Page 363 - Chinese Art, Vol II By Stephen W. Bushell

PICTORIAL ART. 109

or less accentuated according to the age of the sitter. The group-
ing of these elements and the proportions of the composition are
carefully arranged in accordance with certain canons.
The same methods apply to the students of all kinds of subjects ;
figures, scenes and landscapes, animals and flowers. The favourite
flowers of the studio are the wild prunus and the orchid, the tree
peony and the chrysanthemum ; and a separate volume, printed
in colours, is devoted to the composition of each of these four
flowers, a succession of pages being filled with studies of single
petals, leaf blades, and twigs, until at last the flower is allowed
to appear as a whole, built up like a mosaic of its component parts.
Their conception of the representation of the figures of things
has induced the Chinese to attribute an extreme importance to
the line in pictorial art ; bodies appear to them, not as they are
in reality, that is to say round and with hght playing about them,
but as if circumscribed by a precise line, defined visibly from the
ambient air. So the painters of the Middle Kingdom have never
appreciated the real substance of things in modelling or relieving
the surface ; even at the finest epochs of their art they have re-
mained incapable of representing solid and living forms, and after
some twenty centuries of production they are still where Italian
painting was in the time of Giotto and of Simone Memmi ;• they
have not aspired to anything further.
If the clear vision of plastic form has been denied to Chinese
painters, they have at any rate a fairly just feeling of linear per-
spective ; they have observed, in fact, that distance modifies the
apparent dimensions of objects and that their size changes to
the eye in the inverse ratio of their distance from the observer.
But they have not attained to the knowledge of a correct vanishing
point, or of the exact laws of the foreshortening of figures. \\'hen
they aim at giving the impression of distance to their field they
have recourse to a peculiar process ; they place the point of view
of their composition very high, and arrange in groups, one above