curator at Freer before becoming professor) and studying mainly with a teacher who was strongly committed to a visual approach (Max Loehr), I worked very hard, during my three decades as scholar-teacher-collector at Berkeley, to inculcate what I took to be right habits of looking in my students--using for this purpose, along with other materials, ptgs in Ching Yuan Chai collection. I'm very glad that quite a lot of them are now finding their way into the BAM collection, a development that is celebrated in this exhibition, and others may well end up as long-term loans to the Evajhem (?). I trust they will be used in similar ways by my successors, and by Julia and her students, far into future.

CLP 168: 1989 "Gong Xian's Early Styles." Paper for Nanjing symposium, Incomplete.

Gong Xian's Early Styles

(Paper for Nanjing symposium, September 1989)

Nearly twenty years ago I published an article on "The Early Styles of Kung Hsien" (Oriental Art, Spring 1970) in which I attempted to trace the development of his style from the earliest period to his maturity in the early 1670s. I want to recapitulate in outline the conclusions of that article before introducing some additional material.

According to Wang Shiqing's research, Gong Xian was born in 1619. He began to study painting early in his life, and knew such artists as Dong Qichang , Yang Wencong , Yun Xiang , and Zou Zhilin . He must have been active already as a painter, then, well before the fall of Nanjing to the Manchus in 1645. But no dated painting is known to me earlier than 1655, a full decade later. We know where he was living during these years--in Hai-an in Jiangsu for about four years from 1647; in Yangzhou from 1651 to the mid-1660s, or slightly later, when he returned to Nanjing. Wang Shiqing also argues, from the evidence in Gong Xian's poetry collection, that he was active more as a poet than as a painter in these years. He began to paint more after he returned to Nanjing, and from that time on we have enough dated works to understand his stylistic development in some detail. The most difficult period to reconstruct is the years before 1655; and even for that we have some clues, paintings that can be roughly dated by context.

S. The earliest of these may be a leaf by Gong Xian in a collective album of "Ten Scenes of the Nanjing Region," done by nine different artists. The album is undated, but other painters represented in it were active in the late Ming--dated works by Zhang Chong and Zou Dian (the father of Zou Zhe) are from the 1630s and 1640s--so the whole album can be dated around the last years of the Ming. Gong Xian's leaf depicts the Qing-liang Tai , the hill in Nanjing where his family estate was located and where he was to live in his later life. His painting is undistinguished, with only hints of his later style in the composition and in a few characteristic motifs--the bridge, the trees, the buildings. It is easily understandable as the work of a young artist who had met and been influenced by Dong Qichang. The ink is brushed lightly onto the landscape forms for an effect of shading.

S. A leaf from another collective album (which I know only from a reproduction) can be dated around 1648-49, again by context, since other leaves in the album are dated to those years. The other artists represented include Hu Shikun , Zou Zhe , and Fan Qi , all Nanjing painters; Gong Xian, who was living in Hai-an at this time, may have participated in the album on a trip to Nanjing. We see Gong Xian here moving into a bolder, less cautious style, using thick contour drawing, simplified forms, and large, prominent dotting.

S. This leaf allows us to date roughly to the same period, by style, an undated album of six leaves, and to recognize in this style, which uses blunt, thick linear drawing for simplified masses with only slight shading and no cunfa or texture strokes, as Gong Xian's style in the early years after the Manchu conquest, the late 1640s. Closely related styles were being used in this same period or slightly earlier by a number of older artists active in the Nanjing region and also in Southern Anhui; and these are the artists whom Gong Xian knew and admired. They include:

S. Yang Wencong, seen here in a landscape album leaf dated 1640;

S. Yun Xiang, seen here in a leaf from an undated landscape album;

S. Zou Zhilin, seen here

S. And Zhang Feng , seen here in a leaf from an album dated 1647.

S. Another leaf from Gong Xian's album, in which the relationship to Zhang Feng is especially clear. Gong Xian's association with these artists in his early years, and his admiration for them, can be substantiated from his own writings, but it would use too much time to do that here. We can note also his acquaintance with artists of the southern Anhui region, some of whom were working in related styles around this time: thick linear drawing, without washes for shading or texture-strokes for defining tactile surfaces.

S. Gong Xian's recognition of the Anhui school as a distinct current in painting of his time is shown by a section of an undated handscroll, probably from the 1660s, now in the Fogg Museum, in which he lists masters associated with the school, calling it the Tiandu-pai. The artist whom he names as founder is Cheng Jiasui . The accompanying picture is a good approximation of the Anhui school manner, but is also close to Gong Xian's own early style, and again reveals Gong Xian's affinity in his early period with these other artists.

We might speculate on why this style was so popular in the lower Yangtze and southern Anhui region: like the sparse, expressively thin style of Ni Zan in the late Yuan period, it signified disengagement from the harsh realities of the time, a desire for a purer, simpler world that did not force itself oppressively on the viewer's senses. Its popularity lasted only a few decades; as the Kangxi Emperor's policies brought stability to the country and Manchu rule was increasingly accepted, landscape painting as a whole changes in ways that seem to reflect this stability, becoming more substantial, sometimes more mundane, gradually losing some of the tension and strangeness that characterize so much painting of the Ming-Qing transition. Gong Xian's moves in that direction can be traced through dated works of the 1650s and 1660s. We can observe him "fleshing out," giving more tactile substance to, the forms that are rendered only in line in his early work. But instead of becoming more mundane and ordinary, his landscapes become stranger and stranger. Later he was to argue that qi or strangeness is the quality he most pursued in painting; in tracing his early development we can observe how he mastered the artistic means for producing this effect.

S. In a hanging scroll dated 1655 we see him attempting the monumental landscape mode in imitation of Northern Song masters, as other Nanjing-school artists were doing at this time. The painting is not a complete success, because the archaistic manner used for the landscape forms, with repeated parallel folds and schematic shading from one fold to the next, flattens the forms, depriving them of any sense of real mass.

S. A detail reveals the nature of this shading; it is done in small, indistinct, overlapping flecks of ink.

S. A detail from a similar painting of around the same time. The ink appears to have been brushed on rather dry, in such a way that individual brushstrokes are not distinguishable. This is a departure from the Chinese tradition of distinct brushwork, which had generally been followed (with a few exceptions) by artists up to this time. In the early Qing period, numbers of artists were experimenting with ways of painting that somehow eliminated the visible traces of brush movement. landscape forms for an effect of shading.

S. Another leaf (which I know only from a reproduction) can

CLP 167: 2006 "A Group of Anonymous Northern Figure Paintings from the Qianlong Period." Paper for Wen Fong Festschrift, unpublished.

A Group of Anonymous Northern Figure Paintings from the Qianlong Period

Introduction

Among the finest figure paintings of the late period in China are a group of five works that are all essentially anonymous, even while four of them bear, respectively, an old and absurd attribution, an interpolated inscription, an unreliable signature, and misleading seals. In fact, no reliable evidence for dating or authorship accompanies any of them. One, the well-known depiction of the principals of the "Romance of the Western Chamber" drama in the Freer Gallery of Art, carries an old attribution to the tenth century figure master Zhou Wenju (Fig. 1).[i] Another, the “Beautiful Woman in Her Boudoir” in the Sackler Museum at Harvard, bears an inscription purporting to have been written in 1643 by a painter named Wu Zhuo, claiming it to be his portrait of "Mme. Hedong," i.e. the famous woman poet Liu Rushi or Liu Yin (1618-1664) (Fig. 2). The inscription has clearly been added, probably when the work was cut down in size, to give respectability to what is really an anonymous and generic meiren or beautiful woman picture, painted long after 1643.[ii] These two and a third painting, a representation of the bodhisattva Guanyin and the boy Sudhana in the Indianapolis Museum of Art (Fig. 3),[iii] agree in so many fine points of imagery and style--the faces, the drapery drawing, the meticulous portrayal of gold ornaments, textile patterns, spotted bamboo (the chair in the "Western Wing" picture, the fan frame in the "Mme. Hedong")--that they might be seen as works of a single studio, if not of a single hand.

The other two works are close in style to these, although not enough so to suggest that they are products of the same studio or hand. Both, as it happens, are wrongly ascribed to the figure painter Leng Mei (ca. 1670-1742 or later), whose reliable oeuvre is distinctive and consistent enough to permit the exclusion from it of non-conforming works. (Because of Leng's fame and popularity, such works are many—his name, like Qiu Ying's in earlier periods, becomes more a designation of type than of real authorship.) One, a large family-occasion picture probably intended for New Year's hanging, bears a "Leng Mei" signature, but like Yonezawa Yoshiho, who first published the painting,[iv] I would take this to be an interpolation and see the work as anonymous (Fig. 4). The other is an eight-leaf album of erotic scenes bearing seals purporting to be those of Leng Mei; here, too, the style is different from Leng's, and, I will argue, later (Fig. 5).[v]

A number of other paintings known to me only from reproductions and photographs can provisionally be added to these, on the basis of their style; I will mention only two. A second version of the "Madame Hedong" picture, valuable for revealing the complete composition (the other has been cut down in size), was published in an old journal (Fig. 6);[vi] this one, too, is misrepresented as a portrait of a famous woman, this time a "self-portrait" of Ma Shouzhen (active 1592-1628). The other painting (Fig. 7), now to be seen only in an old photograph, represents a woman in a bordello or a courtesan's chambers being presented to a guest (the viewer) by a maid; it bears an interpolated inscription signed "Tang Yin" but is far later than the time of that great Ming master (1470-1523).[vii]

These false indicators should not be misunderstood to mean that the paintings were done as forgeries; they were turned into that by later dealers and other owners who wanted to elevate their respectability and market value. Nor does their anonymity make them inferior to "genuine" name-artist works; on the contrary, they reach levels of refinement and nuances of expression quite beyond the attainment of Leng Mei in any but a few of his paintings. Their high quality and importance in late Chinese figure painting is in fact good reason for trying to give them a provisional art-historical placement, in the hope that some works in the same style with reliable signatures or seals may eventually turn up that will confirm or alter it, and bestow on the artists the credit they deserve.

I will state here at the outset my tentative conclusions about these paintings, and then will offer the evidence and arguments that support those conclusions. First, that they were executed some time around the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the 1750s-70s. Second, that they were done by artists working in the Beijing area. Third, that they can best be understood within the development of a northern school of figure painting that had its inception in the late Kangxi and Yongzheng eras, i.e. the early decades of the eighteenth century. Fourth, that they belong within the "outside" wing of a rich interaction of artists and styles inside and outside the imperial court Academy. And fifth, that they (and other pictures of this kind) were done for a clientele made up in some part, although certainly not exclusively, of princely households. My plan is to proceed on an inward spiral, so to speak, moving around this group of works, referring to them only glancingly without discussing them in detail (as is done in my book), introducing relevant information and related paintings in the hope that doing so will bring us closer to understanding the circumstances of their production, even though we never reach a center, in the sense of a firm and detailed art-historical placement of them, a goal that seems at present beyond attainment.

A Northern School of Figure Painting

Evidence for the rise and development of a northern school of figure painting in the eighteenth century, flourishing chiefly in the Beijing region, outside the imperial court Academy but interacting closely with it, is presented in my in-press book Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Urban Studio Artists in High Qing China.[viii] The leading northern figure master of late Ming, born in Shandong and active in Beijing, was Cui Cizhong (d. 1644). Some features of his bizarre, archaistic style, with its attenuated figures and Western-derived shading, must have been carried on in early works by the Shandong-based masters Jiao Bingzhen (act. 1680-1726) and his pupil Leng Mei (ca. 1670-1742 or later), and brought with them when they entered the imperial Academy in the late Kangxi era.[ix] The relaxation of this style into a more naturalistic mode, in some part through contacts with artists from the Jiangnan (Yangtze Delta) cities, many of whom had come north in search of patronage or to be employed in the court Academy, might be seen as the starting point for our northern school development. We can see it exemplified, I believe, in a painting by Jiao Bingzhen that has recently come to light, his "Lady Arranging Blossoming Plum Branches in a Bronze Pot" (Fig. 8). The signature on it, written small and neat, reads Jiao Bingzhen gong hui (Respectfully Painted by Jiao Bingzhen); I would tentatively suggest that this formula, similar to the one used on imperially-commissioned paintings but lacking the word chen, "your subject," that accompanies signatures on works done for the emperor, indicates a non-imperial high-level patron, perhaps a prince. In any case, the differences between the woman seen here and those in Jiao's works for the court are striking: where the women in his court paintings are unnaturally elongated, with stiffer bodies and simple oval faces,[x] the woman in the hanging scroll sits in a relaxed posture, her articulated body revealed by her clothing, her face drawn more naturalistically and imparting some sense of inner life. Differences of this kind will be seen to typify the diverging stylistic and expressive directions of the two closely related but separable spheres of painting production, the court Academy and our hypothetical northern school outside it.

