Page 38 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

paintings for the Yongzheng Emperor in 1723 display a fully achieved synthesis of methods

(538). Unlike Jiao Bingzhen and Leng Mei, he gave his paintings a rigorous perspectival
armature: during the 1720s he collaborated on the translation of Andrea Pozzo's Perspective
Pictorum et Architectorum, printed in successive editions in 1729 and 1735. He also created
an intense luminosity, using observed light effects. At the same time he found ways of
avoiding the weightiness of oil painting, by using a modified version of Chinese pigments,

for example, and by adopting plain or landscape backgrounds in a concession to Chinese
practice.
Outside the court, the major center of consumption was the city of Yangzhou,

dominated by Huizhou families active in the exploitation of the nearby salt fields. These
families had been dominant in Yangzhou since the early seventeenth century, when they had
gained control of the management of the salt monopoly. Even before their recovery from the
economic depression of the first forty years of the Qing, they took the lead in the
reconstruction of the city, largely destroyed by Manchu armies at the fall of the Ming. From

the 1690s to the 1720s, they transformed Yangzhou through philanthrophic and private
building into a city of mansions, gardens, temples and parks, an essential stop for any tourist
of the day. We can glimpse something of the glories of early eighteenth century Yangzhou,

the second city of the empire, through the elaborate pictorial fantasies of the Yuan family
workshop, suppliers of decorative screens and hanging scrolls to the Yangzhou commercial
elite, and portraitists of their newly-built gardens.
Unlike the Huizhou mansions with their tight structures of interlocking spaces around
a small courtyard, Yangzhou mansions of this period were a more standard mixture of one

and two storey buildings in Jiangnan style which opened on to large gardens. The walls were
whitewashed, and the darker pillars and lattice work completed the highly decorative effect.
The gardens soon rivalled those of Suzhou; but whereas Suzhou gardens were best known for

their individual rocks, often from nearby Lake Tai, the gardens of Yangzhou were celebrated
for their garden mountains, artfully constructed from innumerable small rocks. The materials
were brought back from the interior by the boats used to export Yangzhou's salt. In the
paintings of Yuan Jiang (active ca. 1680s-?1730s) and Yuan Yao (active ca. ?1690s-?1740s),
virtuoso decorative brushwork elides the traces of construction to create organic, wave-like

forms (539). Often, too, the microcosmic garden mountains are transformed in the painting
into a full mountainscape, a representational move that privileges the imaginative idea
underlying the garden over its outer appearance, hemmed in by walls and city streets. This is

characteristic of both Ming and Qing paintings of urban experience which, with certain
documentary exceptions, tend to privilege private spaces over public ones, and psychological
experience over accurate visual record. Inside Yangzhou's mansions, such large-scale