Page 221 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

Map i 2 Artistic centres of southeastern
yards of the Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets ( Wang-shih
Yuan), copied with scrupulous care in the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York, is further enriched with the exquisite group of
rocks illustrated here, which was rescued from an abandoned gar-
den in Soochow.
In and around Soochow also were concentrated the great pri-
vate collections, those, for example, of Hsiang Mo-lin (i 525—
1590) and Liang Ch'ing-piao (1 620-1 691) whose seal on a paint-
ing, if accepted as genuine, was often all the collector required to
attest to its authenticity. It was these and other private collectors in
the southeast, rather than the Ming emperors, who preserved the
remaining masterpieces of Sung and Yuan, some of which were
to find their way back into the imperial collection in the eighteenth
century.
201
Copyrighted material