[i] Well discussed in Lawton, Chinese Figure Painting, no. 15, 84-7. But see also Stuart, “Two Birds with the Wings of One," 25-28; Stuart calls into question the usual identification of subject, arguing that the work may be only a generic scholar-and-beauty scene.

[ii] First published in Cahill, ed., The Restless Landscape, no. 82; it was later the subject of an article by Robert Maeda, “The Portrait of a Woman”, Archives of Asian Art, vol. XXVII (1973-74), 46-52. The misidentifications of subject, date, and authorship are accepted in both publications.

[iii] Published in Marsha Weidner, ed., Latter Days of the Law: Images of Chinese Buddhism, 850-1850 (Lawrence, Kansas, Spencer Museum of Art and Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1994) no. 50, 162-4, with a brief, perceptive text by Gary Baura.

[iv]Yonezawa, Shin-ga Taji Tu.
[v]For color reproductions of all eight leaves, see Moss, The Literati Mode, no. 22.

[vi] In Ostasiatische Zeitschrift vol. 1, 1912, 58. Physical evidence that the Sackler Museum picture has been cut down and altered can be seen in a faint shadow of the expunged round window in upper right, and marks remaining from furniture cut away on both edges. I am grateful to Robert Mowry for reporting the outcome of his detailed examination of the work.

[vii] I acquired the old photo from the estate of Archibald Wenley, Director of the Freer Gallery of Art, upon his death in 1962; he must have received it from the Shanghai dealer E. A. Strehlneek, whose writing is on the back, during his early years in China. Included is the price: "Mex. $950." Both this painting and the previous one are dealt with at greater length in my book-in-press, see following note.

[viii]Publication of this book has been long delayed by the serious curtailment of the series project for which it was originally written, "The Culture and Civilization of China." The book is in the hands of Yale University Press, and will presumably be published by them. Since, however, it will not appear soon, I have lifted a few passages from the book for this essay.

An important northern figure painter who has received little attention is Cui Hui (act. ca. 1720s-1740s or later). He was from Liaoyang in present-day Liaoning Province, but was active in Beijing--one of his works is signed "Beiping Cui Hui."[xi] He was probably from a bannerman family; his surname and the term given as his birthplace, Sanhan, suggest that he may have been of Korean ancestry, but the evidence is inconclusive. Several of his paintings are in the Palace Museum, Beijing (one of them, an album of bird-and-flower paintings, dated 1721) and the Tianjin Municipal Museum. There is no record of his having worked within the court, although he is said to have studied painting under Jiao Bingzhen; he must have known Leng Mei. From Cui's hand are two of the most original and moving images of women we have from late-period China: an imaginary portrait of the twelfth-century poet Li Qingzhao (1084-ca. 1151) in her study,[xii] and a painting of a woman in a garden pavilion in autumn, awaiting the return of her husband from a frontier garrison, based on a Li Qingzhao poem (Fig. 9). The affinities in the figure style and the figure-and-setting relationship with such a painting as Jiao Bingzhen's (Fig. 8) are clear: the natural pose of the figure, the overtones of human emotion, the use of surrounding space to allow reverberations of feeling. Even closer in many respects is the album bearing (misleading) Leng Mei seals (Fig. 5)—so close as to suggest an attribution of that album to a follower of Cui Hui, or conceivably to Cui himself. These connections, and the high quality of his work, establish the importance of Cui Hui as an identifiable master within the development we are tracing.

Types of Patronage

The situation of academic-style painting in Beijing in the Yongzheng-Qianlong eras seems to have been like that in Hangzhou in the Southern Song period, when artists trained in that tradition worked both inside and outside the court, and considerable interaction occurred between the two spheres. Outside the Academy, we can conjecture (with a few clues), support and commissions for artists came from wealthy and powerful patrons of several categories, beginning with the Manchu nobility. Many imperial princes, sons and grandsons of the emperor, lived within the Forbidden City, and many others, mostly those of the emperor’s generation and older, lived in lavish style with their large households in imperial villas northwest of Beijing, and in the imperial gardens, the Changchun Yuan and Yuanming Yuan.[xiii] These, along with well-to-do and powerful Manchu officials and Qing bannermen families living in the Beijing area, must have made up a rich community of consumers for this growing output of technically finished, relatively naturalistic painting, which suited their aristocratic tastes, and which was too time-consuming and technically demanding to be within the reach of all but the most well-off commoners.

Howard Rogers writes about, and cites evidence for, "a rise in private patronage among Manchu nobility and high officials" as a "major development of the later Kangxi era."[xiv] Prosperous Han-Chinese officials, and presumably merchants as well, must be added to the mix of those with enough wealth and status to collect paintings and support artists. We can begin to note, with suitable caution—the evidence is still scanty—what appears to be a pattern in the kinds of paintings they preferred. The Han-Chinese officials seem to have been the main support for artists from the south, such as Luo Ping from Yangzhou, who worked in some version of the literati or "amateur" styles even while they were in fact making their livings through their painting.[xv] These officials were also the principal patrons for the portraitist Yü Zhiding (1647-1710 or after), another from Yangzhou. Members of the Manchu nobility, perhaps in part because they grew up seeing pictures in the "academic" manner in the court and princely environment, seem to have preferred paintings in that manner, whether by Academy masters who produced some work outside the court, by independent Beijing-area masters such as those who made up our Northern school, or by painters from other places who followed the "academic," Song-derived styles. Examples of the last include Wang Yün (1652-ca. 1735) from Yangzhou, who spent seventeen years in the capital and was a favorite of Prince Kang,[xvi] and Yuan Jiang, another Yangzhou master who specialized in landscapes with palaces and villas in Song-derived styles. One of Yuan's extant paintings bears a seal of Prince Yi (1686-1730), thirteenth son of Kangxi and half-brother of Yongzheng, a seal he used from his enfoeffment in 1723 until his death in 1730.[xvii] The problem of Yuan Jiang's activity in the north will be considered in the section that follows.

This possible correlation between styles and patronage is put forth only as an hypothesis to be tested and refined. It obviously cannot hold true for the Jiangnan cities, where the "academic" styles were popular among urban, not aristocratic, audiences. And the Qing emperors did, to be sure, sponsor literati-style paintings also, especially landscapes, mostly done by painters who also held official rank in their courts, But the mind-numbing repetitiveness of most of those, their relatively strict adherence to established Orthodox-school style, suggests that they served more as emblems of status and legitimacy than as pictures to be enjoyed.

The Problem of Yuan Jiang At Court

A Chinese source written around 1735, shortly after Yuan Jiang's period of traceable activity ends (his last known dated painting is from 1730), states that he served in the court as a zhihou (painter in attendance) during the Yongzheng era (1723-35). Another, published around 1790, adds that his service was in the Outer Yangxin Palace Hall, an "outer branch" of the painting academy set up by Yongzheng in 1731 in the Yuan Ming Yuan, the great imperial garden just outside the city wall to the west, where he was to spend much of his time.[xviii] Yongzheng had already installed a second zaoban chu, the office directing the imperial workshops, in the Yuan Ming Yuan in 1723, the first year of his reign.[xix] That Yuan Jiang was in Beijing in the 1720s-30s seems beyond question; the painting mentioned above with a seal of Prince Yi used in the period 1723-30, and an extant work dated 1724 and done, according to the artist's inscription, "in Yantai" (an old name for Beijing), are evidence for that.[xx] The problem has to do with his reported service as an academy painter in Yongzheng's Outer Yangxin Palace, and arises from the fact that no Yuan Jiang paintings can be found recorded in the Qianlong imperial catalog, Shiqu Baoji, nor do any of his extant signed works bear imperial seals or the chen signature, which would indicate a painting done for the emperor. A number of writers on Yuan Jiang, including myself in an early article,[xxi] have proposed solutions to this problem. I suggested that Yuan had been put to work doing decorative kinds of painting for which artists were not individually credited. Others, including Nie Chongzheng, retired curator at the Palace Museum in Beijing who is a specialist on Qing court painting and has made good use of his special access to Qing court records, have argued that Yuan Jiang probably never served at court at all, and that has been the most widely accepted theory.

The truth of the matter, I believe, is that we have all missed a crucial circumstance, "the elephant in the room." It is true enough that no signed painting by Yuan Jiang is known from his presumed service in Yongzheng's "outer branch" of the Academy in the Yuan Ming Yuan. But the same is equally true of nearly all the other artists who worked there: no signed work by them is known. With surprisingly few exceptions—some paintings by the Italian Jesuit artist Lang Shining (1688-1766), landscapes by Tang-dai (1673-after 1752), several paintings by Chen Mei (d. 1745) done alone or with other artists, four or five auspicious pictures, perhaps a few others unknown to me[xxii]—the entire output of Yongzheng's court painters appears to have been absorbed into the project of producing, anonymously and collaboratively, a huge body of paintings in hanging-scroll, handscroll, and album form, many or most of them including images of Yongzheng himself. The recent publication of two large selections from these permits us to assess this great expanse of nameless work in "homogenized" styles. It is like some massive Cultural Revolution project in which teams of artists worked selflessly in turning out a series of elaborate and detailed pictures, most of them with Chairman Mao in the center. To observe that most of these paintings were probably intended for decorating the palaces and other buildings erected during the great expansion of the Yuanming Yuan carried out under Yongzheng's reign, and to furnish them with pictures for the emperor's enjoyment, helps to account for their character but not to excuse it: great paintings had been made throughout the previous centuries for the decoration of palaces, many of them the acknowledged work of individual masters.

[ix]A presumably early work by Leng Mei representing two foreign-looking men, one with tilted, foreshortened face, watching a boy atop an illusionistically shaded elephant, appears to link him with the Cui Zizhong style; see Zhongguo Huihua Quanji , v. 27, pl.170.

[x]A good example is Jiao Bingzhen's twelve-leaf album of "Occupations of Palace Ladies" in the Palace Museum, Beijing; see Nie Chongzheng, comp., Gugong Bowuyuan, 1. The possibility that the "Arranging Flowers" painting was in a princely collection is strengthened by an inscription on the Japanese box claiming that the work was once owned by the Xuantong Emperor (r. 1908-1912).

[xi]A small, imaginary seated portrait of Li Qingzhao in the Palace Museum, Beijing. See Zhongguo Meishu Quanji, vol. 10, pl. 108.

[xii] See Gugogn . . . Shinu, 38.

[xiii] Rawski, The Last Emperors, 120 ff.

[xiv] Rogers, "Court Painting, 306; the discussion of patronage 306-10.

[xv] Much information about Luo Ping"s patrons in Beijing is in Karlsson, Luo Ping. On the commercialization of painting in Yangzhou in this period, including or even especially that in the "eccentric" styles, see Hsü, A Bushel of Pearls,

[xvi] Chung, Drawing Boundaries, 58.

[xvii]Murck, "Yuan Jiang", 230.

[xviii] The first is Zhang Geng, Guochao Huazheng Lu; the second, anonymous, is Huaren Buyi. Both are cited in Murck, "Yuan Jiang," 229. See also Chung, Drawing Boundaries, 68, where the various theories, including Nie Chongzheng's, are reviewed.

