Page 171 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

extremely revealing as a document on tenth-century costume, fur-
niture, and porcelain, and shows how lavishly paintings, includ-
ing monochrome landscapes, were used in interior decoration,
forming panels on the beds as well as tall free-standing screens.
It would seem that the hanging scroll has not yet become
fashionable.
The last great exponent of the T'ang figure-painting tradition
was Li Kung-lin (1046-1106), better known as Li Lung-mien
from the name of his country estate of which he, in emulation of
Wang Wei, painted a long, panoramic handscroll. Several versions
of it exist. Li Lung-mien moved in an intellectual circle at court
that included the poet Su Tung-p'o and the historian Ou-yang
Hsiu, while it is recorded that even the great statesman Wang An-
shih, who was "careful in choosing his friends," condescended to
visit him. In early life he was a famous painter of horses—until, so
the story goes, a Taoist told him that if he continued much longer
in this vein he would become like a horse himself, whereupon he
switched to other themes. He was thoroughly eclectic, spending
years in copying the old masters, and though his own technique
was restricted largely to ink-line (pai-miao), his subject matter in-
cluded everything from horses and genre scenes to Taoist fairy
landscapes, Buddhist figures, and paintings of Kuanyin amid
rocks, of which he created an ideal conventional type. I lis sweep-
ing brush-line, characterised by a typically Sung refining of the
186 Attributed to Li Lung-mien (c.
1040-1 106). Hone andGrcom. One of
manner of Wu Tao-tzu, also provided a model for figure painters
five tribute hones. Detail of a
that endured down to Ming times. handscroll Ink and colour on paper
.

The reverence for the past revealed in Li Lung-mien's sedulous CONNOISSEURSHIP
copying of the old masters is from now on to loom large in
Chinese connoisseurship and to present the most formidable
problems to the expert. In the case of a master we may assume that

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