Page 204 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

220 Ch"icn Hsuan (c. 1235-after I )0l).
Wang Hsi-ehih Watching Cmt. Detail of a
handwroll Ink and colour on paper.
ned on the tradition of monumental landscape painting that had
survived in the north under the patronage of enlightened Chin
rulers; but such professional painters are barely mentioned in the
literature of Chinese painting, which was written by the scholars
themselves, and we know very little about them. The southern
gentry, viewed with deep suspicion by the Mongols, deprived of
the right to rise in public service, kept themselves alive by teach-
ing, practising medicine, or fortunetelling, while some of the bet-
ter-off devoted their enforced leisure to the writing of a new kind
of fiction and drama which has permanently enriched Chinese lit-
erature. With few exceptions, the great scholar-painters also put
themselves beyond the conqueror's reach.
Ch'ien Hsiian (c. 1235-after 1301), already middle-aged when
the Sung Dynasty fell, lived out his life in retirement, loyal to the
last. Two small album-paintings, of a squirrel and a sparrow (if in-
deed they arc his) show him as a sensitive exponent of Sung iMfi-
misme , but in his gentle way he was a revolutionary too. His choice
of the archaic T'ang style for his charming handscroll of the callig-
rapher Wang Hsi-chih watching geese, and indeed of the subject
itself, may be seen both as a rejection of the Sung culture that had
betrayed itself and as the beginning of the restoration of the art of
a more glorious past that was henceforward to be a preoccupation
of the scholar-painters.
It would be strange indeed if so splendid a court as that of Ku-
blai Khan had attracted no painters of talent, and in Ch'ien
184