[xix] Yang Boda. “The Development of the Ch'ien-lung Painting Academy” ,335-36.

[xx] Murck, "Yuan Jiang", 230.

[xxi]Cahill, "Yuan Chiang and His School," Part II, 208-9.

[xxii] See Zhongguo Gongting Huihua Nianbiao, 40-42.

Yuan Jiang was probably, I believe, one of such a team of artists engaged in the Yongzheng project; many of the paintings are imposing architectural compositions with palace buildings and figures, exactly the genre in which Yuan excelled.[xxiii] It is true that we cannot easily distinguish his individual hand among these, but neither can we detect in them the recognizable hands of any other court artists.[xxiv] All those who took part in this undertaking were willing, or forced, to submerge their artistic personalities—insofar as these had survived into the Academy at all--to the will of a ruler who wanted, apparently, pictures with images of himself prominent in them, along with his ministers and servants, consorts and concubines—pictures not cluttered with artists' signatures or inscriptions--and who cared nothing for style. A recent writer, on the basis of Yongzheng's support for the imperial workshops and his love of antiques, has called him "the first true art lover among the Manchu rulers," but that judgment needs some qualification.[xxv]

Who were the artists of Yongzheng's court Academy? Howard Rogers identifies three who entered it at the beginning of the era, and names others who probably served in the "outer branch" of the Academy in the Yuan Ming Yuan.[xxvi] A chronological charting of Qing court painting, compiled by the Palace Museum staff from court records, lists four artists who were assigned in 1723 to study with Lang Shining, and eleven others who entered the Academy in 1726.[xxvii] Yuan Jiang's name does not appear on either list, but these are surely not complete: they do not include, for instance, Zhang Zhen, a Yangzhou master who probably had entered court service in the late Kangxi or early Yongzheng era, and his son Zhang Weibang, both of whom must have served under Yongzheng.[xxviii] Zhang Weibang is one of four artists named in a record of 1736 as holding an appointment in the Yuan Ming Yuan at the beginning of the Qianglong era, when artists were again able to assume more distinct personalities and sign their works.[xxix] We know the names of quite a few who served in the Yongzheng Academy, that is, but by no means all of them.

Major figure masters who had been active there earlier, on the other hand, seem to have avoided service under Yongzheng. Jiao Bingzhen painted an album of scenes of palace ladies during this period, and signed it xiaochen Jiao Bingzhen gonghua ("Respectfully painted by your lesser subject. . ."); but inscriptions on facing leaves are written by Prince Bao, who would become the Qianlong Emperor, and Jiao may have been staying with him, the two producing this album together for presentation to the emperor. Jiao's name does not appear again in court records or on paintings. Leng Mei may also have been a "painter guest" in Prince Bao's household, as suggested by Nie Chongzheng; in 1735 he painted an album that bears a seal used by Prince Bao before his succession.[xxx] Chen Mei, as noted above, entered the Academy in 1726 and painted a birthday picture for Yongzheng in that year, and in 1728 began work on the Qingming Shanghe Tu, the collaborative handscroll that would be presented to the new Qianlong emperor in 1736.[xxxi] But some time around 1728 he was "granted a leave of absence from the court so that he could return home to marry." His works done outside the court, which like those of Leng Mei can be identified by the way they are signed, date between 1728 and 1735. On the accession of Qianlong Chen Mei was back in court, and produced many paintings in the years after that, until his retirement to Hangzhou and his death in 1745.

Whatever the reason, all of Chen Mei's out-of-court paintings are landscapes, some with figures and animals, in a distinctive semi-westernized style. No such pictures, on the other hand, are to be seen among those he made as an Academy artist, judging at least from extant and published works. We may speculate that the kind of informal and atmospheric naturalism of these paintings, with their strong effects of sunlight and shade, unpatterned tangles of tree limbs and foliage, and convincing recessions of earthy ground surfaces, was as unwelcome in court circles as were the more relaxed and humanized kinds of figure painting. That hypothesis is supported by comparison of two Chen Mei paintings with identical compositions, one dated 1730, the other 1735; the latter bears two collector's seals of Prince Bao, and suggests that Chen Mei, as another of the future Qianlong Emperor's "painting guests" at the end of the Yongzheng era, redid his earlier picture for his host. The earlier version has all the striking depths and nuances, achieved with highly unorthodox brushwork and strongly contrasting ink values, that distinguish Chen Mei's out-of-Academy works. In the later one these qualities are mostly gone, replaced by a drier, flatter mode of execution and forms closer to those of the Orthodox mode.[xxxii]

Leng Mei's Period Outside the Academy

Since Leng Mei's absence from the court during the Yongzheng years may be relevant to the development of our northern school, the circumstances behind it are worth recounting here. They have been reconstructed, tentatively but convincingly, by Yang Boda and Nie Chongzheng.[xxxiii]

Leng had come into the Academy about 1690, and between then and 1723 had produced a number of dated or datable paintings and taken part in collaborative projects such as the huge pair of handscrolls, titled Wanshou Tu, "Myriad Blessings" pictures, prepared for the Kangxi emperor's sixtieth birthday between 1713 and 1717.[xxxiv] Some time late in the Kangxi era he painted an album of didactic Confucian subjects titled Yangzheng Tu (Preservation of Righteousness PIctures), probably for the instruction of one of Kangxi's sons who was favored to succeed to the throne.[xxxv] But another son, Yinzhen, seized the throne by force upon Kangxi's death and declared himself the Yongzheng emperor, imprisoning or executing the rival imperial princes and purging the court of their supporters.[xxxvi] Leng Mei, through his association with one of the other princes, may have been one of those banished. Additional factors that can be suggested for his leaving court service, supposing it was in some part voluntary, may have been the supplanting of his and his teacher’s figure style in imperial favor by that of artists from Yangzhou, and the prospect of having to take part in the huge anonymous and collective project that, as described above, seems to have dominated court painting during the Yongzheng reign.

Whatever the cause, there is no record that Leng Mei did any work at court during the thirteen years of the Yongzheng era, nor, in any painting dated to those years, does his signature include the word chen, which would indicate that it was a court production. Moreover, the paintings on which Leng Mei himself wrote dates are all from these years outside the Academy. As noted earlier, he may have been, late in that period, a "painter guest" of Hongli or Prince Bao, who succeeded to the throne as the Qianlong emperor on Yongzheng's death in 1735.[xxxvii] Leng Mei was reinstated at court in that year, and began again to produce signed works for the court—no less than eight in 1736 alone, when Qianlong issued the highly unusual order to "give Leng Mei eight pieces of painting silk, and have him paint them as he wishes."[xxxviii] He served with high honors until he retired from the Academy in 1742. How much longer he lived is not known.

The question of Leng Mei's activity as a painter during the "missing years" is of particular concern here, since some of his works that can be provisionally assigned to those years, done presumably for patrons outside the imperial court, fall into the genres that appear to have been specialties of the "northern school" artists: meiren or "beautiful woman" pictures, “occasional” works to be hung for New Year and other family gatherings, birthday presentation pictures. The abundance of his output during this period, judging from the number that have survived and the shallow and sentimental character of many of them, lead to the assumption that he employed studio assistants in this kind of product. The signature that appears on most works of this period is Jinmen Huashi Leng Mei, ("Painting Master [i.e., professional painter] from the Golden Gate [the imperial court], Leng Mei”). The Jinmen, which he uses also in his seals, asserts with pride his status as a former court painter; he presumably would not have used it while serving in the court Academy.

There are also some high-quality paintings that bear no signatures, but only Leng Mei seals--the British Museum Woman Resting from Reading is one of them[xxxix]--works that do not match in style those with reliable signatures, and should perhaps be ascribed to studio followers. Their existence encourages the hypothesis that Leng Mei, during his years away from court, may have set up a studio to fill the demand for these kinds of functional works. Painting studios in China were commonly family studios, in which relatives were employed to color or otherwise complete compositions sketched out by the master, or to fulfill less important commissions.[xl] In the year immediately following his return to the court, 1736, Leng Mei asked and obtained permission from the Qianlong emperor to employ his son Leng Jian to help him; a second son, Leng Quan, appears to have worked in the capital but was never employed in the court.[xli] It is possible that these two, and perhaps others such as Leng Mei's student Yao Wen-han. who also served in the Qianlong Academy, had been apprentices or assistants to Leng Mei during his years away from court, and that the Leng Mei studio, once established, continued after his return to the Academy, and probably beyond his lifetime, to produce high-quality figure compositions, relying on the prestige of Leng's name and his association with the Imperial Academy but also on the technical excellence of their creations.

[xxiii] The paintings are reproduced in Nie, Gugong Bowuyuan, nos. 39-44, and in Nie, comp., Qingdai Gongting, nos. 10-20 (occupying 66 pages). They make up all but one the paintings in both volumes from the Yongzheng period. More—many more?--are in the Beijing Palace Museum collection, unpublished; three large-scale scrolls if this kind produced under Yongzheng are mentioned in Wei Dong, "Qing Imperial 'Genre Painting'", 19. The series “Portraits of the Yongzheng Emperor in the Twelve Months” (Nie, Gongting Huihua, 20), twelve large, elaborate hanging scrolls of palace buildings and figures, particularly suggest the possible participation of Yuan Jiang.

[xxiv] It is true that I have argued, in a published article and in my forthcoming book, that the figures in some of these appear to be in the manner of the Yangzhou master Zhang Zhen and perhaps his son Zhang Weibang. But this is a matter of local and family style, not individual hand. The article is Cahill, “The Three Zhangs"

[xxv]Krahl, 243. A welcome break with a general reluctance to recognize the dullness of a great deal of Qing Academy painting is Souren Melikian's review of this Three Emperors exhibition, which appeared in The International Herald Tribune, February 17, 2006 under the title "A Show Heavy on China, Light on Art." As an outsider to Chinese art, Melikian wonders how the Qing emperors, themselves accomplished calligraphers and (especially Qianlong) connoisseurs of antique paintings, can have tolerated paintings of the kind shown in this exhibition--the work, as he sees it, of "anonymous hacks who had little in common with the great masters of Chinese painting" and whose pictures are "worthy forerunners of the posters of {Chairman] Mao as the Great Helmsman." He understandably goes wrong on several issues, but points up the need for more discerning and critical writing about Qing court painting by us specialists, writings willing to distinguish, however unfashionably, between paintings as art and pictures as visual records.

[xxvi] Rogers, "Court Painting," 308.

[xxvii] Zhongguo Gongting Huihua Nianbiao, 40-41.

[xxviii] On these, see Cahill "The Three Zhangs”.

[xxix] Yang Boda, "Development of the Ch'ien-lung Painting Academy", 338.

[xxx] Yang Boda, "Leng Mei"; also Nie, "Jiao Bingzhen, Leng Mei, 59.

[xxxi] Zhongguo Gongting Huihua Nianbiao, 41; Rogers, "Court Painting," 307.

[xxxii] The 1730 painting exists on two versions. One, which was sold in a Sotheby's Hong Kong auction, Important Classical Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy, October 29, 2000, no. 31, is presently in a U.S. private collection; the other, unpublished so far as I know, is in the Nanjing Museum. These correspond too closely to be both by the artist, and we must assume an original-and-copy relationship. For the 1735 painting see Kaikodo Journal XV, January 2000, no. 18, with an article by Howard Rogers. This painting was previously in the Fujii Yurinkan, Kyoto.

[xxxiii] In the writings cited in note 30. An English summary of their findings is in Brown and Chou, Heritage of the Brush, 76.

[xxxiv]See Rogers, "Court Painting," 307. The original painting has not survived; the composition can be seen in a well-known woodblock-printed version and in a copy made by Qianlong-era court artists. For the first scroll of the latter, no less than 37 m. long, see Rawski and Rawson, China: The Three Emperors, no. 24.

[xxxv]Reproduced in Nie, Gugong Bowuyuan, pl. 3:1-10.

