Page 224 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

Shih-chu-chai shu-huap'u (Treatise on the Paintings and Writings of the
Ten Bamboo Studio), published in 1633. Thereafter, handbooks on
the art of painting as a pastime were to proliferate, the most fa-
mous being the Chieh-tzu-yiian hua-chuan (Painting Manual of the
Mustard Seed Garden), first published in five parts in 1679, later ex-
panded, and still used as a technical primer by Chinese students
and amateurs today.
In the late seventeenth century, Chinese colour prints reached
Japan, stimulating the growth of the art, although full-colour
printing was not perfected in Japan till the middle of the eigh-
244 Lotus Leaves and Root. Colour teenth century. But, while inJapan the colour print developed as a
woodblock prin i from the Treatise on the vital art form in its own right, of which the masters recognised
Paintings and Writings of the Ten Bamboo
and exploited the very limitations of the medium, in China it was,
Studio. Ming Dynasty, early seventeenth
century. like so much else, the servant of painting, and was always at its
best when it most nearly gave the effect of ink and watcrcolour.
After a sad decline in the nineteenth century, the art was revived in
the 1920s, and thejung-pao-chai studio in Peking has become fa-
mous both for its decorated letter papers and for its faithful repli-
cas of paintings printed with up to two hundred individual
blocks.
MING COURTLY AND At the Ming court there was no personality of the stature of Chao
PROFESSIONAL Meng-fu to mediate between the academicians and the literati,
PAINTING who kept their distance and made no attempt to influence court art
for the better. The Ming emperors, following the T'ang model,
made the Bureau of Painting a subdivision of the Hanlin Acad-
emy, but it was no longer the centre of culture and art that it had
been in former times. It was set up in the Jen-chih Palace within
the Imperial City, and a special office under the Directorate of Pal-
ace Eunuchs was established to control it. Painters were honoured
with high military titles (to distinguish them from civil officials!)
and treated with great favour. This favour, however, depended
upon absolute obedience to a rigid code of rules and regulations.
They lived, moreover, in terror of their lives. Under Hung-wu,
four court painters, including Chou Wei and Chao Yuan, were ex-
ecuted for having incurred that savage monarch's displeasure, and
it is astonishing that any good work was produced at all. By the
time of the Hsiian-te emperor (Hsuan-tsung, 1426-1435), who
was a painter himself, the lot of the senior court artists had much
improved, and they were now given the time-honoured rank of
tai-chao, yet Tai Chin could be dismissed from the emperor's ser-
vice because he had allegedly painted the garment of a fisherman
red, the colour reserved for officials at imperial audiences.
Among the most talented of the court painters was Pien Wen-
chin (c. 1 400-1 440), who specialised in painting birds and flowers
in the careful, decorative, outline-filled-with-colour style of the
Five Dynasties master Huang Ch'uan. In his day he was consid-
245 Lu Chi (late fifteenth to early
sixteenth century). Pair of Wild Geese en ered one of the three greatest artists living; and, indeed, his works
a Snowy Bank, flanging scroll. Ink and
have a delicacy and perfection of drawing and colour which link
colour on silk. Ming Dynasty.
him rather to Hui-tsung than to any of the host ofdecorators who
turned out paintings by the hundred to adorn the innumerable
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