Page 225 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

246 Shih-jut (mid-fifteenth century),
Strolling among Floweri. Detail of a
handscroU. Ink and colour on silk. Ming
Dynasty.
rooms of the palace. Dominant among these was the late-fif-
teenth-century painter Lii Chi, whose magnificently decorative
compositions, rich in colour, definite and precise in form, con-
servative in style, were exactly suited to the taste of his imperial
patrons. In landscape, the models for the professionals were Ma
Yuan and Hsia Kuei, partly because they too had been academi-
cians, partly because the basis of their work, like that of the flower
painters, was not self-expression but technique, and technique
could be learned. Ni Tuan, for example, modelled himself on Ma
Yuan, Chou Wen-ching on both Ma Yuan and Hsia Kuei, Li
Tsai—who is said to have impressed the great Japanese landscape
painter Sesshu—on Ma Yiian and Kuo Hsi, while Shih-jui. in a
beautiful handscroll reproduced here, skillfully combined the
monumental manner of the Northern Sung with the rich mineral-
bluc-and-grecn colouring of a still older tradition. In most of their
works, however, the element of mystery in the Sung romantics
has hardened into a brilliant eclecticism, its poetry into prose.
Tai Chin (i 388-1 452), a highly skilled landscapist at the Ming
court, was a native of Hangchow in Chekiang, where the styles of
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