[xxxvi]Wakeman, The Fall of Imperial China, 95-96.

[xxxvii]Nie, "Jiao Bingzhen, Leng Mei" 59. An album by Leng Mei dated to 1735 and bearing seals with names used by Prince Bao before his enthronement leads Nie to speculate that Leng may have stayed with him for part of his time outside the court academy.

[xxxviii] Zhongguo Gongting Huihua Nianbiao, 42; Yang Boda, "The Development of the Ch'ien-lung Painting Academy”, 348.

[xxxix] Ars Asiatica IX, 55.

[xl]Cahill, The Painter's Practice, 102-12.

[xli]For Leng Jian, see Yang, “Development of the Ch’ien-lung Painting Academy,” 345, also Yang Xin, "Court Painting," 346. Nie Chongzhen (personal communication) believes that Leng Quan was probably another son of Leng Mei. For a painting of palace ladies by Leng Quan, see Guo and Zhang, eds. pl. 108.

Academic-Style Painting in Early and Middle Qing

The foregoing sections have laid out a background for paintings of the kind represented by our group, identifying some of the circumstances attending the development of a "northern school" of figure painting in the Beijing region within which it can be located. They also, I hope, have opened the way for using the term "academic" in a sense free of negative connotations. About academic-style painting as it concerns us, several things can be said. Its ultimate basis is in the styles of the Southern Song imperial Academy and their extension into the production of painting outside it, along with the continuation of both in some painting of the Ming. Throughout the later centuries it was for the most part critically depreciated; by the end of Ming, good artists could scarcely practice it without some admixture of archaism or other ingredient that tempered its effect, for this period, of being flavorless and outworn. But demand for paintings in the academic styles, pictures to be hung and used by individuals and households somewhat apart from the prestigious works that made up serious collections, did not lessen; the growing prosperity and expanding market of this time saw to that. (These are the kinds of paintings that my Pictures for Use and Pleasure book is about.)

The willingness of many early Qing painters who did pictures of this kind to adopt, and turn to their new and special purposes, elements of Western style from pictorial materials that had become accessible to them was a major factor in a new flourishing of these academic styles among what I call "urban studio artists," those openly professional masters who worked, largely in response to commissions and demand, both in the great Jiangnan cities and in the Beijing region in the north. It is the Jiangnan city masters, artists from Suzhou and Yangzhou but also Jiading, Nanjing, Changshu, Wuxi, Zhenjiang, and others, who mostly staffed the imperial Academy in the early decades of Qing. As Yang Boda points out, court artists working under the Kangxi and Yongzheng emperors were called “southern craftsmen” (nanjiang); it was only under the Qianlong emperor that this designation was changed to “painters” (huahuaren).[xlii] The styles the Jiangnan artists brought with them were already affected by Western borrowings; these were reinforced by interaction with northern masters such as Jiao Bingzhen and Leng Mei, and later with Jesuit painters employed in the court, especially Lang Shining. The kinds of selfless collaborations to be discussed in the following section, which appear to have been aimed at erasing individuality of style and personal handwriting in the pursuit of impersonal, "styleless" but strikingly true-to-life images, might in fact be regarded as a Chinese attempt, conscious or not, to approximate the condition of European paintings as they saw them. Consistent with that hypothesis is the prominence of Lang Shining as leading master in many of these collaborations (his name is usually—always?--first in a list of participants), the praise and high honors accorded him by the emperors, and his role as teacher to other Academy artists.

This brief account of the practice of academic-style painting in the early and middle Qing points up a serious imbalance in our studies. Painting of the Manchu imperial Academy, as one manifestation of it, has received a great deal of scholarly attention, partly because the paintings are easily accessible and its history well documented, partly because of the allure of "Forbidden City," second only, perhaps, to "Silk Road" in popular visions of East Asian art. The practice of this kind of painting in the great Jiangnan cities, by contrast, scarcely figures in either Chinese or foreign accounts; and the growth of what I want to call a "northern school" of figure painting in the Yongzheng-Qianlong period, related to and affected by both the former two, has not been recognized at all.

Collaborative Work in the Qing Academy

Collaborative work, in which several or many artists work together on a single painting, sometimes with each contributing some special skill to the joint task, become frequent in the Qing court from the late Kangxi period on. The earliest large-scale Qing example is the production of the Kangxi Nanxun Tu, a set of twelve long scrolls documenting the emperor's second Southern Inspection Tour made in 1689; the project was directed by Wang Hui (1632-1717) and carried out by a number of artists under him over the period 1691-98.[xliii] Other collaborations, already mentioned, include the 1713-16 Wanshou Tu comemmorating Kangxi's sixtieth birthday, the large-scale collaborative project carried out by nameless Academy masters under Yongzheng, and the well-known updated version of the Qingming Shanghe Tu done by Chen Mei and three others, begun in 1728 and finished in 1736. Quite a few others could be added.

By the beginning of the Qianlong era, then, the collaborative production of academic-style paintings was a well-established practice. The project of recording Qianlong's first southern tour (1751) in twelve scrolls, following the precedent set by Kangxi's series, was accomplished this time by a court Academy master named Xu Yang during the period 1764-70. Xu Yang signs the last scroll as though he were the single painter of all of them; Maxwell Hearn, in his study of these scrolls, concludes that the absence of collaborators' names "At the very least . . suggests that Xu had fewer helpers available to him than were available to Wang Hui and that their roles were comparatively unimportant." He adds that "Efforts to curtail the amount of detail in the scrolls, notably by devoting long sections to the depiction of water," also suggest "a shortage of manpower and increase the likelihood that Xu did the majority of the work himself."[xliv] These are good observations; one may nonetheless suspect, viewing the many hundreds of figures and long stretches of street scenes, the sheer square footage covered with finely detailed painting of high technical finish, that Xu Yang (who was also the single credited maker of another complete set of the scrolls executed on paper) enlisted assistants to do some of the routine filling-in of scenes he had sketched out. Team projects of this kind testify to the availability in the city of minor artists trained in the academic styles who could be called upon when needed. We will encounter a few of them below.

A collaborative work that has some stylistic affinities with our group is an album of twenty scenes of porcelain manufacture, done around 1743 by Ding Guanpeng (entered Academy 1726; d. 1770) and two other artists of the Qianlong court; it was sold at auction in 1996 and is presently whereabouts unknown.[xlv] A leaf depicting the glazing of pots will serve to exemplify the style: clearly defined and interrelated spaces within which the figures are set; objects such as the vats of glaze and the well shaded for three-dimensional effect; washes of pale color for a sense of atmosphere (Fig. 10). Ding Guanpeng, who was from Beijing, served as the top-ranking master in a number of collaborative projects of this kind; he was one of six top-grade artists of the Qianlong Academy, and under Yongzheng had received the highest salary of any.[xlvi] His success is an indication of the esteem that a northern master working only in the academic manner could win by this time.

This, the Xu Yang "Southern Tour" scrolls, and other collaborative paintings done in the Qianlong Academy represent another stylistic coalescing, like the one seen in the Yongzheng court paintings, into a more or less homogeneous, highly polished mode of depiction. Although some joint works by nameless collaborators continue to be made in the Qianlong period, following the Yongzheng model, the Qianlong court collaborations are more often signed, with the artists all named; they can exhibit subtle differences in style. But on the whole they fit comfortably into Hearn's characterization of the style of the Xu Yang scrolls, which, he writes, "may be summarized as meticulous in detail, eclectic in its sources, but homogeneous in appearance, with idiosyncracies of personality subordinated to a universal Academy manner."[xlvii] Included in its eclecticism, as noted earlier, was a strong admixture of foreign style, learned from European paintings and prints to be seen in China, but also from Jesuit artists working in the court, especially Lang Shining. By this time it had been so thoroughly absorbed into the homogeneous Academy manner as to have lost its exoticism and become a well-established way of enhancing the illusionism, the "true-to-life" quality, of the paintings.

Quite apart from the obvious reasons for employing multiple artists on a single work—combining skills, faster production, larger and more elaborate compositions incorporating more visual information--collaboration permitted a further degree of what was already a deliberate erasure of individual style and handwriting. We now are inclined, with good reason, to regard this impersonal character negatively, as robbing the paintings of feeling and aesthetic interest, but for the emperors it had positive value. What Qianlong, like Yongzheng, mostly expected from his court painters was optically "true" images, not manifestations of personal style; if he felt inclined to enjoy the latter, he could turn to the works of individual famous masters in his unparalleled collection, or (in principle if scarcely in practice) to paintings by "literati" artists serving as officials in his court. The paintings of his Academy artists recorded visual experiences convincingly enough to function like photographs in preserving and evoking memories of those experiences—his travels, his hunts, court ceremonies (all selectively re-imagined, to be sure), his pets and his consorts—or recalled his viewings of old paintings such as the Qingming scroll by doing a copy or imitation of it. They might also stimulate imaginings of ideal experiences he might have. We will return later to this last function.

Excursus on Words

The above references to "academic" styles and "optically 'true'" images raise the continuing problem of our usage of characterizing terms of this kind. It emerged in several contexts during the "Bridges to Heaven" symposium, perhaps most strongly at the end in response to Richard Barnhart's paper on "The Song Experiment with Mimesis." Apart from the familiar dangers of applying foreign terms, with their unavoidable baggage of foreign concepts, to Chinese styles and art-historical episodes, the legitimacy of calling one style or image more "mimetic" than another (or more naturalistic, realistic, true-to-life—which term fits best is a separate problem not addressed here) is today frequently questioned, on the curious grounds that elements of convention can be identified in the achievement of any effect of verisimilitude; the artist is not simply "portraying what he sees." The former problem had come up long ago at another Princeton symposium, the "Artists and Traditions" of 1969, when a colleague in European classical art criticized our use of the term "archaism," pointing out that we applied it (for instance, in writing about early Yuan landscapists' revival of pre-Song styles) to somewhat different situations than they did. My response then, and my belief now, is that if we were to allow ourselves to be dissuaded from employing an English-language term in our writings because it did not correspond neatly with its usage in Western art-historical studies, we would be left without a working vocabulary, Our only sensible course was and is to define our particular usage as best we can and go on using the term. (My own contribution to that project, on that occasion, was an attempt to define "orthodoxy" in Chinese landscape painting as fully and exactly as I could.)[xlviii] At the more recent symposium we were told—unsurprising news--that mimesis in Song painting as Barnhart used the term (and everyone present knew what he meant by it, whether or not they agreed with his use of it) was different from what is called mimesis in the European painting tradition. We also learned, from Maggie Bickford's original and perceptive paper, that the quality of "lifelikeness" in some bird-and-flower painting of the Huizong Academy and earlier was achieved by unsuspected means. The eye is fooled; but so is it fooled, in a different direction, by some French Impressionist paintings that appear to have been executed in a quick and spontaneous manner but turn out to have been produced by careful, systematic overlays of brushstrokes. The effect in each case is no less of truth-to-life or of spontaneity. What these observations--quite legitimate and valuable in themselves-- lead to, then, is mimesis-plus, or mimesis modified, or mimesis attained by unexpected means. What none of them leads to is non-mimesis--they cannot, that is, negate or seriously dilute the strongly mimetic character of much of the best Song painting. Similarly, we could list and analyze the ways in which Song or Qing academic painting differs from, say, French 19^th century academic oil painting; that would be worth doing. But the French examples no more nullify the academicism of the Chinese than the Chinese do the French: they are different varieties of academicism.

[xlii] Yang, "Development of the Ch'ien-lung Painting Academy", 333-356. See also Nie Chongzheng’s essay on the Academy under the Qing, in his Qingdai Gongting, 1-24 (Chinese) and 25-27 (English summary); this reference on 5.

[xliii]Hearn, “Document and Portrait". An important late Ming predecessor to these court-produced collaborative handscrolls has recently been identified: see Wu Meifeng. Wu argues convincingly, with stylistic comparisons, that Ding Yunpeng (1547-1625 or after) was one of a group of artists who produced, at the court of the Wan-li Emperor (r. 1573-1620), probably around 1683, two long handscrolls, now in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, representing two imperial outings. (The English title and summary mistakenly give the artist's name as Ding Guanpeng.)

