Page 68 - 2019 September 10th Sotheby's Important Chinese Art Jades, Met Museum Irving Collection NYC

Subsequently, the Qianlong Emperor commanded the palace painting master, Ding Guanpeng
(act. 1708-ca. 1771) to copy the paintings and the new inscriptions that he had applied to them.
Ding’s copies are now in the collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, and published
Gugong shuhua tulu / Illustrated Catalog of Chinese Painting in the National Palace Museum,
vol. 13, Taipei, 1994, pp. 183-214. Over the decades, the emperor had the images reproduced in
additional media, including textiles and jades.
In 1764, the abbot at Shengyin Temple, Master Mingshui, instructed local stone engravers to
copy Guanxiu’s paintings and the emperor’s colophons and seals. The sixteen engraved stone
panels were installed on the sixteen sides of the Miaoxiang Pagoda in Hangzhou. Rubbings of
the engravings were made by adherents as acts of piety, allowing the images and the emperor’s
comments to proliferate further. The rubbings taken from it, as well as stone copies of the stele,
are also preserved in museums, libraries, and private collections to this day (Þ g. 1). The pagoda
and its carvings have since been moved to the Hangzhou Stele Forest.
From the outset, the rubbings were widely admired. Knowing the emperor’s fondness for
them, in 1778, the military governor of Shandong province, Guotai (d. ca. 1782), presented the
Qianlong Emperor with a magniÞ cent zitan folding screen set with black lacquer panels inlaid
with white jade in imitation of the rubbings. The emperor was so impressed by the splendid gift
that he had the Yunguanglou (Building of Luminous Clouds) of the Imperial Palace completely
redesigned to accommodate and complement it. The illustrious screen remains part of the Qing
Court Collection at the Palace Museum, Beijing, and was exhibited in the traveling exhibition The
Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem,
2010, cat. no. 49.
The present boulder closely follows the design of Guanxiu’s portrait, as preserved in the stele
and rubbings. In the rocky overhang above the luohan, the Qianlong Emperor’s identiÞ cation
of the subject is recorded beside his eulogy on the painting. The colophon describing the
emperor’s study of the paintings is inscribed on the reverse side. This would presumably have
been made as part of a set of sixteen pictorial boulders, with the present one perhaps ranking as
the most important due to its inclusion of the lengthy third colophon describing the emperor’s
contribution to the legacy of Guanxiu’s paintings.

66 SOTHEBY’S