Page 229 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

Chia and his nephew Wen Po-jen, but the flower painter Ch'en
Shun (Ch'en Tao-fu, 1483 -1544) and the fastidious landscapist Lu
Chih ( 1 496-1 5 76) . Although much of his own work is refined and
sensitive, in his last years Wen Cheng-ming painted a series of re-
markable scrolls of old juniper trees in pure monochrome ink
which in their rugged, twisted forms seem to symbolise the noble
spirit of the old scholar-painter himself.
Two painters active in the first halfof the sixteenth century cannot T'ANG YIN AND
be classified as belonging either to the Che or to the Wu School. CH'IU YING
T'ang Yin (1479-15 23) ruined a promising career when he be-
came involved in a scandal over the civil service examinations; he
could thus no longer be considered a gentleman, and spent the rest
of his life between the brothels and wine shops of Soochow on the
one hand and the seclusion of a Buddhist temple on the other,
painting for a living. He was a pupil of Chou Ch'en, but his true
teachers were Li T'ang, Liu Sung-nien, Ma Yuan, and the great
Yuan masters. He was also a friend of Shen Chou and Wen
Cheng-ming, and because of this is often classed with the Wu
School. But his towering mountains painted in monochrome ink
on silk are a re-creation of the forms and conventions of the Sung
landscapists, though with a hint of mannerism and exaggeration.
Gentleman Playing the Lute in a Landscape (Palace Museum, Taipei)
is a good example of his work at its most refined—scholarly in
content, yet highly professional in technique. It is these conflict-
ing qualities in his style and social position that make him so
hard to place and have caused a Japanese scholar to label him
"neo-academic."
Into the same class falls Ch'iu Ying (c. 1494-c. 1552), a man
born also in Wu-hsicn, but of lowly origins, who was neither
court painter nor scholar but a humble professional, idealising in
his pictures the leisurely life of the gentry whose equal he could
never be, and happiest if one of the great literati condescended to
write a eulogy on one of his paintings. He is also famous for his
long handscrolls on silk depicting with exquisite detail and deli-
cate colour such popular themes as the "Lute Song," life at the
court of Ming Huang, or the multifarious activities of the ladies
of the palace. As a landscapist he was the last great exponent of the
green-and-blue style (Fig. 252), though he worked also in the ink-
washes ofthe Wu School. His delightful pictures are widely appre-
ciated both in China and in the West, and next to Wang Hui he is
probably the most-forged painter in the history of Chinese art.
In the later development of the literary school no man played a TUNG CH'I-CH'ANG
more significant part than the scholar-painter Tung Ch'i-ch'ang AND THE NORTHERN
AND SOUTHERN
(1 555-1636), who rose to high office under Wan-li. Not only did
he embody, in his paintings, the aesthetic ideals of his class, but he SCHOOLS
also gave them theoretical formulation through his critical writ-
ings. Tung Ch'i-ch'ang was himself a noted calligrapher and a
painter of landscapes in monochrome ink, but though he worked
freely in the manner of the great masters of the past he was not
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