[xliv] Hearn, "Document and Portrait," 118.

[xlv] Christie's Hong Kong, 28 April, 1996, The Imperial Sale, lot 65.

[xlvi] Yang Boda, "Development of the Ch'ien-lung Painting Academy," 341.

[xlvii] Hearn, "Document and Portrait," 119.

[xlviii] Cahill, "The Orthodox Movement."

The Gengzhi Tu Album by Xu Pu

The homogeneous "universal Academy manner" for the Qianlong period, once firmly established both inside and outside the Academy as an all-purpose mode of depiction, no doubt served as the basic training for apprentices aspiring to be professional masters, and could be used as well by a single artist as by a group. A little-known academician named Xu Pu (active mid-18^th cent.) used it in copying the series of Gengzhi Tu, or "Pictures of Rice Culture and Silk Culture," painted originally in the 1690s on order of Kangxi by Jiao Bingzhen and first printed by woodblock in 1696 (Fig. 11).[xlix] Jiao Bingzhen's original paintings have not been preserved, but a number of painted copies, of which this is one, are based on the printed pictures. (That Xu Pu worked on the basis of the prints is indicated by his writing "copied and added colors" with his signature.) The figure style and the landscape settings have affinities to those in several leaves (not reproduced here) of the "Leng Mei" album (cf. Fig. 5 and note 5)—in the diagonal recessions, in the shading on figures and animals, in the sense of atmosphere and distance achieved by washes of pale blue and green. (The last two features pertain to Xu Pu's style, not Jiao Bingzhen's, since Xu knew Jiao's pictures only by way of the linear woodblock prints.)

The information on Xu Pu in the standard dictionary of artists records a collaborative project he carried out with three other minor painters in 1751, a Zhigong Tu, "Tribute Bearers," which probably consisted of preliminary research and sketches for the handscroll series of that title, a kind of illustrated ethnological study showing pairs of figures from many countries and cultures accompanied by long informational texts, painted in the Academy by Ding Guanpeng and three other artists from 1761.[l] Two of the artists who worked with Xu Pu were graduates of the Guozi Jian, the Imperial College set up in the capital, which brought them little prestige or access to official positions;[li] they may have contributed more to the documentary than to the pictorial side of the project. No painting by any of them is known to me; we can include them among the numerous minor artists working in the academic style in the capital, for various kinds and levels of patronage.

Xu Pu's Gengzhi Tu album, undistinguished in other respects, takes on some importance for our investigation when we observe the pattern of signature and seals on it. He signs, in small, neat characters on the last leaf: Neifu Jiao Bingzhen ben, chen Xu Pu gongmu shi'se ("Your subject Xu Pu has respectfully copied Jiao Bingzhen's original in the Palace, and added colors.") The presence of the character chen ordinarily indicates that it was made for the emperor, and Qianlong imperial seals appear on several of the leaves, including the Shiqu Baoji seal which normally would point to the inclusion of the work in the imperial catalog of that name. But it appears not to be recorded there. A collection seal on the mounting of the first leaf reads ceng cun Ding-fu You Heng Tang, indicating that it was owned at some time by Prince Ding. This must be Mien-en (d. 1822), grandson of Qianlong, who inherited the title on the death of his father in 1750 and was deprived of it for wrongdoing in 1776.[lii] The album, then, might have been painted by Xu Pu for this prince, perhaps as a painter-in-residence, and then presented to the emperor. Alternatively, it was painted for the emperor while Xu was an Academy artist and presented to Prince Ding. The absence of any seals of later emperors supports the latter account, as does the chen signature--although the possibility should be left open that painters might have sometimes used this signature on works done for imperial princes.[liii] In either case, the album provides another example of the interchange between court and princely households--the environment, I am arguing, for much of the painting under consideration here.

Idealizing Images of the Emperors and Imagined Consorts

Among the kinds of painting done in the Academy that portrayed the emperor in some ideal situation, or depicted scenes and spaces into which he could imagine entering, some have distinct erotic implications. He might be assigned a role in the Han-Chinese narrative of the scholar-beauty romance, as in a pair of panel (?) paintings portraying Qianlong as a scholar in his study, gazing through a window at a beautiful woman putting a flower in her hair, preparing to receive him.[liv] These are unsigned, but probably a collaboration between Jin Tingbiao (entered Academy 1757, d. 1768) and Lang Shining. Others show the emperor surrounded by beautiful consorts, or gazing at them.[lv] Another type, which represents an adoption into the court of a genre popular outside it, simply presents the beautiful woman in an interior, open to the gaze of the (presumably male) viewer outside that space; this is the imperial equivalent of the popular genre of meiren hua or beautiful-woman pictures. Yongzheng's version of this type can be seen in the famous "Twelve Beauties" paintings, works of the late Kangxi period (they bear inscriptions written by Yongzheng while he was still a prince.) Originally they were panels in a pair of weiping or "surrounding screens" within which he could sit in his favorite haunt in the Yuan Ming Yuan (where they were kept), gazing at imagined Han-Chinese concubines in lavishly-appointed palace interiors (Fig. 11).[lvi] A painting of this type done for Qianlong is the "Beautiful Woman Arranging a Flower in Her Hair" by Jin Tingbiao (Fig.12).

To achieve their effects—which are very different from the refined aesthetic experiences literati paintings were meant to arouse—paintings of this kind needed to be as if transparent, free of impediments to "seeing through" the surface to the scene or occupied space beyond. Song paintings had aimed at similar effects; the difference is that the Qing-period academic-style pictures more often make inconspicuous use of perspective and other devices to locate the viewer in a way Song paintings did not, firming his implied relationship with the scene or object viewed. Prominent brushstrokes marred this effect by holding one's attention at the surface, as did inscriptions and seals, which are usually confined in such pictures, if present at all, to marginal areas of the composition. (It is significant in this regard that the inscriptions in the Twelve Beauties paintings are written as though on surfaces within the picture, not on the painting surface.) In the large hanging-scroll pictures of this kind that are meant to function visually like doorways or windows that draw the viewer's gaze, and sometimes in imagination the viewer himself, into the space beyond, even those are eliminated; if the artist signs, it is in tiny, all-but-invisible characters in hidden places. (Hidden signatures on academic-style Song paintings are to be understood the same way—they do not hamper the pictorial effect.) These pictures were virtually always painted on silk, a more "transparent" surface in that it allowed finer detail and more even shading, and discouraged rough-brush and other eye-catching distractions.

Jin Tingbiao's meiren picture bears a "hidden" signature in lower left, using the chen character that identifies the emperor himself as the intended recipient. Its affinities with the paintings of our group, especially the Freer "Western Wing" picture (Fig. 1), are immediately apparent: the stage-like foreground within which the large figures are set as principal subjects; the woman leaning on a table; the deep, step-by-step penetration created beyond (in both cases continuing into a garden); the rich furnishings and antique objects; the tokonoma alcove with a landscape painting hanging in it. (The bordello scene (Fig. 5), otherwise similar, probably featured such an opening-back before it was cut down in size.) None of the earlier examples of the type (cf. Figs 8 and 11, both probably late Kangxi in date) offers a recession so deep, so insistent, so systematically worked out. The woman in Jin's painting is placed a bit farther back, and is of course unaccompanied, except by the maid; she is putting a flower in her hair, preparing for the emperor's coming, or to go to him.

That this kind of composition, as noted above, is much more common outside than inside the Academy suggests that Jin may be deliberately creating here for his imperial patron a kind of meiren composition not truly proper to their world. The Manchu emperors' somewhat surreptitious fascination with the erotic culture of the Jiangnan cities, and their employment of Jiangnan urban masters to recreate aspects of it in their paintings for the court (Jin Tingbiao was from Wuxing in Zhejiang), is a sub-theme of one chapter in my book, where I argue also that the Yangzhou artist Zhang Zhen and his son Weibang were probably doing the same for Yongzheng in the "Twelve Beauties" paintings. The similar sizes of paintings of this kind—the "Twelve Beauties" scrolls, Jin Tingbiao's meiren, and the Freer painting are all roughly two meters in height—indicates that the scale was calculated carefully to facilitate imagined access to the foreground figures, which appear as they would if located a short distance beyond the "opening" of the picture plane. Pictures of this kind are not entirely devoid of individual traits of style—Jin Tingbiao's beauty, for instance, has a thinner face, and the drapery drawing is heavier than that in the Freer painting. But style in the sense of idiosyncratic distortions or simplifications of form, those creative acts by which images are transformed into configurations of brushstrokes, are not to be seen, and are quite irrelevant to academic-style painting. Jin Tingbiao, a versatile master, was quite capable of other styles as well, in works intended for other kinds of viewing.[lvii]

Since Jin Tingbiao's period of activity is known, the resemblance of his painting to at least one of our group supports the dating of the group about the same time, the third quarter of the eighteenth century.

[xlix][xlix] Some leaves reproduced in China: Treasures and Splendors, no. 130.

[l] Yu Jianhua, 719. For the finished scroll painted by Ding Guanpeng and others, see Nie, Gongting Huihua, 75. Clarifying the relationship between these two projects requires research that is beyond the scope of this paper. Zhongguo Gongting Huihua Nianbiao 49 states that Xu Pu painted a Zhigong Tu, and left the academy, in 1770. Again, I do not know whether this refers to the same project or a separate one. This is the only indication I have found that Xu Pu served in the academy at all. For a fuller account of the production of the Zhigong Tu scrolls, see Wei Dong, 22-24.

[li] See Elman. "Social Roles of Literati", 366. The other three are Men Qing'an (Yu Jianhua, 565, a Han bannerman); Sun Daru (Yu Jianhua, 678), a figure specialist; and Dai Yuji (Yu Jianhua, 1451). Men and Dai were graduates of the Imperial College.

[lii]Hummel, ed., 2, 728-29, entry for Tsai-ch'ûan.

[liii] Two authorities on Qing imperial history to whom this question was put, Harold Kahn and Evelyn Rawski, both responded that it was possible in principle, but neither of them had encountered any case of it. Other paintings raise this question, e.g. an album of twelve scenes of unidentified places by Jiao Bingzhen, signed chen Jiao Bingzhen gonghui but devoid of imperial seals: see Christie's Hong Kong, Fine Classical Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy, May 30, 2005, no. 1044.

[liv] See Nie, Gongting Huihua, 45. These are discussed in my Pictures for Use and Pleasure.

[lv] Examples are in Nie, Gongting Huihua, 12.1 and 12.5, for Yongzheng, and Ibid. 59, for Qianlong.

[lvi] For these, see Nie, Gugong Bowuyuan, 41-42, also Rawski and Rawson, 173. An old misidentification of them as "The Twelve Consorts of the Yongzheng Emperor" was corrected in an article by Zhu Jiajin, "Guan yu Yongzheng". Seals and inscriptions on several of them—written and impressed as though on surfaces within the paintings—bear names used by Yongzheng before his enthronement, and date the works to the late Kangxi era.

[lvii] See for examples Nie, Gugong Bowuyuan, 110-114, four paintings that serve well to demonstrate his versatility. All these others bear inscriptions and seals of the emperor.

