Page 257 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

171 7). who as a poor student had been introduced to Wang Shih-
min, whose pupil he became. He devoted much of his talent to the
imitation of early masters, and his huge oeuvre consists chiefly of
endless variations on the styles of Tung Yuan and Chii-jan as they
had been successively reinterpreted by Huang Kung-wang, Tung
Ch'i-ch'ang, and Wang Shih-min. The Palace Museum collection
also contains a number of clever pastiches of tenth-century and
Northern Sung landscapes which are almost certainly his work.
Of the four Wangs, Wang Yiian-ch'i (i 642-1 71 5) was the most
gifted and original. The grandson of Wang Shih-min, he rose to
high office under the Manchus, becoming chancellor of the Han-
lin Academy and vice president of the Board of Finance. He was a
favourite of K'ang-hsi, who frequently summoned him to paint
in his presence, and he was appointed one of the editors of the
great anthology of painting and calligraphy, P'ei-wen-chai shu-hua-
p'u, published on imperial order in 1708. But Wang Yuan-ch'i was
no academician. Although he drew his themes from the Yuan
masters, notably Ni Tsan, and his curious angular rocks and gaunt
trees from Tung Ch'i-ch'ang, he had an obsession with form,
unique in a Chinese painter. With deep concentration, he would,
as it were, pull apart and reassemble the rocks and mountains in his
paintings, like a cubist. These are not landscapes to wander in;
they are, rather, semi-abstract creations of the painter's mind, to-
tally convincing in their own terms and remote from the man-
nered distortions of Yuan Chiang and his school.
Yiin Shou-p'ing (commonly known as Yun Nan-t'ien, 1633-
1690) was the son of a Ming loyalist and consequently had to live
in partial obscurity in the Soochow-Hangchow region far from
the capital, where he supported himself by his painting and callig-
raphy. There is a widely held belief that he gave up landscape
painting because he felt he could not compete with his friend
Wang Hui. But although his flower paintings, chiefly fans and al-
bum-leaves, show an exquisite mastery of the "boneless" tech-
nique, his heart was in the landscape, which he painted with a sen-
sitivity often lacking in the work of the brilliant Wang Hui.
Wu Li, born in 1632, is of unusual interest because he came un-
der the influence of the Jesuits, was baptised, and spent six years
studying theology in Macao where he was ordained in 1688,

288 YO11 Shou-p'ing (16JJ-1690),
Autumn Fragratue: Chryunthemurr. and
Cmvotvutus. Ink and colour on paper.
Ch'ing Dynasty.
237
rial