Page 252 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

it I Chu Ta (Pa-<a Shan-jen. :6i6-c.
1 70$), LanJuape in Ikt Mtmnrr of Tung
Yuan. Hanging scroll Ink on paper.
an inner serenity of spirit through his sparse, dry landscapes, frag-
ile yet incredibly solid, sensitive yet monumental, that exude an
atmosphere of almost unearthly purity very close to that of Ni
Tsan. By contrast, the Nanking painter Kung Hsicn (1 620-1 689)
seems to have been "on the run" for some years after the fall of the
Ming, harried by political enemies and private anxieties. His des-
olate, prisonlike landscape in the Rietberg Museum, Zurich, in
which no life seems possible, nothing stirs, may owe something to
the expressive distortions of Tung Ch'i-ch'ang, but like other pic-
tures of his middle years it is also symbolic, both of the condition
of his native land raped by the Manchus and of his own desperate
sense of having, literally, nowhere to turn. Yet, his whole career
cannot have been so turbulent, for he was also a noted poet, callig-
rapher, publisher, and art teacher—his pupil Wang Kai was the
chief compiler of the Painting Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden re-
ferred to in Chapter 10—while the calm, monumental landscapes
of his later years seem to suggest that he had found peace at last.
l»l Chu h, I've Birds. Album-leaf Ink
on paper. Ch'ing Dynasty. These masters were certainly individualists, but that label is
often, and arbitrarily, reserved for three great painters who dom-
inated the art of early Ch'ing as Hung-jen and Kung Hsien never
did. These men are Chu Ta (1626-c. 1705), K'un-ts'an (Shih-ch'i,
c. 1610-c. 1670), and Tao-chi (Shih-t'ao, 1641-c. 1710). Chu Ta,
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