The Qianlong Albums Master

Among the high-level erotic albums produced in this period, which would appear to be a high point in the development of that genre, are three by an unknown artist whom I have termed the Qianlong Albums Master. His surviving oeuvre, so far as I know, consists of these three, all unsigned but all clearly by the same painter, all originally made up of a mix of erotic and non-erotic leaves (the erotic leaves have been removed from two of them, or from the publications of them.) Twelve leaves from one of the albums (here designated QAM A) are now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Fig. 14); these and twelve more are known from an old reproduction album, and it is very probable that those twenty-four, since they belong to a subject type that consistently accompanied openly erotic leaves in what I call part-erotic albums, were joined originally by an approximately equal number of erotic leaves. This was a large-scale project, then, and an imperial project: an additional leaf bears seals, which appear to be genuine, of Qianlong and his successor Jiaqing (r. 1796-1820). The published album reproducing the non-erotic leaves, moreover, bears a note saying that it was formerly in the imperial palace.[lviii] The second album is presumably complete in twelve leaves, evenly divided between erotic and non-erotic (Fig. 15); here designated QAM B, it was sold at auction in 1983 and is presently whereabouts unknown.[lix] The third album, QAM C, is known only in another old reproduction book from the same Shanghai publisher, again with a note saying it came from the palace. It contains a selection of leaves, some double-size horizontal; these, too, must have been accompanied by openly erotic leaves in the original album.[lx] Both QAM A and QAM C contain leaves virtually identical in composition (in one case reversed) to leaves in QAM B; they must all, then, have originated as separate works, and cannot be parts of a single series.

The non-erotic leaves (Fig. 14, 15), as always in the part-erotic albums, portray scenes and suggest situations leading up to, or following upon, the openly erotic encounters; they serve to contextualize those encounters and deepen their emotive resonances. What is significant for our present concern is that the Qianlong Albums Master seems to have been another who worked both inside and outside the imperial court: the separate leaf in QAM A with Qianlong and Jiaqing collectors' seals presumably establishes his insider status, while the absence of any such evidence associated with the other two indicates that they were done for other than imperial patronage, The absence of imperial seals on the leaves of QAM A themselves suggests some mode of production other than official Academy production and open display. Belonging also to this same shadowy category, presumably, are the four albums of illustrations to Jin Ping Mei, two hundred large, highly detailed pictures, some of them openly erotic, that were done, I have argued, for Kangxi by the Suzhou master Gu Jianlong (1606-1687 or after) during his period at court in the 1660s-70s. Here, too, accompanying leaves bear Qianlong's collector's seals, but no imperial seals are on the paintings.[lxi] We can imagine such albums as having been kept and enjoyed by the emperor and others separately from the more open system of imperial production, cataloguing, and storage, Further research may eventually clarify these elusive circumstances.[lxii]

It is worth noting also that the usual distinctions in style and expression between paintings done inside and outside—the court Academy productions stiffer, cooler, more elaborately finished, those outside more relaxed and somewhat looser in execution—do not apply here; no such shadings of difference can be observed among the three QAM albums, which seem midway in style between the stiffness and formality of Academy productions and the more humanized and expressive qualities that "outside" works typically display. A strong likelihood is that this painter worked within the palace environment for a clientele that included both the emperor himself and other high-level Manchu patrons, most probably princes. The three albums, along with others unknown, would then belong to a still unrecognized and unstudied interchange between a somewhat clandestine, informal production of paintings done for the Manchu emperors and a closely related production, much of it by the same artists, done for Manchu princely households by painters they supported.

The figures that occupy the domestic scenes in these albums are not portrayed as Manchu nobility; the mature men wear scholar's caps, and the women are in Han Chinese dress. Like virtually all other high-level Chinese erotic albums, these present the imagined world of a rich and powerful Han Chinese household, not unlike, except in their open practice of sex, the Jia family household in the novel Hong Lou Meng—or, earlier and closer in that respect, the household of Ximen Qing in Jin Ping Mei. Both novels were well known and enjoyed in the Manchu court. Erotic pictures made for the emperors and princes portrayed, then, not their own situations but this Han Chinese romantic-erotic ideal, the same that the Manchu emperors also enjoyed in some of the paintings by artists they had brought into the court from the Jiangnan cities. Pictures of these kinds, made outside the system of proper court Academy painting, escaped to some degree the formality that ruled there, permitting them to take on some of the more engaging qualities that "outside" pictures offered.

Conclusion

In recognizing this difference in expressive effect we move closer to making an informed appraisal and placing of the paintings of our group. Any clearer defining of the levels of patronage for which they were done must await further research and the uncovering of more evidence; for now we can only suggest again that it was outside, but closely related to, the imperial Academy, and most probably included princely households. And we can begin to correlate the expressive distinctions among the paintings with this inside/outside pattern.

The restrictions within which the proper Academy masters worked can be further revealed by a comparison of two closely related works, both large compositions portraying Qianlong and his consorts and sons celebrating the New Year's holiday.[lxiii] One, which must be the finished and accepted version, bears an inscription with the date 1738 and the names of the artists: Lang Shining, Chen Mei, Tangdai, and three others. The other painting, uninscribed, is very probably an earlier version by more or less the same group that was rejected (but, untypically, preserved), and the differences between them allow us to speculate on what the emperor found unacceptable in the original picture. There he is placed further off center, located within a strong perspectival recession that draws the viewer's attention away from him, and is shown looking down fondly at a squirming baby in his lap while striking a sounding stone with a mallet to amuse the child. The finished, accepted version eliminates this charming anecdotal touch, portraying Qianlong sitting stiffly upright, holding only a lingzhi fungus and looking straight out of the picture. It also reduces the perspectival pull and moves the emperor closer to center.

To turn from both these to the family New Year's picture in our group (Fig. 4) will dramatize strikingly the inside-outside difference: the "outside" picture is full of activity, of anecdotal and human-interest detail, to a degree unthinkable within the Academy.[lxiv] This is especially true of the left section, where the women of the household look after the younger children (detail, Fig. 16); they are exempted from the dignified demeanor that the father and older sons necessarily display. The young woman holding up the baby at far left, her face turned mostly away from us, is especially affecting, with her slightly parted lips, her concerned look.

The other paintings of our group exhibit, in different ways and degrees, the same qualities. In the Freer painting (Fig. 1) it is tender love, conveyed, despite the expressionless faces of the lovers, in their exchange of looks, their postures, the play of fingers and flower in their hands. The "Liu Yin" meiren painting (Fig. 2) projects an open appeal and sensuality that Jin Tingbiao's pin-up for Qianlong (Fig. 13) lacks. Even the Indianapolis Guanyin (Fig. 3) projects a quasi-secular seductiveness (which is, to be sure, an attribute of one manifestation of the bodhisattva, in which she used her sexual lures to bring about men's spiritual transformation and conversion to Buddhist faith.)[lxv] And the leaves of the "Leng Mei" album (Fig. 5), as would become clear if more of them were reproduced and discussed here, are witty and evocative, inviting narrative-like readings of the indelicate scenes they present. Similar expressive qualities can be found in the best of southern city artists' works; now, by way of earlier northern masters such as Jiao Bingzhen and Cui Hui who must have learned them from Jiangnan painters and paintings, they have been absorbed into the northern school, where they enjoy a final flowering.

It is significant that many of the surviving paintings of this kind are found in old foreign collections, acquired by early, "naive" collectors who had not yet learned the more refined, literati- and brushwork-oriented tastes of cultivated Chinese. If we more recent enthusiasts have failed to recognize the pleasures these paintings offer, it is because we have been indoctrinated by our readings of Chinese writings, and by observing the reactions of Chinese connoisseurs to such paintings, into believing the older kind of response to be inappropriate and low-class—a learned attitude that needs to be reconsidered.

The fast decline of court Academy painting from the late Qianlong era through the Jiaqing and beyond is painfully apparent in the less skilled drawing and repetitiveness of works produced by court artists of those later periods.[lxvi] The same decline can be assumed to have beset academic-style painting outside the court, since really capable artists would have been recruited if they had been available. No evidence known to me, moreover, indicates any healthy continuation of such painting into the 19^th century. Brilliant and moving figure paintings would still be done, by such masters as Ren Xiong and Ren Bonian, but they would be in other styles. The paintings of our group stand, then, as the last significant manifestations of a long and, for its late phases, badly under-appreciated tradition.

Afterword

My writings and lectures of recent years have sometimes ended with an apologia, renouncing any claim to having "proven my case," acknowledging a too-frequent use of such qualifiers as "probably" and "presumably." These studies have been made in the hope that the hypotheses and tentative formulations they offer can be put on more solid ground (or altered or contradicted) in future by further archival and other research. Meanwhile, I have been inclined to venture incautiously into areas of painting for which the visual evidence is strong, the archival or written evidence scanty, in the hope of bringing some initial order into those areas. They contain some of the most interesting of surviving Chinese paintings, and are in danger of remaining, otherwise, in limbo status for a long time. The foregoing study is another of that kind.

[lviii] Yanqin yiqing "Intimate Scenes of Leisurely Love." Some leaves from it are reproduced by R. H. van Gulik, Erotic Colour Prints, 155-6 and Pl.V-VI; and his Sexual Life in Ancient China, pl. XVI-XVII, both with an absurd attribution to Qiu Ying. Also in Beurdeley et al., 61, 66, 67, 71.

[lix] Sotheby's New York, June 18, 1983, Fine Chinese Paintings, no. 11. Fortunately, I made slides from all the twelve leaves before it was sold. These albums are discussed also in Cahill, ""The Emperor's Erotica," and in greater detail in my forthcoming book.

[lx] Naishi xingle, “Pleasures of the Age”

[lxi] For these, see Cahill, "Where Did the Nymph Hang?"; also the correction note in Cahill, "The Emperor's Erotica", 40-41. The entire series has been reproduced as Qinggong Zhencang Bimei Tu.

[lxii]The albums of Jin Ping Mei illustrations are said to have been looted from the (Shenyang?) palace by Zhang Zuolin in the 1920s and owned later by his son Zhang Xueliang, who reportedly took them to Taiwan during the Nationalist exodus in 1948; two groups of leaves from the series have indeed surfaced, and been sold, recently in Taiwan. There is a strong possibility that Albums QAM A and QAM C have had more or less the same recent history. A disinclination among collectors to publicize their erotic holdings makes tracing them difficult.

[lxiii]Nie, Gugong Bowuyuan, 50 (inscribed) and 59 (uninscribed); the latter also in Rawski and Rawson, no. 16. These paintings are discussed at greater length in my unpublished Pictures for Use and Pleasure.

[lxiv] A trompe-l'oeil perspectival wall painting in the Yucuixuan of the Ningshougong in the Imperial Palace portrays an interior with a consort, her maid, and playing children in an informal and naturalistic manner quite unlike the Academy style; this, too, appears to belong to a special mode of production within the court, meant for the intimate enjoyment of the emperor and those close to him. See Nie Hui, fig. 3.

[lxv] Chün-fang Yü, “Guanyin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteshvara," esp. pp. 166-69, "Guanyin As Seductress." This theme is further explored by Yü in her Kuan-yin, 421 ff. This quality in the Guanyin painting is recognized by Gary Baur in his catalog entry, see fn. 3.

[lxvi] For a selection of these, see Nie, Gugong Bowuyuan, 135-51.

CLP 169: 198? China-to-Japan in Edo Period Ptg and Prints (Intended as preparation for exhibition that was never realized.)

"China-to-Japan in Edo Period Painting and Prints."

History of Art 230, China-to-Japan Seminar: First Bibliography

Yoshiho Yonezawa and Chu Yoshizawa, tr. Betty Iverson Monroe, Japanese Painting in the Literati Style. New York and Tokyo, Weatherhill/Heibonsha, 1974. (Ch. 7, by Teisuke Toda, on "Chinese Painters in Japan"; ch. 8 on "Chinese Painting Manuals and Japanese Nanga.") Read ch. 1 & 2.

James Cahill, Scholar-Painters of Japan: The Nanga School, New York, Asia House Gallery, 1972. Read ch. 1 & 2, others later.
James Cahill, "Phases and Modes in the Transmission of Ming-Ch'ing Painting Styles to Edo Japan." In: Yu-him Tam, ed., Papers of the International Symnposium on Sino-Japanese Cultural Interchange, vol. 1, Aspects of Archaeology and Art History, Hong Kong, Institute of Chinese Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1985, pp. 65-97. Read.

James Cahill, Sakaki Hyakusen and Early Nanga Painting. Berkeley, Inst. of East Asian Studies, 1983. English version of articles published in Japanese in Bijutsushi, 1976-79. Read later.

