Page 10 - The Ian and Susan Wilson Collection Schilar's Objects, Christie's, March 2016

The scholar’s studio itself ideally was a separate building,
detached from the main living quarters and set in a well-planned
and meticulously landscaped garden. The studio provided a
secluded environment where the scholar could retreat from the
“dusty world”—i.e., a haven for escape from the stresses of work
and the pressures of daily life—in order to relax, read, study, write,
paint, and entertain like-minded friends. In addition, it aforded
a space that the scholar could design and appoint to express his
aesthetic sensibilities. The works of painting and calligraphy
they created not only revealed their genius as artists but gave
expression to their cultivated personalities. In like manner, wanting
their surroundings to refect their refned aesthetics and elevated
taste —both for their own enjoyment and for the delectation of
their cultivated friends—they furnished their studios with objects
in so-called scholar’s taste that appealed to their liking and
refected their aesthetic preferences.

A desk, a painting table, chairs, and bookcases constituted the
studio’s essential furnishings, all of which were crafted in fne
woods, typically huanghuali 黃花梨, and in a classic style that we
today term “Ming style”. The scholar would hang a painting or
two by a fellow literatus on the studio wall, frequently exchanging
one scroll for another in order to ensure the paintings’ wellbeing
and to alter the look and feel of the room (so that nothing came to
be taken for granted). Should a learned friend or connoisseur of
painting visit, the scholar likely would select from his collection an
important scroll by a famous artist for display.

Many scholars also hung a qin 琴, or classic zither, on the studio
wall as an emblem of their knowledge and appreciation of music
(lot 1178). A long, rectangular instrument, the qin is one of the most
ancient of Chinese musical instruments, and it mostly likely was
in use as early as the Shang dynasty (c. 1600 BC – c. 1050 BC).
With its association with Confucius, who was said to have played
the instrument, and with its association with early scholars, the
qin naturally became the favored instrument of the literati. The
scholars’ love of the qin accounts for the wealth of studio objects in
the shape of that musical instrument.

The best known of the literati accoutrements are the so-called
“Four Treasures of the Scholar’s Studio” 文房四寶, namely, ink,
inkstone, brush, and paper. In addition, there likely would have
been paperweights, a water pot, a water dropper or for titrating
water onto the inkstone in preparing ink, a brush pot for holding
brushes when not in use, a brush rest for supporting brushes in
use but not immediately in hand as the artist alternated amongst
brushes of various sizes and textures, and a wristrest to steady
the artist’s hand and wrist when doing small-scale calligraphy or
painting fne lines with meticulous brushstrokes. A few scholars
even had an inkrest on which to place the wet end of an inkstick

8