Page 152 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

his quality as a man. Because Wang Wei was the ideal type of man,
it was argued, he must also have been the ideal type of painter.
A gifted musician, scholar, and poet, Wang Wei (699-761?)
joined the brilliant group of painters and intellectuals around
Ming Huang's brother Prince Ch'i. He got into political difficul-
ties at the time of the An Lu-shan rebellion, but was extricated by
his brother and restored to imperial favour. When his wife died in
730 he became a devout Buddhist, though whether this influenced
his painting is not known. He was famous in his lifetime for his
snow landscapes, but the work for which he is best remembered
by later painters is a long panoramic handscroll depicting his
country estate, Wang-ch'uan, outside Ch'ang-an. This picture
disappeared long ago, and although the general composition has
I6j Style of Wang Wei (?). Rivmidt been preserved in many later copies, one of which was engraved
unJtr Snow. Pan of a handscroll(?). Ink
on stone in the Ming Dynasty, these give little idea of the style,
and colour on silk. A bout tenth century.
still less of the technique, of the original. Perhaps the nearest we
shall ever get to his intensely poetic relationship with nature is the
beautiful little Riverside Under Snow, formerly in the Manchu
Household Collection and now believed to be lost. Tojudge from
reproductions, it might be a late T'ang or tenth-century painting
in his manner. The landscape conventions are archaic, the tech-
nique simple, yet no early Chinese landscape painting evokes
more movingly the atmosphere of a river bank in the depths of
winter, when the snow covers the ground, the roofs, and the bare
branches, and men hurry home to their cottages at dusk.
It is difficult to write with any certainty about the style of T'ang
landscape painting when almost all we have to go on arc the fres-
coes and banners from Tunhuang and the recently discovered
paintings in the T'ang tombs. But enough has been revealed to
suggest that by the eighth century three styles had come into
being, which might be called the linear, the boneless, and the paint-
erly. In the linear style, which traces its origin back to Ku K'ai-chih
and beyond, the forms are drawn in fine, clear lines of morc-or-
less even thickness and filled with washes of colour, as in the land-
scape from the tomb of I-te of which a detail is illustrated here. In
the boneless style, exemplified in the detail from Cave 21 7 at Tun-
huang (figure 158), colour is broadly applied in opaque washes
with little or no outline, a technique which seems to have been re-
served for wall painting. In the third style, the painterly, an artic-
ulated, calligraphic line is combined with broken interior ink
washes to produce a richly integrated texture. This style, in the
development of which Wang Wei's contemporary Chang Tsao
2
rather than Wang Wei himself was a key figure, seems to have be-
come fully expressive in the eighth century, and can be illustrated,
in rather crude form, by the detail from one of the Tunhuang ban-
ners shown on p. 127. The painterly style was to develop into the
mainstream ofink landscape painting in the hands ofmajor paint-
ers of later dynasties, while the linear style sank for the most part
to the level of the professional craftsman painters, and the bone-
less style, at least in China, sank out of sight altogether.
In the last century of T'ang, the focus of cultural activity shifted
away from Ch'ang-an and Loyang to the southeast, which was
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