Page 179 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

190 Chang lie-nun (lite eleventh to
early twelfth century), Life along the
River on thr F.vt ofthe Ch 'ing-mmg
Hitivel. Detail of a handscroll. Ink and
slight colour on silk. Northern Sung
Dynasty.
emerging from a wood at the base of a huge precipice. The com-
position is still in some respects archaic; the dominating central
massif goes back to the T'ang Dynasty, the foliage retains several
early conventions while the texture strokes (ts'un) are still almost
mechanically repeated and narrow in range; their full expressive
possibilities are not to be realised for another two hundred years.
Yet this painting is overwhelming in its grandeur of conception,
its dramatic contrasts of light and dark in the mist, rocks, and
trees, and above all in a concentrated energy in the brushwork so
intense that the very mountains seem to be alive, and the roar of
the waterfall fills the air around you as you gaze upon it. It per-
fectly fulfills the ideal of the Northern Sung that a landscape paint-
ing should be of such compelling realism that the viewer will feel
that he has been actually transported to the place depicted.
The high point of Sung realism was reached in a remarkable
handscroll depicting life on the outskirts of the capital just before
the Ch'ing-ming festival in spring. The artist reveals an encyclo-
paedic knowledge of the look of houses, shops, restaurants, and
boats, and of the variety of people of high and low degree who
throng the streets. His vision is almost photographic, while he dis-
plays complete mastery of shadowing (in the hulls of the boats)
and foreshortening. It is worth noting that the painter, Chang Tse-
tuan, otherwise almost unknown, was a member of the scholar-
gentry and that he did not consider it beneath him to concern him-
self with so mundane a subject. But the Ch'ing-ming scroll,
painted perhaps around 1 1 20, is both the climax and the swan song
of pictorial realism as an ideal for painters of his class: from now