Page 253 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

or Pa-ta Shan-jcn as he signed himself in his later years, was a dis-
tant descendant of the Ming imperial house who on the advent of
the Manchus became a monk. When his father died, so the story
goes, he was struck dumb and would only shout and laugh, the
butt of the children who ran after his ragged figure in the streets.
He turned his back not only upon the world but upon the art of
painting as practised in his time. His brush style appears careless
and slapdash, and yet, like that of the Ch'an eccentrics who were
his spiritual ancestors, it is incredibly sure and confident. His land-
scapes executed in a dashing shorthand carry Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's
creative distortion of the Southern tradition to a pitch that must
have shocked the orthodox disciples of the late Ming master. Per-
haps his peculiar genius shows best in his swift album-sketches, in
which a small angry-looking bird perches upon a rock in an infin-
ity of space, or in his studies of fishlike rocks and rocklike fishes,
drawn in a few brilliant sweeping lines of the brush. This is "ink-
play" at its most unrestrained; yet it is no mere empty virtuosity,
for Pa-ta's deceptively simple style captures the very essence of the
flowers, plants, and creatures he portrays.
Shih-t'ao and Shih-ch'i are linked together by Chinese art his-
torians as the Two Stones (Erh Shih), yet there is no positive evi-
dence that they were close friends. Shih-ch'i was a devout Bud-
dhist who spent all his life as a monk, his later years as abbot of a
monastery at Nanking, an austere and unapproachable recluse.
The texture of his landscapes, painted with a dry, scrubby brush,
has the groping, almost fumbling, quality that we find in Ce-
zanne, and as in Cezanne this very awkwardness, this refusal to
make concessions to the viewer, are witness to the painter's integ-
rity. Yet the final effect—in the beautiful autumn landscape in the
British Museum, for example—gives an impression of grandeur
and serenity.
Shih-t'ao, whose family name was Chu Jo-chi, was a lineal de-
scendant of the founder of the Ming Dynasty, which fell when he
was still a child. He laterjoined the Buddhist community on Lu-
shan, taking the monastic name Tao-chi. But he was no recluse,
and never a real monk. In 1657 he went to live in Hangchow, and
thereafter spent much of his life wandering about China, visiting
sacred mountains in the company of monks, scholars, and painter
friends such as Mei Ch'ing. He spent nearly three years in Peking
(where he and Wang Yuan-ch'i collaborated on a picture of Bam-
boo and Rocks), and finally settled in Yangchow, where he severed
his monastic vows and, because he had no private income, became
a professional, though highly respected, painter. A chronicle of
Yangchow, a city famous for its gardens, says that one of his fa-
vourite hobbies was "piling up stones"—i.e., designing gardens,
among which his Garden of Ten Thousand Rocks laid out for the
Yu family was considered his masterpiece. It may be that some of
his little album landscapes were actually suggestions for garden
designs.
Shih-t'ao 's aesthetic philosophy is contained in the Hua yii lu, a
profound and often obscure document that cannot possibly be