Page 188 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

—
the remote grandeur of Northern Sung and the brilliant romanti-
cism of Southern Sung painters such as Ma Yuan and Hsia Kuci.
The first great Southern Sung landscape painter of whom wc
have any knowledge was Chao Po-chu, a member of the Sung im-
perial family who as a youth had been in Hui-tsung's academy
and lived on to become a favourite of Kao-tsung (i 127-1 162) and
a high office-holder in Chekiang. He is said to have excelled in
landscapes with figures in the grccn-and-bluc style that had origi-
nated with Li Ssu-hsun. His handscroll, Rocky Mountains along a
River in Autumn, of which a detail is illustrated here, combines re-
strained echoes of the precise, decorative Tang manner with a
monumental intimisme that is typical of Sung landscape painting at
its best.
igi Ma Yuan (active 1 190-122$). Old
Mountain Path in Spring, with 1 poem by
Yang Mci-tzu. consort of Ning-tsung.
Album-leaf. Ink and colour on nlk
Southern Sung Dynasty.

MA YUAN AND Perhaps because of its obvious visual and emotional appeal, the
HSIA KUEI work of the Ma-Hsia School, as it is called, has come in Western
eyes to represent the very quintessence of Chinese landscape
painting, and not only in the West, for this style was to have a pro-
found influence too on the development of landscape painting in
Japan. Its language of expression was not altogether new. Wc have
found an anticipation of its spectacular tonal contrasts in Fan
K'uan and Kuo Hsi, its clawlike trees and roots in Li Ch'cng, its
axe strokes in Li T'ang. But in the art of Ma Yuan and Hsia Kuci
these elements all appear together, united by a consummate mas-
tery of the brush which would border on mannerism if it were not
so deeply infused with poetry. Without this depth of feeling, the
style is in itself decorative and easily imitated in its outward as-
pects — qualities which were to be seized upon by the painters of
the Kano School in Japan. What is new is the sense of space,
achieved by pushing the landscape to one side, opening up a vista
of limitless distance. There are many night scenes, and the atmos-
phere is often redolent of a poetic sadness that hints at the under-
lying mood of Hangchow in this age of deepening anxiety.
Ma Yuan became a tai-chao at the end of the twelfth century,
Hsia Kuci early in the thirteenth. It is not always easy to disentan-
gle the style of the one from the other. If wc say, looking at the