Page 392 - Chinese Art, Vol II By Stephen W. Bushell

134 CHINESE ART.

capital at Nanking, but it was transferred in 1403 by his son Yung
Lo to Peking, where it has remained to the present day.
The Sung dynasty was hterary and artistic, rather than warUke,
and under its rule the Chinese intellect seems to have become, as it
were, crystallised, and Chinese art to have developed into the lines
which it still, for the most part, retains. It was a period of cata-
logues, encyclop?edias, and voluminous classical commentaries,
which has been summed up in a word as that of Neo-Confucianism.
Buddhism was neglected, attacked by the Confucian literati, as
well as by the Taoists, under whose auspices new systems of natural
philosophy were elaborated. In the realm of art, as M. Paleologue
shows, it is in landscape, without question, that Chinese painting
under the Sung attains its highest point. The poets of the period
wrote their verses with the same brush which afterwards drew the
picture of the scene which had inspired them. There was hardly
a poet who was not at the same time a painter. Painting was not
a special profession, it was a means by which every cultured
writer was able to express his thought, to illustrate his genius. True
artists were at once statesmen, men of letters, historians, mathema-
ticians, poets, painters, and musicians. In their passion for nature
they did not care, however, for full hghts of summer and of noon,
or for exuberant vegetation ; they preferred the delicate fresh hues
of spring, the deep melancholy of autumn, light mists rising from
the rice fields at sunrmer sunsets, the pale clear tones of an October
moonhght view, the still sadness of a winter scene covered with its
mantle of snow.
The fine landscape roll in the British Museum, over seventeen
feet long and about fourteen inches deep, by Chao Meng-fu, one of
the great masters of the Yuan dynasty, which has been already
referred to, was acquired in 1889, and described Ijy Mr. Binyon in
the T'oung-pao (1905, No. i). The artist, born a.d. 1254, a de-
scendant of the founder of the Sung dynasty, retired, on the fall of
that' house, into private life till 1286, after which he held official