Page 259 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

291 HuangShen(l6«7-l768 + ). Tht
Port T'to Yian-ming Enjoys tht Early
Chrytanthtmums. Album-leaf Ink and
colour on paper.

individualism stop and eccentricity begin? Were there really eight
eccentrics in Yangchow? There were many kinds of eccentricity,
natural and assumed. Some of these men were friends, others not;
some were outstanding, others obscure. But these traditional
groupings are helpful, as much to Chinese as to Western readers,
in reducing the bewildering number of Ch'ing painters to some
sort of order.
The careers of some of the Yangchow eccentrics point to a
change in the status of the so-called amateur painter in China. Ide-
ally, he was a salaried official or a man of means who painted for
pleasure in his spare time. But among the Ch'ing gentlemen-
painters were many—indeed, a majority—who were not officials
and had no private income, and so were forced (although this was
not openly acknowledged) to paint for a living. Wang Hui, for ex-
ample, painted industriously for the patrons in whose mansions
he lodged for months on end. Chin Nung for a time was reduced
to decorating lanterns, while competition for the patronage of the
Yangchow salt merchants forced artists such as Chin Nung and
Huang Shen to cultivate a deliberate oddity to attract their atten-
tion. The miracle is that the discipline of the brush still held, and
that there is still so much sensibility and freshness in their art.
The art of the individualists and eccentrics can be interpreted as
292 Hua Yen (1682-1755 + ), Birds, Tm
their private protest against the academicism of the painting of the
tmJ Rock. Hanging scroll dated
time. But as the Ch'ing settled deeper into the stagnation that equivalent to 1745. Ink and colour on
paper. Ch'ing Dynasty.
seems to have been the fate ofevery long-lived dynasty in Chinese
history, the lamp of individualism burned more and more dimly,
while a kind of spiritual paralysis seemed to grip the scholar class
as a whole. Only in Canton and in the brash new treaty port of
Shanghai, grown suddenly rich in the late nineteenth century, was
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