James Cahill, "Yosa Buson and Chinese Painting," in International Symposium on the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Property: Interregional Influences in East Asian Art History, Tokyo, National Research Institute of Cultural Properties, 1982, pp. 245-263. Read later.

James Cahill, "The 'Noble Scholar' Ideal and Image in Paintings by Kôyô and Buson: Examples in the Gitter Collection." In: The Arts of the Edo Period: An international Symposium presented by the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, 1983, pp. 1-29. Read later. (On the Buson 1772 painting discussed in this article, see also Gene Phillips, Chinese Poets and Poetics in the Art of Yosa Buson, paper for AAS panel, March 1988 (see below)

Joan Stanley-Baker, "Idealist Painting in China and Japan: Wenrenhua in a Nanga Perspective." In: Suzuki Kei Sensei Kanreki Kinen: Chûgoku Kaiga-shi Ronshû, Tokyo, 1981, 115-168. Offprint. (pp. 129-133: on Pa-chung hua-p'u, "Eight Kinds of Painting Manual, Anhui publication, 1621, reprinted in Japan as Hasshû gafu, 1672 and 1710.

Kao Mayching, Literati Paintings from Japan, Hong Kong, Institute of Chinese Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1974. Read general essay, pp. 27-48.

Burton Watson, trans., Japanese Literature in Chinese, v. II: Poetry and Prose in Chinese by Japanese Writers of the Later Period. New York, Columbia U. Press, 1976.

Burton Watson, trans., Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jôzan and Other Edo-Period Poets. San Francisco, North Point Press, 1990. Introduction, pp. ix-xx.

David Pollack, The Fracture of Meaning: Japan's Synthesis of China from the Eighth through the Eighteenth Centuries. Princeton, Princeton U. Press, 1986.

Marius B. Jansen, China in the Tokugawa World, Cambridge, Harvard U. Press, 1992 (Reischauer Lectures).

Particularly on Buson:

Calvin French et. al., The Poet-Painters: Buson and His Followers, Ann Arbor, U. of Mich. Museum of Art, 1974.

Papers by members of our 1985 (?) seminar, presented at Assoc. for Asian Studies annual meeting, panel on "Yosa Buson: Image, Meaning, Context," organized by Maribeth Graybill (with whom I co-taught the seminar): her "Introduction"; her "Buson as Heir to Saigyo and Nobuzane: A Study in Self-Fashioning"; Gene Phillips paper (see above); Yoko Woodson (auditor in seminar), "Haikai Poet, Commercial Painter: Who Bought Buson's Paintings and Why."

Yoko Woodson, doctoral dissertation. Concentrates on Rai Sanyô and Tanomura Chikuden, both later than Buson; but useful anyway.

Writings of Leon Zolbrod, Buson specialist (literature), U. of British Columbia, Vancouver. Also Yuki Sawa and Edith Marcombe Shiffert, Haiku Master Buson, San Francisco, 1978: contains lots of translations, and annotated bibliography of writings on Buson. Pp. 156-57: trans. of Buson's "Preface to the Collected Haiku of Shundei," 1777. (This is discussed by Zolbrod in his "Talking Poetry: Buson's View of Haiku.")

Mark Morris, "Buson and Shiki," Part I. In Harvard Journal of Asian Studies, (date?) pp. 381-425; Part II, ibid. (date?) pp. 255-321.
History of Art 230, China-to-Japan seminar, second bibliography.

I. Other Routes from China:

Chinese Painters in Japan

Japanese Quest for a New Vision: Impact of Visiting Chinese Painters, 1600-1900. U. of Kansas, Lawrence, Spencer Museum of Art, 1986.
Howard Rogers, “Beyond Deep Waters,” in Sophia International Review 7, 1985, pp. 15-37.
(Also chapter in Yoshizawa & Yonezawa book; articles in Japanese by Takeyoshi Tsuruta, etc.)

Ôbaku (Huang-po
Stephen Addiss and Kwan S. Wong, Obaku: Zen Painting and Calligraphy. Lawrence, Kansas etc., 1978.
An Exhibition of Huangpo Chan/Obaku Zen Calligraphy and Painting. Hong Kong, Chinese U. of Hong Kong, 1989.
(Also larger book, Ôbaku bunka, Uji, Mampukuji, 1972. No English text.)
Joan Stanley-Baker, "The Ôbaku Connection: One Source of Potential Chinese Influence in Early Tokugawa Painting." In Papers of the International Symposium on Sino-Japanese Cultural Interchange,v. I, "Aspects of Archaeology and Art History," Hong Kong, Chinese U. of Hong Kong, 1985, pp. 99-154. (My own "Phases and Modes: ibid. 65-97.)

II. Other Kinds of Edo (and earlier) Painting

Shogunal (Daimyo) Art

The Shogun Age Exhibition (from the Tokugawa Art Museum, Japan.) L.A. County Museum etc., 1984-85. Highly idealized account of Tokugawa shogunate and its art.

Yoshiaki Shimizu, ed., Japan: The Shaping of the Daimyo Culture, 1185-1868. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 1988-89

Western Styles, Western Influence.
Calvin French et. al., Through Closed Doors: Western Influence on Japanese Art 1639-1853. U. of Michigan, Ann Arbor etc., 1977-78.
Calvin French, Shiba Kôkan: Artist, Innovator, and Pioneer in the Westernization of Japan. New York and Tokyo, Weatherhill, 1974.
Rimpa ("Decorative School," Sôtatsu-Kôrin etc.)

Exquisite Visions: Rimpa Paintings from Japan. Honolulu, 1980-81. (Main text by Howard Link)
Ôkyo and the Maruyama-Shijô School of Japanese Painting. Exhibition catalog, St. Louis and Seattle, 1980. Principal essay by Johei Sasaki.

III. Other Individual Nanga Masters

Melinda Takeuchi, Taiga's True Views: The Language of Landscape Painting in Eighteenth-Century Japan. Stanford, 1992.
Stephen Addiss, Tall Mountains and Flowing waters: The Arts of Uragami Gyokudô. Honolulu, 1987.
(Also several dissertations to be found in University Microfilm volumes in main stack.)
Most of the above will be found in 419A on the shelf in the southwest corner; a few on shelves A2, A3, A4.

IV. More General Writings

Toda Teisuke, “Bijutsu-shi ni okeru Nitchû kankei” (Relationship Between Japan and China in the History of Art,) in Bijutsushi ronsô (Tôkyô daigaku bungakubu bijutsu-shi kenkyû-shitsu kiyô #7). English abstract.
Akira Iriye, ed., The Chinese and the Japanese: Essays in Political and Cultural Interaction. Princeton, 1980. Pp. 9-36: Harry Harootunian, “The Functions of China in Tokugawa Thought.”
Peter Nosco, ed., Confucianism and Tokugawa Culture. Princeton, 1984. Includes Donald Keene, “Characteristic Responses to Confucianism in Tokugawa Literature,” and Samuel Hideo Yamashita, “Nature and Artifice in the Writings of Ogyû Sorai.”
History of Art 230, China-to-Japan seminar: Slide-show I: Chinese styles and subjects in Japanese painting apart from Nanga/Bunjinga. (Note: "Akiyama" = Akiyama Terukazu, Japanese Painting, Geneva, Skira, 1961.)

I. Early period (Nara-Heian)
- Hôryûji wall paintings: Paradise of Amitabha. Late 7th cent. Akiyama 24 etc.
- Hokkedô kompon mandala, 9th cent.? Japanese? Boston M.F.A. Akiyama 26 etc.
- Anon. 11th cent., Senzui Byôbu, from Tôji. Yüan Chen visiting Po Chü-i. Pollack Fig. 5 p. 69; Akiyama 71. Cf. screen in Jingôji, 13th cent..
- Crowd scene, Ban Dainagon scroll, late 12c.
- Mounted warriors, from Heiji Monogatari scroll, 3rd quarter 13th cent., Boston M.F.A. (Cf. Akiyama 98-99.) Compare:
- Riding to the Hunt, wall ptg. in tomb of Chang Huai, early 8c.
- Li Kung-lin, Pasturing Horses, copy after Wei Yen, late 7c-early 8c.
- Ippen Shônin eden (Life of the Monk Ippen), 1299. Different section in Akiyama 101. Cf. landscape handscroll attrib. Chao Po-chü, 12c, Palace Museum, Beijing.

II. Muromachi-Momoyama (13-17 cent.)
(Of interest: Martin Collcutt, Five Mountains: The Rinzai Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan.)
- Landscape by Shitan, before 1317.
- Josetsu, "Catching a Catfish in a Gourd," commissioned by Ashikaga Yoshimochi. Cf. Collcutt p. 99.
- Mokuan Reian (went to China 1326-29): The Three Sleepers. Hotei (Pu-tai). Cf. ptgs by Li Ch'üeh, Chinese 13c follower of Liang K'ai. Cf. Liang K'ai, "Li Po Walking and Chanting a Poem."
- Other figure paintings: "Three Tasters of Vinegar"; Lin Pu (Ho-ching); etc. Late Northern and Southern Sung Culture.
( Miyamoto Musashi, or Niten, early Edo: Hotei and Fighting Chickens.)
- Shûbun (active 1414-63). "Reading Books in a BambooGrove" (Chikusai dokusho)
Sesshû Tôyô (1420-1526). In China 1467-69.
- Landscapes of Four Seasons, Tokyo N.M. (Cf. Che-school works of Ming.)
- Section from Sanzui chôkan (Long landscape handscroll), former Môri family. Cf. Hsia Kuei, sec'n of "Pure and Remote View of Streams and Mountains." (copy of copy of ...)
- Fan ptg, copy after Yü-chien, late Sung. Cf. fan ptg. attrib. Yü-chien.
- Haboku sansui (landscape in cursive style), 1495. Tokyo N.M. Akiyama 114, Pollack fig. 8 p. 188, etc. Cf: Yü-chien, "Mountain Village in Clearing Mist."
- Amanohashidate ("The Bridge of Heaven") near Miyazu, ca. 1503. Akiyama 115 etc.
Sesson Shûkei (ca. 1504-after 1589). Self-portrait. (Cf. Huang Kung-wang, Chinese, 14c, "Visiting Tai on a Snowy Night.")
Series of Kano-school screen & fusuma ptgs with Chinese subjects:
- Kano Shôei (1519-92), "Paragons of Filial Piety," screens.
- Kano Sansetsu, 1589-1651, "The Lan-t'ing Gathering," screens.
- Attrib. Kano Mitsunobu, "The Everlasting Sorrow" (Po Chü-i's poem about T'ang Emp. Ming-huang and Yang Kuei-fei).
- Kano Tanyû (1602-74), "Chinese Emperors," screens. Another set, fusuma (sliding-door) compositions.
- Kanô Tanyû, "Four Sages of Mt. Shang," "Seven Sages of Bamboo Grove." Screens.
Kaihô Yûshô (1533-1615). Kinki shoga (The Four Accomplishments), screens. Another pair, ink monochrome.

Hasegawa Tôhaku (1539-1610).
- Fusuma, Gibbons in Trees, after Mu-ch'i (Chinese, 13c)
- Screens: Gibbons in Trees, Crane in Bamboo Grove.
- Pines in Fog, screens. (Detail: Akiyama 128.)

III. Edo Period: Other Than Nanga

Ôgata Kôrin (1658-1716).

- T'ai Kung-wang Fishing.
- Hakurakuten (= Po Lo-t'ien = Po Chü-i), screen.
- Three Laughers; Po-i and Shu-ch'i. Ink monochrome paintings.

Maruyama Ôkyo (1733-1795)

- The Lan-t'ing Gathering (? scholarly gathering.)
- The Red Cliff, after Su Tung-p'o's ode.
- General Kuo Tzu-i and Children, fusuma ptgs, Daijôji.

Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754-99)

- Mt. P'eng-lai (Hôrai-zan).
- Han-shan and Shih-te (Kanzan Jittoku)
- Nine Immortals of the Winecup (Li Po and companions.)
History of Art 230: China-to-Japan seminar. Suggested topics for mid-seminar presentations.
- Chinese themes in Muromachi painting, emphasizing the non-Zen, non-Buddhist. (Shimizu/Wheelwright volume; translations of Japanese books on Muromachi ink-painting; etc. Fontein and Hickman: Zen Painting and Calligraphy. etc. And, tentatively and as we go further, how these differ from Chinese themes depicted by Edo artists.)

- Pollack, and whatever other theoretical formulations of China/Japan cultural relationship problem we can locate. Reviews of Pollack? Theoretical underpinnings. Present these critically, and lead discussion.

- Yoko Woodson on patronage (anything else in English?) and economic situation of bunjin artists in Japan. Cf. to China (using my Columbia U. lectures in press.) Background: rise of merchant class, their cultural aspirations, etc. (Charles David Sheldon, The Rise of the Merchant Class in Tokugawa Japan, 1600-1868, An Introductory Survey. Locust Valley, N.Y., AAS, 1958. UGL HC462 S48 1958.) Cambridge History of Japan essays?

- Japanese uses of Chinese literature in this period (cf. to earlier); poetry written in Chinese by Japanese poets, etc. Parallels with painting. (Someone other than Charles should do this one.) Writings of Watson, Keene. Talk with Prof. Mack Horton? (on leave this year but reachable.)

- "Other routes from China": Nagasaki School (Shen Ch'üan etc.); Obaku; Chinese painters who came to Japan in this period.
- Chinese subjects in other kinds of Edo-period painting: Maruyama-Shijô, Rimpa, Kano, etc. Various catalogs, other sources.
I can supply some English-language readings for all of these.

Book left off Second Biblio. (under II, "Other Schools of Edo Painting"): Ôkyo and the Maruyama-Shijô School of Japanese Painting. Exhibition catalog, St. Louis and Seattle, 1980. Principal essay by Johei Sasaki.

History of Art 230, China-to-Japan seminar, Spring 1993. Slide Show 2: early Nanga painting. (Nanga=my Scholar-Painter of Japan; Y&Y=Yoshizawa and Yonezawa; Kao=Kao Mayching Literati Ptrs.;Takeuchi=Melinda Takeuchi, Taiga’s True Views.)

Early Nanga Painting and Chinese Sources

(Mochizuki Gyokusen, 1692-1755. Fisherman at mouth of Cave ("Peach Blossom Spring," after leaf from Hasshû gafu. Other works: Gathering of Old Men, 1749; Woodgatherer Reading Book. Other figure paintings of this kind.)

Gion Nankai (1676-1751).

- Bamboo in ink. Y&Y 10? KQO 9.Cf. leaves of Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting.
- Blossoming Plum, Nanga 2, Y&Y 8?
- Landscape with Natural Bridge (Mt. T'ien-t'ai?) Cf. another Mustard Seed Garden leaf.
- Landscape with Figures, 1707 (surprisingly early.) Kao 10. Cf. Mustard Seed Garden leaf with color.
- Landscape, Tokyo National Museum, Nanga 1. Cf. works by I Hai (I Fu-chiu, Chinese artist who came to Japan), Takeuchi 23; Tung Ch'i-ch'ang. Hyakusen 61-63 for these together.
(Another, Y&Y 9? “Landscape After T’ang Yin.”

Yanigisawa Kien (1706-58).

- Bamboo in ink, cf. Y&Y 12? Another in green (!), Y&Y color 8.
- Flowers of Seasons, triptych, ink & colors on silk. Nanga.
- The West Lake at Hangchou. Pair. Nanga 4. Cf. leaf from Ming-shan t'u (Pictures of Famous Mountains), late Ming woodblock-printed book.
(Another landscape, Takeuchi 7).

Nakayama Kôyô (1717-80)

- Li Po? Gazing at Waterfall; T'ao Yüan-ming, Kao 13.
- Landscape of Matsushima, 1772. Nanga 7. Cf. Y&Y 7, 1775.
- Landscape with Recluse's Dwelling, 1778. Cf. 1776 one, Kao 12.

(I Fu-chiu/I Fukyû. Various landscapes. Cf. Y&Y 5? Kao 1.)

* Sakaki Hyakusen (1697-1752).

- Screens, Tokyo Nat'l Mus., 1747. Cf. ptgs by Sheng Mao-yeh, late Ming. Hyakusen 9-12, 57-58.
- Gathering of Scholars, undtd. Cf. anon. Ming (Nelson Gallery, decorative arts gallery). Hyakusen 1,2.
- Seated scholar with servant pouring wine. Cf. Li Shih-ta. Hyakusen 3-5.
- Landscape with Waterfall. Cf. ptg by Sung Hsü, 1689.
- Li Po Gazing at Waterfall. Nanga 6, Kao 11, Hyakusen 50.
- Landscape with Women in Ravine, Hyakusen 32-33.
- Landscape with Scholars Gazing at Waterfall, 1731. Yabumoto Col.
- Landscape with Rainstorm, undtd. Hyakusen 48.
- River Landscape:with Willows: Buying a Fish, 1745, Nanga 5, Hyakusen 49.
- Bamboo in Wind (Henderson col., Seattle), Hyakusen 39.
- Branch of Blossoming Plum, Hyakusen 36, 37.
- Two landscapes, from photographs. Hyakusen 65, 68.
- Figures on Natural Bridge at Mt. T'ien-t'ai. Cf. ptg by Sheng Mao-yeh.
- Hyakusen fusuma paintings in Suhara House, Tônomine, 1751, Y&Y 7? (misdated? ca. 1740), Hyakusen 37, 42-44, 84-86.
- Spring Landscape, Asian Art Mus. (former Gloria Hahn). Hyakusen 79.
- Various haiga etc. by Hyakusen; cf. to Buson. Hyakusen 80-83.
- Ptg. of men floating down river on raft.
(Note: disregard Y&Y 17, Hyakusen 73: not by him.)

* Ikeno Taiga (1723-76).

- "Willows at Wei-ch'eng," 1744, Y&Y 10? Takeuchi 9.
- "Essay on Enjoying One's Will (Rakushi-ron), 1750. Text written out by Nankai; title by Kien. Nanga 8.
- 1748 "Red Cliff," after Su Tung-p'o's ode. Cf. Hyakusen; another, screen, 1749. Another, Freer Gallery of Art, undtd. Cf. Mustard Seed Garden leaf.
- Landscape with Figure, 1749.
- "The Orchid Pavilion" (Lan-t'ing/Rantei), screen, Burke col. Nanga 10, Takeuchi 51 (color).
- “The Six Distances,” 1766. Nanga 13.
- "Mt. O-mei," undtd. Private col. (Yabumoto).
-The Nachi Waterfall. Nanga 15.
- True View of Mt. Asama. Takeuchi 29, Y&Y 24?
- True View of Kojima Bay. Nanga 14, Takeuchi 47.
- Eight Views of the Hsiao-Hsiang. Nanga 16.
History of Art 230, China-to-Japan seminar, slide show 4:

Later Nanga Painting (excluding, for the moment, Tanomura Chikuden, Aoki Mokubei, Uragami Gyokudô, Tomioka Tessai.)

- Noro Kaiseki (1747-1828). Nanga 19, landscape dtd. 1811; another dtd. 1825. Cf. Huang Kung-wang, "Stone Cliff at the Pond of Heaven," 1341 (Cahill, Hills Beyond a River, 40); copy in Fujita Museum, Bunjinga China 3, pl. 9.

Taiga associates & followers:

- Ike Gyokuran (see catalog by Patricia Fister of exhibition of women artists of Japan.)
- Aoki Shukuya (d. 1789). Nanga 17.
- Kuwayama Gyokushû (1746-1799). Author of Kaiji higen (ca. 1799); leading theorist of Nanga school. Landscape, 1798, Nanga 18; others.
- Yokoi Kinkoku (Buson follower, 1761-1832). Road to Shu, Nanga 29. Others. See French, ed., The Poet Painters: lots of Kinkoku.
- Okada Beisanjin (1744-1820). Nanga 52: Landscape with Pine Groves, 1820.Y&Y 73: another, undated.
- Okada Hankô (1782-1846). Nanga 53, Y&Y 74 and 80 (color detail): "Crows Taking Flight Through Spring Haze," 1841. Others.
- Tani Bunchô (1763-1840). Nanga 54: Landscape with Figures, 1794. Y&Y 93: True View of Mt. Hiko, 1808, detail. Others. (His pupil Tachihara Kyôsho, Woodcutters in Landscape, 1811. Another, Y&Y 84.)

- Watanabe Kazan (1793-1841). Nanga 57: Weaving by Moonlight, dtd. 1829 but ptd. ca. 1840. Playing Fish, dtd. 1834 but probably ptd. ca. 1840. Portraits of Ichikawa Beian. Landscape in Manner of Yün Shou-p'ing, 1838. Others, Y&Y 94-95.

- Rai Sanyô (1780-1832). Y&Y 79: landscape. Others; one dtd. 1829. Yoko Woodson dissertation.
- Nakabayashi Chikutô (1776-1853). Nanga 59: Landscape in Rain. Lots of others.

- Yamamoto Baiitsu (1783-1856). Nanga 60: Bamboo Groves and Waterfalls. Nanga 61: Birds and Flowers, 1861. Others.

(Various other late Nanga paintings.)
History of Art 230, China-to-Japan seminar, slide show 5: Gyokudô, Mokubei, Chikuden.
Uragami Gyokudô (1745-1820) Nanga ch. 5; book by Stephen Addiss.
- Building a House in the Mts., 1792. Nanga 30.
Cf. paintings by Huang Kung-wang, Wang Shih-min: compound or layered brushwork in some Yüan and "Southern school" landscapes.
- Green Pines and Russet Valleys, 1807. Nanga 31.
- Streams and Rocks in a Deep, Dark Valley, 1816. Nanga 38.
Cf. Wang Chien-chang, Landscape in Rain, 162 (late Ming Fukien master)
- A Myriad Sounds and Thousand-layered Peaks. Nanga 32.
Cf. Kung Hsien leaves.
- Sun Setting Behind the Mountains. Suzuki Gyokudo book pl. 42.
- Landscape, Gitter col., New Orleans (done while drunk?)
Cf. Yanagisawa Kien (again), The West Lake at Hangchou; late Ming print.
- Two Peaks Embracing Clouds, Nanga 34.
- Mist and Clouds album (Enka-jô), 1811. Album of 12 leaves. Nanga 35; Suzuki volume, etc. Cf. album by Li Ch'u-pai, unident.: Chinese? 18th cent.? Article by Kozo Yabumoto (owner) in Kokka 1010.

*Snow Sifted from Freezing Clouds (Tôun Shisetsu). Former Kawabata Yasunari.
Cf. landscape attrib. Mi Fu; leaf in Mi manner by Tung Ch'i-ch'ang.
- Mountains in Autumn Rain.
- Enveloping Clouds Arouse and Nourish, Nanga 36. Others.

Aoki Mokubei (1767-1833) (Nanga ch. 6)

- Mt. P'eng-lai (Hôraizan), 1811. Nanga 39.
- Autumn Landscape, 1824. Nanga 40.
- Morning Sun at Uji, 1824. Nanga 41.
- New Verdure Wet with Rain, 1826.Nanga 42.
- Heaven Protects the Nine Similitudes, 1830. Nanga 43.
- Clouds Around the Base of a Mountain. Nanga 44.

Tanomura Chikuden (1777-1835)

- Autumn Landscape, 1827. Nanga 45.
- Boat Trip on the Inagawa, 1829. Nanga 46.
- Pine Valley and White Cranes, Seattle Art Museum, cf. Nanga 48.
- Living in Seclusion, 1832. Nanga 49.
- Mata-mata ichiraku-jô (Yet Again One More Pleasure album), 1831-32. Nanga 50. Cf. Sheng Mao-yeh leaves. Others.

Takahashi Sôhei (1802-1833) paintings.